[From the archives] two little lines about the mouth
Narrative threads of anxiety, luck, and age in Edith Wharton's 1905 The House of Mirth
This weekend, I’m re-sharing one of my earliest essays, from when I first started this Substack, back in February 2023. This is not only because we have so many new subscribers around here (we’ve surpassed the 500 mark!) but also because I’m having a short but somewhat invasive surgery this weekend. I have a feeling that sitting at my desk and forming coherent thoughts might be a tough go for a few weeks.
So, until I’m up to new essays, I hope you’ll enjoy a few pieces from my archives over the next couple weeks, as well as some gobsmackingly wonderful Close Reader interviews.
Today: a close reading of a truly fantastic scene from early in Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth.
If you haven’t read the novel, you’ll gain enough context here to find it meaningful, and all major spoilers are avoided. This excerpt may even entice you to join me on a Mirth read-a-long this spring! (More on that coming very soon — make sure you’re subscribed to get the updates later this month.)
Thanks, as always, for reading and hanging out with me here. If you like today’s essay, I hope you’ll leave a comment to let me know your thoughts!
A jam-packed scene from Edith Wharton
In Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, the 29-year-old socialite Lily Bart frets with diverse but relatable anxieties. She longs for a different, better existence, but also feels elegantly trapped in her life:
“She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself. But what manner of life would it be? She had barely enough money to pay her dress-makers’ bills and her gambling debts….Ah no—she was too intelligent not to be honest with herself.”
The precarity of her situation is becoming increasingly clear: she is unwed at 29 years old, has virtually no suitors that interest her, and she’s entirely dependent on a small, but livable allowance from her cold and mean-spirited aunt Peniston, with whom she lives.
Her situation aptly recalls Charlotte’s, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Charlotte, Elizabeth’s friend, is unwed at 27 and knows she’s become a burden to her parents. So when the tiresome Mr. Collins proposes marriage to her, she accepts in a flash—heartbreakingly eager to resolve the overwhelming social anxiety that underlies her existence. In fact, I believe Austen makes it clear just how desperate Charlotte is by making Mr. Collins as noxious as he is; that she’s willing to marry the least interesting and most condescending man on the planet tells us a whole lot about how hard (read: impossible) it was to make your own way as a lower-middle-class lady in the 19th century.
Both Lily and Charlotte are “too intelligent not to be honest” with their situations. But Lily, unlike Charlotte, resists her fate to a tragic end.
In scholarship on the novel, much has been written about Lily’s passivity — the way “she was like a water-plant in the flux of tides,” as the novel puts it. Yet she actively chooses to ignore potential suitors, like Mr. Gryce (who bears striking resemblance to Mr. Collins) by missing their arranged dates or playing coy to overt advances. Lily feels that, thanks to her beauty and established social position, she can marry a man like Gryce at any time. Why rush it? Why not enjoy the relative freedoms her unmarried life permits a little longer?
So, despite the overwhelming number of readings and analysis of Lily that think of her as this passive, even waifish or weak, figure…I read Lily as a rather active, if defiant, figure.
Lily actively rejects many of the social expectations around her, while she simultaneously bears the profound weight of them. This dynamic compounds the agony of her failures in what we might call a passive resistance.
The question I puzzle over, every time I read it, is why does Lily handle this situation the way that she does? What is she holding out for? What pleasures does she find in her current situation that she believes will dissipate upon marriage?
Ultimately, the novel begs a question about the traditional marriage plot we find in novels like Pride and Prejudice, where the thrust of the novel is to get a young woman safely and happily married off, to firmly establish her in some realm of stability: Why does Lily resist this stability?
Her vague wishes for a better situation, and her bitter recognition of the life she’s meant to lead, keep her tightly bound in a web of indecision. And so, trapped as she feels, she gambles.
Lily before a foreboding mirror
In the scene I’m close reading today, I think we start to find some answers to the question of why Lily approaches her rather dire social situation in the way she does. It’s a nice, long passage, so I’ve included the whole thing. If you want to find it in your own copy of the novel, it takes place in Book 1, Chapter 3.
A bit of setup: Lily is back in her private room at her aunt’s house after a night of playing bridge with her (extremely wealthy) married friends.
Let’s get into it:
“Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold purse which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she returned to her room….Only twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling that for a moment she fancied she must have been robbed. Then she took paper and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table, tried to reckon up what she had spent during the day. Her head was throbbing with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again and again; but at last it came clear to her that she had lost three hundred dollars at cards.
….
But of course she had lost—she who needed every penny, while Bertha Dorset, whose husband showered money on her, must have pocketed at least five hundred….
A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place to Lily Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.
She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had sent to bed. She had been long enough in bondage to other people’s pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter received her wages more regularly.
As she sat before the mirror, brushing her hair, her face looked hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.
“Oh, I must stop worrying!” she exclaimed. “Unless it’s the electric light—” she reflected, springing up from her seat, and lighting the candles on the dressing-table.
She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained.”
There is SO MUCH happening here.
Here’s a little summary: Lily comes back to her room after losing a bunch of money that she couldn’t afford to lose in a night of gambling she couldn’t afford (socially) to skip. She feels bad about it and then she looks in the mirror and sees wrinkles. That’s like lemon juice in a paper cut: this nasty little reminder of her age is a sign not just of her gambling failures but her overall failures in life. She’s getting old — and has increasingly little to show for it. Her “little gold purse” is lighter than ever. She tries to blame the lighting on the wrinkles, but even when she lights a candle instead, “the two lines about the mouth remained.”
OUCH. Poor Lily.
Now, if we want to move beyond summary to close-read the passage, one of my favorite things to do is create a word bank. It’s like another kind of summary, one that catalogues the language at play in the scene. Here’s what we’ve got:
Luck
Persistently bad
Startling
Throbbing
Fatigue
Miserable
Laws of a universe
Calculations
Bondage
Bitter
Position
Hollow and pale
Frightened
Worrying
Electric
Waveringly
Uncertain
Haze
Notice the tone of all these words: there’s a direness, a desperation, to them that, listed out this way, feels overwhelming. How did Wharton so deftly organize all these concepts and allusions into that tight excerpt?
Well, we can start to understand her craft—the artfulness of the way she puts words together to tell a story—by treating these words like building blocks that construct the scene. What we can do, then, is make some categories within the catalogue by looking for commonalities between the language, or languages, Wharton is leveraging here:
The language of anxiety
The language of luck and chance
The language of age
What I notice first in the list is what I’d call the language of anxiety here: “Startling,” “throbbing,” “bondage,” “bitter,” “hollow and pale,” “frightened,” and “worrying.” There’s also unease: “waveringly,” “uncertain” and “haze.” All of this language works together to set the scene of Lily’s profound discomfort, her own mismanagement of funds, and the cruel “laws of a universe” that she feels consistently disadvantage her.
So that’s one narrative thread here. There’s another, woven into it, that deepens the meaning.
The language of “luck” and “calculations” — a complex figuring of a fixed universe that is also riddled with chance. Lily’s “luck” has been “persistently bad,” and that’s presumably the cause of her great losses. However, “luck” is profoundly contradicted by the fact that Lily’s fellow players at the table were bankrolled by husbands with deep pockets. Was it really lucky that they walked away with handfuls of bills while Lily went home in debt? Note that Lily also feels “robbed,” as if the game was rigged.
This is one of the moments in the novel where Lily flirts with the realization of her stuckness. Rather than hold society or her own culture accountable for her frustrations, however, Lily internalizes it (like a good girl) and becomes physically ill with anxiety: her head throbs, she frights at her own reflection.
Then, there’s another narrative thread, interwoven here, that deepens the complexity of the scene even more. The language of age.
We’ve got to go beyond the list I created above to find it, but it’s there—and perhaps more visible to us now that we’ve laid out other threads or tensions at work. As she gazes in the mirror, Lily is frightened by the signs of age on her face: “two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws.”
As she sat before the mirror, brushing her hair, her face looked hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.
Plump, rosy cheeks where a sign of health in the 19th century, and Lily’s “hollow and pale” face is not just a reflection (literally) of her fatigue, but of her anxiety. Her internal states, then, are profoundly influencing her external ones.
Anxiety about her bad luck, Lily rants to her mirror, is the reason for the “flaws” in her complexion. It’s her fault, her bad luck, her problem, that her most valuable social currency—her beauty—is fading.
What I find stickiest about the passage is Lily’s response to her pale reflection: to blame the electric lights on the wall. They’re harsh and too bright; she assumes that, back in candlelight, the reality of her situation will be obscured and she’ll be restored to her illusions about the time she has left before she makes a decision.
She turns off the lights, lights her candles, and looks back: “the two lines about the mount remained.”
I can’t imagine a more deftly delivered gut punch. (Wharton is the master of this.) What Wharton establishes here, across this vocabulary of anxieties, is the true depth to which Lily is both internalizing and in denial of her situation. She is honest with herself, yes, but only to a point. Her limited view will continue to frustrate her and us, as we read a novel which forces us to witness a self-destructive cycle of indecision and defiance.
As Lily’s gaze finally widens, toward the end of the novel, we’ve already gotten enough foreboding moments—like this one, in her candlelit mirror—to know it won’t be enough. The narrative threads woven here are, for me, the dominant ones of the entire novel. And as Wharton expertly braids them across the rest of the novel, we find Lily further and more deeply bound not only by the reality of her tragic social situation but by her own desire to turn out the lights and hide from it.
A few takeaways
The novel supposes a Social Darwinist framework — a world of strict laws and forced adaptability, the one Lily feels she was “always left out of.” This is what American Naturalist novels do: they take the scientific theory of evolution to its natural conclusions in violent social worlds.
In this scene, Lily’s response to her wrinkles, her loss of a great sum of money she couldn’t afford to lose, her desire to hide from reality, perhaps shows us the depths to which Lily is “unfit” for this system—precisely due to her refusal to see what is plainly on her face.
And yet, perhaps due to Wharton’s deft prose or my own hubris, I can’t help but adore Lily and long for her to make a different choice. Every time I read the novel, I feel myself wishing and willing her to stop caring so much about those wrinkles; to stop hanging out with Bertha, who is the actual worst person; to stop gambling not just with her coins but with her life.
What I really end up wishing for, though, is not a different Lily but a different social system for Lily—one in which she might be free of the throbbing fatigue and desperate anxieties that tire her. And I think that’s really the point (of one of many) Wharton’s making here. Despite all Lily’s efforts to take this on herself and blame herself—internalize her pain, throb with the “bad luck” of her situation—it’s plain to see the way Old New York society wrecks her, makes a game of her situation, and bets on her losing out.
That she stays in the game as long as she does is, I think, a testament to whatever is in her that can’t be socialized or controlled. And that, for me, is what makes the novel worth reading over and over again.
‘Til next time.
Have a speedy recovery, Haley! 😀
Wishing you a speedy recovery Haley! I hope the time is relaxing but also flies by. And I’m so glad you reshared this as I just started reading Wharton last year and plan to read House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence this year since I’m hooked. You’ve given me all the more reason to be excited about Edith Wharton.