Wharton Wednesday: Book 1, Ch 11, 12 & 13
Week 5: "Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up!"
Welcome to Week 5!
Next week, we wrap Book 1. You’re doing it, we’re doing it, we’re reading this novel so slowly together! And I, for one, am having a blast. I can’t wait to hear all your thoughts on this week’s assigned chapters.
Today, we’re working through Chapters 11, 12, and 13 of The House of Mirth.
View all previous chapter summaries and the reading schedule.
For next week, read chapters 14 and 15 — and then write about them! You’ll find a special prompt for the end of Book 1 included in this week’s notes.
Note that today’s newsletter, thanks to all the artwork I’ve included, is too long for email! You’ll need to click over to your browser or the Substack app to read the whole thing. Sorry, in advance, for being so darn verbose 😉
What happens in chapters 11, 12, and 13
Here is our usual plot summary of what happens in each chapter. The characters we meet this week are in bold.
In Chapter 11:
It’s been a rough economic season for the upper crust and they’re bored out of their minds
Miss Grace Stepney starts to stir up trouble for Lily via the almighty power of gossip and innuendo
Mrs. Peniston, Lily’s aunt, doesn’t want to believe the horrible things people are saying about her niece…but she also kinda believes all of it
In Chapter 12:
“Lily felt she was gradually losing control of the situation” and with signature aplomb, she attempts to reassert control by appearing in the tableaux vivants at the Welly Brys’s ornate house party
Gerty and Selden are in attendance
A “splended frieze” of artworks unfold at the party, including a Goya, Titian, Vandyck, and Lily’s “Mrs. Lloyd”
Selden seeks her out and they find themselves in the garden
They kiss; Selden proposes again
Lily runs away again
In Chapter 13:
Lily wakes up very happy the next day — and has two notes, one from Selden and one from Judy Trenor inviting her for a visit
Judy cancels her visit to the city and tells Gus Trenor to let Lily know
Gus does not tell Lily, so she shows up to visit Judy after a late-night dinner party and Gus traps her in the drawing room for a long, harrowing, embarrassing scene
Lily finally escapes Trenor’s cruel trick, but she’s shaking and devastated and terrified — he has finally called her bluff and the game is up
As she rides home, she longs for a friend to hug her and console her — and spies Gerty Farish’s apartment on a nearby block
Tableaux vivants
I want to make sure you all know what a tableaux vivants performance is. It’s central to this week’s reading, and to our evolving understanding of Lily status as artist vs. art object — as well as to our evolving conversation about what it means to be “conspicuous.”
Tableaux vivants = “living pictures”
Translated directly from the French, tableaux vivants are a form of performance art, in which real people costume themselves like figures in famous paintings, and then sit inside a literal frame on a stage, holding perfectly still, to give a kind of three-dimensional, real-life effect to the artwork.
As scholar Emily J. Orlando explains, this art form “enjoyed a revival in the nineteenth century as a kind of parlor game for the leisure class, has a colorful history that predates Wharton’s day. Its origins can be found in the pageants and royal processions of the Renaissance.”
The Welly Brys’s party definitely evokes that kind of pageant feel, as the women adorn themselves and get up on stage for appraisal by their community.
The tableaux vivants form also has obvious ties to theater, in the way it stages and frames individual people as characters within referential scenes. Orlando explains: “The players who enacted tableaux were called ‘model artists,’ a term that points to their dual classification as both models (still, frozen bodies) and artists (makers of art).”
(Think of Lily’s “dual classification” in the novel, so far, as both art and artist…)
If you’re a Gilmore Girls fan, you might recall the episode when Sookie goes into labor while Lorelai is posed in her frame — and her pager goes off mid-performance. (This is the same delightful episode where Kirk plays a vindictive Christ in The Last Supper.)
Watch the clip below for a look at tableaux vivants in action:
In chapter 12, Lily performs at the Welly Brys’s party as Joshua Reynolds’ Mrs. Lloyd:
The painting is a depiction of a young, single woman carving the name of her lover into a tree. And Lily portrays her to great effect.
We’ll dive into all the details as we go through today’s reading and discussion topics, but it may help you track everything that’s happening in chapter 12 (and in chapter 13, really) to have this imagery in your mind.
Looking at the painting also helpfully contextualizes just how right on the line Lily’s choice of artwork would have been to the audience. Those draperies are pretty sexy and sheer, Mrs. Lloyd! And after all, it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that women began to participate as models in tableaux vivants at all. Before then, like many stage productions, all the players were men. As Orlando explains: “As soon as the viewer’s gaze shifted to female bodies on display—and scantily clad at that—the tradition became associated with indecency.”
For me, seeing the exact painting Lily selects for her scene contextualizes Selden’s totally-turned-on reaction to her performance, as well as all the lewd comments the other men make after the curtain falls.
Orlando argues thusly:
“Wharton’s heroine objectifies herself, and she seems to understand that her aim is not so much to embody art as it is to use this occasion to sell herself as a marriageable commodity.”
I have to wonder, though, if what Lily is really shooting for her is that impossible bothness of her status. Because, on this re-read, I have been so struck by the way Lily seems to want to occupy contradictory statuses all at once, and to thereby collapse their power or perhaps concentrate it. In fact, she continually insists on opposition and contradiction, as if living by Walt Whitman’s famous words: “I contain multitudes.”
She wants to be both art and artist, maker and made. By staging herself in this way, could we argue that she’s attempting to attract the kind of man who will allow her to occupy the wholeness, or the impossible tension, between these states?
I think Orlando is right that Lily is staging herself on the marriage market — but to what end? We know Lily is getting desperate, but she’s also not accepting any of the offers coming her way. At this point in the novel, I think we can safely say that Lily knows she has to marry, but she loathes the idea of it. So…why would she stage herself in such a sexy, amorous scene, for all those eligible (and totally not eligible) men in the audience — and for all those women who are her peers, who are increasingly gossiping behind her back about her “arrangements” — and then not capitalize on Selden’s offer, which immediately follows?
Is it fate? Is it choice? Is it plot? Is it character?
Remember how Cynthia Griffin Wolff, another Wharton scholar, puts the question to work:
“Can a woman take an active role and make beauty, become the master craftsman; or are women fated to passivity, required always to be beautiful, become objects that can be admired, collected, and cared for—and deprived thereby of human dignity?”
Those epic tableaux
Chapter 12 gives us a decadent social scene and a bit of artistic theory. Wharton uses the occasion not just to quite literally stage Lily at the center of all the tensions we’ve thus far read about, but also to take us deeper into an analysis of the kinds of minds that populate this esteemed corner of the New York elite.
“Tableaux vivants depend for their effect not only on the happy disposal of lights and the delusive interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision.”
Let’s translate that into modern day English: Living pictures only work if, in addition to perfect lighting and costuming, the people in the audience also adjust the way they’re looking and what they’re expecting to see.
Let’s take it one level simpler: Living pictures only work if you are willing to use your imagination.
We know, so far, that Selden and Lily are a bit unique in their social set because they have vivid imaginations and big ideas. The people they’re surrounded with are, um, a little stuffy by comparison. (Think of dull Gryce and his mommy issues; Judy Trenor with her fixation on marrying Lily off; Bertha with her endless string of distracting affairs; Peniston with her rigid moral code.) All these people are “unfurnished minds,” which is Wharton’s way of saying completely empty-headed.
“To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination.”
Translation: To empty-minded people, living pictures look like a cheap wax museum piece. But if you are willing to be playful and let yourself get swept away, they’re absolutely magical because they let you move between what’s real and what’s not real at the same time.
When we read fiction, we call this propensity “the suspension of disbelief.” It’s the detachment from the strands of pure reality that allows us to be carried away by a story — to believe impossible things, from the explicitly fantastical (like the existence of wizards in the Muggle world) to the plainly realistic but unlikely (like Mr. Darcy actually changing himself for Elizabeth).
Tableaux vivants depend on your ability and desire to be swept away by the effects of a work of art. Think of the people dragged to the museum on family vacation, who complain that modernist paintings are too easy to too boring to be “real art,” or the people who watch a Mission Impossible movie and are bothered by how unrealistic all those stunts are. “He couldn’t possibly fall out of that plane on a motorcycle and fix his broken parachute on the way down, barely launching it in time to still keep pace with the bad guys.”
The suspension of disbelief requires that you allow for such things — that you clue into what the art, or blockbuster, is offering you and you take it to task for what it does do, and not hold it accountable for what it does not do.
In the case of tableaux vivants, and in the case of The House of Mirth, Lily uses this moment to connect with the suspended — with those who are willing to entertain and even believe impossible stories. People like Lawrence Selden.
We learn that Selden has the right kind of mind to truly appreciate art — and Lily’s arts, specifically. We kind of already knew this, but in case we’d missed it, chapter 12 doubles down.
In fact, “he could yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the spell of a fairy-tale.” Selden is, in other words, a perfect audience member for Lily’s performances — both in this scene at the party and in all the other scenes in which he has beheld her.
After all, she is the “refreshing” sight he first notices in the train station, in chapter 1. He has wondered how much she cost to make, how many other women are less beautiful because Lily seems to be hoarding all the gorgeousness for herself. He has watched her from afar and he takes advantage of any chance to look at her close-up. He has frequently treated her as a beautiful spectacle to behold.
And then, in this chapter, as he gazes upon her performance, Gerty says they’re seeing “the real Lily—the Lily I know.”
What do you think Gerty means by the “real” Lily Bart?
What do you think Selden means by the “real” Lily Bart? The “Lily we know”?
Why and how and in what ways does this pretense or artifice — the performance of herself as an art object — stage Lily’s realness?
The paintings
To help with your visual journey throughout the tableaux vivants, I’ve collected what are the most likely matches to the paintings Wharton describes in the chapter:
First, we have “a group of nymphs dancing across flower-strewn sward in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli’s Spring.”
Then, we have Carry Fisher’s Goya — likely one of his portraits “with her short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated glow of her eyes, the provocation of her frankly-painted smile:
And then we have “a brilliant Miss Smedden from Brooklyn” who “showed to perfection the sumptuous curves of Titian’s Daughter, lifting her gold salver laden with grapes above the harmonizing gold of rippled hair and rich brocade.”
Then, the “young Mrs. Alstyne, who showed the frailer Dutch type, with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and lashes, made a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin, against a curtained archway.”
Then, we have “Kauffman nymphs garlanding the altar of Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads and marble architecture; and a Watteau group of lute-playing comedians, lounging by a fountain in a sunlit glade.”
This display of classical arts forms a kind of procession in performance — a beauty pageant, staged via beloved artworks — with the culminating display coming from Lily as Joshua Reynolds’ “Mrs. Lloyd.”
Notice the diverse artistic types and sensibilities in the paintings Wharton has evoked — and how each type of woman aligns to a different kind of artwork or artist’s perspective.
Carry Fisher has those dark, brooding eyes typical of Goya; another young lady has those “sumptuous curves” that Titian infamously captured with such sensuous care.
And yet Lily both embodies and transcends her “type”:
“She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynold’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.”
From chapter 12
What do you make of Lily’s selection? How does this complicate, evolve, or undo some of what we’ve previously learned about her proclivity for putting on displays and performing herself to advantage? How does this align with the frequent gaffs she has made?
(And just a snarky side note: scholars debated for a long time whether Wharton knew much of anything about painting. I find this pretty shocking because she had to have a solid grasp on it to write this chapter…!? Luckily, more recent scholars have attuned their readings of the novel to Wharton’s obvious aesthetic knowledge and keen sensibilities.)
“Nowhere in the novel is Lily more powerful than when she poses as Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd and thereby oversees her objectification.”
-Emily Orlando, “Picturing Lily”
A garden interlude
After Lily’s performance, Wharton does something very curious and wonderful. She juxtapositions the responses from the male gaze along extremes:
Selden’s swooning, wide-eyed gaze that wants to seek out more Lily because he has seen “the whole tragedy of her life” up on that stage
An appreciative — meaning awestruck or grateful — gaze
All those other men whose gaze is downright gross — they basically slut-shame Lily for appearing in such a beautiful, gauzy depiction of a woman’s body
An appreciative — meaning valuing or measuring — gaze
Trenor’s disgust and obvious jealousy
A gross, typical gaze from this guy who is totally obsessed with her
We eavesdrop on all these men who are absolutely agog at Lily’s scene — and then Selden utters my favorite line from this week’s reading:
“Does one go to Caliban for a judgement on Miranda?”
This is another Shakespeare connection — this time coming from his play The Tempest. In that play, Caliban represents a bestial creature, while Miranda is a good and beautiful woman, the daughter of the ruler Prospero. In this question, Selden is voicing his frustration: Why should any of us care what these misogynists think about Lily? (Would you ask a jealous, mean man for a fair judgment on a kind woman he cannot have? Would you share his opinion? Would you trust his judgement, in other words?)
In contrast with their comments, which “cheapened and vulgarized” the beauty of her scene, Selden feels “an overmastering longing to be with her again.” Honestly, Selden, same.
I have no idea how to write about the scene that follows, except to say that F. Scott Fitzgerald had to have this passage dog-eared when he was writing Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion in The Great Gatsby, right?
The luminous halos of light, the fragrant flowers, and that kiss. It’s all so romantic and beautiful — and still tinged with that feeling of artifice, as if Lily and Selden have stepped into the most romantic setting possible, a stage laid for them by the narrative and by Lily’s careful calculations.
(Is the novel following her? Or is she following the novel?)
…And then, as many of you have started noticing, whenever Lily has a really great moment that she could turn into a success…she kinda botches it instead.
Selden tells her he loves her, and he even positions that love as the kind that can help her. I always read this scene as Selden telling Lily that the best way he can help her escape her dwindling social status and reassert her social power is to marry her. And yet she puts him off:
“Love me, love me, but don’t tell me so.”
?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!
If she just said yes, in that moment, we might completely avoid what’s coming in chapter 13…
Trenor’s payment
We all saw this confrontation coming — but I wonder if any of us were prepared for how utterly demoralizing and scary and tense it would be? Gus lures Lily into his empty home, late at night, and then demands “a seat at the table” that he’s paid for.
"Like much contemporary naturalism, Wharton’s fiction discovers a potential violence in everyday life, though in Wharton’s world of customs and manners it is the subtlest shades of decorum that can contain the gleam of a knife.”
—Nancy Bentley, “Edith Wharton and the Science of Manners”
For the early twentieth century, and even for Wharton, Trenor’s aggression and anger are pretty sharp. While we’ve seen some of the sneakier violences from women like Bertha or even from Grace Stepney’s damaging gossip, Trenor’s violence in chapter 13 is boiling over — far from the “subtlest shades of decorum,” he has departed into anger, bitterness, and indignant entitlement.
Trenor is embarrassed and the trick he plays feels like something out of a Hardy or Dickens novel: it’s cruel and manipulative, and the moment Lily realizes what is happening, she’s furious.
And yet, even when it’s clear that Trenor has tricked her and is cornering her…Lily keeps up appearances. She makes little jokes, she asks simple questions, and she tries to get to the door — which he blocks. He blusters and threatens, and as the tension builds, you wonder what he’s about to do. How insistent is he on payment? How much can Lily afford to keet putting him off?
These are a gambler’s questions.
This is the moment when the House (of Mirth) calls her bluff.
Lily seems astonished that it’s all so literal. Gus really is demanding sex for money; Lily really is in a position of feeling that she must “pay up” for his “services” with services of her own.
And yet, what I noticed on this read of the chapter was that Trenor seems a bit shocked, too. None of this is meant to excuse his behavior, but rather to understand what’s at stake here. He’s disgusting and it’s so clear that he’s been thinking of Lily as nothing more than a sexual piece to be played with and payed for.
But was there some part of him that hoped Lily really did like him, and that she wasn’t just using him for money? Was there some part of him — the part we see humiliated behind all the angry threats — that believed he was of real value to Lily, as much as she was of value to him?
Was he, like Lily, under the impression that this wasn’t all so bluntly transactional?
Likewise: was there some part of Lily that wanted to believe their relationship was based on more than sex and the stock market? Was there some part of Lily that had valued herself more highly than what Trenor’s demands suggest she owes?
We can put it bluntly: Chapter 13 lays bare the relationship between Lily’s objectification and the fact of prostitution. Was the tableaux vivants, beautiful as it was, just a display of marketable goods? Was Lily, like one of the men in attendance says, really just putting herself on auction by appearing on that stage?
At this point, I think we have to ask:
Why does Wharton structure the story this way?
Meaning: Why does she follow Selden’s gorgeous, heart-wrenching offer/proposal with Trenor’s nasty demands/charges?
What do these chapters tell us about Lily?
What do these chapters tell us about this novel as a marriage plot?
“Wharton illustrates a kind of compromise by which women comply with the battering of their bodies within the world of art.”
-Emily Orlando
A gossiping (dis)Grace
Oh, Grace. You’re the worst.
Wharton is already foreshadowing some real drama with that pile of letters, Lily’s horrible interaction with Gus, and the never-ending question of what she’ll do about Selden.
And now we’ve got mousy, jealous girl kneeling at the feet of Mrs. Peniston and serving her cup after cup of piping hot tea?! Literally!?
Last week, I wrote about how we can look to Grace and Gerty as foils for Lily, and I’m curious to know what you’re thinking about these two very different women. The novel tells us that Lily has kind of lumped them together as unfortunate, unmarriageable girls in her mind — but we find out this week just how incredibly different they are.
Gerty sees Lily as a beautiful muse and good person; Grace sees her as an ungrateful brat, taking advantage of fusty old Peniston.
We’d do a disservice to pretend that what these women think doesn’t matter — and that their beliefs about Lily (true or not), as well as all those of the Trenors, the Dorsets, the Alstynes, Rosedale, Selden — aren’t, in many ways, starting to drive the plot more than Lily’s choices are.
My favorite sentence
I already mentioned it above, but here it is again:
“Does one go to Caliban for a judgement on Miranda?”
I love Selden’s question because I think it’s one that we’re all wrestling with: Where can we turn for a true read on Lily’s character? Who can rightly judge her?
Is it our job, as readers, to judge her?
Are we, like spectators in the audience, watching “the whole tragedy of her life” as if it is a work of art? Or as if she is a real person, facing real consequences?
It seems plainly unfair to read her through the eyes of the men who only want her for sex and view her as a plaything — they merely objectify her. Yet it seems likewise foolish to depend wholly on Gerty’s doting assessment or Selden’s lovestruck gaze.
Where is the “real Lily Bart”? Have we seen her? Have you?
Close reading tip
Try this:
Reread the tableaux vivants scene — this time, with the visuals.
Whenever a literary work invokes another form of art — be that a song, a painting, a poem, or even an architectural movement or specific building — do a quick online search to find what they’re talking about!
Did your impression of Lily’s tableau change when you saw the painting she chose? Why? In what way(s)?
What other moments in the novel, so far, have invoked art — or artistic movements, like impressionism or Byzantine poetry — that might mean more once you understand the reference?
Writing prompts
Translate Wharton’s prose into your own, as I did with the passages about the tableaux vivants. Pick a passage that is puzzling you and put it in your own words. Then, take your own words and translate them again. Notice the shifts you make as you do.
Pick a single phrase and analyze the crap out of it. For me, this week, I’d want to sit more with the idea of “responsive fancy.” What is that? What does that mean? Why does Selden have it? Who else has it?
Additional reading
The resurgence of tableaux vivants during the pandemic // More on the tablueax vivants art form from University of Chicago
Up next
Read chapters 14 and 15 for next week. You can review the full reading schedule anytime. Happy reading! 📚
In the comments today, let’s get the discussion going!
How do Gerty’s and Grace’s ideas of “the real Lily Bart” differ? Does the difference matter?
(Are you a Grace or a Gerty when it comes to Lily?)
What was your favorite scene or sentence from this week?
What do you think will be the end of Book 1? Where will this phase of Lily’s story end?
Remember: if you have something you’d like me to cover next week, tell me about it here.
I take notes every week and had actually created a chart to compare/contrast Gerty Farish (“heart was a fountain of tender illusion”) and Grace Stepney (“precise register of facts as manifested in their relation to herself”). Grace feels anger toward Lily which drives some of her decisions.
So does Gus Tranor and what happens in Chapter 13 is previewed in Chapter 12: “Tranor was in truth in an unmanageable mood. In spite of his understanding with Rosedale he had been somewhat heavily “touched” by the fall in stocks; his household expenses weighed on him, and he seemed to be meeting, on all sides, a sullen opposition to his wishes, instead of the easy good luck he had hitherto encountered.”
Chapter 13 was pretty intense. My notes: “Lily was tricked by Tranor. She got away!!”
Selden reminds me of Rhett Butler in one way - he knows who Scarlett is but he wants her anyway. When they finally marry, he lets her be her true self. Selden sees Lily for who she is, but I wonder if they do get engaged/marry, if he will try to change her under the guise of “helping” her. This often leads to heartache and disappointment so we’ll see.
The tableaux vivants description reminds me of Festival of Arts Pageant of the Masters Laguna Beach.
https://www.foapom.com/pageant-of-the-masters/
I must have seen it with my mother in 1966 or 67 and it blew me away. At the time, all of the participants in each living art piece were local (and may still be true). In conjunction with the Pageant, there was a juried art exhibit and what they called The Sawdust Festival, booths set up by artists that you can enjoy before the performance. If you ever get a chance to attend, go!
Finally Selden is more than an observer, and it turns out he's as motivated by his mother as Lily is by hers. We only know about Mrs. Selden through the rosy lens of her son' s gaze, but apparently her gift was to be able to bring charm to less than ideal settings. Selden introduces us to Lily by highlighting her ability to transform a common train station at rush hour. Ah, makes sense now; in Lily he sees a woman like his mother. The fact that she leaves the station with him also feeds the idea that they might find a way to flout convention and stilted society life. Selden admits he is looking for "a love which should broaden and deepen till it became the central fact of life." It would be nice to think Lily could grow into his vision, but I don't see evidence of it in her character so far. While he's totally into their encounter in the garden, she's just riding high on what she sees as the return of her power. Were she to marry him, I don't think it would be long before her extravagance and his unrealistic opinion of her would collide leading the arrangement to end in bitterness. So unless that's the story Wharton has in mind, I don't see things going that direction. In other developments, her amazing night at the Brys' is bracketed by big problems. In response to the vindictive gossip delivered by Grace Stepney, her aunt feels "as if there had been a contagious illness in the house, and she was doomed to sit shivering among her contaminated furniture." No wonder Lily literally has no refuge in that home after her tense evening with Trenor. She's been reckless (and maybe naive?) to gamble her reputation, her actual safety, and her future. I feel a net tightening as her options dwindle. Is Selden still an option, and will she even take it if he is? Her response to Selden's note the day after the party is sheer vanity "it brought back the culminating moment of her triumph: the moment when she had read in his eyes that no philosophy was proof against her power." How very Scarlet OHara.