Wharton Wednesday: Book 1, Chapters 2 - 4
Week 2: "She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate"
Welcome to Week 2 of our Edith Wharton
read-a-long!
Today, we’re working through Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of The House of Mirth.
Full read-a-long details are available here. If you have not read the assigned chapters for today yet, I suggest stopping here and doing so before you read any more of this post!
Revisit our summary of chapter 1 here. Remember: read through chapters 5, 6, and 7 for next week. Review our full reading schedule here.
I’m so excited to hear your thoughts on these chapters.
This week, I created a Pinterest board with Mirth-inspired imagery, should you need some imagination-fuel as we dive deeper into the story.
A reminder:
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and are able to leave comments!
An update on subscription status:
Substack doesn’t allow Free subscribers to comment on posts that have a paywall. So I’m removing the paywall, because the whole point is for us all to have wide-open discussion about the novel in the comments!
I’ll keep paid subscriptions available — just consider a paid subscription a way to support the time I spend developing each post and adding the fun extras, like questions and links. Your paid subscriptions really help me block aside more time for devoting to this read-a-long!
What happens in chapters 2, 3, and 4
Here’s a basic plot summary of what happens in the most straightforward sense. The characters we meet this week are in bold.
In Chapter 2:
Lily catches her afternoon train to Bellomont and has tea with the extremely tiresome and sorta handsome Percy Gryce (who has obvious mommy issues)
What’s Bellomont? It’s a large home, outside of the city, that rich social groups would “escape to,” during hot summer months, to play cards and drink a lot and make (under the table) business deals. The owners of homes like these would have had many other homes and properties; this is basically their “party house.” It’s kind of like how Mr. Bingley rents Netherfield in Pride and Prejudice, so that he can throw a ball to meet girls.
Bertha Dorset boards the train with her husband and forces her way to Lily’s table with Gryce, and demands cigarettes
In Chapter 3:
Lily observes the crowd and plays cards at Bellomont
Lily goes to her room after playing bridge with the gals and realizes she lost $300 (about $11,000 in today’s money 🤯)
“the gambling passion was upon her, and that in her present surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.” No kidding.
Lily panics at the sight of wrinkles around her mouth
Lily thinks about her childhood and her parents (her mom sounds terrible — maybe Lily, like Gryce, also has mommy issues?)
In Chapter 4:
Mrs. Judy Trenor — hostess of Bellomont, married to Gus Trenor — asks Lily to help her with tasks normally reserved for a secretary; Lily feels bitter about it but doesn’t want to get more wrinkles so she fakes a smile 😂
Mrs. Trenor gossips to Lily about who is and is not invited to the Trenors’ upcoming balls and events
Mrs. Trenor tells Lily that Bertha is annnoyed that Selden didn’t come to Bellomont; it’s heavily implied that Selden and Bertha have been having an affair but that Selden recently called it off and Bertha is pissed
Lily realizes this is probably why Bertha keeps monopolizing Gryce’s time: to mess with Lily because Selden didn’t come to the party and Bertha isn’t happy unless she’s got a play-thing — “She delights in making people miserable, and especially poor George”
Mrs. Trenor offers to call and invite Selden to make Bertha happy, so that Bertha will stop flirting with Gryce — but Lily convinces her not to
Lily resolves to marry Gryce, and “she determined to be to him what his Americana had hitherto been: the one possession in which he took sufficient pride to spend money on it.” And she will do this because the trade-off, she believes, will be that “she would be able to play the game in her own way”
Then…Selden shows up! 🤯
Drama, drama, drama…
“But why had she failed? Was it her own fault or that of destiny?”
Today’s chapters focus on the idea that “Society is a revolving body” that takes turns punishing some people while rewarding others. The only problem is that Lily can’t figure out if she’s being punished or rewarded.
“In the decades following the Civil War, American capitalism began to produce a distinct culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and circulation of money and goods at the foundation of its aesthetic life and of its moral sensibility.”
—from Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture
by William Leach
Across these thirty-ish pages, we watch Lily oscillate across feeling trapped and stuck in a miserable world with no options at one extreme to feeling, less than twelve hours later, that she is ready to join the very people she hated the night before to “lord” over society with them. The effect is a bit dizzying. It’s clear Lily doesn’t really know how she feels — or what to do.
Yet there is one constant in these chapters: Lily feels like a failure. She has “failed” at marriage, at aging, at money, at life. But she is plagued with questions. Did she cause this failure through her choices? Did she let this happen to her through her passivity? Or does she really have no control at all, and all this suffering was fated for her by some cruel universe?!
Basically, today’s chapters explore Lily’s burgeoning existential crisis, in which she squirms around ideas of accountability for her choices and wonders about the power of a predetermined destiny.
Is Lily to blame?
“After they had lost their money, [her mother] used to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: ‘But you’ll get it all back—you’ll get it all back, with your face.’”
Lily’s beauty is all tied-up in her ideas about luck, fate, and failure. And in chapter 3, we get some insights into this tangled web.
We learn about her parents — a haughty, spoilt mother and a haggard, exhausted father — and Lily’s role as a beautiful trophy. We learn about her childhood: “a zig-zag broken course…tugged at by the underflow of a perpetual need—the need of more money.”
After her father dies from being financially “ruined,” her mother positions Lily’s beauty as “the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt.” In other words: Lily has been taught that her beauty has high-stakes social value. That, in every conceivable way, Lily is only valuable as a person as long as she is aesthetically pleasing to others. It is only by marrying rich that Lily can prove her value, which can be summarily defined as becoming a wealthy man’s wife.
What’s more, Lily also seems to believe—thanks to her mother—that her beauty, invested wisely, is the only way to establish social and financial stability and power. But Wharton has already shown us, at least once, that Lily isn’t very good at saving or investing. Instead, in anxiety and hopefulness, she gambles things — opportunities, money, connections — away.
It’s worth asking:
Aside from her literal gambling, what examples have we seen of Lily’s “gambling” behaviors so far?
What’s the relationship between money and beauty? How has the novel explored the question of “value” so far?
Remember Selden and Lily’s conversation about Americana and rare books in chapter 1? How does that relate to all this?
What are the layers to Lily’s anxiety? What is at stake for her?
How has Lily’s past informed her present?
Social Darwinism
“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?”
Wharton uses words like “adapt” and “evolve” a lot, so far in the novel. She even uses the word “extinct” to describe Lily’s father’s death. There are allusions to “species,” “types,” and “fitting in.” Lily, especially, has a restless relationship the role she is expected to play and the marriage she has been raised to pursue and establish — she has somewhat “adapted” to her fate, but she is also resisting it and “failing” it in key ways.
We can ask:
Is she really meant to “adapt” to her new situation, despite being raised to live an entirely different kind of life?
What does it mean to “fail” when your choices are so limited?
Does Lily really have choices?
Does Lily want to fail?
When we think about “who is to blame” for Lily’s situation, the question is much more complex than our own moralizing might lead us to believe.
All of these ideas have strong connections to Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin — scientists who explored and presented theories of evolution and adaptation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In fact, there’s a whole genre of literature called naturalism, which is (in many ways and often disputed) a specific branch of realism.
Naturalism is, in the simplest terms, literature informed by Darwinist thought. This means that it engages with (but doesn’t necessarily agree with) ideas like “survival of the fittest.” For Social Darwinists, like Spencer, society — like any other networked ecosystem — requires that its subjects adapt or die.
As Donald Pizer puts it in the Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, naturalism “rest[s] on the relationship between a restrictive social and intellectual environment and the consequent impoverishment both of social opportunity and of the inner life.”
For a long time, scholars did not categorize Edith Wharton’s fiction as naturalism at all, but rather as straightforward realism. But reading The House of Mirth through the ideas of Social Darwinism invites us to see the “restrictive social…environment” Lily lives in — and how living under such harsh restrictions leads to an “impoverishment” of her choices and collapses her opportunities to “make an independent life for herself.”
In other words: thinking about how Wharton was engaging with scientific and sociopolitical ideas of her time — namely Social Darwinism — allows us to better understand why Lily would think of the universe as a miserable place with very few opportunities for her beyond marriage to a rich guy. Darwinistic thinking helps us understand why Lily believes that her father’s death was a result of his financial “ruin,” and that because she has yet to marry, she has “failed” at life.
As you reflect on this week’s reading, and get into chapter 5, think more on this idea of “survival of the fittest” in the context of the social world Lily lives in. Is it a “dog-eat-dog” social world? Is Bertha “the fittest”? Who is at the “top” of this food chain?
How apt are these scientific concepts as social models?
A historical tidbit
Remember when I mentioned the Titanic last week?
John Jacob Astor IV was the wealthiest man to die in the tragic sinking of that famous ship. His mother, Mrs. Caroline Astor, is worth telling you about today. She spearheaded a curious little cultural artifact from early-twentieth-century New York that helps us understand Judy Trenor’s anxious work to clearly articulate who is and who is not invited to Bellomont.
Mrs. Caroline Astor’s List of 400
Mrs. Caroline Astor — “the queen of New York society”1 — was New York’s proudest and most dedicated social gatekeeper in the 1890s. Along with Ward McAllister, a self-proclaimed “social arbiter,” Mrs. Astor created “The Four Hundred,” a list of New York’s crème de la crème according to herself and McAllister (informed heavily by how “pure” your New York bloodlines were). Her ornate ballroom just so happened to fit exactly 400 people.
If this feels like some Regina George Mean Girls shit, or the kind of thing that the Malfoys totally would’ve done over in the Wizarding World, that’s because it totally was.
“There are only about four hundred people in fashionable New York society. If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or make other people not at ease… these people have not the poise, the aptitude for polite conversation, the polished and deferential manner, the infinite capacity of good humor and ability to entertain or be entertained that society demands.”
—Ward McAllister
To be on the list was to be considered among the most influential and powerful in New York society. To not be on the list was (as intended) a shame, a reminder of your lack of social power, and an implication that you were absolutely not part of the cool club.
The list held such sway that it was published in the papers in the early 1890s. Mrs. Astor held annual balls, inviting only those on the list, until her own social power ebbed, as emerging socialites drifted to new parties in new settings, usually thrown by new money families.
Old New York was a small, small world: Caroline Astor was the first cousin of Edith Wharton’s father. Wharton, herself, would’ve been deeply familiar with the concept of the List of 400 — and what it meant to be included, or excluded, from the list. Edith’s own family, after all, was the Jones family. The very same Jones family that inspired the famous phrase: “Keeping up with the Joneses.”
“Mrs. Astor became senile in her last years, before her death in 1908, and was reported to have gone on entertaining imaginary guests in her French Renaissance chateau on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, long after society had by-passed her doors.”
—Hermione Lee
Discussion questions
If you’re keeping a reading journal, or discussing the novel with your own book club, here are a few questions worth examining:
What other characters can you think of who resemble Lily’s parents? Lily? Selden? (Think broadly, beyond literature, to film and television)
What seems to be the lesson Lily learned from her father’s death?
What’s the relationship between money and beauty?
How has the novel explored the question of “value” so far?
What is “dinginess” in the novel? How did Lily’s mother define it? How does Lily define it?
Writing prompts
Connect your understanding of Lily’s society to the excerpt below. In what ways does The House of Mirth describe this “distinct culture”? (Think especially about what Selden and Gryce each have to say about collectibles and “Americana.”)
“In the decades following the Civil War, American capitalism began to produce a distinct culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and circulation of money and goods at the foundation of its aesthetic life and of its moral sensibility.”
—from Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture by William LeachExplore Lily’s belief that “to be poor seemed to her such a confession of failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she detected a note of condescension in the friendliest advances” (from chapter 3)
Write a character sketch of someone from the novel, thus far. What are their desires? What are their flaws? Who would play them in an HBO adaptation of the novel?
Outline a ghost story inspired by Caroline Astor’s imaginary parties and imaginary guests.
My favorite sentence
It’s from mid-chapter 3, when Lily sits and tallies up her dwindling money and finds she lost pretty much everything while her wealthiest friends made thousands:
“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.”
The chapters this week play on a theme we met on page one: luck. In fact, that’s the first thing we hear Lily say: when she spies Selden in the train station, she says. “Mr. Selden — what good luck!”
In this week’s chapters, Lily thinks about luck and chance and laws and “calculations” in a complicated web of entangled meaning. We see Lily struggling against the “laws” of her society, which tell her to get married, as well as against the “laws” of the universe, which seem to reward rich women with more riches while punishing Lily with increasing desperation.
Lily is striving to understand the connections between all these tensions, but in these chapters, we also find out how tired she is. There are numerous mentions of Lily’s anxiety, fatigue, and even pain — throbbing headaches, especially. Lily is miserable, and she’s also scared. The world, for Lily, is increasingly a “miserable place,” and she’s not sure how to move forward.
For me, this sentence best anticipates the sentiment that ends chapter 3: “She was beginning to have angry fits of rebellion against her fate…” and we start to understand the depths of Lily’s anger, her “rebellion,” and her assumptions about “fate.” This sentence could be read as Lily victimizing herself a bit — she feels, after all, that the entire universe is conspiring against her, that it “was so ready to leave her out.” But…is she wrong?
Close reading tip
Try this during your next reading session:
When you come across a sentence you really like — for any reason — read it again, out loud. Then, say it in your own words.
Wharton is a wickedly talented sentence-maker. She turns a phrase like no one else — and to really engage with what she’s putting forth in each sentence, try paraphrase.
Paraphrasing, as opposed to summarizing, doesn’t look for the main theme or overarching idea. Instead, it seeks to carefully unpack each piece of a sentence to understand the true depth of what is being conveyed. Wharton’s a perfect author to practice your paraphrasing skills with. Here’s what to do:
Underline or pick a unique colored highlighter for your “favorite sentences” or those sentences you want to try putting into your own words.
Read aloud the sentence you’ve selected. Try putting the emphasis on different parts of the sentence to find the rhythm and internal logic of the words.
Rephrase the sentence in your own words, using a dictionary to help with unfamiliar terms or phrases, and see how and where the meaning shifts as you play with the words.
Notice how your version of the sentence and Wharton’s version of the sentence operate similarly and differently. Think about what may have compelled her to use the words she used.
Additional reading
Read a short academic piece about Lily’s stay at Bellomont (spoiler alert!) // My close reading of Lily’s anxiety about her wrinkles // A short piece on vintage fashion and dress styles at the turn of the century // More about the infamous List of 400 and Mrs. Astor // An essay by John Updike about Edith Wharton’s life // An informative blog post with lots of great images from the Astors’ enormous 5th Avenue Chateau // An interview about Caroline Astor’s biggest competition: Alva Vanderbilt //
Up next
In week 3, we’ll dive into more of the historical context behind the novel and especially into Wharton’s own history. Can’t wait!! Remember: read through chapters 5, 6, and 7 for next week. You can review the full reading schedule on the new Mirth page I’ve added to my site. Happy reading! 📚
In the comments today, tell me:
What you think of Bertha!!!!
Your favorite scene or sentence from this week’s chapters
What you think will happen next…
Why did Selden come?
From Hermione Lee’s fantastic biography of Wharton, page 33.
I thought of commenting last week and it felt strange, as it is my first time reading this novel. Even worse, I first heard of Wharton when I started following you on IG. I might have seen her name on the screen in Scorsese's movie, but never put much thought into it, since it is not my favourite.
I see myself as well-read person, but I read mostly last 250 hundred years of European literature, as a good pupil in Europe does. With more and more focus on different voices, I do not understand how Wharton falls out of revisions of proposed readings. It is very high society, but I see so many female issues that still plague us in a modern post-suffrage (and many waves of human rights) world.
How many of us has looked in the mirror and seen lines forming and started panic-shopping for anti-age cream. Or have (half-)joked with our friends, why haven't I just married rich and all my problems would have gone away? Yes, we have come a long way from being property of men, depending on them to support us, but have we also shed the fear of ageing, stoped caring about being at least pretty if not beautiful to attract male (and supposed happiness a relationship brings)? It seems that although we can support ourselves, have a career and money, we still rely on beauty to bring us happiness and fulfilment?
There is an amazing video essay on Youtube by Abby Cox, Victorians were Obsessed with Ugly Children, which discussed the pretty privilege and related issues from 18th to 20th century. It is worth a watch when we are thinking of beauty and marriage in Victorian and Edwardian era.
My favorite scene is toward the end of chapter 4: “Seating herself on the upper step of the terrace, Lily leans her head against the honeysuckles wreathing the balustrade.” Wharton goes on to describe the view and in my mind’s eye I see it as a painting. I imagine her momentarily at peace; the real peace one achieves when transported away from daily worries. The paragraph goes on to describe a different kind of peace: she knows she could marry Gryce and “her vulgar cares were at an end.” However is it true peace when it involves a loveless marriage, revenge, and the narrow confines of societal norms? A lot of thoughts run through her head ….. and then Selden!!!
Wharton is an amazing writer. Every word advances the narrative; no description is just taking up space, it is all purposeful.