Wharton Wednesday: Book 1, Chapters 5, 6, and 7
Week 3: "No one could hurt her as much as she was hurting herself"
Welcome to Week 3 of our Edith Wharton
read-a-long!
Today, we’re working through Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of The House of Mirth.
View all previous chapter summaries and the reading schedule.
For next week, read chapters 8, 9, and 10.
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Let’s get into today’s reading!
What happens in chapters 5, 6, & 7
I have to confess that I absolutely orchestrated chapter 6 landing on Valentine’s Day. Because I can’t imagine a more achingly lovely and strange and tense conversation than the one we get between Lily and Selden as they stroll through the floral air and hazy sunlight together. It’s not quite a love scene, is it? But it is deeply romantic. We get a pastoral setting, the warm Sunday sun, an almost-but-not-quite marriage proposal. I hope you found yourself swept away by it; it carries me away every time. Nobody writes dialogue like Wharton!
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 5:
Lily pretends to be religious to impress Mr. Gryce 😂
We find out why Lily is so attracted to Selden
At a large dinner party at Bellomont, Lily is seated with Mr. George Dorset, Bertha is seated with Selden, and Gryce is seated with another woman — and Lily’s plan to marry Gryce starts to fall apart
Lily finds Selden and Bertha up early, sitting in the library together
Lily goes on a walk and feels like a failure for missing out with Gryce and Selden in the same morning
Then. . . Selden shows up and they have more of that deliciously coy banter as Selden sets up an afternoon walk with Lily
In Chapter 6:
Lily and Selden go for a walk in “a zone of summer”
They have a fascinating conversation about Selden’s “republic” and Lily’s future
They define “success” in very different ways
They talk about marrying each other but neither one of them can let their guard down long enough to know if the other is serious
In Chapter 7:
Judy Trenor lectures Lily about her “folly”
Bertha got mad and told Gryce Lily smokes and plays cards and borrows money
Selden left Bellomont without rekindling anything with Bertha
Lily is running out of people to marry
Judy sends Lily to pick up Mr. Gus Trenor from the train station
On their way back to Bellomont, Lily convinces Trenor to start making “investments” on her behalf to grow her income
Lily admits she has no idea what the stock market is or how it works
Lily pretends to have no idea what she’ll owe Trenor for this “favor”
“She was like a water-plant in the flux of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was carrying her toward Lawrence Selden”
Today’s chapters bring Lily and Selden closer together, as her attraction for him unexpectedly grows. As they grow closer, Lily becomes more distant from her plans to seduce Gryce into a marriage proposal; the prospect of marrying for money, rather than any form of connection or love, is becoming odious to her.
Yet what remains so fascinating is the way we move with Lily across these wavering tides of feeling: she knows she shouldn’t ditch church, and yet she does. She knows Bertha will stir up trouble, and she lets it happen. She knows something is brewing with Selden, but she — and he — both know they’d have to be pretty bold to make it real.
“The afternoon was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air, and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which diffused the brightness without dulling it.”
In last week’s (amazing!) comment thread, quite a few readers caught onto the word “dingy,” and I’d love to know your thoughts on the word “dull” in this week’s reading — especially on this hazy, romantic day that is not dulled at all when Selden and Lily go walking.
Across this week’s pages, we again watch Lily oscillate across feeling trapped and stuck in a miserable world with no options to feeling lightheaded and even giddy with possibilities as she walks with Selden and then rides with Gus Trenor. Once again, while reading, we’re struck with the sensation that Lily still doesn’t really know how she feels — or what to do.
Last week, we discussed the fact that 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?”
In this week’s reading, however, we finally get Lily’s — and Selden’s — definitions of success.
Are Lily and Selden a match made in New York?
“How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden’s distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.”
Lily seems to be falling for Selden hard in chapters 5 and 6 because she has begun to understand his definition of success as truly powerful. As he tells her on their sunlit stroll in chapter 6, he defines success as “personal freedom.”
For Lily, who in the quote above is ruminating on the “captives” in the “bottle” of restrictive Old New York society, Selden’s power — his “distinction,” or what makes him special as a character — was that he “had never forgotten the way out” of that bottle. For Selden, the cage is no cage.
For Lily, success is “to get as much as one can out of life,” she tells Selden. This seems to be her warped idea of freedom: to accumulate, to gain, even to consume. To have, though it’s unclear whether she means material goods, money, or more ephemeral things, like experiences and feelings. So far in the novel, we’ve seen her eagerly seeking all kinds of things to have — including things, like a proposal from Gryce, in which she has no interest whatsoever.
Selden’s definition — and distinction — are “personal freedom,” which he explains further:
“From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that’s what I call success.”
Much of the rest of chapter 6 follows Lily’s conversational work to unpack what on earth Selden means — and how ignorant he is of his privilege to hold such a definition and to find himself able to achieve it.
It’s worth asking:
What are the differences between Lily’s and Selden’s definitions of success and of the “republic of the spirit”?
How do their previous conversations inform the conversation they have on their Sunday stroll?
Specifically, how does their previous conversation about Americana and collectibles connect to this conversation about success and “getting as much as one can out of life”?
How does Lily’s social status and financial reality inform her position on what defines success? How does Selden’s?
What can we learn from juxtaposing Lily’s definitions of failure and success?
Conspicuous consumption
“The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else.”
During their conversation, Lily and Selden banter about the idea of alchemy and wealth. Selden’s main issue is in hoarding wealth — like Tolkien’s infamous dragon, he imagines Old New York as lacking the power to turn their gold into anything beneficial or lasting in society. Lily sees herself as an alchemist, however. She believes, given the opportunity, she would use profound wealth for good. (I imagine she shares this feeling with many of us, who, learning that Bezos or Musk earn in minutes what most people earn in a lifetime, believe we’d be better at it or manage it more effectively than those terrible hoarding billionaires.)
In chapter 7, when Lily rides with Trenor from the train station, Trenor speaks about his wife’s exorbitant spending habits and how much work he has to do to keep the “machinery” running.
Both of these conversations point at a term that had been coined by Thorstein Veblen just a few years before the novel came out: conspicuous consumption.
“Conspicuous consumption,” is essentially the ostentatious display of wealth or performance of power, tied directly to how much money a person has. Think of all those billionaires with their vanity rocket ships, their $70 million estates, their golden toilets.
As Ruth Bernard Yaezel explains, “Like Veblen, Wharton represents a world in which people acquire and maintain status by openly displaying how much they can afford to waste; and like Veblen, she knows that the crowded conditions of modern urban life compel them to make such displays all the more conspicuously.”
We can ask:
How are Selden’s and Trenor’s views on money different? How are they the same?
How is Lily’s view of money informed by her own “conspicuous” status?
Remember the first scene of the novel: Lily captures Selden’s attention through her beauty and ease — her visibility is a form of “conspicuousness,” or standing out, attracting attention.
As you reflect on this week’s reading, it’s worth triangulating the ideas we’ve discussed so far in this reading group:
Social Darwinism — this idea of the survival of the richest
Conspicuous consumption — this idea of performing wealth to gain status
Lily Bart’s social status — this idea of a beautiful woman, with high social standing, who is running out of money
Invoking the stock market
In the final paragraphs from our reading this week, Lily enters a “hazy” arrangement with Gus Trenor. (It’s worth comparing the haze of her stroll with Selden with the haze of her deal with Trenor!)
Wharton keeps the terms of this deal vague, perhaps because the terms are so vague to Lily. What we do know, and what Lily knows, too, though, is that this is no innocent arrangement. Lily has essentially asked Trenor to bankroll her continued existence in this social setting: to provide her with the money she needs to “keep up” with the other ladies in the group.
Lily believes this will happen through the stock market — which was one of the early twentieth century’s most confounding economic inventions. It’s clear Lily doesn’t know how it works. So why is she willing to enter this agreement with Trenor? What do you think will happen?
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:
How is playing bridge like playing the stock market?
Did Selden propose to Lily? What’s going on there?
What is Lily going to seek, now that Gryce is gone? Who, or what, will she pursue next?
Writing prompts
Find your favorite scene and rewrite it in a 21st century voice. What do you struggle to translate? What feels as fresh in your voice as in Wharton’s?
Write the scene of Selden and Lily’s walk together from each of their perspectives. Try inhabiting Lily’s view, without knowing Selden’s observations, and vice versa. How does it change the scene? What does it teach you about Wharton’s choice of narrator?
My favorite sentence
So far in the novel, we’ve seen how Lily is compared to works of art: she’s beautiful, she’s poetry in motion. All the men think she’s absolutely gorgeous and the women seem to act in competition with her.
But we also know Lily is a “skillful operator,” and can create the scene or establish the setting and story needed to make for fruitful social interactions. (Remember when she sets the tea table for Gryce on the train to Bellomont? Or when she slowly convinces Trenor to help her invest in stocks?)
My favorite quote this week is the moment Selden calls her an artist, rather than a work of art:
“You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today.”
Lily wavers between statuses: rich and poor, excited and scared, artist and art. In this moment, when Selden is getting to see her more vulnerable in some ways and more guarded in others, he notices her craft. He can see that, as beautiful as she is herself, she also knows how to create beauty. In this moment, he flips the relationship from Lily as art object and Selden as observer, to Lily as artist and Selden as material. It’s a curious reversal of the typical roles — and casts Lily as the active creator, with Selden like clay in her hands, or paint on her palette.
Close reading tip
Try this during your next reading session:
Use a ruler to underline your favorite lines in the novel.
I know it sounds a little arduous, but it totally changes the experience of annotating your books — especially if you struggle with perfectionism, like I do. I simply don’t like the look of sloppy lines or crooked notes in my books, because I like to go back and reference what I’m noting.
Half-sized rulers, available at campus bookstores and office supply stores and that one website that has everything, make it especially easy to do this.
I use this small ruler as my bookmark.
Additional reading
Self-care as conspicuous consumption // Historical characters inspired the cast of The Gilded Age // Get to know (some of) Wharton’s own feelings about romance // Conspicuous consumption in the 21st century //
I’m being careful not to include any links with spoilers — there will be many more when we’ve finished the novel!
Up next
Read chapters 8, 9, and 10 for next week. You can review the full reading schedule anytime. Happy reading! 📚
In the comments today, tell me:
Your favorite moment in Selden and Lily’s conversation
Your favorite scene or sentence from this week’s chapters
What you think will happen next…
What will Lily do after leaving Bellomont?
I have been enjoying this readalong SO much! Petition to induct Lawrence Seldon into the pantheon of Hot Literary Guys - I’m obsessed with him. Finding it hard to say how I feel about Lily though - I wish she would just be brave and marry Seldon!
My favorite scenes are the ones where Wharton describes the setting, especially when the characters are outdoors. However the quotes that have really left me hanging and brings out a strong ick response are the last two sentences of chapter 7.
“It was part of the game to make him feel that her appeal had been an uncalculated impulse, provoked by the liking he inspired; and the renewed sense of power in handling men, while it consoled her wounded vanity, helped also to obscure the thought of the claim at which his manner hinted. He was a coarse dull man who, under all his show of authority, was a mere supernumerary in the costly show for which his money paid: surely, to a clever girl, it would be easy to hold him by his vanity, and so keep the obligation on his side.”
Lily knows there will be a cost associated with allowing Trenor to assist her in her quest to secure financial security. She thinks she can manage him - but what if the cost becomes too high on a personal level? She could lose Gryce (and maybe she already has), Selden, her standing in society, future relationship prospects and her self-respect.
And what about the cost on the financial side? I believe few people in the early 20th century understood how the stock market worked - it was new and exciting, a way to potentially make a lot of money with little or no work - until it all fell apart. Many, many innocent and/or inexperienced people were swept up in the crash - Lily could easily be among them!
I fear for her both personally and financially.
(As an aside: my father was born October 30, 1929, the third of three sons. The day before, my grandfather lost the home he had built himself. This experience was seared into the psyche of two generations and my siblings and I were affected by their subsequent approach to money, jobs, etc)
BTW the word dull is used to describe Trenor. I am sure Lily finds him tiresome and colorless, in contrast to Selden, but I believe she will need to deploy all of her skills as an “operator” to keep Trenor working on her behalf.
I am enjoying this exercise a lot. Thank you for inviting us along.