Welcome to Week 7
Today, we’re working through Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of Book 2 of The House of Mirth.
View all previous chapter summaries and the reading schedule.
For next week, start Book 2. Read chapters 4-6.
What happens in Book 2, chapters 1-3
Here is our usual plot summary of what happens in each chapter. The characters we meet this week are in bold.
In B2.Chapter 1:
We’re back in Selden’s point of view, in Monte Carlo
This opening is such a stunning parallel to Book 1, Chapter 1!
Lily is sailing with the Dorsets and Bertha’s latest boy-toy
Bertha has invited Lily to sail with them to keep her husband occupied — and their entire group of Fishers and Stepneys and Brys know it
Lily has only gotten more beautiful in the Mediterranean sun — and all the European duchesses and princesses love her (and dislike Bertha)
Jealousies are brewing and despite his best pretense, Selden has to admit he’s hurt and confused about the night he saw Lily at Gus Trenor’s
People are vaguely worried about Lily and her reputation: Lord Hubert wants to warn Lily of potential social backlash thanks to the circle she’s spending time in; Mrs. Carry Fisher seems worried too
In B2.Chapter 2:
Mrs. Fisher foists the Brys off on Lily
Lily is becoming a social manager — a kind of babysitter for immature adults who can’t keep their social affairs locked down
Lily is increasingly functioning as a laborer in the leisure class, and she’s not very good at it
George Dorset is ready to file for divorce after being humiliated by Bertha and he goes to find Selden to discuss the terms
Bertha turns on Lily and frames the gossip about the Dorset’s impending divorce as Lily’s fault, rather than Bertha’s repeated and public affairs
In B2.Chapter 3:
Selden warns Lily to leave the Dorset yacht, but Lily is convinced Bertha needs her support (Really Lily????)
At the end of a fancy dinner, Bertha loudly announces that Lily is not allowed back on the yacht — a particularly cruel and public accusation that Lily is sleeping with George, which she is not, and which successfully diverts attention away from Bertha’s messy entanglement with Ned Silverton and his dull poetry
Selden, in shock, takes Lily to a nearby garden to figure out a plan, and arranges for her to stay — secretly — at the Stepney’s house for the night
She is expected to take the first train out in the morning
Complicated social politics
Reading the chapters for today, I was reminded of the first time I read Wharton. My brain had a hard time tracking the dizzying amount of social intricacies and details — all the fancy names and rich people, all the money secretly trading hands, all the private deals happening behind closed doors.
On this reread, I kept shaking my head: all these players, such an intricate game. These chapters, for me, really nail the confusion and ever-shifting politics in this social set. They also gave me renewed sympathy for Lily.
While we’ve discussed many times all of the ways Lily seems to botch wide-open opportunities to stabilize her future (and we even learn this week that she had a particularly powerful moment to marry into European royalty ten years ago), we’ve also started to see how much of a game this whole darn system is.
Lily fancies herself a better player than she is, yet I can’t help but feel sorry for her. Once we see how deep the layers of the game are, and how unwilling Lily is to stoop to the cruelties Bertha reaches for with ease, it gives me a new perspective on Lily. She may not be the sharpest player in the ring. But she’s also not the nastiest, and maybe that matters. These are life-and-death games, and the cards seem always stacked against her.
More than ever, Wharton’s use of bridge and gambling metaphors stand out as a stunning representation of this whole Old New York house of cards.
Seeing Lily anew
As much as we see Lily failing, again, to rise to the social occasion this week, we also see changes in her. As Selden observes Lily in chapter one, we get a new perspective on her shifting beauty:
“a subtle change had passed over the quality of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible; now its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance.”
If we saw a flowing, fluid Lily in Book 1 — and especially in her tableau vivant — as she posed in liquid silks under soft lights, we now see a hardened Lily, a “crystallized” form “when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape.”
But Selden notices another kind of crystallization taking place, too:
“He felt that she had at last arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced into the service of the state.”
What a chilling image of painful reduction. What an indictment against all of that lovely potential and power Lily had for so long. It seems all to have come to this: the forced stilling of “rebellious impulses,” in favor of “the state.”
Selden views this change in Lily — this hardening of her fluidity — as a violent dictatorship, in which her socially acceptable and most useful self holds hostage all the “rebellious” and “vagrant” parts of her that are no longer acceptable.
Recall the openness of Book 1, Chapter 1: we all felt so much potential for Lily. We watched her spark with Selden, sending up rebellious fires as they tucked away into his apartment for a private conversation and secret cigarette. While Lily was bothered then at her situation, the Lily we meet in Monte Carlo has none of the vibrancy or flirtatious energy — and open, eager personality — that Selden has been accustomed to “enjoying,” as he often puts it.
Instead, we see a hardened Lily who has begun to hold herself hostage.
As I read, I feel suffocated reading the descriptions of Lily abroad. I also wonder if Lily knows this change has occurred, or if she has enforced it upon herself out of necessity and is therefore ignorant to how visibly it has altered her. I’m not sure we know yet, and I am curious if we ever will.
Lily’s reduced selfhood
Walt Whitman tells us that we “contain multitudes.” That to be alive — to be a human being — is to hold simultaneous complications and contradictions, impossibilities and limitations: to be enormous with potential and possibility and tension.
This is a modern view of selfhood: an emerging idea of the self as made-up of all the thousands of impressions and seconds of lived experience and billions of atoms of us. It’s a complicated picture of humanity, and a rethinking, or reimagining, of our potential and our complexities.
It’s also a theory about humanity that shines a spotlight on the reductive work of cultural institutions.
That’s perhaps why we get this worldview via Selden, our seemingly objective observer, the one who spectates and looks on the crowd from a distance, the one who (in Lily’s estimation) enjoys the comforts of being in the group, but not of the group or beholden to its shifting loyalties.
But I found myself asking this week, and I want to know your thoughts on this:
Is Selden a reliable narrator? A reliable observer of Miss Bart?
In what ways is Selden objective? In what ways is he not?
…and what of our narrator? Who are they? Are they reliable?
I found myself wonderful all about the shifting images and perspectives and ideas about Lily we continue to receive — and wondering how fair any of it really is. I wondered if Lily has truly penned herself in and become a smaller version of herself — or if, his own romantic potential with her cut-off in his mind, Selden is only now able to discern a kind of severity that was always present in Lily.
Then I wondered: perhaps the point of Bertha’s bitch move at the end of chapter 3 is precisely to help us see, with an almost brutish (Trenor-esque) force, just how easily Lily can be shaped to fit others’ narratives. The moment Bertha turns on Lily seems to highlight how desperation makes people, especially women like Lily, pliable. How the forces of social acceptability and normalcy can transform Lily from a person — a complex, multitudinous, contradictory being, a lá Whitman — into a plot device for jerks like the Dorsets.
This whole tension is perhaps best captured in a single exchange between Selden and Lily in chapter 3:
“You have to think of yourself, you know —” Selden insists.
“If you knew how little difference that makes!” Lily replies.
My favorite sentence
This week was tough because there were so many beautiful moments that summed up Lily and the particular drama she find herself stuck in, again. Here’s the part that stood out to me most as I read:
“That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.”
Well. There it is. That’s about the most succinct summary of Lily I think we’ll find — and it comes from Mrs. Fisher, who back in New York, was constantly scheming to help Lily find a stable relationship or advantageous proposal.
What strikes me is that someone in the novel says this to Selden. It’s the kind of acute character sketch we might expect from our witty narrator, and yet it comes from a character. To me, this suggests two things:
The continued “spectacle” of Lily’s existence — that she really is so very visible and “conspicuous” and it’s not just a hyperbole of the narrative
The continued “spectating” of her society — that everyone really is looking at her, sizing her up, judging her, at all times and she’s at their mercy
It’s a truly vicious dynamic and as chapter three comes to a close, we see its damning effects coming down hard on her. In fact, we see a horrible inverse of Fisher’s claim: Lily has sown the seeds of her ruin, and is now forced to reap the effects of Bertha’s betrayal.
Close reading tip
If you want to dig into these questions about Selden’s reliability and the narrator’s perspective, try this:
Get to know the narrator.
Find a favorite scene from Book 1 and re-read it, this time paying specific attention to the narrator.
What is the voice? Does it seem masculine? Feminine? Calm? Angry?
What is paid attention to?
What is ignored?
Who is our narrator?
Writing prompts
Based on the exercise above, write about the narrator of The House of Mirth. Who are they? Are they an objective observer? Do you think they like Lily? What stands out to you? Have you ever noticed them before being asked to notice them?
Additional reading
What is Third-Person Omniscient Narration // The importance of point of view // Another view on points of view // What is an unreliable narrator? // Narration in 19th century women’s lit // Read the first letter Henry James ever sent Edith Wharton, in which he nitpicks about her narrator //
“I applaud, I mean I value, I egg you on in, your study of the American life that surrounds you. Let yourself go in it & at it—it’s an untouched field, really: the folk who try, over there, don’t come within miles of any civilized, however superficially, any “evolved” life.”
-Henry James in his first letter to Wharton
Three weeks to go
We’re in the home stretch of the novel! You can review the full reading schedule anytime. Happy reading! 📚
Week 8: Wednesday, March 20
Book 2, Chapters 4 - 6 (read to the end of chapter 6)
Week 9: Wednesday, March 27
Book 2, Chapters 7 - 10 (read to the end of chapter 10)
Week 10: Wednesday, April 3
Book 2, Chapters 11 - 14 // END OF BOOK 2
Now, let’s get the discussion going:
What was your favorite scene or sentence from this week?
What is your favorite scene so far in the novel? Why?
…Or any of the other questions I’ve explored today
Have something you’d like me to cover next week? Please tell me all about it here!!!!
Okay, so I'm going to change a bit my tune and try very actively not to be too mean to Lily this week (I realize that's how my previous comments might have come across)!
So I'm going to take one of my favorite sentences for this week as a hook: it's when Selden notes "the present at [the dinner] of little Dabham of the 'Riviera Notes,' emphasized the ideals of a world where conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society column had become the roll of fame." It just feels like such a neatly packed (with a nice bow!) description of this whole world. But it's certainly not as simple, since we need the *right* type of conspicuousness--Lily's brand seems to leading her the opposite direction of distinction. Mrs. Fisher seems acutely aware of this, when she says she's leaving the Brys to Lily: if earlier *they* needed *her* (and others') prestige in the social circle to establish their presence, it is now Lily who should realize she needs *their* support to remain a player.
And speaking of Mrs. Fisher, here's another one of my favorite excerpts from this week, from her: "Sometimes...I think it's just flightiness--and sometimes I think it's because, at heart, she despises the things she's trying for. And it's the difficulty of deciding what makes her such an interesting study." Indeed, to me, Mrs. Fisher really "glowed up" this week and seems to think that Lily could be something of her "trainee" in this social laborer type of work that she performs in Europe for less well-connected Americans. We could argue, I suppose, this is not exactly a life Lily would aspire to, but it seems to come from a place of genuine interest in Lily's possibilities as a "girl" who at 29 has no concrete prospect.
Finally, I was really struck by the vocabulary on chapter 3 of "interiority" and "exteriority": the chapter is full of "temper" and "mood" and "attitude" and "will" and "composure," all words that feel very central not just to the action of this specific chapter but for the novel as a whole (at least of what we've read so far!).
What a bored and boring group of people. They are in Monte Carlo! Their biggest dilemma is where to go for lunch, not for the best food, but where best to see and be seen. Bertha finally has had her revenge. Lily is cast out without (yet?) using those letters she's paid dearly for. I remarked earlier that Lily has seemed not to have benefitted from an education. Silverton says of her she's "Dead as a stone to art and poetry". Lily herself is charmed by the "romantic adventure" of the cruise and only "vaguely touched by the names and scenes amid which she moved." I fear she lacks the imagination to do anything other than find new schemes to attract less and less of the attention of these insipid people. She hasn't shown evidence that she's willing to play dirty like Bertha. Selden disappoints. For all his talk, plan for her immediate problem is to quickly get her sheltered with a relative. Oh for some real rebellion from these two.