Wharton Wednesday: Book 2, Ch 4, 5, 6
Week 8: "For the first time in her life, she found herself utterly alone"
Today, we’re working through Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Book 2 of The House of Mirth.
View all previous chapter summaries and the reading schedule.
For next week, keep going in Book 2. Read chapters 7-10.
Two weeks to go
For our final week, I’m cookin’ up something special and I can’t wait to celebrate the conclusion of our first read-a-long together! Is there something you’d like me to cover in our final discussions of the novel? Make your requests here.
Where we’ve been
Thus far in the novel, we’ve heard what Carrie Fisher and Lord Hubert and Grace Stepney and Julia Peniston and Lawrence Selden and Gus Trenor think about Lily’s indecision and persistent unmarried status.
We’ve witnessed Lily receive multiple marriage proposals and deny or vaguely defer them. We’ve now also witnessed Lily receive multiple business proposals from her two remaining viable suitors. George Dorset sees her as a fine rebound who can help him convince a court to cut-off Bertha from his wealth with proof of her affairs. Simon Rosedale sees her as an investment in his continued journey up the social ladder toward power. Both men express their desire to make their proposals convincing to Lily, and in today’s assigned chapters, we find Lily more torn than ever.
We see Lily toiling under the problem that many of you pointed to in last week’s reading: Mrs. Fisher’s astute observation that Lily’s failures seem to stem less from her knowing what do than from her unwillingness to play the game like everyone else. For all her pettiness and materialism, there’s also a compelling nobility to Lily’s attempts to “opt out” from having to engage in the kind of cruel social games that women like Bertha play with her.
We also perhaps glimpse, more than ever, the key desire that underpins Lily’s persistent singleness. It seems she’s looking for much more than a savvy business match or lucrative social advantage.
“I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy;
I should want someone who made it interesting.”
― Edith Wharton
What happens in Book 2, chapters 4-6
Here’s a basic plot summary of our reading this week. The characters we meet this week are in bold.
In B2.Chapter 4:
Lily returns to New York
Aunt Peniston has died
Peniston’s will has been rewritten — Lily gets $10,000 (about $380,000 in today’s dollars) and Grace gets the remaining $400,000 (about 14 million dollars in today’s money)
Lily saves face and congratulates Grace, but is forced to move in with Gerty and start figuring out her next moves
After a few weeks, she asks Grace for an advance on her inheritance but Grace is haughty and decides to use her new position to punish and shame Lily
Grace is essentially Julia Peniston 2.0 and that’s likely why Julia rewrote her will at the last minute: to perpetuate (and protect) the family wealth under someone as judgmental and upper-middle-class as she was, as well as to punish Lily and force her to either marry or fall into poverty…
In B2.Chapter 5:
Mrs. Fisher arrives with a (guilty) proposition for Lily: To join her in entertaining and creating social opportunities for The Gormers
Mattie Gormer, specifically, is an up-and-coming nouveau riche girl who is looking for upper-class society connections and Lily is a perfect mentor for her
Lily spends the weekend and much of the rest of the summer in this new social group (she randomly goes on a road trip to Alaska???)
Back in town, Mrs. Fisher lets Lily know she has two possible proposals on the horizon: George Dorset and Simon Rosedale
In B2.Chapter 6:
George Dorset approaches Lily at the Gormer’s beach house and begs her forgiveness
He also asks if she can pretty please help him prove Bertha’s affairs in court so he can divorce her, keep his money, and marry Lily instead
George makes a(nother) desperate visit to Lily’s private room and begs her to help him, again, and Lily turns him away
Lily sees Rosedale socially and is slowly coming to a decision to accept his proposal
Mrs. Fisher lets Lily know that Bertha has spread nasty rumors about Lily in order to turn the Gormers against her and we learn from Mrs. Fisher how the chess pieces have fallen:
“I believe you can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don’t care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from Bertha is to marry somebody else.”
Marry or perish
“Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. ‘The world is too vile,’ she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher’s anxious scrutiny.”
The novel began with a moment of arrested attention: Miss Lily Bart is quite the sight in Grand Central Station, capturing Selden’s wavering attention as she stands perfectly still in the bustling Monday crowds. She was, in that scene, “apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her…wearing an air of irresolution.”
In today’s reading, we still see Lily “letting it drift by her,” — all those social machinations and cruel games and busy parties — and painfully, that “air of irresolution” seems to remain.
While it’s clear to Carry Fisher that Lily no longer has a choice to marry, we see Lily still sitting in this air of indecision as George comes pleading with a proposal, and Rosedale is — multiple times — in the kind of proximity where she could easily give him an answer to his proposal.
In other words: the world continues to race and move along as Lily sits at rest, unwilling or perhaps unable to commit to any kind of movement forward.
The unfortunate result of this indecision is that she seems to be moving backward. Marrying for love seems to be off the table; marrying for fun or advantage is also out of the picture.
Lily can now marry for desperation, only. She can marry George as a form of social retaliation against Bertha, or she she can marry Rosedale as a rebellious middle-finger at all those upper-crust folks who’ve now rejected them both.
Marriage, then, has been reduced to little more than a final desperate act of stability and social acceptance, rather than an exciting prospect or union of soulmates.
This gradual but painful reduction of Lily’s marriage opportunities begs a few questions we’ve toyed with throughout the reading:
Did Lily ever perceive marriage as anything other than a desperate final act?
Have we seen any models of happy or loving marriage in this society?
Has Lily ever seen a marriage that was more than a financial arrangement?
Is marriage actually just a financial arrangement, at the end of the day? Despite anything else that might be true about it?
To be or not to be a robber baron
It’s tempting to compare today’s billionaires to the “robber barons” of the early twentieth century. After all, “robber baron was a term applied to a businessman in the 19th century who engaged in unethical and monopolistic practices, utilized corrupt political influence, faced almost no business regulation, and amassed enormous wealth.” (Source)
But when we think about the wealth disparities, it’s helpful to understand that the gap between the robber barons (people amassing wealth at the velocity of Simon Rosedale) was profoundly larger than the gaps we experience today.
If you convert Vanderbilt or Carnegie wealth into today’s money, they weren’t just billionaires. They were worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The exponential power of their wealth was so far out of balance with the remainder of society that the political and legal spheres had virtually no power in comparison. As one historian points out, “Even other businessmen felt exploited by monopolistic practices as it was virtually impossible to compete in some fields.”
(We see this echoed in Gus Trenor’s anxious stock market power plays and George Dorset’s panics about proving Bertha’s infidelity.)
As I explained a few weeks ago, this is a moment in history when big money is getting bigger. This is the time of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Astors — robber barons and railroad magnates. Monopolies and unchecked economic power centralized around a few key families on 5th Avenue who also happened to know all the politicians. This time also predates the key labor movements, political decisions, and legal changes that started to put critical regulations around the power of wealth in the United States.
Now, I explain all of this not to garner sympathy for today’s billionaires and tech magnates, who, like their robber-baron-predecessors wield far too much influence in American politics at large. I explain all this, rather, to put into perspective the vast leaps across social groups, community, and power — the class system — that Lily is precariously navigating, and the reason behind her dizzying indecision:
Lily has the opportunity to marry Simon Rosedale who is, by all accounts, becoming exponentially wealthier than everyone else she has ever associated with — he is becoming a Carnegie or a J.P. Morgan in his own right
With Lily poised at his side, as his beautiful and willing wife, Rosedale hopes to exponentially increase their financial power, as well as all the profound cultural, political, and social power that comes with it
Lily is increasingly spending time with Gerty Farish, a solidly lower-middle class woman who has a modest family income and virtually no marriage prospects while she socially guides women like Mattie Gormer into higher and higher spheres (at her own peril)
In this space, Lily can only ever toil. Will Selden come back and help her establish herself as a firmly middle-class woman who is married to a working-class lawyer? It’d mean far fewer trips abroad and no more dress-maker money, but it’d also mean a home of her own and continued invitations to peripheral social events
Lily seems to veer ever-closer to the fate of the char-woman: an impoverished, working-class woman with no more Cinderella-story avenues that might lift her from “dullness” and obscurity into an elegant castle in the sky
We have no idea how Lily would fare in this space, but based on her judgements of the char-woman Mrs. Haffen and of her own maid and staff, I have a feeling it wouldn’t be awesome.
What we find, then, is that Lily is not merely waffling between the choice of marrying a dull man like Gryce or a fun flirt like Selden — an upper-middle-class trust fund, or a working-class lawyer with a few progressive tendencies.
What we find, rather, is that Lily’s opportunities have changed and the stakes are considerably higher. What once felt like a riches-to-riches fairy tale is increasingly becoming a riches-to-rags cautionary tale.
“Since marriage is her only way to get money, why should she not try to get money in that way?…The mercenary marriage is a perfectly natural consequence of the economic dependence of women.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from “Women and Economics,” 1900
Discussion & reading questions
Looking back at our early discussion and reading questions, it’s time to bring some of them back. If you’re keeping a reading journal, or discussing the novel with your own book club, here are a few questions worth examining:
How has your reading of Lily changed in Book 2 so far?
What did you know about Lily before today’s reading?
What do you know about Lily now? What have you learned about her character, so far?
Can you make any guesses about what she’ll do next?
What does Lily think about marriage?
What does her society think about marriage?
How has the novel explored the concept of gender?
How does Lily and Selden’s conversation at his apartment show different “sides” or perspectives on how gender impacts social mobility?
What do you make of a 1906 review of the novel, in The Saturday Review, which claims: “The heroine of the novel, Lily Bart, is a masterly study of the modern American woman…”?
How is Lily “modern”?
What makes her distinctly American?
What does it mean to be a “modern American woman”?
My favorite sentence
My favorite sentence from today’s reading is (drumroll please…)
“What if she made him marry her for love, now that he had no other reason for marrying her?
This sentence completely broke my heart this week. I haven’t ever noticed it before, in any of my previous re-reads, and it struck me right through the chest as I read the chapter on Sunday night.
Poor Lily. Her prospects are completely closing down around her — and yet she still seeks the thrill of a little game to play with Rosedale, even though there’s nothing left to win.
Additional readings
Learn more about class dynamics in The Gilded Age // The rise of the middle class in the 20th century // An academic summary of the Gilded Age // The meaning and history of the term "robber baron” //
For next week
We’re reading Book 2, chapters 7-10. Make sure you read through the end of chapter 10!
Until then, sound off in the comments with anything that stood out to you or caught your eye this week. What was your favorite sentence? What broke your heart? What pissed you off or shocked you?
Two weeks to go! 📚
And remember:
If there’s anything about the 20th century, Edith Wharton, or the novel that you’d like me to cover in our final discussions of the novel…Make your requests here.
One of my favorite sentences this week: "I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda." What a quote!! Wharton is so funny in a depressing sort of way.
I honestly made more notes on my book this week than I thought I would, so I'm going to try and stay under control and not ramble!
In chapter 5, there's this moment where Lily is with the Gormers and it is said that she "had the odd sense of having been caught up into the crowd as carelessly as a passenger is gathered in by an express train." This feeling of passivity comes back in chapter 6, but it's really interesting to me here because her experience in the Long Island house is basically the opposite from how we see Bellomont play out from her point of view. While in Bellomont, it was a calming, almost idyllic moment where Lily felt she was in control of the situation, here the chaotic energy around her underlines how very much she is *not* in control. And less so in a victim position as she has placed herself before ("oh no, what have people done to me?") and more so in the sense that she seems to acknowledge that she does not hold any reigns. It also reminds me of comments in previous chapters where Lily is compared to hot was in terms of being pliable and adaptable (but not necessarily in a good way).
On the other hand, Lily also comes across as almost masochist in certain points. The people who abused her and denied her their friendship are the ones she most craves, whereas the people who *do* offer their time and energy, freely, to her as looked down on, repeatedly, acting like she is superior to the people who are actually being helpful or pleasant to her (Gerty, Carry, even the Gormers). This includes Rosendale, who has never given her any concrete reason for mistrust (beyond being a Jew, yikes).
Also, interestingly, I realized in chapter 6 that for all the talk about marriage and future, there's actually very little discussion about children, with Lily herself never really mentioning motherhood as part of her plans. Of course "children" would come with the package of "marriage," but since there's so much talk about family legacy, it's interesting to me to find that the most "direct" means of guaranteeing such legacy seems not to be really a point for these characters. I think this goes along with your point about Grace being chosen by Aunt Julia--isn't it interesting that the most explicit discussion of family legacy so far has been through this sort of post-mortem adoption?
My favorite passage was, by far, when Lily is talking to Gerty about her story in chapter 4: "'The whole truth?' Miss Bart laughed. 'What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it 's the story that 's easiest to believe.'" I wish I had read it a week earlier so I could have added it to my previous text, to be honest! It carries to much punch and it's basically the distillation of women's history in a simple comment!