After one reads all of Jane Austen’s novels, one begins fumbling through the literary desert seeking the Next Jane. Eventually, the search alights on Edith Wharton. Wharton, like Austen, uses feather-light prose to describe juicy conflicts: marriages of convenience vs. love matches, rich people jockeying for status with the slightly less rich. It’s all extremely satisfying, except for the glaring difference: unlike Austen, who bestows happy endings on her heroines, Wharton is a pessimist: a curmudgeonly, anti-Semitic pessimist. In a Wharton novel, Society will inevitably beat the crap out of the Individual, and the author will imply that the Individual was asking for it by flaunting Society…but not really…but kind of, yeah.
As a zealous Janeite and a considered Whartonite, I was psyched to attend a recent Jane Austen Society of New York meeting whose order of business–besides the usual bonnet-optional Jane-worship and finger-sandwich nibbling–was a talk called “The Heroine’s Journey: Elizabeth Bennet vs. Lily Bart.” Get out your popcorn! The heroines of Pride and Prejudice and the House of Mirth were due to have an epic smackdown, except…talk about an unfair matchup, thought I. Elizabeth ends up mistress of a giant mansion and Lily ends up a corpse in a sad-sack boardinghouse. Upon further consideration, though, I did acknowledge that they both begin as members of the depressed gentry relegated to the marriage market–and both novel’s problems arise because the two protagonists have these weird yearnings to be full human beings and not saleable objects. This is what academics would call “a lot of rich material to unpack,” amirite?
With my Janeite sister-in-law beside me, I broke the ice with my fellow meeting attendees by joking, “Sooo…is anyone in here Team Lily Bart? Anyone?” Nary a peep was uttered. Poor Lily, thought I. She is as out of favor here as she is on Bertha Dorset’s yacht, if you dig my meaning.
But maybe not, it turned out. According to the excessively diverting talk by Professor Elaine M. Toia, the way I was regarding these two stories was static. Initially, you see, both Lily and Elizabeth are resistant to what Simone de Beauvoir dubs the patriarchal “women’s education” (now you’re jealous: Wharton, Austen, and de Beauvoir plus finger sandwiches), whose aim is to train her into being “the ornament in a man’s collection.” Both heroines sabotage themselves in the game, either by being dirty-petticoated and preferring the flattery of Wickham to Darcy’s disses (Elizabeth) or daring to walk around Grand Central with dudes (Lily, that slut). Also, in Lily’s case: skipping church, gambling, accepting sketchy financial assistance from married men, being used as a patsy in your friend’s adulterous schemes, and falling in with characters of ill-repute. (c.f. Toast editrix Nicole’s comparison of Lily’s plot to a poorly-played Choose Your Own Adventure)
But then, Toia pointed out to us Janeites, things get surprising in terms of who resists the “woman’s education” and who succumbs. Elizabeth gets The Letter from Darcy and decides that Darcy is right: to this day, she never knew herself. Eventually she starts shutting her mouth more and picturing herself as he might see her, modifying her behavior to fit his standards. Even though she’s on her way to a jackpot marriage, stability, partnership, status and happiness blah blah blah, she has subsumed her interpretation of the world to his. Ergo: feminist fail! Meanwhile, 100 years later and a continent away, Lily Bart, who has shared her tormentors’ shallow beliefs throughout her story, redeems herself by attempting to actually work for a living, accepting friendship from a Jew of all people (jeez, Lily!), and burning the letters she could use to blackmail Bertha and get her own foot back on the social ladder. Even though she overdoses on chloral after she accomplishes all this, she avoids selling herself to the man, or to a Man. Props.
Aside from the fact that the talk made me want to quit everything I’ve worked for, go back and get an English Ph.D and then spend the rest of my life unable to get a job, it also got my gears whirring about “happy endings” in Marriage Plot novels and how they don’t really exist from a feminist standpoint. To be well-ensconced and comfy in a patriarchy is to give up your resistance, but to resist is to end up dead in a boardinghouse.
I’d still take moving to Pemberley over death any day, but I raised my hand at the end of the lecture anyway and asked if there was a sense in which Lily’s ending was more triumphant than Elizabeth’s. Let’s just say this comment caused a lot of ahems and titters, from all sides. Fortunately my impertinent remark was overshadowed by a lady in a bonnet who was really, really incensed by Lily Bart’s imbecile moves. “I mean, going to a man’s apartment alone, where she could be seen! WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?” the woman asked us all. What, indeed, readers? What indeed?
Tags: books, edith wharton, feminism, jane austen, sarah seltzer
I LOVED THIS. Thank you.
Unghhhh my students 100% adore/identify with Elizabeth and fail to understand why I love House of Mirth far far more than P&P. (“it’s not even FUNNY!” one wailed.) Next semester I’m just going to give them this essay and go home.
Hahaha. “House of Mirth,” such a misnomer.
But seriously, I loved this piece.
Yes this was great! My first reaction is that Darcy subsumes his world view to Lizzie as well. There’s a symmetry there which implies that their economic imbalance won’t translate directly into a relationship power imbalance.
One of the interesting things about P&P is how unseriously Elizabeth takes the economic circumstances of her family. Whereas Lily is always very aware of how tenuous her financial stability.
I was going to say, the thing is, Darcy also has to change in order for the novel to work out. Which, considering the way men were entitled to treat women, is pretty massive. It’s a long game, where you hope the Darcy kids will move a little further along in a generation.
Lily… I can get behind that she l lives the more triumphant life. It’s a good way of putting it, I think.
I am not sure I want to see these as Lily v. Elizabeth. You have to play the hand of cards you are dealt, and I don’t really want either hand these women get. They lose something either way they play and begin and end with less than the men around them.
I’m still working this thought through, but…is Lizzie the best Austen equivalent for Lily Bart? I thought of Elinor (S&S), and Fanny (Mansfield Park), who end up with their less-than-wildly-wealthy true love Selden analogues; Fanny even refuses a [more] affluent suitor for being too much fun (not really. Well, sort of. Ugh, Fanny and Edmund are the worst) (#teamMaria).
Lucy Steele. She’s not a protagonist but I like her ruthlessness, and unlike other Austen books she never gets her comeuppance. I always enjoy the realism of that, for some reason.
Yeah, I always thought Lucy Steele seemed like she was an exchange student from an Edith Wharton novel. However, I don’t think it’s her comeuppance Austen is concerned with, but rather Mrs. Ferrars’s.
After awhile, Mrs. Ferrars likes her though! Not really much of a comeuppance. I much prefer Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monster’s take though.
It’s a very existential punishment for both of them, at least in that wonderful period after Lucy has revealed herself. If hell is other people…
P.S. Henry Crawford, like, used to travel on Sundays and shit. That kind of activity is reprehensible.
[I also enjoy the knowledge that even contemporary readers of Mansfield Park rolled their eyes at Fanny.]
I was totally down on Fanny Price for years, until I read this a few days ago, and my whole thinking about the book shifted: http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/rereadi…
Oh man, this is pretty fantastic!
I’m actually not an out-and-out Fanny (or Fanny and Edmund) hater; I think Austen does a good job of describing the circumstances and situation that would lead someone like her into being such a gentle and self-deprecating woman of Strong Moral Fiber. She’s not as fun to read but everything she does makes sense, and the Crawfords blase attitude towards adultery is a little ridiculous. The way that elite British society inequitably deals with adultery is similarly ridiculous, but alas..
I’d love to see a three way comparison of the treatment of adultery in the social elite via Anna Karenina, Age of Innocence, and this small blip of Mansfield Park. The latter might be a bit of a shoehorn though.
My thinking on Mansfield Park was always “this would be such a great book if Fanny had anything resembling a personality,” so having Ms. Kowal (who is a great read if you like genre mashups btw) point that out was pretty significant for me.
And yeah, the Crawfords are pretty gross.
Mary Crawford tells a sodomy joke at the dinner table and gets away with it. Woman has ovaries.
Mansfield Park is definitely interested in consent (I would probably call it integrity), but it also has a lot of feelings about imperialism, and how women who are able to walk long distances are kind of slutty.
I guess there’s inherent value in a strong sense of self? but Jane Eyre, to steal Abanthis’s example, shares a lot of Fanny’s virtues without being such a wet blanket.
This is filling me with the memory of intense, complicated feelings about Can You Forgive Her?, which, as I recall, is basically Lily’s plot arc with a “…dammit, I guess I’ll marry the boring dude because I don’t want to accidentally kill myself alone in a boarding house after all” twist to the side at the end. (Plus a lot of less interesting plotlines about politics that I mostly don’t remember, and the tragic one-sided lesbian romance that I still feel bad about.)
It’s a novel with three interesting women all having complicated feelings about marriage and buying into the What Women Are Supposed To Do thing, and those who buy in to what patriarchy wants from them get “happy” endings, and those who try to make their own happiness have mediocre to tragic ones. Which…felt both very realistic and deeply frustrating.
Which I guess is just a long way of saying that I need to go read that book again, and then House of Mirth, and compare the two.
Oh my gosh. I think this will have to be my next Trollope. Sounds fabulous.( Anthony T. is so hit or miss)
Trollope’s The Small House at Allington! A failed marriage plot with another frustrating Lily!
Loved Small House at Allington! I like the ambiguous, somewhat open ending so much that I’ve never read the next books in the series.
THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON! One of my favourite books ever, far and away. Lily Dale, so so frustrating, and yet with the choices she had you can’t really blame her.
Morally speaking, Lily is utterly triumphant. In choosing to love Selden, though, she shows lousy taste: he’s not only conventional and priggish, he’s passive about it, too.
Slightly O/T, but I question whether Wharton was actually antisemitic. She certainly shows a society that looks down on Jews, but it’s not clear to me that she does herself. For instance, she presents Rosedale as having truly superior taste (he appreciates Lily in ways that even Selden doesn’t) and being honest in his relationships in a way no one else in Lily’s world can manage. That quietly undercuts two of the most common anti-Jewish stereotypes of Wharton’s world (Jews are dishonest and have inferior, nouveau riche tastes), and I think it’s deliberate on her part.
She had some quite nasty racial politics in the later part of her life.
Yeah, Selden is terrible. His virtues are entirely negative, he’s at best, NOT one of the vapid society types that Lily associates with. All he really does is get Lily into lasting trouble by persuading her to act unconventionally, then make her feel bad about her choices without offering any realistic better ones. And he sort of Nice Guys her the entire book: “It is a moral failing on your part that you haven’t married me, even though I have never asked.”
” Wharton, Austen, and de Beauvoir plus finger sandwiches”
You bet your patootie I’m jealous!
I think Isabel Archer should be somewhere in this conversation too. She gets the worst of both worlds, but she does VERY DELIBERATELY reject the happy-ending marriage plot when she rejects Warburton’s proposal. (I admit to some screaming aloud and foot-stomping and “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???” on first read of this moment.)
I’m obsessed with Lily Bart. One of my dissertation chapters is about Wharton’s development from House of Mirth to Age of Innocence (Ellen Olenska is an answer to Isabel Archer, I’ve always thought.) Wharton kicks Austen’s ass up one side and down the other.
The speaker mentioned Mizz Archer a few times. I would love to see her get worked in to the thesis! Although she’s different in the sense that she has money to begin with.
True–money changes everything. I do think that Lily would still manage to fuck things up for herself even if she did have money, somehow.
It’s ingenuousness that makes the difference, I think. Elizabeth has it, and Lily most emphatically doesn’t. Lily tried to play the system, and she got played instead. One of the reasons we like her is that she knew the risks, but took them anyway. When she lost, she took it like (excuse the expression) a man.
If you’re contemplating another heroine analysis, can I put in a request for Isabel Archer vs. Dorothea Brooke?
I always saw the ending of the House of Mirth as more triumphant and hopeful than sad, which I know is a little crazy-town, but I think you’ve hit on why here: Lily got a chance to set herself right with the world, and she took it.
I am as much a Lizzy Bennet partisan as anyone (I will accept duels on this point), but in this discussion its impossible not to see her as helplessly naive in some ways. Even when Charlotte is making really practical points directly at her, her response to her likely future of poverty is pretty much “la la la, I just want to follow my heart.” Not saying she should have married Mr. Collins, obvi, and it makes her such a nice person to know she would not use Darcy for his money when she didn’t like him, but she’s just so blithe and unconcerned about it all.
If you think about Lizzy refusing Darcy’s first proposal like Lily going off with Selden instead of going to church with that-rich-dude-whose-name-I-forget, they are both forgoing a loveless and unhappy marriage in order to preserve their sense of self. But Lily is doing it knowing — though not necessarily conscious — that she is choosing a much more difficult future. Lizzy doesn’t seem to see the future at all. Lily’s justified dread of poverty makes her continual rejections of the “correct” path more admirable in some ways. Lizzy never seems to be making a choice, and she never has to because “la la la” it all works out. Lily is always making a choice, and as stupid as many of her actions seems along the way, in the end she is always making the right choice because she is always choosing to preserve her selfhood.
Yes. And it’s not just that Lizzy is lalala. It’s that her own pride and vanity are her most consistent motivators, along with(and this is why we love her) fierce loyalty to Jane.
That’s true. The question of pride/vanity versus selfhood is a tough one (as P&P struggles with throughout). When I say Lily in the end “sets herself right with the world” in a large part I think that is in discovering and allowing herself to feel what Austen might call “proper” pride, or, going back to the feminism vs. patriarchy argument, she finds value in herself and her own actions instead of her relationship to men and the value the patriarchal world tried to assign to her. Of course there’s a historical precedent for calling women “immodest” like that’s a bad thing. So I don’t want to ding Lizzy too much for her pride and vanity — which I guess is what you are saying above, that her “prejudice” and the shaming she gets for it in the book is in some ways a capitulation to patriarchal ideals of female behavior.
Does resisting the patriarchy inevitably lead to death? must happy marriage plots equate with the gradual disappearance of a woman’s self? I’d like to think not but of course, this is all very complex . I must go now and write my own novel about this.
Let us consider Jane Eyre, which my English teacher fabulously interpreted as the necessary triumph of femdom. Jane also rejects a marriage in which she would not be respected and fulfilled, and sets off into the world with a full sense of the risks she is taking and what it means to be poor -though as an adult she rarely knew what it means to be alone. It is Rochester who must get his comeuppance, be beaten down, and prove himself worthy of *her*, not the other way around. I really feel people who read her as passive, pious, and meek are missing out -she’s quite and forgiving, but at least half of that can be attributed to financial necessity, and she casts that to the winds when a point is important to her moral sense of self.
I agree with what you’re saying here, but I think Jane rejects the initial “marriage” given that it’s not really marriage at all. She’d essentially be a mistress. But you’re right that Rochester has to prove himself worthy of her – much of the arc of the book is concerned with his sin and redemption.
And I’ve NEVER thought of Jane as passive and meek. Quiet doesn’t necessarily equal pushover.
No, it’s the classic unequal marriage (where the woman begins as the less powerful) made possible by the taking down or symbolic castration of the unfairly powerful male. In Jane Eyre’s case: losing one’s eyes = symbolic castration.
It’s a kind of brutal template, but it’s quite noticeable in many novels. But then, how many ways were there for a woman with no means to become equal with her socially and financially superior husband?
She doesn’t just reject Rochester, she also rejects St. John, who offers the proper package. That’s also pretty impressive.
Personally, I’ll never stop cheering Jane Eyre for turning down the oh-so-romantic St. John. Fuck that loveless, missionary shit, lady, yeah!
Also consider: Lizzie Borden vs the Patriarchy
I thought this was going to be Lizzy Bennet vs. Lily Bass from Gossip Girl and I was foolishly excited for that.
This, however, stirred my English-major heart out from its lawyer-y shell. LET’S ALL GO GET ENGLISH PHDs, job market be damned.
Seriously, I was so confused as to why all the Edith Wharton talk in the beginning, as I have never read House of Mirth, and now I realize it was Bart Bass, and her name was Lily Bass.
While I love this and am supremely jealous of your attendance at any conference where people unironically wear bonnets, I do sometimes wonder if, when we’re comparing characters like this, we somewhat collapse time a bit, and just think “oh yes, they lived in the olden days, when women wore corsets.” Because (as you said) the characters were written a hundred years apart, their authors lived in completely different countries. Society changed rapidly between the early 19th and 20th centuries. Is comparing Elizabeth Bennet and Lily Bart is a little bit like comparing Lily Bart to Bridget Jones? Am I just very sleep-deprived? Who knows.
Well… if Bridget Jones dealt explicitly with the conflict between the need for social/financial security and the desire for emotional fulfillment (maybe it does; I have actually only seen bits of the movie on tv), and if it wasn’t a retelling of P&P (because that kind of corrupts it as contemporary social commentary), then I think there would be merit in comparing it to Wharton.
P&P public service announcement: they made a miniseries out of the terrible Death Comes to Pemberley which I liked pretty well, certainly more than the book, perhaps mostly because I like the actress who played Elizabeth (who is also in Bletchley Circle, which has a new season, surprised yay!)
WHAT??? WHEN??? WHERE??? Bletchley Circle, I thought we were parted FOREVER!
The new season started on Monday, but it may still be available on whatever the ITV version of iplayer is.
I think the word you want is “flouting,” not “flaunting.”
Brian Lehrer made the same error a day or two ago. Forgot to take him to task on that!
I think a really interesting comparison is Bertha Dorset vs. Lily Bart. Bertha plays the game masterfully where as Lily makes too many mistakes. Bertha makes an advantageous match that has brought her great wealth and social standing. Although it’s a loveless marriage, she uses it to her advantage and as a screen to hide her affairs. She is able to gain a sort of freedom albeit within the confines of a patriarchal society.
When I was a kid and listening to my mother, who tried to make me believe my only goal in life was to find a husband, my plan had been to either escape this fate somehow, or marry, then clean out my husband’s bank account one day and disappear, maybe take the slow boat to China. All because it seemed quite unfair that I should be expected to marry at all. I totally thought being coerced (even by society) into marriage justified such a plan. I was glad to discover, as I grew up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, obviously, that I didn’t have to do this. But Lily infuriated me with her lack of subversiveness. She enforced this unfairness upon herself, totally believing in it. Yes, she was a nice person, and yes, I’d have done the same as she, burning the letters. I believe in a certain sense of honor. But I sure as hell would have found a way out, whether by stealth and even if it meant just accepting that I was going to be poor. What was her problem, she couldn’t stand, what was it again? Dust or something? Dinginess? Something like that. Seriously, she just couldn’t bear dinginess or something. Crazy. I’d have just embraced it and said the hell with everyone.
The new season started on Monday, but it may still be available on whatever the ITV version of iplayer is.
What about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall? There’s a slightly different twist on the marriage plot novel. (Spoiler alert!) The bride is the one with the power (albeit after much appropriate feminine self-sacrifice and suffering), and the groom is the one who has to change his way of thinking in order to be with her, after being proposed to.
Personally, I'll never stop cheering Jane Eyre for turning down the oh-so-romantic St. John. Fuck that loveless, missionary shit, lady, yeah!
I'm a lurker, not a commenter, but I just have to step in here to stay, FUCK YES JANE EYRE. Something that made me love her even more: My favorite contemporary author, Jeanette Winterson, wrote in her memoir that her crazy-religious mother CHANGED THE ENDING when she was reading it to her as a child. She improvised an ending where Jane goes with St. John. (I may have written a paper speculating on the way the themes of proto-feminism and independence are subverting by such an ending change…nerd alert). Going back to Rochester is complicated, but staying with St. John would just be the WORST. What a douche.