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I have sometimes thought that a women’s nature is like a great house full of rooms; there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a doorstep that never comes. — The Fullness of Life (1891)
In Wharton’s scheme, Lily Bart’s fate was to be beautiful, to become poor and unmarriageable, and to die a suicide, a tragic heroine. Like bread crumbs, Wharton scatters clues to Lily’s predicament. “[S]he likes being good and I like being happy,” Lily says of poor Gerty Farish to Lawrence Selden. Some of the clues correspond to Selden’s grand idea, proposed once to Lily, that there is a “republic of the spirit” she might enter. Lily’s conflict — her wish for freedom but her sense “that I never had any choice”—conspires to keep her from the independent or idiosyncratic life Selden represents. (His republic of the spirit is an imaginary structure, perhaps the house of mirth itself.)
Wharton’s use of architecture operates in the traditional way — as built structure, as expression of the symbolic order, as place, as evidence of the hierarchical order — but it is exercised for fictive ends. The novel begins in a terminal, Grand Central Station, and terminates in a rented room. The “house” is first a capacious, modern public building, a place anyone may enter and pass through, and last a cramped space open to the public but required only by the poor. Lily journeys, like Richard II, from bigness to smallness, from a magnificent building that seems infinite — kingdom, modern world — to small rented room of desperate finitude — cell, deathbed. Space and place change with Lily Bart, or change her.
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Lawrence Selden makes Lily happy or sad whenever they meet. It is Selden whom Lily encounters by chance in Grand Central Station, and it’s Selden who finds Lily dead at the novel’s end. His presence frames Lily’s life, ghosts and subverts it, as the rooms, scenes and encounters Wharton sets Lily in structure it. What the reader knows of Lily’s thoughts about her impossible position is gleaned primarily in her discussions with Selden, her foil and confidante. Selden is a fitting comrade, a modern flawed hero or antihero. He arouses the dubious sprite fortune and its reversals, and with its partner hope and possibility, plagues Lily. No one underwrites Lily’s placelessness, or lovelessness, more than Selden.
Wharton had a keen interest in ghost stores and the supernatural, and Selden flits through The House of Mirth as if it were a Gothic tale and he were its elusive hero. Selden is a haunted and haunting figure who magnifies Lily’s unfitness and increasing inappropriateness whenever he appears. Her double in drag, he even impedes her so-called progress with other suitors, fulfilling his double-agent, phantom-lover mission as the budding star in a magnificent sense of plot points. His last appearance at Lily’s bedside makes her death more pointedly tragic and beautiful, since we see her through his shattered vision. At that deadly moment Selden becomes a character — or an ornament — Wharton might have borrowed from Poe.
The House of Mirth was originally titled “A Moment’s Ornament.” Lily Bart could have been its temporary decoration. Though from Lily’s point of view, the occasional ornament could have been Selden. But then Wharton enjoyed symmetries. Her house, the Mount in Lenox Massachusetts, which she designed and had built, has three front doors, one of them fake; Wharton wanted the façade to be symmetrical. Selden is symmetrical to Lily and does balance her even as he unbalances her. (Symmetry to Wharton, “the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration” [Decoration, 7].) The uncoupled couple, the two-faced couple, articulates Wharton’s comprehension of how women’s changed, conflictual desires are met by changed, conflicted men. Both are, in a way, misfits, though Selden’s eccentricity and inappropriateness, including his bachelorhood, have value while Lily’s spinsterhood and virginity daily lose theirs.
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Wharton’s enclosures house conflicts and conflicted characters, created not just by ordinary walls. The author constructs walls, limits, that are both real and metaphorical. Wharton’s central and most sustained trope, architecture always alludes to Lily’s physical or mental space, her environment or psychological condition. The decor — couches, paintings, fireplaces, bric-a-brac — becomes evidence of the state in which she exists or of the character of the characters she meets.
[Mrs Dorset] could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room. (I, 2, 21-2)
There was nothing new to Lily in these tokens of a studied luxury; but though they formed a part of her atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness to their charm. Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction, but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth. (I, 4, 34)
Look at a boy like Ned Silverton — he’s really too good to be used to refurbish anybody’s social shabbiness. (I, 6, 56-7)
The exterior suggests the interior or, rather, is the manifestation, the visible order, of an inner world.
Since architecture also defines space by what is not built and what lies outside, the trope allows Wharton to delineate the unbounded, permeable relationship between outside and inside, the flow and inevitable transmission between the so-called inner life and outer life. Lily contends with the limits of public life and space, with propriety and sensibility, with street life, the places without walls that are bounded and limited, to women.
All good architecture and good decoration (which it must never be forgotten is only interior architecture) must be based on rhythm and logic. (Decoration, 13)
For Lily Bart, leaving rooms and being on the street is hazardous; it’s when many of her most devastating and decisive encounters occur. Leaving Selden’s apartment, she accidentally meets Mr. Rosedale in front of the Benedick (bachelor) Apartments. She tells a lie that propels the novel’s story — and her undoing — into motion. Lily instantly realizes her error. (Rosedale’s appearance has been foreshadowed by an unkempt charwoman on the Benedick stairs, who unsettles Lily and with whom Lily compares herself. The charwoman also returns to plague her, blackmail her.)
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice? (I, 2, 19)
Her comings and goings are not easy; she doesn’t make smooth exits; and there are certainly no escapes.
Ironically, Lily identifies with the man who can undo her, Simon Rosedale, a noveau riche Jewish businessman initially sketched by Wharton with the brush of conventional anti-Semitism. He is, like Lily, “a novelty” (I, 2, 16). She “understood his motives, for her own course was guided by nice calculations” (I, 2, 16). Within a very few pages, Wharton serves up two male characters, dissimilar to each other and to her, as well as a dissimilar female, against whom to judge Lily. All balance our view of her, creating a kind of symmetry or the rhythm and logic fundamental to Wharton’s idea of design in architecture and fiction.