Beauty and dinginess, beauty and the beast, depend upon each other. Dinginess isn’t brilliant, sublime, perfect, but dirty, tainted, dark, discolored, worn, or spoiled, used and disgusting. (The word “dingy” may come from the word “dinghy,” a small boat or vessel that sails by the side of larger vessels.) Lily’s mother instills the terror of it in her. Mrs. Bart’s greatest “reproach” to her husband is that he expected her to become dingy or “live like a pig” (I, 3, 26), one of Freud’s animals. (Anality comes to mind.) Treated with indifference and contempt, Mr. Bart’s a cash machine to his wife and to Lily, who has more sympathy for him. After he loses his money, his failure and inadequacy in Mrs. Bart’s eyes are made complete when he dies and leaves them poor, ruined.
After two years of hungry roaming, Mrs. Bart had died — of a deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after the first year. (I, 3, 30)
To Miss Bart, as to her mother, acquiescence in dinginess was evidence of stupidity; and there were moments when, in the consciousness of her own power to look and be so exactly what the occasion required, she almost felt that other girls were plain and inferior from choice. (I, 8, 70)
Mrs. Peniston’s opulent interior was at least not externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality that assumes all manner of disguises; and Lily soon found it was as latent in the expensive routine of her aunt’s life as in the makeshift existence of a continental pension. (I, 3, 31)
Dinginess isn’t ever simple wear and tear. Contrasted again and again to brilliance, light, the sun, glow (as if Wharton were a Manichee), the dark and dirty that Lily fears and names dinginess emanates from what she doesn’t know and can’t see. There’s no clarity, no bright light by which to see these appalling, unconscious forces that threaten her every step. Stupidity, as dullness, is also dinginess (though for her to shine too brilliantly could attract unwanted attention and failure). But Lily is stupid before the irrational. Wharton knew everyone was.
In an extraordinary passage, Lily worries that Mrs. Peniston (“To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor” [I, 3, 32]) has been “too passive,” has not helped her enough socially; but Lily also fears she herself has “not been passive enough” and too “eager” (I, 3, 33).
Younger and plainer girls had been married off by the dozens, and she was nine and twenty and still Miss Bart.
She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself but what manner of life would it be?. She was too intelligent not to be honest with herself. She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again against its flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch. (I, 3, 33)
She fights against being ruined. It’s a struggle to the death that she loses, one beyond her control, fought blindly, unconsciously. For a smart girl, Lily often acts impulsively and against her interests. But Wharton sometimes confounds the reader who is attempting to decide what is in her interest. Maybe nothing is. Even if Lily knew what her interests were, she might not be able to stop herself or control herself, for reasons she cannot know.
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The question persists: If plainer and stupider girls could marry, why can’t Lily? Marriage’s promise is not just economic and social partnership, but also sexual union. Terror of sex and sexuality, of being made dingy, may be a piece of Lily’s unmarriageability, inscribed in her body as attenuated virginity. Intent upon weaving surface and foundation, Wharton lets Lily’s body and interior speak society’s prohibitive customs and conventions.
(Imagining a character’s psychology can be as “slippery” as the “bright pinnacles of success” Lily can’t reach. But Wharton looks hard at Lily, as a condition, as a symptom of social injustice, restriction, inhibition, repression, oppression, as an unstable object in an uncertain structure. She scrutinizes her with a kind of clinical neutrality.
The chief difference between the merely sympathetic and the creative imagination is that the latter is two-sided, and combines with the power of penetrating into other minds that of standing far enough aloof from them to see beyond, and relate them to the whole stuff of life out of which they partially emerge. Such an all-round view can be obtained only by mounting to a height; and that height, in art, is proportioned to the artist’s power of detaching one part of his imagination from the particular problem in which the rest is steeped. (Writing, 15)
Her very sharp pen, held high, is dipped in the ink of ambivalence — fascination, contempt, compassion, anger, fear. Like all writers, Wharton works as much from what she knows as from what she doesn’t. The unconscious presents mysteries and allows pleasures, pains and pathologies a visibility that one can’t plan or control.)
Lily’s unlovableness and sense of unworthiness is disguised by her beautiful, impenetrable exterior. She’s valued for it alone.
One thought consoled [Mrs. Bart], and that was the contemplation of Lily’s beauty. it was the last asset in their fortunes. She watched it jealously as if it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian. (I, 3, 29)
The dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the existence to which she felt herself entitled. To a less illuminated intelligence Mrs. Bart’s counsels might have been dangerous, but Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to convert it into success other arts are required. She knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of the stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features. (I, 3, 30)
Lily can’t manipulate what’s inside her, her feelings about who she is or isn’t. Her beauty is unassailable and absolute; no one touches it — or her. But its scale triggers alarms, calls too much attention upon her and maybe isn’t a good enough cover story. She manages it, like her intelligence, though it’s inconvenient and ill-fitting—“more conspicuous than a ballroom.” Lily’s “passion for the appropriate” (I, 6, 51) may be oxymoronic.
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In The Decoration of Houses, Wharton claims that “structure conditions ornament, not ornament structure” (Decoration, 14). Lily’s an ornament that can be betrayed, deformed, in the wrong setting. Her beauty will turn ugly if nothing else around it, or within her, supports it, makes it function or harmonize with the structure that conditions it. Inappropriate and out of context, beauty can be empty, a thing, nothing but a facade, a fake. When Selden thinks he “see[s] before him the real Lily Bart,” she is a tableau vivant, an image, “Mrs. Lloyd” of the Reynolds painting (I, 12, 106). He suddenly perceives her “divested of the trivialities of her little world and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part” (I, 12, 106).