It’s a singular moment. Lily blends in, in the right setting, and is embraced by Selden for her perfection. Selden’s revelry is shattered, though, when Ned Van Alstyne trivializes her, and he becomes indignant.
This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda? (I, 12, 107)
He’s sympathetic to her; but she’s an idealized image. Wharton extols her beauty in this highly artificial, artful scene. She freezes Lily and portrays her as a living picture, so there’s something grotesque about it, and about her, too. She’s not quite human. But Selden, an aesthete, can adore her and suspend his harsh judgment of her. He can almost love her.
Selden’s no less harsh about her, and society, than she is. There’s dogged reason in Wharton’s pairing of these cool characters, each of whom mirrors the other’s desires and lacks. The differences between them elucidate differences based on sex, but through them, Wharton plays with balancing the unbalanced sexes.
If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small group of the like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and was not insensible to the part money plays in their production. All he asked was that the very rich live up to their calling as stage managers, and not spend their money in a dull way. (I, 12, 103-4)
Like Lily, Selden isn’t rich, but unlike her he works for a living. Like Lily, he abjures dullness, appreciates beauty and the finer things, has a pronounced and cultivated sensibility, and recognizes and is repulsed by vulgarity. He feels above most people; he wants to avoid being bored. His lack of chastity isn’t, of course, an obstacle. Lily often talks with him about her chances for marriage. But she rarely thinks about or mentions love. (When Lily loves and thrills, it is to rooms and places. Her sensitivity to a room and decoration is as excessive as her beauty.) One of the times she considers love is when she thinks about Selden.
(Lily) could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dullness she had fled from? Lily had no definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings. She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man. If Lily recalled this early emotion it was not to compare it with that which now possessed her; the only point of comparison was the sense of lightness, of emancipation, which she remembered feeling. that glow of freedom; but now it was something more than blind groping of the blood. (I, 6, 52)
Earlier in the scene, Lily wails for Selden to come to her, surrounded by nature, with which she “had no real intimacy” (I, 6, 51). Nature is another one of The House of Mirth’s uneasier foundations. What is woman’s nature? With freedom, will Lily Bart be “womanly,” capable of giving herself in marriage, having babies and conforming to social obligations? Or will she become too new, unusable?
She’s been “in love with fortunes and careers, but only once with a man.” Nature and love aren’t natural to Lily, and she doesn’t conform to feminine proscriptions that link women with nature, women with love. Lily thinks she knows Selden’s nature, since it’s like hers. His “air of friendly aloofness. [is]. the quality which piqued Lily’s interest” (I, 6, 53). Selden’s aloofness sets Lily up, off and down. She doesn’t know what to expect from him, never knows if he loves her or might be serious about marrying her.
Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him most of all perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met. (I, 6, 53)
She admires him for an irony that keeps him at a distance. Like her his passions are oxymoronically reserved for the appropriate. Wharton’s odd couple are dedicated to controlling themselves. But love jeopardizes control; forces one to become involuntarily subject to another, even lost in the other. Selden’s suspicious of losing himself, and he’s so suspicious of Lily he thinks that “even her weeping was an art.” (I, 6, 58)
That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood — the time when he was his own ideal.5
When Selden thought he saw the real Lily Bart, she was a living doll. Maybe he loved her most then as a lost part of himself, the illusory ideal he once imagined himself to be or have. They’re both difficult characters, wary of love, looking for perfection. Not finding it in themselves or others, they don’t lose themselves.
In a recent TV advertisement for a men’s perfume called Contradiction, a young man declares, “I don’t want her to need me. I want her to desire me. Need isn’t desire.” Lily needs Selden more than she desires him; Selden’s idea of freedom entails being wanted, not needed. Their attraction to each other is unstable and compelling, living, dying, again and again. The contradictory logic that might make them lovers — both are ambivalent, both want freedom — is precisely what makes them unfit for each other.
***
In this thwarted romance, star-crossed lovers want to love but can’t, do in some ways love themselves and each other, but also share in self-loathing, an effect, too, of narcissism. Freud wrote that loving oneself is not a “perversion but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature” (“Narcissism,” 105). Selden’s self-regard appears less compromised than Lily’s; she worries too much about becoming clingy. But both suffer from narcissistic wounds and lick them throughout the novel, sparing themselves the pain of further injury.
The effect of the dependence upon the love object is to lower that feeling [of self-regard]: the lover is humble. He who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, which can only be replaced by his being loved. (“Narcissism,” 120)
There is, in the act of love, a great resemblance to torture or to a surgical operation.6
Selden and Lily never stop preserving and defending themselves from imagined or real injuries and threats. Love — relinquishment of control — might be torture for them. When Lily visits Selden for the last time, she is finally able to articulate it.
Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well — you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. But the moment is gone — it was I who let it go. And one must go on living. Goodbye. (II, 12, 241)
Love’s dead, but “something lived between them also. it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his” (II, 12, 241). Her idea of love colludes with Wharton’s understanding of desire that arises from the desire to be desired. Even more abstractly, Lily understands that “she could not go forth and leave her old self with him; that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it must still continue to be hers” (II, 12, 241). Even when love is dead, no longer capable of causing pain, surgery — amputation — won’t be allowed. Lily’s fear of losing herself, giving herself up to him, certainly may be her magnificent desire to be herself. But what Wharton suggests is that her impassioned need to preserve herself at all costs may be an implacable obstacle to happiness; for it she will pay the ultimate price.