***
Not coincidentally, the most exquisite or maybe the only love scene in The House of Mirth is not between Selden and Lily, but between mother and child — with Lily playing the mother and becoming the child in a kind of self-love scene. (It’s also the only scene in which one character holds another with passion or for any length of time.) After the devastating last meeting with Selden, Lily bumps into Nettie Crane Struthers, one of Gerty Farish’s “girls,” on the street.
Nettie Struther’s frail envelope was now alive with hope and energy; whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be cast into the refuse heap without a struggle. (II, 13, 243)
Though poor, Nettie’s not rubbish, not dingy. Nettie invites Lily home: “it’s real warm in our kitchen” (II, 13, 244). In another of Wharton’s relatively few underscorings and repetitions, she italicizes “was” in Lily’s repeated thought: “It was warm in the kitchen” (II, 13, 244). (Warm or warmth occurs several more times in this hearth-and-home kitchen scene.) Nettie’s life, though different from Lily’s, has its similarities. She was about to give up, having been jilted, but unlike Lily, Nettie found a man, George, married, and had a baby. Nettie’s reputation doesn’t stop George from marrying her; Lily’s stops everyone. Nettie’s success as a traditional woman, playing traditional roles, is severely contrasted to Lily’s failures, her flawed femininity and fatal unmarriageability. This extreme pairing, before Lily’s suicide, seems to enunciate the author’s ambivalence toward Lily and the allure and demands of femininity. And maybe it also addresses Wharton’s own maternal deprivation, since through the veil of fiction one writes what one wants as much as what one doesn’t.
When Lily holds Nettie’s baby, at first the child
seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as she continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the child entered into her and became a part of herself. (II, 13, 245-6)
Wharton fashions another tableau vivant, a Madonna and Child (by Bellini, let’s say), and paints the badly mothered Lily Bart into it. In a moment of devastating psychological revelation, Lily is transformed as the infant enters her. The baby becomes a lost part of her, an adult still so little, so undeveloped, she’s as weak as a baby, or she is the baby.
[Nettie: ] “Wouldn’t it be too lovely if she grew up to be just like you?” [Lily: ] “Oh she must not do that — I should be afraid to come to see her too often.” (II, 13, 246)
Now Wharton’s gone Gothic again, writing a ghost story. Lily foresees her death, and, as a ghost, could return to visit the real Lily Bart, who has never actually existed. The baby could become the person she might have been, had she been loved and able to thrive. At Nettie’s warm hearth, Lily’s heartless mother is a spectral presence, with Lily’s pathetic, beaten-down father hovering in the corner where her mother placed him. (What kind of man could Lily love after him? Or, even, could Lily really love a man after him?)
***
One may distinguish the novel of situation from that of character and manners by saying that, in the first, the persons imagined by the author almost always spring out of a vision of the situation, and are inevitably conditioned by it, whatever the genius of their creator; whereas in the larger freer form, that of character and manners (or either of the two), the author’s characters are first born, and then mysteriously proceed to work out their destinies. (Writing, 89)
In writing and design, Wharton strove for clean lines and economy, to remove excess. Lily’s excessive, a disturbance within the social structure. It’s rotten, but she’s a character formed inside its rooms. Lily wanted to be an original, and Wharton, conflicted and ambivalent about the new, gave her enough rope to hang herself — trapping her between the novel of situation (or circumstance and circumstantial evidence) and the novel of character. Through her imperfect heroine, Wharton proclaimed the vivacious allure of freedom, the voracious seductiveness and promise of modernity and change, with all its destructive potential, and the helplessness of individuals before the claims and blind dictates of society in which women and men lived. But she didn’t allow them a talking cure, and her characters have very little room in which to negotiate happy endings.
***
Another unsettling element of modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious, is that of fiercely guarding against it. (Writing, 17)
Original vision is never much afraid of using accepted forms [my emphasis]; and only the cultivated intelligence escapes the danger of regarding as intrinsically new what may be a mere superficial change, or the reversion to a discarded trick of technique. (Writing, 109)
There is one more thing to be said in defence of conformity to style; and that is, the difficulty of getting rid of style. Strive as we may for originality, we are hampered at every turn by an artistic tradition of over two thousand years. Does any but the most inexperienced architect really think he can ever rid himself of such an inheritance? He may mutilate or misapply the component parts of his design, but he cannot originate a whole new architectural alphabet. The chances are that he will not find it easy to invent one wholly new moulding. (Decoration, 15)
When I read the last quote to Laura Kurgan, an architect, she said, “You could get rid of the molding entirely.” It’s what the modernists did.
I have discovered the following truth and present it to the world: cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use. Don’t you see the greatness of our age lies in its inability to produce a new form of decoration? We have conquered ornament, we have won through the lack of ornamentation. for ornament is not only produced by criminals; it itself commits a crime, by damaging men’s health, the national economy and cultural development.7
Adolf Loos wrote his famous essay, or manifesto, “Ornament and Crime,” in 1908. Wharton’s work on houses and decoration preceded it by a decade. She was in line with Loos, and the modernists, to a point.
It is the superfluous gimcrack — the “ornament”—which is most objectionable, and the more expensive these items are the more likely they are to harm. (Decoration, 177)
The supreme excellence is simplicity. Moderation, fitness, relevance. There is a sense in which works of art may be said to endure by virtue of that which is left out of them, and it is this “tact of omission” that characterizes the modern hand. (Decoration, 192)
Wharton appreciated simplicity and omission. But she could see the reason, rhythm, and logic of certain kinds of decoration.