Teaching Philosophy and Materials
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, Book Two
In our discussions about Book Two of The House of Mirth, we considered issues related to the social constitution of New York City in the era of Wharton's novel. We took a look at the various roles available to women, as portrayed in the novel, and noted some of the social phenomena that pop up in Wharton's work. Because of rapid changes in manufacturing and because of swelling tides of immigration, New York City as a place where people of all kinds worked and lived was extraordinarily multi-dimensional, yet Wharton only shows us with any clarity, for most of the novel, one dimension, one "culture." She does, however, give us peeks into the other worlds within the metropolis of New York City, such as the immigrant world, or the world of social reformers, or the world of working women. Lily's life brushes up against the lives of people in these other spheres and she dreads really penetrating into any of these lives herself, though she does as Book Two unfolds.
From early in the novel, the existence of the underclass disturbs Lily (such as when she passes the charwoman in the hallway of the Benedick and she smiles to herself, wondering why "a char-woman's stare would so perturb her"). We later come to think of this as foreshadowing, but there is something else at work here too. Lily is afraid of the underclass as if she is vulnerable to that status herself, which she is. She is afraid, in effect, of being "infected" by a kind of coarseness, dullness, lack of freedom, poverty, and ugliness. She is annoyed again by a servant woman who is mopping the floors at her Aunt's house and won't get out of Lily's way.
Interestingly, it is working women who Gerty Farish serves and Gerty is the only character in the novel who we appreciated as morally solid, as "good." Gerty has helped many down-on-their-luck girls at her "club" and Lily had "worked" at the club too, in a rather noncommittal way. Later, Lily comes to find out that her services there were greatly appreciated and one woman of this underclass, who remembers Lily as if she were some amazing emblem or fantastic resplendent celebrity, comes to figure as the ultimate emblem of happiness to Lily just before her own final, tragic end. This woman, Nettie Struther, comes to represent what it means to have earthly happiness, to have "everything," even if this everything contains very little of material substance or financial value. She has that ineffable treasure: love.
So, we have a scale of women: Lily on one end and Nettie on the other. At one point in her tale, Lily was afraid, as it were, of "catching something" from such working types, which is the reason perhaps that she bristles so much when she comes into contact with maids and laboring women. I spoke to you about the social work movement and about Jacob Riis's role in exposing the horrible living conditions of the working underclass in large American turn-of-the-century cities, namely New York. His How the Other Half Lives catalyzed a whole reform movement, but it also spoke to societal fears regarding contamination, infection, and communicable disease. Such disease were more prone to spread in the unsanitary, cramped quarters of many tenements, but the social uproar about these conditions, once they were made known by Riis and others, indicates two concomitant fears: fears of unknown people and fear of unknown "germs." Such fears could easily grow in populous places like New York City, full of so many different kinds of people. Social work activities such as the ones with which Gertie is involved do represent the larger movements that strove to organize and cleanse metropolitan culture and combat moral and physical vice and illness. By thinking about this cultural context, we can see that there is likely a lot more at work in Lily's fears of losing her social standing, represented by the chills that course through her when she, however infrequently, sees a char-woman or imagines herself among the working poor.
While Nettie Struther "begin[s] over again," Lily feels that she cannot begin her own life over again, so she, intentionally or unintentionally, ends it. She had a glimpse through Nettie's life of "the central truth of existence," and that truth is love . . . is it not? (According to Wharton?) Or is that not the central truth to which Wharton refers in her final pages? We see a disavowing of fear of social contagion in the end of The House of Mirth, as the only thing Lily "catches" from going into Nettie's small and cramped apartment is the warmth of love and a sense of what she doesn't have in her own life. What she doesn't have is less a matter of money that it is a matter of morality and conviction and faith. An excellent article on these ideas about "communicable" disease as they relate to literature and to Americanization is Priscilla Wald's "Communicable Americanism: Contagion, Geographic Fictions, and the Sociological Legacy of Robert E. Park," from American Literary History," 2002. I am happy to provide you a copy if you are interested.
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