The House of Mirth: Social and Character-Driven Tragedy

Introduction: A Tragedy of Character and Society

The tragic end of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth has its roots in both the character of the central protagonist Lily Bart and the society that creates her. Lily has been raised since birth to marry a wealthy man. Because she comes from a socially prominent family without financial resources, she must marry for the sake of a man's position and fortune rather than for love. However, romantic ideology suggests that a respectable woman marries for love and does not think of money. Torn between these two imperatives, Lily rejects her wealthy suitors and falls into poverty, drug addiction, and eventually suicide. She has been taught to do nothing other than act as an ornament. Lily is both a victim of her society and an architect of her own destruction.

Lily as Victim: Social Injustice and the Dorsets

Lily's status as a victim is most obviously evident in the way she is treated by Bertha and George Dorset. As an unmarried, twenty-nine-year-old orphan, she holds a fragile place in society, and the Dorsets exploit this fragility as a cover for their own infidelities. Eventually, Bertha — who is having an affair with Ned Silverton — accuses Lily of propositioning George. People believe Bertha not because she is trustworthy, but because she wields more power and influence than Lily. Society is unjust, Wharton implies, because people like Bertha can ruin others' reputations for purely selfish ends. Those who judge Lily harshly care only about clothing, gambling, and frivolous pleasures, even as they regard themselves as superior to Lily and to the lower classes.

The Injustice of Compulsory Marriage

The fact that Lily must marry at all is itself shown to be unjust: it renders her vulnerable and perpetually at the mercy of others. Because she lives in a society that views marriage as the ultimate female purpose, she has never been taught to do anything productive. She knows nothing about managing money, which leads her to accumulate enormous debts and to become embarrassingly dependent on a married man, Gus Trenor. Lily believes Trenor is investing money on her behalf, but he is in fact simply giving her money, treating her as a kept woman. Repaying this debt becomes one of her most powerful motivations throughout the novel.

At the novel's end, Lily even fails to earn a living making hats. Compared with other working-class women, her skills are poor. She cannot create beauty — she can only embody it — and the novel suggests that even Lily's loveliness is not innate but is rather a triumph of artifice. As Lawrence Selden reflects:

"Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair — was it ever so slightly brightened by art? — and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?" (Wharton 6)

Conclusion: Inevitable Destruction

Lily dies at the end of the novel, passively, half by intended suicide and half unintentionally, as a result of her addiction to sleeping medication. She can do nothing useful, but she lacks the money or the social position to conceal this fact. At the novel's close, Wharton makes Lily's condition painfully explicit:

"She had learned by experience that she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines; to become a worker among workers, and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded. She could not hold herself much to blame for this ineffectiveness, and she was perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird's breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?" (Wharton 487)

Lily dies before Selden can offer her marriage, yet the question remains whether she truly just misses being saved. Perhaps her real destruction came far earlier — when she absorbed her mother's lessons about materialism too young, combined with her deep internalization of the ideal of the "true" lady. She can neither marry purely for love nor purely for money, leaving her in a moral half-way house — the ironically titled House of Mirth. Wharton's novel stands as a powerful indictment of a Gilded Age society that fashioned women like Lily into exquisitely useless ornaments and then discarded them when their decorative function could no longer be sustained.

Works Cited

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. C. Scribner's Sons, 1905.