Invisibility, Race, and Gender in Wharton and Ellison
This essay examines invisibility as a social and political condition in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Drawing on scholarship by Callahan, Merish, Goldner, Hardin, and Restuccia, the paper argues that invisibility operates differently depending on one's position within hierarchies of race, class, gender, and power. For Lily Bart and the unnamed narrator of Invisible Man, invisibility is an imposed condition — a marker of disenfranchisement — yet both protagonists subvert it into a source of agency. The essay also explores passing, homoeroticism, biraciality, and feminist ornamentalization as dimensions of a shared liminal social experience in early twentieth-century America.
- Defining Invisibility as Social Condition: Invisibility as imposed condition across race and gender
- Power, Puppeteers, and the Invisible Elite: How the powerful choose invisibility to maintain control
- Passing, Lying, and Subversive Agency: Lying and passing as tools of hidden resistance
- Race, Jim Crow, and Transgressive Sexuality: Survival through passing during the Jim Crow era
- Ornamentalization and Marginalized Groups: Women and Black men as ornaments of white male power
- Invisibility as Potential Power: Subverting invisibility into agency and heroism
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What makes this paper effective
- Draws a sustained, nuanced parallel between two canonical texts across different axes of oppression — race in Ellison and gender in Wharton — without flattening their differences.
- Uses secondary scholarship (Merish, Goldner, Hardin, Restuccia) purposefully, integrating critics to build rather than simply decorate the argument.
- Introduces productive irony early — that both protagonists are in some sense hypervisible — and returns to that tension throughout to deepen the central claim.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative literary analysis anchored in a unifying theoretical concept. Rather than treating the two novels separately, the writer identifies a shared mechanism — invisibility — and traces how it functions differently for characters positioned at distinct intersections of power, making each textual example illuminate the other.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by defining invisibility as an imposed social condition and introduces both texts. It then distinguishes between the invisibility of the powerful and the invisibility of the oppressed. Subsequent sections explore specific manifestations — lying and passing, Jim Crow survival, homoeroticism and biraciality, and feminist ornamentalization — before concluding with an argument that invisibility, though imposed, carries subversive potential that both protagonists exploit.
Defining Invisibility as Social Condition
The opposite of a superpower, invisibility refers to the condition of not mattering, not qualifying, or not counting in the eyes of the dominant culture. Invisibility is a quality imposed by the oppressor and experienced by the oppressed. Those who do not conform to a white patriarchal standard are rendered invisible; they may float through life never fitting into a social circle and never gaining access to the means by which they might change their status. Invisibility is what Miss Lily Bart experiences as she subverts gender norms in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Invisibility is also what the narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man experiences as he navigates his way through early twentieth-century America. The disenfranchised are rendered invisible when they are positioned at intersections of race, class, gender, and power.
For the invisible man in Ellison's novel, invisibility is ironic because a Black man is very much a visible sight in a white-dominant, racist society. His anonymity — his namelessness — is an emblem of the narrator's invisibility, the badge he wears to prove that Blackness blends into the background and renders one powerless. Blackness and invisibility are also symbols of what Callahan calls the "great formlessness of Negro life wherein all values are in flux" (24). Miss Lily Bart, on the other hand, possesses white privilege, but that privilege is rendered impotent in a patriarchal society. Just as invisibility is ironic for what would otherwise be a very visible outsider — a Black man — Lily Bart's invisibility is also ironic given the precise function of invisibility in The House of Mirth.
Works Cited
Callahan, John F. "Before Publication." In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Franklin, Anderson J. "Invisibility Syndrome and Racial Identity Development in Psychotherapy and Counseling African-American Men." The Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 27, No. 6 (Nov. 1999), pp. 761–793.
Goldner, Ellen J. "The Lying Woman and the Cause of Social Anxiety: Interdependence and the Woman's Body in The House of Mirth." Women's Studies, Vol. 21, Issue 3, 1992.
Hardin, Michael. "Invisibility, Race, and Homoeroticism from Frederick Douglass to E. Lynn Harris." The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004), pp. 96–120.
Kaplan, Amy. "Crowded Spaces in The House of Mirth." In Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: A Casebook. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Merish, Lori. "Engendering Naturalism." In Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: A Casebook. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Restuccia, Francis L. "The Name of the Lily: Edith Wharton's Feminism(s)." Contemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 223–238.
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