justice for lily bart!

The House of Mirth, Girard, and AlgoZombies

Hello friends—

Over the last couple of days, across a series of stolen moments before and after events, on walks and on the train, moving through the city now gray with fall cold, I have been revisiting the ending of The House of Mirth. Not just the beautiful moments at the close of the book, but the entire final movement of the novel, starting with Lily Bart’s brief attempt to climb back into a social world she’s been exiled from, her realization of the futility of this attempt, her joining the working classes as a milliner in training, her chemical dependence, the last encounters with suitors who previously pursued then jilted then pitied her, and the revelation of the vast indifferent machinery of the New York world of style and fashion.

Usually, when I go through this part of the novel, my emotional response is governed by a feeling of tragedy and pity, sympathy for Lily, anger at the world and its restrictive narrowness. In essence, I am so in the book, that I don’t usually do much thinking because I am so overwhelmed by feeling. I mean, it’s Edith Wharton. She do be doing that to a person!!!

I am not saying that my response was less emotional this time, because, let’s be real, how can you watch someone succumb to a fate they might have so easily escaped if only they had possessed a slightly more durable character, whose chief fault was naivety and hopefulness and a certain disregard for their social inferiors. One of Wharton’s accomplishments in the novel is Lily’s moral transformation. It is not that she ceases to want the things that she wants, but she comes to understand how very little they are worth, how silly, and ultimately how silly she was to have let herself be persuaded, for the happiness of others, to play the game she had been raised to play. She comes to understand the futility of everything she sought to achieve at a time when it is too late to do anything about it. This realization is not new to the novel. It has been circulating in the minds of the characters who have come to pity Lily as she goes about with disreputable women. But that Wharton dedicates the final movement of her novel to Lily coming to that realization for herself and coming to terms with it, truly coming to terms with it, and that her final independent acts, things she’s come to on her own principles, are two acts of great character, is astonishing to me. The novel is a tragedy, yes, of course, but that the tragedy is particularly keen because we’ve just watched Lily realize the truth of life and of the world, we’ve just seen her come through everything and find a real moral vision for how she wants her life to be lived. That’s what’s so brutal. She’s just gotten it right, and if only she had tomorrow, if only that one little thing, tomorrow, if only.

When I say that her final two independent acts are acts of profound character and independence of mind, I am speaking of when she chooses not to reveal Selden’s affair with Bertha Dorset, a woman who orchestrated Lily’s own downfall. And when she resolves to pay back a great debt to Gus Trenor, that ruinous debt that caused Lily to be disinherited and disowned by her family and friends. Lily might have played the game. She might have revealed Selden and Bertha’s affair via the letters that fell into her lap, and she might have used that to climb back up a few rungs of the social ladder. But she cannot bring herself to do it because she has herself tasted ruin. When the whip is in her hand, Lily, who has been lashed by these awful people, cannot bring herself to lash in return. When she might restore her fortunes through revenge and cruelty, Lily really takes stock of what all that might entail, what those fortunes must be—going to nice parties, wearing a nice dress, going about town in fashionable carriages, going to concerts and to shows, attending all the right events, being seen as someone worth seeing, worth emulating. Lily passes her eye over all of that and sums it up, and she comes to feel that it isn’t worth it in the end.

The ending of the novel is tragic. Lily overdoses—either intentionally or accidentally—after setting her affairs right, just as Selden arrives to finally marry her, only to find out that he’s too late. The very thing that might restore her socially, a good marriage, a sensible marriage to a stylish man, comes only after we’ve seen Lily restore her honor—that is, we see Lily writing out the check and paying off her debt to Dorset and also burning the letters that would compromise Selden’s situation. She absolves herself and proves her moral standing. And, the game completed, she dies. At the cusp of happiness, there is nothing to do but pass away. In America, one pays for the crime of downward class migration with one’s life. Better to die in honor than to live in dishonor, in this horrible country.

Anyway, normally, I am too wrecked to think very much while reading the end of this novel, but this time around, I was struck by several passages for their startlingly resonant observations on the nature of mimetic desire. And since I spent last weekend at a conference on the work of René Girard, it seems a fitting theme for a newsletter. As I have mentioned, there’s a part of The House of Mirth where Lily gets a job as an apprentice milliner after she’s had her social reputation ruined. At this point of the novel, she’s been disinherited. She’s been basically disowned. She tried to get back in with her social group by affixing herself to an up and coming couple, the Gormers, only to have her reputation once more ruined by Bertha Dorset, her nemesis and former friend. Then she works for a woman named Mrs. Hatch, who isn’t not a kind of Undine Spragg, an acquisitive parvenu with no social graces. But then Selden convinces her to quit that job, but still gets burned just the same, and then she has no choice but to work. And what does she do, but begin to make hats.

At first, the woman who owns the millinery wants Lily to work in the show room. She’s beautiful, she has all the proper bearing, and she speaks the language of the clientele. After all, Lily herself was one such client. And Lily, being stylish and oft-imitated in her life as a socialite, would serve as a wonderful mimetic target for the women seeking stylish fashions. However, Lily quashes that idea immediately: “But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a negative which Gerty emphatically supported, while Mrs. Fisher, inwardly unconvinced, but resigned to this latest proof of Lily’s unreason, agreed that perhaps in the end it would be more useful that she should learn the trade.” One is tempted to ask why almost immediately. After all, Lily is preternaturally suited to this position. It would make work out of the thing she has been raised to do: to be beautiful, to be seen, to be stylish, to float through a world of tableaux and appearances. One of Lily’s most astounding social successes came at just such a moment, after all. At a party, when she participated in a tableau-vivant and melted the brains of every man in attendance.

Yet we have the sense that it would be uniquely uncomfortable and uniquely painful to be seen by the very women who had once been her peers. Naturally, it’s ironic because even when Lily was their peer, she was still in effect performing for her supper. She was always serving at the pleasure of some more established lady, biding her time until she did what she had been bred to do: marry successfully and become an established lady in her own right. And barring that, she might still go on in the mode of other ladies, and have a successful career as a professional friend and helpmeet to these ladies, spending her days as their social secretary in effect.

The moment when Lily considers her job in the show-room is presaged by a moment earlier in the novel when Lily observes Mrs. Hatch and the tacky world of the New York hotel. As I mentioned before, Mrs. Hatch is a kind of Undine Spragg, a woman of means looking for someone to help her break into society, vulgar and rich and too eager to be seen as stylish. Lily has the genteel’s native distrust of the interloper, looking around at what will eventually just become the ethos of the influencer, she observes:

 The environment Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from “art exhibit” to dress-maker’s opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities: they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real existence than the poet’s shades in limbo.

It's in this show-room of sorts, this hotel, this place where women put themselves on display solely for the sake of display, in which all traces of any human self has been eradicated to present an infinitely smooth social façade, so that they might seek with bloodless ambition a reputation, any reputation. She doesn’t want it. Not for herself.  Lily’s appraisal, the joining of the women and high-stepping horses, the description of the women as wan creatures, suggests a growing fatigue with the world that she might have at another time secretly envied or desired to join. Lily in in this moment is on the cusp of something, and we feel, crackling along the edges of her observations, a kind of stinging disgust.

This fatigue and aversion to the tableau-life is further suggested when Lily demurs from the role in the show-room. She seeks to be hidden from the public for a little while at least, and wants to escape the prying eyes of Bertha and that set. At least until she can get back on her feet and back on level ground at least morally speaking by paying off her debts, which at this point in the novel are both financial and spiritual. What better place then than the work-room, where no woman from Lily’s former social world would ever happen across her. Lily hates it, to be honest. She is not having a gay old time working at making beautiful hats and adorning them with decoration. No matter how she might have set the style in her life amid the social scene, when it comes to the manual work of actually bringing that style about, she is out of her depth.

Lily is here to learn a trade. Lily’s friends, Gerty and Mrs. Fisher, have squirreled her away here because they dream of Lily opening up her own little shop. They imagine she will use her name and style to become that most incredible modern saint: the small-business owner, so that she might provide a living for herself. Lily knows that she will not be able to make good on the dreams and fantasies of her friends because is already planning to use her small inheritance to pay off her debt to Gus Trenor, not to open the shop. Wharton captures the whimsical she-her capitalism that so characterized the 2010s and 2020s in downtown Manhattan and near-Brooklyn: “Other young ladies of fashion had been thus “set up,” selling their hats by the mere attraction of a name and the reputed knack of tying a bow; but these privileged beings could command a faith in their powers materially expressed by the readiness to pay their shop-rent and advance a handsome sum for current expenses. Where was Lily to find such support?” Who will pay for Lily’s version of The Wing?!

What struck also about this set-up this time around was how incredibly analogous it is to influencer merch culture. The minute someone goes a little viral or acquires even a modicum of attention on social media, they pivot to print on demand merch. T-shirts, mugs, caps, pens, even Cameo accounts. Scaled up, this impulse becomes the lifestyle brand or the celebrity apparel line or cosmetics brand. What it all reminds me of is sticky-tabs. Walk with me on this one.

I am a fan of sticky-tabs. I spend a lot of my time looking at 1200-piece sets of rectangle reading flags in various muted color palates. The other week, I wanted some that were gray, and not finding any, I went on Etsy to look. What I saw was kind of amazing. The same small square of white cardstock with two stacks of rectangle book flags, but with different brand names situated in exactly the same position on the cardstock square. It occured to me then that, oh, yeah, people just pay some company somewhere to make these and put their name on it. And that we are all just buying the same product endlessly, but with different names on them, and that the price we charge is really just what that company thinks their marketing and branding lets them get away with charging us. There is no definitive difference in quality. And so the hatshop that Lily’s friends want her to make is just an Etsy storefront that will sell the same products that every other hatshop sells, the same things endlessly circulated with the name changed just slightly.

It's while she’s in the process of learning how to adorn hats for a living rather than for fun that Lily has one of the more brutal realizations about the nature of small-scale social fame. As she works, she listens to the chatter of the girls around her, who outstrip her in skill and panache. In another way, Lily might never have even considered the fates of these women. She might never have even come into contact with them. Wharton writes, “She had never before suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and contemptuous freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this underworld of toilers who lived on their vanity and self-indulgence.” Wharton is drawing a line—not just for the reader, but for Lily as well—between that exterior shining world that is the demimonde of style and fashion, and the people who make that style and fashion possible not merely through their labor, but through a network of mimetic desire.

There would be no need for celebrities and models if there not people who looked upon them and learned to want what these shining demi-gods want. The demimonde, the world from which Lily has been ousted, serves as a sieve through which objects, modes, ideas, and habits of mind flow and are sifted and presented back to the producers of such objects with a gleam or charge that suddenly multiplies the value of those objects. That gleam, that charge, is what I call mimetic thrall. But it is only a borrowed light and has nothing to do with any inherent property of the object itself. The mimetic thrall comes from contact with what Girard calls the mediator. And so we come to want what our mediators possess or want. We build our codes of desire, achievement, lust, greed, acquisitiveness, around our mediators. But only so long as someone serves a mimetic target. Once they are no longer a mimetic target, they lose their mimetic thrall.

As Wharton observes, “That Lily was a star fallen from that sky did not, after the first stir of curiosity had subsided, materially add to their interest in her. She had fallen, she had “gone under,” and true to the ideal of their race, they were awed only by success—by the gross tangible image of material achievement.” How brutal because how easily can we imagine Lily becoming a subject of conversation among these girls when she was going around in rich women’s carriages and going to rich people’s parties. How they might have tried to intuit her desires and thoughts. And now, when they have a chance to ask her directly, they don’t care anymore. Because it was never anything having to do with her as she was, in her own soul and heart and mind. It was only ever her position among the social firmament representing some set of ideas projected out through space from the good, Protestant materialist ethos of American capitalism.

But it’s all rather more brutal when you take in the whole vista of the paragraph, which is as follows:

On and on it flowed, a current of meaningless sound, on which, startlingly enough, a familiar name now and then floated to the surface. It was the strangest part of Lily’s strange experience, the hearing of these names, the seeing the fragmentary and distorted image of the world she had lived in reflected in the mirror of the working-girls’ minds. She had never before suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and contemptuous freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this underworld of toilers who lived on their vanity and self-indulgence. Every girl in Mme. Regina’s work-room knew to whom the headgear in her hands was destined, and had her opinion of its future wearer, and a definite knowledge of the latter’s place in the social system. That Lily was a star fallen from that sky did not, after the first stir of curiosity had subsided, materially add to their interest in her. She had fallen, she had “gone under,” and true to the ideal of their race, they were awed only by success—by the gross tangible image of material achievement. The consciousness of her different point of view merely kept them at a little distance from her, as though she were a foreigner with whom it was an effort to talk.

The whole world described here is exactly the world of social media and the parasocial undergirding that keeps it all flowing all of the time. We are never fully people to those we adore and lift up. And they are never fully people to us, either. How could they be? Not even Christ survived our adoration. Not the man in him, anyway.  To adore is to always be a little distant. The women make their hats. They trade and barter information about the women, but truly, they are trading and bartering information about these women as they exist in the social imagination. They trade them like widgets, argue and advocate as their reputations rise and fall like bits of stock. And all the while, Lily, whose own stock as fallen sharply, sits there and watches, the whole gross, ugly machinery of it revealed to her. It’s gruesome. Spiritual slaughter.

As I was reading The House of Mirth over the last few days, I was taking pictures of some passages and posting them to social media with captions like y’all do be like that! and some of y’all do be out here doing this. The responses were funny and playful. People could recognize the broad contours of our own moment. I always feel a weird icky feeling in stomach when I share things online. On the one hand, I like sharing things! I like making jokes and connecting with people. I like sharing my thoughts and hearing what other people think and feel. But I am very much aware of the fact that I am a mediator for many people. There are people out there who simply cannot help themselves and must know where I got a thing from before they’ve even really engaged with the thing I’ve shared or posted. Sometimes people ask me where something is from—a passage, a sweater, a pen, a backpack—before they’ve even really seen it, or read it. They reach out first in imitation. Their first response is mimetic, and they have no sense that they’re even doing it. The world is so deeply grooved by this impulse that people do not even realize the degree to which they are surrendering their own subjectivity to algorithms and to people who directly serve the interests of algorithms because the algorithms will give them attention.

That’s the thing I find very interesting. The algorithm—what people used to call destiny, fate, manners, mores, convictions—is the most incredible metaphor for the naturalist’s determinism that we have yet devised. And yet, we are willingly and happily indulging in behaviors that will please the algorithm so that it will surface our content. And we don’t stop to think…why am I privileging the subjectivity of the algorithm. The algo has become the mimetic mediator for a whole segment of society. It is Christ. Influencers are its priests and speak with the voice of its authority. I find it a very bleak state of affairs. I used to think that AI taking over the world would look like androids and cyborgs ruling over us all.

But now I think it looks a lot more like us shifting our behavior by small margins to optimize the algorithm’s perception of us, bits and pieces of ourselves given away, ceded to the matrix, turning all into the walking undead. The AlgoZombies.

In that way, maybe The House of Mirth isn’t a tragedy really. Maybe it’s a horror novel.

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