I got my George Dorsets and Gus Trenors mixed up in my rush to get the draft out, but have now resolved it. I was walking back from getting yogurt, and I had this horrifying realization that I had typed Dorset when I meant Trenor, though of course Lily had some issues with George and Bertha, especially on the yacht, and came home to realize that I had in fact done just that and had to make the edit, lol. Totally normal Friday night things for a hip young guy about town.
I’m in love with this essay. Omg. The way you’ve tied that “underworld of toilers” to the present moment--and our insatiable chase of the algorithm’s own thrall--is brilliant and cracking the novel open in new ways for me.
Especially loved this: “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.”
I’ve always read Mirth as a novel about thwarted desire but you’re making me think it may equally be about desire achieved -- after all, many of those who use and abuse Lily end up getting exactly what they desired, banking (literally) on Lily’s loss of thrall to protect their own.
Yes! And also, let's not forget the fact that even in trying to rehabilitate her, they are all kind of operating with their own agenda. Like, when Sim Rosedale at first wants her to ruin Bertha, he's got at least three schemes banking on that outcome. And when Mrs. Fisher is trying to help her, it's also for her own ends. And when Mrs. Hatch takes her on, it's to further her schemes in pursuing a role among the ton. It really is just a never ending litany of people trying to use Lily, even when they act like they're trying to help her, smh.
I've been obsessed with House of Mirth since forever, because I read it back in the late 80s and related it to the fashion modeling world I was involved in at the time, and it's a testament to Wharton's genius that it went on to mirror just as aptly the world of social media, and *its* horrible humanity. The thing that struck me, reading this essay, because you pointed out how Lily had finally wrapped up her debt and done her checks and balances in her mind, is that it makes perfect sense that she should die. Also, that it's not clear whether it was accidental or deliberate -- the point being she had to die: because no one in the demimonde can exist without debt.
I'm thinking of how, over the years, wealthy or well-connected friends have tried to marry me off (for my own good) to men who I suppose looked good on paper but were actually irreconcilably objectionable (to me). It would have cost me a lot, in terms of my own conscience and/or integrity, to be with them. I actually did imagine that being with those men would have been a horror for me. I still shudder at the thought of them, and wonder if my friends secretly wanted that horror for me. (And yet other women seem to have found them perfectly acceptable.) Anyway, like Lily, I had many chances at wealth and success and a glittering existence, but remain broke and a cautionary tale to women my age, and in debt, too, but financially only. We all have to carry a debt of some kind to walk this earth, it seems. I'd rather owe the IRS forever.
But Lily is free! Free of the horror. In a way, she is not a tragedy but a ruthless, idealistic success.
Was just talking about the echo chamber that is the algo today... how we feed it what we like and it spits more of it back out at us. I too find it a bleak state of affairs. What worries me the most about AI is the distancing we will experience from each other. After all, if AI is providing what you need on demand... what is the use of imperfect people, compared to that? Wild to be living in these times. Wouldn’t have thought I’d be reading about Lily Bart on a Friday afternoon so thank you for that!
Yeah, that distancing is very worrying. I already feel it in so many of my online friendships and relationships. I feel sometimes that I am not talking to people, but an amalgam of content consumed. It's a really alienating thing. Like when all college-aged American men could only speak in Family Guy references or references to Adam Mackay movies. It's like that, but so much worse.
I love the idea that The House of Mirth is a horror novel--there is often an undercurrent of horror in Wharton in terms of the terrible secrets and betrayals that take place in her work.
What a great essay to read just after deactivating my twitter account. Also one of my favourite books and I have always been too emotional at the end to think much more about it than "she needed one more day" - thank you for this!
In high school I used to obsessively wonder about whether I Actually Liked anything, or if I was “just” influenced by trends and fads. This seems to have just gotten worse as the algorithm pursues me decades later. In happier news, here’s hoping I’ll finally read House of Mirth now!!!
You are wiser than I was, lol, and probably still am. It never occurred to me that my desires were the result of my imitating someone else until I stopped having desires governed by the body social, lol. And then I could look back and think, oh, yeah, that's why there were cool kids in all of those toy commercials during cartoons. Ohhhh.
This is wonderful! And the novel truly a horror story. Selden, in particular, is among the vampires, as the last scene brutally indicates. But does Lily really restore her honor by burning the letters, and is she truly motivated by a concern for potential harm to either Selden or Bertha? As Rosedale point out, Lily doesn't have to expose either of them. She merely has to let Bertha know that she possesses the evidence. Lily is repelled by the "baseness" of such an act and by its "freedom from risk." I.e., a different view of the conclusion is that Lily has never been able to tolerate the thought of being "dingy" or to accept a true loss of status. (She's not willing to survive as Carrie Fisher does, for example--and Selden is determined to prevent her from having that option.) And she is ultimately willing to pay a very high price to preserve a sense of elevation.
I love that reading too, re: Lily's aversion to dinginess. Like, at the end when she pays off Trenor all at once because she was afraid that it would no longer be intolerable to live under a horrible debt, and there's a way in which that attitude is proof that her mother's training has at last won out. After her mother dies before herself becoming totally dingy, the very thing she hated most.
And I do think there is an element in it. But I also feel that so much has happened to her, and she has undergone such an internal shift that, she reaches the same conclusion and perhaps even expresses it in the same terms as before, but we have this new sense of her moral development and that we are in fact watching a person justify their greatest act to themselves with the language of the world they are repudiating.
Idk, much to think about. But I love this comment so much!!!
You've captured so well how Celebrity and Fame can so easily stand in for Society in a Wharton or a James story. When it gets too horrifying, I pick up Jane Austen and pretend there's an actual happy ever after to it all ❤️
I loved this essay ~ such a emotionally conscious character analysis. Your points on the Algorithim get me thinking of Foucault's thoughts on the panopticon, and of the ever-dizzying ways being aware of being part of an algorithm affects behavior and subjectivity. Sometimes I wonder if trying to uphold the wisdom of "Comparison is the thief of joy" is something that can really be achieved ~
You've made me really want to read House of Mirth for the first time - although I'm embarrassed to say that my recurring thought during this essay was that I need to run to my Blackwells wishlist and buy the edition you wrote an intro to... I'm sad that Twitter is dying because I'll be finding and buying fewer new-to-me books, but hopefully I'll be reading more and thinking more about what I've already got...
I got my George Dorsets and Gus Trenors mixed up in my rush to get the draft out, but have now resolved it. I was walking back from getting yogurt, and I had this horrifying realization that I had typed Dorset when I meant Trenor, though of course Lily had some issues with George and Bertha, especially on the yacht, and came home to realize that I had in fact done just that and had to make the edit, lol. Totally normal Friday night things for a hip young guy about town.
I’m in love with this essay. Omg. The way you’ve tied that “underworld of toilers” to the present moment--and our insatiable chase of the algorithm’s own thrall--is brilliant and cracking the novel open in new ways for me.
Especially loved this: “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.”
I’ve always read Mirth as a novel about thwarted desire but you’re making me think it may equally be about desire achieved -- after all, many of those who use and abuse Lily end up getting exactly what they desired, banking (literally) on Lily’s loss of thrall to protect their own.
Yes! And also, let's not forget the fact that even in trying to rehabilitate her, they are all kind of operating with their own agenda. Like, when Sim Rosedale at first wants her to ruin Bertha, he's got at least three schemes banking on that outcome. And when Mrs. Fisher is trying to help her, it's also for her own ends. And when Mrs. Hatch takes her on, it's to further her schemes in pursuing a role among the ton. It really is just a never ending litany of people trying to use Lily, even when they act like they're trying to help her, smh.
Absolutely! Even Selden takes waaaaaay too long to realize he's using her, too.
I've been obsessed with House of Mirth since forever, because I read it back in the late 80s and related it to the fashion modeling world I was involved in at the time, and it's a testament to Wharton's genius that it went on to mirror just as aptly the world of social media, and *its* horrible humanity. The thing that struck me, reading this essay, because you pointed out how Lily had finally wrapped up her debt and done her checks and balances in her mind, is that it makes perfect sense that she should die. Also, that it's not clear whether it was accidental or deliberate -- the point being she had to die: because no one in the demimonde can exist without debt.
I'm thinking of how, over the years, wealthy or well-connected friends have tried to marry me off (for my own good) to men who I suppose looked good on paper but were actually irreconcilably objectionable (to me). It would have cost me a lot, in terms of my own conscience and/or integrity, to be with them. I actually did imagine that being with those men would have been a horror for me. I still shudder at the thought of them, and wonder if my friends secretly wanted that horror for me. (And yet other women seem to have found them perfectly acceptable.) Anyway, like Lily, I had many chances at wealth and success and a glittering existence, but remain broke and a cautionary tale to women my age, and in debt, too, but financially only. We all have to carry a debt of some kind to walk this earth, it seems. I'd rather owe the IRS forever.
But Lily is free! Free of the horror. In a way, she is not a tragedy but a ruthless, idealistic success.
"a ruthless, idealistic success" is SUCH A MOOD. But also so terrifying, haha.
Was just talking about the echo chamber that is the algo today... how we feed it what we like and it spits more of it back out at us. I too find it a bleak state of affairs. What worries me the most about AI is the distancing we will experience from each other. After all, if AI is providing what you need on demand... what is the use of imperfect people, compared to that? Wild to be living in these times. Wouldn’t have thought I’d be reading about Lily Bart on a Friday afternoon so thank you for that!
Yeah, that distancing is very worrying. I already feel it in so many of my online friendships and relationships. I feel sometimes that I am not talking to people, but an amalgam of content consumed. It's a really alienating thing. Like when all college-aged American men could only speak in Family Guy references or references to Adam Mackay movies. It's like that, but so much worse.
I love the idea that The House of Mirth is a horror novel--there is often an undercurrent of horror in Wharton in terms of the terrible secrets and betrayals that take place in her work.
What a great essay to read just after deactivating my twitter account. Also one of my favourite books and I have always been too emotional at the end to think much more about it than "she needed one more day" - thank you for this!
In high school I used to obsessively wonder about whether I Actually Liked anything, or if I was “just” influenced by trends and fads. This seems to have just gotten worse as the algorithm pursues me decades later. In happier news, here’s hoping I’ll finally read House of Mirth now!!!
You are wiser than I was, lol, and probably still am. It never occurred to me that my desires were the result of my imitating someone else until I stopped having desires governed by the body social, lol. And then I could look back and think, oh, yeah, that's why there were cool kids in all of those toy commercials during cartoons. Ohhhh.
This is a brilliant analysis of HoM and it’s relevance to our time! Thank you!
This is wonderful! And the novel truly a horror story. Selden, in particular, is among the vampires, as the last scene brutally indicates. But does Lily really restore her honor by burning the letters, and is she truly motivated by a concern for potential harm to either Selden or Bertha? As Rosedale point out, Lily doesn't have to expose either of them. She merely has to let Bertha know that she possesses the evidence. Lily is repelled by the "baseness" of such an act and by its "freedom from risk." I.e., a different view of the conclusion is that Lily has never been able to tolerate the thought of being "dingy" or to accept a true loss of status. (She's not willing to survive as Carrie Fisher does, for example--and Selden is determined to prevent her from having that option.) And she is ultimately willing to pay a very high price to preserve a sense of elevation.
I love that reading too, re: Lily's aversion to dinginess. Like, at the end when she pays off Trenor all at once because she was afraid that it would no longer be intolerable to live under a horrible debt, and there's a way in which that attitude is proof that her mother's training has at last won out. After her mother dies before herself becoming totally dingy, the very thing she hated most.
And I do think there is an element in it. But I also feel that so much has happened to her, and she has undergone such an internal shift that, she reaches the same conclusion and perhaps even expresses it in the same terms as before, but we have this new sense of her moral development and that we are in fact watching a person justify their greatest act to themselves with the language of the world they are repudiating.
Idk, much to think about. But I love this comment so much!!!
What a banger this essay is, thanks for a great read!
I will be thinking about this essay for a loooooong time. I’ve never read “House of Mirth” and now I must! What have I been waiting for?
Also, random, but you introduced me to Nancy Goldstone and I’m forever grateful!!
You've captured so well how Celebrity and Fame can so easily stand in for Society in a Wharton or a James story. When it gets too horrifying, I pick up Jane Austen and pretend there's an actual happy ever after to it all ❤️
That's the thing with Austen, she knows just where to end the story before things get even worse, haha.
So true - "let other pens dwell on guilt and misery" but yet she's the one who brought it up lol. 🌻
I loved this essay ~ such a emotionally conscious character analysis. Your points on the Algorithim get me thinking of Foucault's thoughts on the panopticon, and of the ever-dizzying ways being aware of being part of an algorithm affects behavior and subjectivity. Sometimes I wonder if trying to uphold the wisdom of "Comparison is the thief of joy" is something that can really be achieved ~
oh man, i need to get back into wharton. If nothing else, it’ll serve as a counterweight to my current gleeful hate-watch of s2 of the gilded age.
You've made me really want to read House of Mirth for the first time - although I'm embarrassed to say that my recurring thought during this essay was that I need to run to my Blackwells wishlist and buy the edition you wrote an intro to... I'm sad that Twitter is dying because I'll be finding and buying fewer new-to-me books, but hopefully I'll be reading more and thinking more about what I've already got...
Bravo, this. Bravo.