As Louis Auchincloss observed: “She knew their history and their origins, their prejudices and ideals, the source of their money and how they spent their summers.”15 She seemed to hate the society she belonged to, and described it with pervasive irony and sharp wit. Her philistine and hypocritical characters are spoiled and selfish, idle and self-indulgent, hedonistic and materialistic; their social hierarchy, through which Lily Bart makes her tragic descent, is as rigid as the Army or the Church. In a society rife with financial scandal and sexual intrigue, anything is allowed as long as the transgressors are wealthy and maintain a respectable façade. The “vulture” Carry Fisher, who’s twice been divorced and receives money from Gus Trenor, has powerful protectors and is invited everywhere. The fierce and vindictive Bertha Dorset has flagrantly indiscreet affairs with Selden and Silverton but, ironically protected by her victim Lily Bart, manages to maintain both her reputation and her marriage.

In her revealing introduction to the 1936 reprint of The House of Mirth, Wharton explained her choice of subject and suggested her major theme: “When I wrote The House of Mirth I held, without knowing it, two trumps in my hand. One was the fact that New York society in the nineties was a field as yet unexploited by a novelist who had grown up in that little hot-house of traditions and conventions; and the other, that as yet these traditions and conventions were unassailed, and tacitly regarded as unassailable.” She admitted that she “wrote about totally insignificant people, and ‘dated’ them by an elaborate stage-setting of manners, furniture and costume.” Such people, she said, “always rest on an underpinning of wasted human possibilities,” and their sadly vulnerable victim was “the tame and blameless Lily Bart.” Ironically listing Lily’s misdemeanors, Wharton described her as “a young girl of their world who rouged, smoked, ran into debt, borrowed money, gambled and—crowning horror!—went home with a bachelor friend to take tea in his flat!”16

Wharton’s caustic novel, piercing the secure stockade of convention, alarmed and disturbed the rulers of New York. In a letter of November 11,1905, a month after the book appeared, Wharton defended her work. She said that the American upper classes lacked the sense of social responsibility, the noblesse oblige still maintained by their aristocratic counterparts in Europe: “I must protest, & emphatically, against the suggestion that I have ‘stripped’ New York society. New York society is still amply clad, & the little corner of its garment that I lifted was meant to show only that little atrophied organ—the group of idle & dull people ... [whose] sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes.”17

Lily’s quest for mirth, or amusement, is both innocent and foolish. When she returns to town after her ill-fated excursion to the Trenors’ country house, her preoccupations, “for the moment, had the happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts” (p. 140). In a similar way, John Milton’s famous “L’Allegro” (1631) opens with the banishment of “loathed Melancholy” and the invocation of “heart-easing Mirth,” whose pleasures it then celebrates:

Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her and live with thee,
In unreprovéd pleasures free....
These delights if thou canst give,
Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

But Ecclesiastes 7:4, the biblical text that supplies the title of the novel—“the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”—opposes Milton’s evocation of happiness and gloomily asserts that the wise realize that life is tragic; the foolish, like Lily, do not. Oliver Goldsmith’s tender, bittersweet song in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) also expresses the universal characters and themes of Wharton’s novel—a foolish beauty and treacherous men, profound melancholy and irremediable guilt:

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?
What art can wash her guilt away?

In her review of Howard Sturgis’s Belchamber, published a few months before The House of Mirth, Wharton expressed the theme of her own novel—lost illusions and destructive melancholy: “A handful of vulgar people, bent only on spending and enjoying, may seem a negligible factor in the social development of the race; but they become an engine of destruction through the illusions they kill and the generous ardor they turn to despair.”18 This is very close to her thematic statement in The House of Mirth when the disillusioned Lily realizes “for the first time that a woman’s dignity may cost more to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it” (p. 181). Wharton stated this theme for the third time in her last major novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), when she condemned people “who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who give rise to them.”19

Wharton indicates the dominant themes of the novel through another literary work, Jean de la Bruyère’s Caractères (1688), which Lily examines on her first visit to Selden’s apartment and sees again at the end of the book. It is the only book in Selden’s extensive library that Wharton specifically mentions. La Bruyère’s ironic and pessimistic observations on the French nobility, especially in the section “On Women,” suggest the way that Selden, and the rest of New York society, observe Lily’s conduct and interpret her character:

There’s a certain woman who annihilates or buries her husband to such a point that he is never mentioned in society; is he still alive? Is he dead? Nobody knows. In his own family he serves only as an example of timid silence and perfect submissiveness.

Lily’s stern, grasping mother has annihilated her husband in precisely this way. In childhood Lily seldom saw her father during the day; and after he could no longer earn money, he became extinct to his wife and almost undistinguishable to his daughter.

There comes a time when the richest of girls must take a husband; if she lets slip early opportunities, she must repent at leisure.

Lily was taught to consider a conventional rich marriage the sole end of her existence. Having rejected numerous suitors during her ten years on the marriage market, she’s extremely vulnerable to the malicious attacks of her enemies.

Women consult their glass to see whether they are far enough removed from their natural selves.

Lily often looks in the mirror and ponders the dual nature of her real and artificial self.

One’s age is written on one’s face.

As time passes, Lily is troubled by the lines and creases in her lovely face, signs of encroaching age.

A man of no judgement and of a licentious imagination lacks nothing to make many women worship him but fine features and a handsome figure.

This exactly defines the good-looking but shallow Selden. He lacks judgment and imagines that the innocent Lily is guilty of sexual immorality, but is loved by Bertha Dorset, Gerty Farish, and Lily herself.

Most women ... follow their hearts, and depend for their morals on the men they love.

Lily behaves spontaneously, impulsively, even self-destructively, and depends on Selden for moral guidance.

A woman conceals from a man all the passion that she feels for him, while he, on his side, simulates a passion for her which he does not feel.

After Lily appears in the tableaux vivants and kisses Selden for the first and only time, she insists on true feeling rather than false speech, and tells him: “Ah, love me, love me—but don’t tell me so!” (p. 148)

Few amorous intrigues can be kept secret.

Indeed, all the people in her circle know the intimate details of Lily’s life, and all misinterpret her behavior.

Certain women have sought to hide their conduct under a veil of modesty ... and have it said of them: “You’d have taken ber for a vestal virgin.”

Lily remains a virgin, but her lack of caution leads men to misjudge her character.

The countless ways by which women arouse strong passions in men give rise to an aversion and antipathy in their own sex.

Lily’s beauty arouses jealousy and vengeance, not only in Bertha, but also in Grace Stepney and even Gerty Farish.

A woman’s untarnisbed and well-founded reputation . . . should remain untouched by her intimacy with women of a dfferent sort.2o

For this reason, Selden warns Lily, who’s compromised herself by covering up Bertha’s adultery with Silverton and assisting in Norma Hatch’s vulgar schemes, to leave Bertha’s yacht and Norma’s hotel.

III

The names of the characters in The House of Mirth, chosen with great care and wit, have subtly negative connotations. The wealthy but undesirable Percy Gryce suggests “grease” and “price.” The blackmailing charwoman Mrs.