Illusions of Wealth and Self: Escapist and Imprisoned Sentiments in "The House of Mirth"

Edith Wharton, in her novel "The House of Mirth" creates a vision of wealth that is simultaneously painfully vapid and heartbreakingly complex.  That is to say, as objective outsiders, we readers see the aloof idleness of Wharton's upper class New York elite at an altitude: the realities of their shallow cliques and menial gossip are too trivial to be real to our more modern gaze.  However, when we become privy to this world of idle wealth through the personal lens of Wharton's main character, Lily Bart, we are able to glimpse the very real complexities of the pressures and performative expectations that someone like Lily, who lacks necessary financial means, experiences in trying to keep-up with her cohorts.

Wharton's dichotomous contrast between objective scrutiny of wealth and class and subjective sympathy for Lily is somewhat of a revelation of the novel's contents.  Like the dualities we readers experience in our perspectives of the novel's themes and ethos, the contrast between the desire to be wealthy and the desire to be free plagues Lily Bart's sense of self throughout the text.  For Lily, wealth represents a freedom from creditors and the stress of trying to act above her means.  At the same time, the calculating nature of her "friends" and their predatory gossip appalls her on a deeply personal level. She sees the "world" of wealth as a "cage" and the world beyond this cage as "alluring" (Wharton, 55).  As much as she needs money, she sees the idle, conformist nature of her wealthy companions.  Their relationships are guised and inauthentic and fraught with quick, eager, self-serving malice.  As someone just beyond the outer limits of this class from a financial standpoint, Lily recognizes the more genuine, honest world that exists outside the pressures of wealth for someone like Lawrence Seldon.  While Lily needs money to soothe her material desires, her emotional sense of self, the self that is not a performance, desires Seldon's world of honest contemplation and forgiven, detached non-conformity. 

Conversely however (and I find this antithesis ironic), Lily often finds herself drawn to the tempting glamour of wealth in a way that is not just remediate but veritably desirable, albeit materialistic.  When looking at Gwen Van Osburgh Stepney's wedding jewels, "the glow of the stones warmed Lily's veins like wine.  More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead" (Wharton, 89).  Lily, like an indecisive magpie, sees freedom beyond the bars of her cage and yet is drawn to the glittering bars themselves as well.  It is this soul-splitting indecision that I believe ultimately incarcerates Lily, who cannot reconcile her material desires to resurrect her childhood class with her adult aspirations to find the space to be herself. Thus, wealth (and the renunciation of wealth as well for that matter) is both an escape and a trap for Lily who seeks both financial and intellectual/ emotional freedom in a social realm where having both is not only impossible but taboo.