The Meaning of Travel as a Symbol of Wealth in "The House of Mirth"

After examining Lily Bart as a character in a more generalized, over-arching sense in my last post on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, I want in my second post to essentially zoom-in on a more specific facet of the novel, travel.  In the beginning of the second book we find Lily traveling aboard the Dorset's yacht, Sabrina.  Her escape to the Mediterranean immediately follows on the heels of her near-mental collapse at Gerty Farish's after realizing how truly limited and dependent she is not only financially but inherently as well because she is a woman.  For we readers, this escape to Europe immediately seems like a tactical avoidance of personal problems on Lily's part, yet we soon realize that for the upper class abroad, the drama, gossip, and aloof idleness is as omnipresent as ever and Lily, try as she might to deny it, cannot run from her problems.

Instead, Lily's wealthy circle of friends is as insular as ever, and for Lily, having new people to admire her beauty only makes her critics more vicious.  While I have always felt that Lily's ego is her primary downfall, and her unwillingness to play by the rules for the things she wants ultimately prevents her from getting anything, her beauty is something that she cannot help possess.   Lily is widely resented and judged more quickly by her alleged "friends" because of the attention her looks receive, especially from married men.  Regardless of what she does, or who she speaks to, she is always scrutinized and gossiped about by so called friends who care little about whether these rumors are true.  Fueling the drama's inescapable nature is the fact that, though in Europe, Lily's friends refuse to leave the security of their isolated yachts and quasi-incestuous social groups.  With the exception of a few carefully calculated interactions with royalty, Lily's friends essentially transplant their existing social scene in New York to Europe with little change from their life at home: the backdrop may change but the drama remains the same.

This passive absorption of other cultures by the wealthy upper class reminded me of Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad".  While Twain's narrator takes a more observant, journalistic tone in his exposé of traveling to the middle east, his fellow luxury liner passengers engage Europe with an air of superiority that I think is highly reminiscent of Lily and her friends.  First of all, both wealthy groups can afford to spend months away from their lives in the United States.  Ironically, the people who do very little are the ones who feel most justified in escaping the not-so-harsh realities of their normal lives.  Second of all, both the characters in Twain's piece and Lily's friends do not seem to have any desire to understand or experience the cultures of the countries they visit; they merely want to consume them.  Ultimately, I believe that the characters' travel to Europe in The House of Mirth becomes richly telling of their lives and interactions in the novel: they seek to escape the insularity and exclusivity of idleness they themselves have created, only to find that the drama they both thrive on and fear in New York is as omnipotent and pervasive as ever.  Wharton's exposure of the leisure class's dark underbelly forces we readers to recognize the treacherous and fictitious nature of elitism and the a-moral and degenerative forces it creates to destroy Lily.