尋找伊蒂絲‧華頓三本鍍金時代小說中的依附空間

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(1)國立台灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 尋找伊蒂絲‧華頓三本鍍金時代小說中的依附空間. The Quest for a Place of Attachment in Edith Wharton’s Three Gilded Age Novels. 指導教授：林秀玲博士 Advisor: Dr. Hsiu-ling Lin 研究生：留宜婷. 中華民國一 O 一年一月 January, 2012.

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(3) i. 摘. 要. 本篇論文旨在探討伊蒂絲˙華頓及其三本鍍金時代小說中女主人翁追尋依附空間的歷程。十九世紀南北戰後的美國經濟快速成長、暴發戶崛起，造就了馬克˙吐溫筆下的鍍金時代。這個時代炫富文化橫行，上流社會女性被視為男性資產。他們衣著華麗、出席各式社交場合，以維持家族聲望和地位。然而，光鮮亮麗的外表下，女性面臨了「物化」、「他者化」所帶來的身分認同危機。如何與其所處的環境建立情感上的依附關係,並將父權社會轉換成賦權空間，成為女性獲得歸屬感的依據。因此在討論創造依附空間的可能性時，首先我會指出空間和身分是相互定義的。當一個人能夠與一個地方產生正向的連結，這個地方將被賦予「家」的意義。第一章討論華頓的作品、生平以及她「第一個真正的家」— 蒙特。從中我們將發現依附空間在女性的身心健康、自我建構上扮演著不可或缺的重要角色。第二章分析【歡樂之家】中莉莉˙巴特尋找家的過程。藉由去商品化和經濟關係的扭轉，莉莉最後在愛和友誼中得到啟迪。第三章檢視【國家的習俗】中，昂黛˙斯普拉格如何利用旅館、公共空間以及她數次的離婚所提供的移動自由，為自己建立數個流動的家。第四章探討【純真年代】中，艾倫˙奧蘭斯卡的無家可歸。艾倫放蕩不羈的生活方式挑戰社會的傳統與權威，使其成為衛道人士眼中「具威脅性的他者」。無法得到家族的支持與諒解，艾倫只能接受被放逐的命運。最後，我將總結依附空間僅存在平衡對等的權力關係中。然而，鍍金時代大部分的婦女對自己的生活並無主控權，尋求、生產依附空間成了艱辛而漫長的旅程。. 關鍵字 Gilded Age, Place of Attachment, Identity, Other, Commodity, Hotel, Mobility.

(4) ii. Abstract. The thesis aims to explore Wharton’s production of homes and her female protagonists’ quest for a place of attachment in her three Gilded Age novels: The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1915) and The Age of Innocence (1920). Characterized by the conspicuous consumption and the display of wealth, the Gilded Age society was constructed within the context of gender inequalities. To secure a place of her own, a woman had to establish an affective tie with her society, turning her living environment into a site of empowerment. However, unable to take control of their life, most women only felt a sense of placelessness. Thus, to discuss the possibility and futility of their quest, first I will point out that “place” and “identity” are mutually defined, and a place becomes home when a woman endows it with meanings to which she can feel attached. In chapter one, by looking into Wharton’s life and works and her design of the Mount, I will argue that a place of attachment is integral to a woman’s well-being and self- conceptualization. In chapter two, I will talk about Lily Bart’s decommodification and her final enlightenment in The House of Mirth. In chapter three, I will examine how Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country utilizes “the freedom of movement” provided by the hotel and her several divorces to establish her homes in mobility. In chapter four, I will turn to discuss Ellen Olenska’s futile search for a place of attachment in The Age of Innocence. Finally, I will conclude that a place of attachment will be produced when one can find in it a balanced power relation.. Keywords: Gilded Age, Place of Attachment, Identity, Other, Commodity, Hotel, Mobility.

(5) iii. Acknowledgements The process of thesis writing is tough yet fulfilling. Just like Edith Wharton and her protagonists, I was looking for a place of attachment through which I could be inspired and enlightened. And the journey of quest will never be complete without the guidance and support from my teachers, family and friends. First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to my advisor, Prof. Hsiu-Ling Lin. Her class on New England and China in the autumn of 2007 aroused my interest in the life and works of Edith Wharton. Later when I decided to write about Wharton, she carefully instructed me and provided me with invaluable advice both on my arguments and writing techniques. Meanwhile, I am also deeply grateful to Prof. Mary Goodwin and Prof. I-Chun Wang for their generosity and insightful opinions. They led me to re-approach my thesis with different perspectives. In addition, I would like to thank my family and friends who always believed in me when I lost confidence and who always encouraged me when I was on the brink of giving up. With their company, I was never alone. Their kindness helped me through my emotional turmoil and “empowered” me to reach my academic goal. Thank you all and love you all..

(6) iv. Table of Contents. 摘要……………………………………………………………………………………i Abstract………………………………………………………………………………. ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………….. iii Abbreviations………………………………………………………………………….v. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 I. Having A Place of Her Own……………………………………………………….3 II. Place and Identity……………………………………………………………….. 4 Chapter One: Edith Wharton and Her Production of Homes………………………...11 Chapter Two: Lily Bart and Her Place of Attachment in The House of Mirth I. Lily Bart as a Commodity……………………………………..20 II. Discovering a Place of Her Own………………………………27 Chapter Three: Undine Spragg and Her Homes in Mobility in The Custom of the Country I. Hotels as Homes in the Gilded Age…………………………...36 II. Undine Spragg and Her Homes in Mobility…………………...41 Chapter Four: Ellen Olenska and Her Placelessness in The Age of Innocence I. Ellen Olenska as the Threatening Other……………………….52 II. Not at Home: Ellen Olenska and Her Placelessness…………..58 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………68 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..71.

(7) v. Abbreviations. AI: The Age of Innocence. HM: The House of Mirth. CC: The Custom of the Country. CS: Collected Stories: 1891-1910. BG: A Backward Glance. WA: “Wharton and Art.” AE: The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton. DH: The Decoration of Houses EI: “Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race.” LE: The Letters of Edith Wharton. WE: Women and Economics. POS: The Production of Space..

(8) Liu 1. Introduction. Edith Wharton (1862-1937), born Edith Newbold Jones to the socially prominent George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, was growing up in one of those “good old families” in New York. These families, priding themselves on their aristocratic ancestry with virtue as their chief quality, were playing the role of a moral arbitrator in their society. They despised the vulgar taste of the nouveau riches and were aiming to correct those who transgressed the moral boundary. Having witnessed the affluence and social conflicts of her time, Wharton is most well-known for her fictional chronicle of Old New York: The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1915) and The Age of Innocence (1920). These novels reconstruct the top drawer society as a “hieroglyphic world” which always involves clashes among the riches, the individual’s pursuit of wealth and status, and most importantly, the female protagonist’s struggle against the rules of their society. For example, in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is refusing to be commodified in the marriage market; in The Age of Innocence, Ellen Olenska is returning to New York to divorce her dissolute husband; and in The Custom of the Country, Undine Spragg never reconciles herself to a quiet domestic life. As a result, for many critics, Wharton’s Gilded Age society is a “prison cell,” and the “social crisis” posed by these protagonists’ indifference to the social conventions is their attempt to liberate themselves from a space that would hinder their self-independence. In “Mrs. Wharton’s Mask” (1970), Marius Bewley speaks of the protagonists in Wharton’s fiction as “hopelessly trapped by the demands or the refusal of their society” (147); in Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975), R.W.B. Lewis indicates that Wharton took the prison cell as the image of a number of her characters’ condition in life (121). Meanwhile, Gary H. Lindberg argues in Edith Wharton and the Novel of.

(9) Liu 2. Manners (1975) that society functions as a prison and its individuals must learn to perceive reality through the bars of its cage (36). Later, when Wharton’s works begin to invite feminist readings, Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (1977) interprets Wharton’ fiction as the author’s victory over social obstacles and patriarchal oppressions while Elizabeth Ammons’ Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (1980) approaches Wharton as a critical writer who describes a social patriarchy robbing women of the right to control their own life. Carol Wershoven, in The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton (1982), also points out Wharton’s defiant heroines as embodiments of the author’s rebellion. In these novels, Wharton’s women are made prisoners of their society either by their marital status or by rules not of their own devising; and the violation of social taboos becomes a way for them to be delivered from the shut-in space of conventions. However, while these women are non-conformers striving to free themselves from the imprisoned state, they are also avidly seeking for a place of their own in the society. In The House of Mirth, Lily is looking for a marriage that will secure her position; in The Custom of the Country, Undine is forever searching for a richer husband who will advance her social status; and in The Age of Innocence, Ellen is trying to win the support of her society people on her cause. They all wish to gain an acceptable place recognized by their society. Nonetheless, the process is not without its difficulties. While Undine is able to take control of her life, shifting from one marriage to another to establish her roots along her traveling route, both Ellen and Lily, regarded by their people as a threatening Other and a marketable commodity, will find their ideal place either a non-existence or one that transcends the bargain and trade of the material culture. Therefore, in my thesis, instead of looking at these female protagonists’ struggle merely as a form of escape, I will consider it their quest for a place of attachment in.

(10) Liu 3. which they can be accommodated and provided with an equal power relation with their men and society. To discuss the probability and futility of their quest, I will focus my thesis on the patriarchal social climate and its constraint on women in the Gilded Age. By pointing out women’s subordinate position rendered by the objectification and commodification of her society, I will argue that an affective tie between a woman and a particular place can only be formed when the woman is able to take control of her life and to unite psychologically with the geographical environment around her. Her sense of place will be acquired when a place is transformed into a site of empowerment where her autonomy is assured and her mobility is guaranteed.. I. Having a Place of Her Own Many feminist writers have insisted on the need for women to have a place of their own. Examining the relation between women and their dwelling, Elizabeth Grosz notes that “〔t〕he containment of women within a dwelling that they did not build, nor was even built for them, can only amount to a homelessness within the very home itself” in that “it becomes the space of duty, of endless and infinitely repeatable chores that have no social value or recognition” (219). Thus, In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf is searching a place in which she can devote herself to the sole mission of writing. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts a mentally-deranged narrator who strives to free her imagined woman from the confinement of a place not of her own. In The Awakening (1899), Kate Chopin narrates the story of Edna Pontellier, who will come to her final awakening when she is given a physical and emotional room to ponder over the various aspects of her life and to take an active role of her own happiness. As for Wharton herself, horrified by the untended streets and the narrow houses of New York and distressed by an unsupportive society depriving her of the opportunities to write and to create, is to.

(11) Liu 4. build The Mount, her “first real home” in Lenox. 1 In her own place, she will dedicate herself to her profession of authorship and enjoy the company of her close friends. In her Gilded Age novels, her protagonists are working on the same goal to find themselves a place of attachment. However, before such a place can be found, a positive people-place bonding has to take place.. II. Place and Identity The meaning of place is always flexible and is subject to the interpretations of its dwellers. For a woman, the feeling of place attachment occurs when she can wield power over her living environment and have it relate to the every aspect of her life. A place becomes “home” because she can identify with it and thus defines it as one. In Place and Placelessness (1976), E. Relph explores place as “a phenomenon of the geography of the lived-world of our everyday experiences” (6) whose meanings are characterized by the beliefs of man (3). Its value, as Yi-Fu Tuan indicates in Space and Place (1977), lies in “the intimacy of a particular human relationship” without which it would have nothing much to offer (140). In Psychology of Place (1977), David Canter talks about place as “the result of relationship between actions, conceptions and physical attributes,” and we could not identify with it until we know what behavior is associated with it (158-9). Later in The Sense of Place (1981), Fritz Steetle argues that sense of place is an experiential process “created by the setting combined with what a person brings to it” (9). Thus, to some degree, we create our own place and it does not exist independent of us. Our personal identity is bound up with this place identity which is crucial for one to create and maintain one’s “self.” This notion of identity is fundamental in defining one’s relation with others. In his discussion of ego identity in “Identity and the Life-Cycle” (1959), Erik Erikson 1. The Mount is, as Wharton calls it in A Backward Glance (1934), “my first real home” (125)..

(12) Liu 5. writes that “the term identity…connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself…and a persistent sharing of some kind of characteristic with others” (102). While identity makes its claim upon beings of every kind, it is founded not only in an object or an individual person, but also in a place to which they belong. This place identity however, is not a simple address which makes the place identifiable; instead, it is a basic feature of our experience of place (Relph 45). In “Place Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self” (1983), Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff claim that place identity is a substructure of one’s self in that it is a “potpourri” of one’s memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas and related feelings about specific physical settings (60). Meanwhile, Kalevi Mikael Korpela, in “Place-identity as a product of environmental self-regulation” (1989), regards place identity as a psychological structure arising out of the individual’s attempt to regulate their environments. He points out that “place-belongingness” is the basis of place identity and the practice of environmental usage will enable one to create and sustain a coherent sense of self (246). In other words, place identity is not static and unchangeable, but varies with human intentions and attitude, and place attachment is integral in the self-definitional process and the formation of one’s self-identity. When a woman is able to view the place as an essential part of her self, the place will turn into her “home.” For many people, the childhood home is such an intimate place. In The Poetics of Space (1969), Gaston Bachelard states that the childhood home is one’s ideal in that it is a place where one’s life is enclosed and protected. It is one’s “original shell” one will always want to go back later in life whether physically or mentally (4). In Topophilia (1974), Yi-fu Tuan also points out that one’s awareness of the past is an important element for one to love a place (99). However, for Wharton, who always holds an ambivalent feeling to her birthplace, is not to return to her childhood.

(13) Liu 6. brownstone house. As Louis Auchincloss writes in his introduction to Wharton’s autobiography,. On one hand, she〔Wharton〕loved it 〔the Old New York〕for the very completeness of her understanding of it and for the richness of the material with which it supplied her. It was, after all, her cradle and family. On the other hand she resented the smallness of its imagination, the dryness of its appreciations and its ever turned back towards everything that made life worth while to her (xi; parenthesis mine).. Therefore, instead of living merely in her memory, she will go beyond her nostalgia to establish a personal bond with her current living space; and during her lifetime, she will produce more than one place of attachment for herself. Having a place with which one can identify and to which one can feel attached is important to the self-perception of an individual. Anne Buttimer, in “Home, Reach, and the Sense of Place” (1980), points out an identity crisis posed by the loss of one’s home or the losing of one’s place (167); and Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots (1955), presumes that to have roots in one place is a necessary precondition for other needs of the soul, and it is vital for one to have multiple roots so that one can “draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a part” (53). Hence, while both Bachelard and Tuan regard the childhood home as the “psychic anchor” associating one with family love and security, they also believe that one’s emotion and feeling for a place should not derive solely from one’s longing for the “first home.” Tuan suggests that it can take many forms and vary greatly in emotional range and intensity (Topophilia 27) and Bachelard also argues that in addition to the past, both present and future give a place.

(14) Liu 7. different dynamism that could stimulate one another (6). And among them, the present that can relate to one’s living experience is foremost important. When a person can find in her current environment a repository for emotions and relationships that give meaning and purpose to life, the place will become part of one’s self-identity and increase a woman’s self-esteem and her feeling of belonging to the society. However, for women in the Gilded Age, the society was a site filled with obstacles. There were problems brought by the influx of the new wealth and a consumer culture based on the male production of wealth. A look into the historical background of the second half of the nineteenth century will illuminate the difficult social circumstance of that time. When Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined the term “Gilded Age” in their 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, they portrayed the postbellum America as an era of excess and parvenus. When Paul Bourget (1852-1935), the French novelist and critic, was instructed by Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald to do his “fashionable-watering place” article on Newport, he was captivated by the energy of the showy resort and was amazed at its grandest mansions 2. He got the feeling that “you half fancy that you have been visiting some isle consecrated to the god Plutus, whose modern incarnation is the god Dollar” (19-20). Meanwhile, Henry James was equally stunned by this extravagant “American scene” after almost twenty-five years abroad. As he showed it in the Ivory Tower (1917), everyone out there was so “hideously rich” (207) and one could even hear “something like the chink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves” (23). Indeed, it was an important turning point of the country. It just transformed itself from an isolated, rural, agricultural nation into an urban, industrial, and multicultural. 2. Some of the grandest mansions of that time: William K. Vanderbilt’s Marble House, Ogden Goelet’s Ochre Court and James Van Alen’s Wakehurst on Bellevue Avenue.

(15) Liu 8. world power. However, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Leon Fink, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and several others have also pointed out the major problems hidden behind this prosperity. The discontent caused by its capitalism was satirized by Twain in his short story “Poor Little Stephen Girard” (1879) and documented by Carnegie in Problems of Today: Wealth, Labour, Socialism (1908). 3 Meanwhile, the Jim Crow Laws deepened the racial discrimination against the black people, erecting a virtual caste system of institutional segregation. 4 And later its “trap” of consumption would be noted by Gillman in Women and Economics (1898) while its rampant materialism was to be attacked by Henry James in The American Scene (1907). These were factors which not only made the Gilded Age society a space of conflicts but also subjected women to an inferior position. The society ladies, whose presence in the public entertainment had become more visible than ever before, were objectified to gratify the desire of men and were commodified to be bought and possessed. The fierce competitions between the haute bourgeoisie and the Old New York elites required these ladies to demonstrate the wealth of their fathers and their husbands and to compete for the title of the “dowager empress” (O’ Connor 44). Therefore, while their men were busily engaged in the financial business, the women were attending operas, going to the theaters and hosting social events. Lavish balls would take place one after another in Mrs. Astor’s summer. 3 .. In this story, Mark Twain aims to shatter the poor-boy-done-good theme, an ideology of success which was widely promoted in the Gilded Age America. The notion showed that with enough of hard work, everyone would be able to succeed. Meanwhile, it was also believed that poor boys might make good more often simply because of fortunate accidents. (“Gimme A Break! Mark Twain Lampoons the Horatio Alger Myth.” History Matters:The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. American Social History Production Inc. 2006. 15 October 2011. < http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4935> 4. The Jim Crow Laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly “separate but equal” status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. Wikipedia. 15 October 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws>.

(16) Liu 9. palace Beechwood, the Berwinds’ The Elm and Alva Vanderbilt’s Golden Ballroom at Marble House, and Alva had to trump them all with the fancy Chinese costume ball at her newly-built Chinese-styled teahouse (Sommer 7-23). They made frequent appearance in the public to display their fine gowns, expensive jewelry, and most important of all, to maintain the status of their family. As a consequence, although their participation in these leisure activities seemed to emancipate them and lead them out of the domestic sphere, it also provided their men with further domination and control. The world was in fact constructed within the context of gender inequalities, and a woman’s identity was a mere social construct. Wharton detected these problems and reflected them in her novels as well. Though embracing the glamour and extravagance of her time and obsessing herself with the leisure activities of collecting and display, Wharton confessed in her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934) that she always hated the “general society” (213). She was acutely conscious of the restraint placed on her by her society, which thwarted her early interest in writing and was the cause of her unhappy marriage. Thus, whether in her writings or in her real life, she was looking for a place of attachment where she was able to live with a real self and not to feel deprived. To discuss Wharton and her protagonists’ quest, I will center my thesis on the social climate of Gilded Age and its influence on its people. I will argue that only when a woman is connected affectionately and positively with her place can she feel a sense of attachment. In chapter one, I will focus on Edith Wharton and her production of homes. By looking into her life and works and her design of the Mount, I will point out Wharton’s belief in the mutual influence between people and their environment and the need to produce a home from which one’s “real self” can be empowered. In chapter two, I will talk about Lily Bart’s quest for home and her final enlightenment in The House of Mirth. Here I will consider the Gilded Age society a.

(17) Liu 10. marketplace in which every “marriageable girl” has to commodify themselves to hunt for a wealthy husband. Refusing to be treated as a commodity and ignorant of the business rules of her time, Lily is going through a process of decommodification that will not only reverse her subordinate position in the economic relation but also lead her to discover a place of attachment in the real human connection. In chapter three, I will examine the idea of “hotels” in the Gilded Age and look at Undine Spragg’s homes in mobility in The Custom of the Country. As a social climber, Undine is shifting from one place to another, always looking for opportunities. Knowing how to utilize the “liminality” or “the freedom of movement” provided both by the hotel space and the public space, she is empowered to establish homes everywhere on her traveling route. In chapter four, I will turn to discuss Ellen Olenska’s futile search for a place of attachment in The Age of Innocence. I will investigate the tribal concept and the imperial mindset in the Gilded Age. I will look at how these two elements contribute to a binary system dividing the world into the insiders and the outsiders and epitomizing the unequal relation between the Orient and the Occident. And Ellen, the European countess who returns to Old New York to divorce her husband, is regarded as a threatening Other who is going to disrupt the order of her society. The society people’s fear of her presence will give her a sense of placelessness and render her an outcast. Finally, I will conclude that space of various types can be turned into place of attachment as long as one can find in it a balanced power relation. Ellen’s inferior position makes her unable to feel at home while Lily’s and Undine’s capability to reconstruct and identify enables them to find a home in the boisterous Gilded Age..

(18) Liu 11. Chapter One Edith Wharton and Her Production of Homes. In The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre suggests that each space is “actively produced” by its dwellers, and the one associated with one’s lived everyday experience is the most alive and dynamic. For Wharton, creating such a place that will be the locus of action and passion becomes a way for her to live a life in accord with her inner self. In the short story “The Fullness of Life” (1893), Wharton compares a woman’s nature to a great house full of rooms, and “in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes” (CS 14). This inner self, often elusive and unrestrained, is a source of one’s personal longings; and its interaction with its surroundings plays a great part in one’s existence. In The Age of Innocence, the “soul” can be seen in Ellen’s unconventional bid for freedom; in The House of Mirth, it is realized in Lily’s instinct for love and humanity and in The Custom of the Country, it is manifested in Undine’s “monstrous” ambition to advance her marriage career. 5 As for Wharton, it is reflected in her desire to produce a place of her own. Always describing in her novels an individual modified or distorted by the mores, rituals or expectations of their society, Wharton believes that the influence between the environment and its people is mutual; and she emphasizes the need for one to build an emotional tie with the environment in order to live a life with energy and mobility. Spending most of her childhood in Europe and growing up indulging herself in the historical sites of Rome and the townscapes of Paris and Florence, Wharton developed a lifelong standard of beauty that would prompt her to free herself from the 5. For the earlier reviewers, The Custom of the Country lacks a sympathetic heroine from whom the reader might learn a moral lesson. In the novel, Undine is glittery, greedy and soulless without any moral feature. For example, The New York Sun (1913) writes that Wharton has created “an ideal monster” with no human feeling, who is “absolutely unmoral” (qtd. in Killoran 66)..

(19) Liu 12. dreary landscape of Old New York and its suffocating way of life. To Wharton, the period from 1840 to 1890 was “the nadir of American taste” (Wilson 156), and she felt dismayed to find that most people felt it easier to arrange their room like some one else’s than to analyze and express their own needs. She could never wipe out from her memory the overcrowded rooms in her parents’ three-story brownstone house on West Twenty-third Street because. like those of most other New York town houses of the period, 〔they〕were so designed as to lack any clear identity and to make privacy impossible. Each seemed somehow to be part of the room next to it—the drawing room was part of the hall, the library part of the drawing room…. The house was expensively but unharmoniously furnished….. (Lewis 22). Therefore, in her first published book The Decoration of Houses (1897), she was redressing the ostentation and “indescribability” of Richard Morris Hunt’s designs with her architectural philosophies; 6 and when she built The Mount, her “first real home” in Lenox (1902), she admitted in her autobiography that finally she was able to enjoy “the freedom from trivial obligations” and to write contentedly (BG 125). Later, it was at The Mount that she was to finish her first important work, The House of Mirth. For Wharton, one’s living environment impacts significantly on the well-being of the individual; hence, it is important to create a place that will cater to the needs of its dwellers. 6. Richard Morris Hunt (1827-95). An eminent and prolific American society architect. He is known for a series of increasingly opulent mansions for which he adopted a variety of styles, as seen in the Stick Style Griswold House, (1863); the Neo-classical Marble House (1982); the Italian Renaissance Revival The Breakers, (1895); and the French château style Biltmore House (1895), all for the Vanderbilt family. The most important of his commercial buildings in New York was the New York Tribune Building (1876). Hunt helped to establish professional building standards and a proper fee basis for architects; he also helped found the American Institute of Architects in 1857 (Callowy 531)..

(20) Liu 13. In Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst (2005), Reneé Somers points out Wharton’s belief in the mutual influence between people and their living space. Discussing Wharton’s several literary texts, “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (1891), “The Lamp Psyche” (1895) and The House of Mirth, Somers believes that Wharton was always exploring how space created meaning and how people were made into “creatures of their environment” (3). Her first novel The Valley of Decision (1902) is full of overwhelming details of settings and lifestyle in which the “background” just upstaged the characters (WA 189). Vanessa Chase also argues that “〔F〕or Wharton, architecture and its decoration both define and are defined by the inhabitants; the house one builds or the room one decorates is an expression of one’s character, and the house or room in which one is obliged to live creates that character” (138). In The Writing of Fiction (1925), Wharton herself praised Balzac as a pioneer in investigating the physical surroundings of his characters and their psychological make-up:. Balzac was the first not only to see his people, physically and morally, in their habit as they lived, with all their personal hobbies, and make the reader see them, but to draw his dramatic action as much from the relation of his characters to their houses, streets, towns, professions, inherited habits and opinions, as from their fortuitous contacts with each other. (8). Moreover, she considered both Balzac and Stendhal “the first to seem continuously aware that the bounds of a personality are not reproduced by a sharp black line, but that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things” (10). Thus, in The House of Mirth, as much as Lily Bart was irritated by Gerty Farish’s “horrid little place”, with the release of her emotion, she was able to transform it into a place where.

(21) Liu 14. the real human contact remains (7). In other words, while a woman is much influenced by her environment, she too can have her personality influencing the surroundings. In Wharton’s case, though she faults the excess of the Gilded Age, she knows how to “tone it down” to make it her place of attachment (Somers 140). In The Decoration of Houses, her main concern is to arrange a house with a view to our own comfort and convenience (20). In Italian Backgrounds (1905), she describes a landscape “humanized” by art (49). In Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1903), she is to conceive a space that is “meant to be lived in” (11). The garden should be “in relation to the house” and the landscape “to the requirement of the inmates” (6-7). Believing in the spatial influence on the people and the people’s ability to define space, Wharton is to produce a place to which she can feel attached and through which she will be empowered. Throughout her life, Wharton had owned and resided in several houses. Among them, The Mount was her masterpiece. In “History of the Mount” (1997), the architectural historian Scott Marshall, claims that Wharton had a “lifelong love affairs with her homes” (qtd. in Benert, AE 26), and her love for houses and gardens, as Philippe Collas and Éric Villedary observes in Edith Wharton’s French Riviera (2002), “was not a superficial or simply aesthetic interests, but rather the symptom of an absolute need to have roots or a shelter to protect her from life’s storms” (9). She was always looking for a way to live her life to the fullest, and a home where her feminine nature and masculine interests could coexist in harmony was just the place to provide her with this opportunity. Being both a society “Grande Dame” and a devoted writer, Wharton was situated in a “threshold position” requiring her to have a place that can serve as a passage for her to traverse from one role to the other; and The Mount was such an invention. On the one hand, the house was a “secret retreat” to secure her privacy; on the other, it.

(22) Liu 15. was open for the guests to invite the fluidity of movement. Visiting it back in 1904, Henry James was impressed by its intricate design and its demarcation of the public and the private. It was composed of a series of different kinds of space: space for servants, space for privacy and for social relations. Her boudoir on the second floor was the room where she spent her mornings undisturbed and no one would have the permission to enter while she wrote. So to both Judith Fryer and Vanessa Chase, Wharton’s boudoir was the “privatized power center” of the entire house. In the boudoir, Wharton was able to assure her autonomy and carry out her reflection and writings (Chase 154). However, Wharton was not building a home only to seek her inner equilibrium. While Wharton considered privacy a requisite of civilized life and made it one of her major principles in The Decoration of Houses, she was also to make her home a place where social activities were provided. In The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton (2007), Annette Benert indicates that Wharton’s vision of the house is that of “social aesthetic” conducing to human development and to gracious gatherings and conversations: “﹝It﹞ anticipates her own high standards not only for house and grounds but for hospitality and relationships” (49). Earlier in Portrait of Edith Wharton (1969), Percy Lubbock also said of her as a “housekeeperish person” who wanted to lay out her garden, furnish her house and feed her friends better than anyone else (25-8). When she was not writing, she needed a place that would connect her with the outer world. Through The Mount, Wharton not only redressed the “brazenly open mansions” of the new plutocracy but also produced for herself a place of attachment. 7 Later when The Mount was sold, she would continue to make homes 7. In the chapter “New York: Social notes” of The American Scene (1907), Henry James diagnoses a chief cause of his unease in these clamorous American spaces: “the absence of closable doors, an ‘affliction’ against which he must continually ‘brace himself’” (McDonald 228). This lack of privacy, of personal space is further testified in a report by Henry Adams, friend to both Wharton and James, on the Newport social life:.

(23) Liu 16. in France where she took her French citizenship. This production of space, according to Lefebvre, is a means of control and domination; and Wharton’s ability to negotiate a place of her own wherever she is derives from a mobility that can only be gained when she subverts her subordinate position. Independent financially from her husband, Wharton is an art connoisseur, an architect and a pioneering feminist writer partaking in the power relation of hegemony and domination. These roles help her to shape her space and to endow it with an identity to which she could relate. Nonetheless, while Wharton understands the importance of a home place and is able to create one for herself, she reflects in her novels the needs and difficulties for her contemporary women to find such a place. Her female protagonists, in their struggle for status and reputation in the society, must learn the coded meanings and values of her culture in order to exert control over their destinies. Though making the pursuit of the soul an elusive theme in most of her novels, Wharton believes that the essence of self cannot be separated from its society. In her essay “The Great American Novel” (1927), she argues with William Dean Howell (1837-1920), the American realist author and literary critic, about the relationship between “self” and its society. There she questions Howell’s claim that the essence of selfhood lays chiefly outside the social boundaries:. how much of it 〔human nature〕is left when it is separated from the web of customs, manners, culture it has elaborately spun about itself? Only that 〔Mrs. Steven’s〕house〔in Newport〕is a sort of center for the New York fast set. The young men stroll in and shout up stairs to know if the ladies are there, and go up to their boudoirs. One rather clever game was extemporized at the house…..Three young men are selected as judges. The young ladies are then brought out in turn and given marks on a certain scale, say 5, for their points; as for instance, hair, 4; figure,3; hands and feet, 2; complexion, 5; and so on. The one whose marks are highest in the aggregate, wins…. (qtd. in Luria 307)..

(24) Liu 17. hollow unreality….. As to real men, unequal, unmanageable, and unlike. each other, they are all bound up with the effects of climate, soil, laws, religion, wealth. (652). Obviously, what forms the core of Wharton’s fiction is an individual within the social structure rather than one outside its boundaries. To be accepted by her society, the woman has to combine her individual and “communal” aspects of identity to form a unified experience with her place. For Wharton’s part, though she is being addressed as a “self-made man” and a “masculine Henry James” (Gilbert 128) and is known as a “triumphant warrior” (Wolff 9) challenging the world with her “brave new politics”, 8 she is not a feminist by nature. Born into a changing era when the old values were fading away and the idea of new woman was yet in the making, she was showing an ambiguous attitude toward her role in the society. Though in her novels, she denounced the social practice of her society, she was equally eager to embrace its prosperity. As a result, feminist critics like Margaret McDowell, Diana Zacharia Worby, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar find it hard to define Wharton’s feminism in that Wharton is not a feminist in an ordinary sense and the nature of her feminism is both equivocal and elusive. As a little girl, Wharton aspired to be “The best-dressed woman in New York”; and each year she shared with her mother the excitement rummaging through the “trunk from Paris” in which one resplendent dress lapped over the other (BG 20). Both her early photographs in her autobiography and Percy Lubbock’s stories about her devotion to her wardrobe suggest that “she did very well in this respect” (Walton 19). Later when she became a literary hostess whose works earned her wide acclaim, 8. Cited from the title of Dale M. Bauer’s work Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. (Madison : U of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

(25) Liu 18. she showed her contempt to women who sought full political and economic independence. For example, in her autobiography, lingering over the excellent foods served by the two famous cooks at her parents’ house, she lamented on the fact that such cookery, which was one of the most important and honorable part of household arts, was to be swept aside by the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated:. Young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living. The movement began when I was young, and now that I am old, and have watched it and noted its results, I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage, deplorable as it is, had done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education. (BG 60). Meanwhile, commenting on Ray Strachey’s The Cause, a book about the history of British feminism, she observed that for her part, she believed that “women were made for pleasure and procreation” (Lewis 486). Hence in “Wharton’s Women”, Martha comes to the conclusion that. Look in vain for a Whartonian guide to laws regarding woman’s suffrage, to references to women entering male-bound professions, or to the rise of female enrollments into institutions of higher learning. Those markers by which women defined their march through history between the 1840s and 1930s are absent from Wharton’s pages. (51).

(26) Liu 19. In a way, as Gilbert and Gubar put it in No Man’s Land (1989), Wharton seems to present herself as “an old-fashioned ‘man’s women’” (126). Nevertheless, despite her contemptuous remarks to the “New Womanly Striving” (Gilbert 126), what we find in her fiction is one of the most searching and searing analysis of the patriarchal construction of femininity. Inextricably bound to the material and social environment of her society, Wharton has to follow its rules to secure a place within its social order; yet at the same time, not to fall prey to its oppressive force, she needs to assault the “vulgarities and failures” of its patriarchal structure with a tone “bitingly cold” and a draftsmanship “harsh and crude” (Wilson 24). The bond between her and the society is always there. In her Gilded Age novels, her heroines are also seeking a metaphorical home that will ensure their autonomous selfhood. However, their “innocence” and failure to modify themselves before they rebel will render the people-place bonding impossible..

(27) Liu 20. Chapter Two Lily Bart and Her Place of Attachment in The House of Mirth. I. Lily Bart as a Commodity While in the previous chapter, the prospect for a woman to find a place of attachment seems to be gloomy, the possibility still exists. In this chapter, I will look at Gilded Age as a space of competition and Lily Bart’s survival skills. Same as Ellen Olenska, in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is looking for a place of her own. Born without a rich father, Lily considers marriage the only way for her to gain a position in the highest rung of society. However, refusing to be treated as a commodity to be traded, she is displaced from one place to another; and it is only when she is “decommodified” will she be able to discover a place of attachment in Gerty Farish’s humble flat or Nettie Sruther’s little house where her “real self” could find a shelter. To look at Lily’s journey of quest and her final enlightenment, I will first investigate the “business domain” of the Gilded Age: its predatory nature and its culture of exchange.. When Paul Bourget was writing about his impression of America, he made this comment,. How many times in the course of this journey have people said to me: —“In Boston they ask you what you know; in New York, how much you are worth; in Philadelphia, who your parents were!” (6). Indeed, the social atmosphere in the Gilded Age was a competitive one; and both the old guards and newcomers were striving to enhance their status either through their.

(28) Liu 21. prominent lineage and or through their newly-gained economic power. Social distinction was their main concern and “survival of the fittest” became a rule by which every participant must abide. Thus, both men and women were busily engaged in the “conspicuous consumption” and the display of leisure. 9 They were vying for space in the New York papers and a title that would secure their aristocratic position as society leaders in any rituals ranging from balls, evening parties, and any festivities. 10 In The House of Mirth, Mrs. Trenor is such an avid competitor. She was a hostess who “knew no more personal emotion than that of hatred for the woman who presumed to give bigger dinners or have more amusing house-parties than herself” (40). This aggressive characteristic, however, is essential for one to survive in the Gilded Age society. In his discussion of the leisure class, the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen categorizes it as a group of people consisting mainly of hunters and warriors. Both are of predatory nature and “reap where they have not strewn” (9). They do not participate in the productive process; instead, they depend on prowess, force or fraud. These devices can be seen operating in most of Wharton’s novels of manners, and they are part of the “adaptive mechanisms” required to be at work in an environment filled with implications for fitness: courtship customs, parenting behavior or status-seeking (Saunders 2). In the novel, Lily Bart is one of those social climbers. She knows that beauty is her asset and she has to use her good look and nice dress to make herself a popular socialite. Nonetheless, her ignorance of the business rules and her lack of the required predatory nature would cripple her ability to find a place of 9. “Conspicuous consumption” is a term introduced by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to depict the behavioral characteristic of the nouveau riches in the nineteenth century. They consumed mainly for the purpose of displaying their wealth.. 10. From the early 1880s, the Times, Herald, World, Sun and other New York papers devoted increasing space to the doings of society leaders, such as the Astors or the Vanderbilts, the “royal families” of that time (Homberger 19)..

(29) Liu 22. her own in the top drawer society, and in the end, would relegate her to the working class position. In the Gilded Age, a woman was serving as a form of commodity for men. Her power and status hinged mainly upon a successful marriage; as a result, she had to look for a potential buyer and sell herself to that man. This concept of women as commodities is discussed by the French feminist Luce Irigaray in “Women on the Market.” In the essay, Irigaray argues that women are two things for men: the “utilitarian objects” and “bearers of value” (175). As a utilitarian object, she is used and consumed by males; while as a bearer of value, she is an object of exchange that would provide status and economic gain to men (176). These two roles are exemplified in the objectification of women in the competitive display of male wealth. In Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York (1988), Maureen E. Montgomery points out women’s objectified position in the Old New York. Examining the “optical excursions” of the society, she indicates that display and spectatorship are operating in a gendered paradigm, and “(s)ociety women signified with their bodily presence and appearance high social class and respectability, which in turn reflected on their male provider’s monetary wealth” (117). Thus, the value of women is purely social in nature. It is endowed solely by men, and she has to live up to the image of a valuable commodity both with her beauty and her reputation. A Moment’s Ornament, Wharton’s first title for this novel, is a suitable metaphor for her heroine and for any women of leisure in this era. In the novel, Lily is aware of her role as an object d’art and she laments on the limited choices a woman could have to enhance her social status. On her first visit to Lawrence Selden’s private room in The Benedick, she grumbles,. “a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes.

(30) Liu 23. are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop — and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.” (HM 12). The value of a woman lies in most part in the clothes with which she adorns herself; and the expense of these dresses, as Veblen suggests, must be expensive and up to date, because “our apparel is always in evidence” and “what is inexpensive is unworthy” (168-9). Meanwhile, the dress should speak of where they are and vary with different social habitats that they occupy. According to Jane Ashelford in The Art of Dress (1996), in Edwardian England, ladies on a four-day visit to a country house required at least twelve to sixteen ensembles; and back in New York, the fashion scene was much the same. As Caroline Milbank points out in New York Fashion (1989), a New York woman of fashion living around 1900 might change her clothes as often as six times a day. For an unmarried girl to hunt for a rich husband, she needs different dresses just to act and to pose in different social scenes. Hence, in spite of her financial difficulties, as long as she wishes to remain in the society, Lily has to keep up her good look, order new dresses regularly and make as much public appearance as possible. Her body, covered in glamour, luxury and leisure should be able to provoke public attention and make her presence the center of visual display. However, when Lily has herself thus objectified, she has herself commodified as well. Spotting Lily outside the train station, Selden immediately noticed her radiant look, and while walking with her, he was conscious of himself taking a “luxurious pleasure” in “the modeling of her little ear” and “the crisp upward wave of her hair.” Then he had a confused sense that “she must have cost a great deal to make, that a.

(31) Liu 24. great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her” (HM 5). He could not help but evaluate Lily as a commodity and analyze its mode of production. In the Gilded Age, people devoted excessively to the consumption of material things, and the atmosphere of “commodity fetishism” prevailed. In Capital (1867), Karl Marx has discussed the commodity as a thing, which, by its properties, is able to satisfy human wants or needs. It contains a use value equipped with a capacity to fulfill such needs and an exchange value which is measured in terms of money. Its presence and transactions are involved in almost any relations, and as a result, “commodity fetishism” becomes a phenomenon common in the capitalist society, and the social relations between people are replaced by the objectified relations between things. The commodity is believed to have an extraordinary power that would exert control. Here without doubt, Lily is a kind of commodity to Selden. She arrests his attention constantly, yet her price is too high for him to afford. Her value is further enhanced after the tableaux vivants in the Brys’ conservatory. On this occasion, she presented herself as one of those splendid “pictures,” mixing herself with the fine surroundings. Her performance brings about a visual impression showing that “her loveliness was no more fixed quality,” and soon she became the center among a group of gentlemen (HM130). So when she found two notes at her bedside the next morning, she quickly dismissed that of Selden’s, and heartily accepted Mrs. Trenor’s invitation. For Lily, Selden, with his “republic of spirit” glorifying a life on morality free from money, poverty, ease and anxiety, is a man of no prospect while Mrs. Trenor, with her connection with the fashionable crowd, always implies a rosy future. Nonetheless, if Lily’s outward beauty made her a valuable commodity able to select and manipulate her potential buyers, her ignorance of the business rules of exchange would prove detrimental to her position in the society..

(32) Liu 25. In The House of Mirth, the society itself is a marketplace, and each relationship is based on a reciprocal arrangement measured by money and personal interests. A simple gift giving does not exist and can easily turn into a form of commodity exchange. 11 Thus, in her Marxist reading of the novel, Wai-Chee Dimock argues that the story is fueled by a critical energy directed at the society as a marketplace. In her view,. The power of the marketplace resides not in its presence, which is only marginal…but in its ability to reproduce itself, in its ability to assimilate everything else into its domain. As a controlling logic, a mode of human conduct and human association, the marketplace is everywhere and nowhere ubiquitous and invisible. Under its shadow even the most private affairs take on the essence of business transactions, for the real of human relations is fully contained within an all-encompassing business ethic. (375). Its influence is powerful yet subtle, and Lily never realizes its rules until Gus Trenor asks her for sexual favors. For Lily, Mr. Trenor’s financial help is a “gift” while to Mr. Trenor, it is as an exchange based on the reciprocal obligations. His demand is actually legitimized by the language of the marketplace and traded benefits. So do Bertha Dorset’s invitation to Lily to join them on board the Sabrina. While Lily considers it a stroke of luck that would renew her already disgraced life, it is in fact a 11. In his analysis of the precarious distinction between gift exchange and commodity exchange, Webb Keane examines the problem posed by money. He notes that, The status of money itself is not entirely stable: in this case it serves as a formal token whose reference is confined to ceremonial exchange, yet it retains the potential for reinterpretation as cash value. In either case it is “symbolic,” but its vulnerability to slippage is a function in part of its irreducible materiality. Even money shares with other objects the property of taking objectual form. Thus it can cross contexts and, being semiotically underdetermined, is subject to reinterpretation (69). Keane’s concern lies in the instability of material objects. When the exchange is not performed properly, it would simply turn into a version of commodity exchange (Miyazaki 251)..

(33) Liu 26. “business arrangement” Bertha contrives to cover her adultery. As for Simon Rosedale, his love for Lily is also a form of exchange. He is juggling between his two roles as a suitor and an investor. He wants nothing but profits, and he proposes to Lily only because he knows that she will be a perfect displayer of his wealth and help stabilize his status in the society. Therefore, later when Lily’s reputation is tainted and is avoided by the society, he refuses to marry her unless she regains her position. These rules of exchange, though offering Lily every possible chance for a place of her own, require her to compromise her dignity and self-respect and also run counter to her belief in conforming to a “real self,” a longing for love and intimacy. For Lily, learning to survive in the marketplace is like treading on a thin line. At one point, she ruminates, “I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were going through an intricate dance, when one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time” (HM 47). Nevertheless, she still takes those “missteps” of her own accord. Reflecting on her ambition, she confesses that “she is secretly ashamed of her mother’s crude passion for money,” and “she would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich” (HM 34). Thus first, she lies to Percy Gryce, and then she refuses Simon Rosedale’s marriage proposal, and finally she burns Bertha Dorset’s letters “on the spur of the moment” (Dimock 386). She foresees her incompatibility with Gryce and Rosedale, and out of her love for Selden, chooses not to tell on Bertha’s affair, and as a result, gives up her last opportunity to remain in the high society. In “Reflecting Vision in The House of Mirth,” Roslyn Dixon argues that “Lily’s choices are reduced to absolutes: she can survive by compromising the ideal, or she can honor the ideal by sacrificing herself” (218). Evidently, Lily is choosing the “ideal.” However, though her unwillingness to compromise would in the end put her in the lowest rung of the.

(34) Liu 27. society, it is also from this place that the economic relationship is reversed and she is able to decommodify herself to embark on the journey of self-discovery and find herself a real place of attachment.. II. Discovering a Place of Her Own Many critics who read the novel with a Darwinian perspective tend to see Lily’s vacillating behavior and unsuccessful mate search as a result of her inherited biological failure. Analyzing the evolutionary concept in Wharton’s novels, Paul Ohler points out that Lily lacks the “intention” and an “inarticulate instinct” guiding her to a most “proper” response to her circumstances (58). Thus, at Bellomont, though she lies to Percy that she is a regular churchgoer, she changes her mind at the last moment to absent herself, leaving a crestfallen Percy rolling away with the Trenors’ girls. In “The Lying Woman,” Ellen Goldner also attributes the “provisionality” of Lily’s lies to her own “conscious will” and “uncertain aims” (289). However, whether her capricious emotional make-up is an inherited passion or an inborn scruple, I will consider it a result of her “nostalgic homesickness” for a place of attachment. This longing requires her to negotiate a relation that will fulfill her many non-economic desires, and most importantly, to come to terms with a divided self which on the one hand, has to be fluent with the world around it, while on the other hand, embraces a life based on love and friendship. In The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960), the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing points out that one’s self-consciousness is divided by “an awareness of oneself by oneself and an awareness of oneself as an object of someone else’s observation” (113). To some degree, everyone is defined by others; yet when the individual fails to “ take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in.

(35) Liu 28. contriving ways of trying to be real…of preserving his identity…to prevent himself losing his self ” (44). For Lily, while she is conscious of herself as a commodity, she is also aware of a self who is supposed to be “alive,” to have her own autonomy and to transcend the social configurations. Analyzing the politics of capitalism in The House of Mirth, Robert Shulman considers Lily’s “divided self” an example of the power of the market society to divide people internally (268). Meanwhile, in The Figure of Consciousness (2002), Jill Kress also notices the tension between “a singular conception of the self and the idea of a self that is continually shifting” in Wharton’s texts (xv). For Kress, Wharton’s protagonists, oftentimes in their struggle between a “socially constructed self” and an “authentic self,” have to concede to a self “saturated with the contents of the social world” (172). However, here Lily is hankering for a relationship beyond the bargain and trade of the market place. As a commodity, she has no real identity and is the mere embodiment of each suitor’s fantasy. Therefore, investigating the psychological space of the novel, Sean Sanlan suggests that we should see Lily as a “possible person,” a “human being” rather than a “deployed” theme (208). Lily is unable to find a partner because what she wants is not just another trade-off, but a chance for her to establish a place of attachment from which she can draw strength and strengthen her role as a human being. Since she was orphaned, Lily has gone into a social-climbing career in which she acts as a transient, a guest, a pensioner and a boarder, and she is constantly oppressed by “the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them” (HM 314). Thus, throughout her life, she is not only searching for a husband but also a place she can call home, and home does not exist when love is nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, before she.

(36) Liu 29. can find such a place, she has to rise above her economic dependency, and her working in the millinery is her first step. After rejecting Rosedale’s offer and leaving Mrs. Hatch’s fancy hotel, with the help of Carry Fisher, Lily went to live in a boarding house and worked in Mme. Regina’s renowned millinery factory. She refused Mme. Regina’s kindness to put her in the show-room as a displayer of hats and volunteered to take a job in the work room. There she used her work as an agency to decommodify herself and to fight against the exchange system. In his labor theory of value, Marx argues that all commodities are products of labor, and their value is determined by the amount of labor that goes into its production. Thus, in Capital, he claims that “(a) useful article…has value only because human labor…has been embodied or materialized in it” (45). For Marx, when unaffected by the private ownership of capitalism, labor is an essential source for a human being’s self-conception and sense of well-being. It is as much an act of personal creation and a projection of one’s identity as it is a means of survival. By working on and transforming the objective matter into objects of use-value, human beings meet the needs of existence and come to see themselves externalized in the world. In other words, a commodity is valuable because labor is involved; and when Lily joined in the workforce, she reversed her pervious role as a commodity and made herself a distributor of such value. Lily had recognized herself as part of that effort of production since the very early stage of her career. After a night’s bad luck in cards and losing lots of money, it struck her that “she and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter received her wages more regularly” (HM 27). In “Edith Wharton’s Hard-Working Lily” (1990), Elizabeth Ammons also points out her working class position: although Lily was associated in most part with the richest people in town, she was linked to the young women laborers “by the common bond of economic struggle.” Later when.

(37) Liu 30. admiring Miss Van Osburg’s bridal jewels with Miss Farish, Lily was fascinated by their artistry and the skills that had gone into their cutting and presentation:. ﹝Her﹞heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces—the milky gleam of perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies relieved against contrasting velvet, the intense blue rays of sapphires kindled into light by surrounding diamonds: all these precious tints enhanced and deepened by the varied art of their setting. (HM 89). While Lily’s longing for a luxury life was further aroused by these finely-crafted stones, she was also conscious of an enormous human endeavor involved in the production of these treasures. This process of value production is a process of “self-creation” that will empower a woman to create and add value both to her economic status and her self-identity. In Women and Economics (1898), Charlotte Perkins Gilman suggests that when it comes to the economic ability of men and women, men always seem to be thousands of years in advance compared to his female counterparts: “men produce and distribute wealth; and women receive it at their hands” either as their wives or their daughters (5). Gilman shares Veblen’s disdain for conspicuous waste in that the conspicuous leisure only renders the well-off women completely idle, and their exclusion from production shrivels both of their social and maternal instincts. In addition, she emphasizes the importance of human labor, writing that “to do and to make not only gives deep pleasure, but it is indispensable to healthy growth” (78). The consumption, on the contrary, as Marx and Engels indicate, is “the destructive antithesis of production” because it uses up resources and consumes the consumers. So in “Consuming Clothes,” Clair Hughes considers Lily one of Veblen’s parasitic.

(38) Liu 31. “vicarious consumers” and a member of the “spurious leisure class” whose demand for a nice wardrobe only consumes and wastes her. The fashions she pursues do not only eat away at her but also erase her unique personality. However, while a woman is working or producing, she is utilizing her labor powers to obtain her independence, whether financially or emotionally. Thus, Gilman believes that human labor defines what it means to be human, and Lily’s identification with the girls in the girls’ club is an exertion of that labor that would help her create a new definition for her own existence. For many critics, it is unlikely for Lily to have herself attached to the working class scenario. For instance, both Judith Fryer and John Clubbe believe that the different social layers that Lily descends is a “downward spiral” which will lead her to spaces with increasing disorder and make her a “lesser” Lily” (Clubbe 552). Eager to display her beauty, Lily seems to feel most at home in the mansions of her “old set” where her body can merge with the glittery surroundings. However, from her reluctance to sell herself to the society, we can see that these mansions can never provide the home that she eventually comes to yearn for. It is only when she disowns her “Vebelenian fate” of unending consumption for the sake of love will she be able to find Gerty Farish and Nettie Struther’s simple tenements noble alternatives to her own tainted public life (Hughes 403). After deciding to defer the purchase of an elegant dressing-case, Lily donated a generous amount of that price to the Girls’ Club, which was one of Miss Gerty Farish’s philanthropic efforts. Through this act, she was turning a potential consumption into a meaningful production facilitated by an instinct for love and connection between human beings. As she reflected, “These were young girls, like herself; some perhaps pretty, some not without trace of her finer sensibilities. She pictured herself leading such a life as theirs….” (HM 110). And her contribution was.

(39) Liu 32. praised highly by Gerty in a talk with Lawrence:. Do you know she has been there (Girls’ Club) with me twice?—yes, Lily! And you should have seen their eyes! One of them said it was as good as a day in the country just to look at her. And she sat there, and laughed and talked with them—not a bit as if she were being charitable, you know, but as if she liked it as much as they did. They've been asking ever since when she's coming back; and she's promised me——oh!" (HM 131). Here a sense of sisterhood has formed, and a union between women is created. The working girls’ club becomes a symbolic home where a love for home is fostered and a sanctuary in a very unhomelike surrounding is established. As Eileen Connell argues in “Edith Wharton Joins the Working Classes” (1997), the working girls’ club in New York City invents a “home” that suits the needs of the working class girls. It is a “representative home” or “a training school to the home” that would bridge the gap between class differences (564). In this “home,” Lily shares with these girls a secondary social and economic position, a similarity that will become a binding force offering Lily a place of attachment and foreseeing her later enlightenment. Thus, to turn a place into home, a particular human relationship is needed for a possible people-place bonding to take place; and sisterhood, generally understood as a nurturing, supportive feeling of attachment to other women which grows out of a shared experience of oppression, is considered a unifying force to confront male chauvinism and patriarchy. Hence, after Lily refused Mr. Trenor to pay back her debt with her body and freed herself from the suffocating mansion, she had a sudden craving for compassion and human nearness that would comfort her torn heart. Though previously, she despised Gerty’s tiny apartment, seeing it as a horrid little.