House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [11]
Wharton offers a rapturous description of Lily posing as Mrs. Lloyd: “Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence” (p. 144). Lily’s appearance, which shows her as she appears to be rather than she really is, has seismic effects on all the men. It provokes Ned Van Alstyne’s crude remarks about her voluptuous figure, Trenor’s assault, George Dorset’s proposal, and (as word gets around) Rosedale’s offer of marriage. Later on, Lily rejects a tableau-like role as model at the milliner’s and perversely tries to earn her keep by sewing hats.
The spectacular setting and theatrical performance at the Brys’ was based on an actual event that took place a few years before The House of Mirth was published and was attended by August Belmont, a model for Gus Trenor. In The Robber Barons, Matthew Josephson wrote that Belmont’s gold armor reappears in the novel in a story from Roman history that Rosedale tells Lily. The virgin daughter of Tarpeius, the commander of the citadel, betrayed the Romans for a bribe and was crushed to death under the golden shields of the invading Sabines. Lily, too, accepts a bribe—Trenor’s “gains” on the stock market—and will also be crushed by her false friends.
A costume ball given by Bradley Martin, a New York aristocrat, in 1897, reached the very climax of lavish expenditure and “dazed the entire Western world.” “The interior of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was transformed into a replica of Versailles, and rare tapestries, beautiful flowers and countless lights made an effective background for the wonderful gowns and their wearers.” One lady, impersonating Mary Stuart, wore a gold-embroidered gown, trimmed with pearls and precious stones. “The suit of gold-inlaid armor worn by Mr. Belmont was valued at ten thousand dollars.”25
Gus Trenor, no doubt fantasizing about Lily’s luscious body, feels he has a sexual as well as financial claim on her and intends to collect his debt. Short of funds after her gambling losses and trying to keep up with the rich instead of being supported by them, Lily asked Trenor to invest $1,000 of her own money. He eventually gives her $10,000, which she naively thinks her money has earned; it is actually his money, and he uses it to keep her in his power. Lily now owes him $9,000 (though he paid no interest on her original $1,000), and she rightly fears that Gus will, like Bertha and Grace Stepney, spread ugly rumors about her.
When Lily accepts the invitation of Judy Trenor, Gus’s wife and her “best friend,” to visit her New York townhouse, Gus first says Judy is upstairs with a headache, then admits that she’s not in the house, nor even in town, and that he’d intercepted Judy’s message canceling her appointment with Lily. Desperate to escape, Lily tries to remain calm as Gus—fat, red, and sweating as always—blocks her exit. He insists that she must pay her debt with sex rather than with money. As she continues to defy him, his will collapses and a remnant of chivalrous feeling reasserts itself. Punning on the sexual meaning of the last word in the sentence, Wharton explains that “Old habits, old restraints, the hand of inherited order, plucked back the bewildered mind which passion had jolted from its ruts” (p. 157).
Lily manages to escape from Gus, but is still pursued by the same inexorable Furies that tormented Orestes in Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy. “The Furies might sometimes sleep,” she thinks, “but they were there, always there in the dark corners.... She was alone in a place of darkness and pollution” (p. 158). She is seen leaving Gus’s house late at night by Selden and Van Alstyne, just as