House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [12]
IV
After Selden disappears, Lily, to escape from Trenor, accepts Bertha’s invitation to join her on a Mediterranean cruise. The scene shifts, at the beginning of Book Two, to Monte Carlo. Lily soon realizes that Bertha has invited her in order to distract her husband’s attention from her current affair with Ned Silverton. During the water festival in Nice, Bertha disappears with Silverton in a closed carriage, leaving Lily and George Dorset alone in the train station and on the yacht. When Dorset discovers that Bertha missed the last train to Monte Carlo, spent the night with Silverton, and did not come aboard until seven the next morning, he pours out his wretched soul to Lily and threatens to get a divorce. To mask her infidelity and win back her malleable husband, Bertha blames Lily for being “so conspicuously on his hands ... in such a scandalous place after midnight” (p. 220). Then, after the Brys give another lavish dinner party, Bertha publicly dismisses Lily by announcing: “Miss Bart is not going back to the yacht” (p. 231). No one defends Lily after her cruel dismissal, though both Dorset and Carry Fisher later apologize for their cowardly behavior. Bertha has no moral scruples; Lily has far too many. Bertha is a Fury and avenger, yet Lily has committed no crime. Wharton makes her heroine the ironic embodiment of Aeschylus’ great theme: suffering teaches wisdom.
Lily returns to New York to find that Grace Stepney has told her aunt that Lily lost money gambling and that Gus Trenor has paid her bills, poisoning the severe and disapproving Julia Peniston against her. Horrified by Lily’s behavior, Julia disinherits her and leaves $400,000 to Grace. Lily’s legacy, though only a fraction of Grace’s inheritance, would still be a sizable sum—if she didn’t owe most of it to Gus. When Lily tries to borrow money from Grace, as she previously tried to borrow from Julia, Grace gives the same sanctimonious refusal as her aunt.
Carry told Lily that George Dorset would be eager to marry her after he divorced Bertha. George is completely uncultured: he describes the opera as “caterwauling” and is “as difficult to amuse as a savage.” But he reveals the sensitive and vulnerable side of his character when he tells Lily that she can set him free if she will provide evidence of Bertha’s infidelity. Yet Lily refuses to take revenge against her enemy and rehabilitate herself in society.
Lily’s refusal to help Dorset means she can only save herself by marrying Simon Rosedale. At the beginning of the novel Rosedale is described with all the repulsive anti-Semitic clichés of Wharton’s class and time. He “had his race’s accuracy in the appraisal of values” (p. 18) and all the “business astuteness which characterizes his race” (p. 19). He’s “fat and shiny, and has a shoppy manner!” (p. 88), and pushy and insensitive, he’s compared to a bluebottle fly that bangs itself against the window panes of fashionable drawing rooms. Wharton twice calls him “the little Jew”—the very phrase Virginia Woolf used to describe her devoted husband, Leonard.
During the Edwardian era, when The House of Mirth was published, Jews had an ambiguous place in English and American society, which despised and accepted them. Benjamin Disraeli had been prime minister in Victoria’s reign and Rufus Isaacs became Lord Chief Justice in 1913. King Edward VII was philo-Semitic at a time when the German Kaiser demeaned Jews and the Russian Czar persecuted them in pogroms. Czar Nicholas II was astonished to find the Jewish railroad tycoon and horse breeder, Baron Hirsch, among the guests at Edward’s estate at Sandringham. The Rothschilds and Sassoons, and the South African Randlords, with great fortunes from diamonds and gold, played a prominent part in English