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In the course of the novel Rosedale rises as Lily descends. He becomes increasingly sympathetic and cares much more than Selden does about her desperate situation. Rosedale’s proposal to Lily—“I’ve got the money ... and what I want is the woman—and I mean to have her too” (p. 187)—provides a crude commercial contrast to Lily’s lyrical moments with Selden at Bellomont and after her tableau. But when she next meets Rosedale, the increasingly desperate Lily—who’s squandered her chances with Dillworth and the Italian prince as well as with Gryce, Selden, and Dorset—is moved by his tender concern and interrupts his impassioned declaration by prematurely announcing: “I do believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale ... and I am ready to marry you whenever you wish” (p. 269). Rosedale then frankly explains that though he loves her as much as ever, she’s no longer in a position to help him enter society. He’s not willing to marry her unless, with his backing, she uses the letters to regain her friendship with Bertha and get back into the society that has excluded her. She refuses Rosedale’s advice to blackmail Bertha, just as she’d refused Dorset’s. At their last meeting Rosedale, unlike Selden, shows true compassion for her degradation and exclaims: “If you’d only let me, I’d set you up over them all—I’d put you where you could wipe your feet on ’em!” (p. 318).

Lily’s marriage to Gryce, Dorset, or Rosedale would have been, like Edith’s to Teddy Wharton, essentially meaningless. She loves only Selden. But she refuses to marry him, for financial reasons, when he’s willing to marry her; and he refuses to marry her, for moral reasons, when she’s willing to marry him. When he finally realizes her true worth, it’s too late. During their six meetings—in his apartment, at Bellomont, at the Brys’ tableaux, in Monte Carlo, in Norma Hatch’s hotel room, and again in his apartment on the day of her death—Selden has fine manners but no heart. A cold and fatally vacillating prig, he avoids true intimacy and cannot respond to her passionate feelings. He likes the idea of Lily more than Lily herself. Though he often comes to the “rescue,” he never really rescues her. He assumes the role of moral advisor while having an affair with another man’s wife, and he expresses emotions in his letters to Bertha that he cannot reveal to Lily.

Though the novel has two redemptive declassé, or working-class, women, Gerty Farish and Nettie Struthers, all the men are portrayed negatively. Selden (like Lily’s father) is well meaning but ineffectual; Gryce a milksop and a bore; Trenor a liar and swindler, a betrayer and would-be rapist; Silverton a phony; Dorset a crude and pathetic cuckold; Rosedale a pushy manipulator. In The House of Mirth, as Irving Howe observed, “human beings seem always to prove inadequate, always to fail each other, always to be victims of an innate disharmony between love and response, need and capacity.” 26

Lily Bart, a camp follower in the army of pleasure, is both a victim and heroine, who despises the society she’s trying to enter. She’s respectable but doesn’t maintain a respectable facade; compromises herself but cannot save herself; and never quite realizes the enormity of her situation. Both extremely conventional and dangerously impulsive, she’s foolish about her rashness and opportunities, finances and obligations, loyalty and sacrifices. With no parents or money to protect her, smoking and gambling, borrowing money and associating with dubious companions, she’s fatally compromised when seen leaving Selden’s apartment and Trenor’s townhouse, and again when she is forced to remain alone at night with Dorset.

Lily descends from the strict, puritanical Penniston-Gryce-Van Osburgh circle, and the more lenient Trenors and Dorsets, who allow ladies to smoke and gamble, to the conspicuously consuming Wellington Brys and the pleasure-loving Gormers, to the flashy upstart Norma Hatch. In the course of her descent Lily works as a social secretary