House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [15]
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes, thy eyes’ windows fall,
Like death when he shuts up the day of life.
In act 5, scene 3, when Romeo discovers Juliet, apparently dead in the tomb, she seems more beautiful than ever:
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light....
Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.
In the final chapter Selden, in a Poe-like scene with ghoulish overtones, confronts Lily’s corpse. Like Romeo, he discovers a tableau mort rather than a living woman. Still trying to distinguish between the real and artificial Lily, “He stood looking down on the sleeping face which seemed to be like a delicate impalpable mask over the living lineaments he had known. He felt that the real Lily was still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible; and the tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense of helplessness” (p. 345). When he finds the check that she’d made out to Trenor and left on her table, and that freed her from an intolerable obligation, Selden finally realizes, from factual rather than circumstantial evidence, that Lily has sacrificed herself to save him from an ugly scandal. Romeo kills himself when he discovers Juliet; Selden merely feels penitential.
Lily is granted a more easeful death than other fallen women who commit suicide in nineteenth-century novels, and is spared Emma Bovary’s prussic acid, Anna Karenina’s fall under a train, and Maggie’s death (in Stephen Crane’s novella) by drowning. Lily, a tragic heroine, had to die rather than survive and marry Selden. As Wharton explained in A Backward Glance, “a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.” 27 Only Lily’s death could lead her as well as Selden to that “sharpening of the moral vision which makes all human suffering so near and insistent” (p. 162).28
Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published forty-three books, including biographies of Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and George Orwell. His life of Somerset Maugham will be published by Knopf in February 2004.
Notes to Introduction
1. Somerset Maugham, The Vagrant Mood (1952; London: Mandarin, 1988), pp. 197, 199. In Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 521, R. W. B. Lewis mistakenly writes that Wharton never met Maugham.
2. Jeffrey Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins,1994), pp. 156-157.
3. Edith Wharton, Letters, edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribner‘s, 1988), p. 5.
4. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934. Reprint: New York: Scribner’s, 1964), p. 73.
5. Quoted in Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 142.
6. Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (1974. Reprint: New York: Ballantine, 1976), p. 206.
7. Edmund Wilson, The Forties, edited with an introduction by Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), p. 209.
8. Quoted in Henry James and Edith Wharton, Letters, 1900-1915, edited by Lyall Powers (New York: Scribner‘s, 1990), p. 16.
9. Lewis and Lewis, Introduction to Edith Wharton, Letters, p. 17.
10. Edmund Wilson, The Twenties, edited and with an introduction by Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 76.
11. Henry James, Letters: Volume IV, 1895-1916, edited by Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 237.
12. James, Letters: Volume IV, p. 373.
13. Virginia Woolf, Letters: Volume Five, 1932-1935, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 305.
14. John Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 129.
15. Louis Auchincloss, “Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks,” Reflections of a Jacobite (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961),