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were unassailed, and tacitly regarded as unassailable.” She admitted that she “wrote about totally insignificant people, and ‘dated’ them by an elaborate stage-setting of manners, furniture and costume.” Such people, she said, “always rest on an underpinning of wasted human possibilities,” and their sadly vulnerable victim was “the tame and blameless Lily Bart.” Ironically listing Lily’s misdemeanors, Wharton described her as “a young girl of their world who rouged, smoked, ran into debt, borrowed money, gambled and—crowning horror!—went home with a bachelor friend to take tea in his flat!”16

Wharton’s caustic novel, piercing the secure stockade of convention, alarmed and disturbed the rulers of New York. In a letter of November 11,1905, a month after the book appeared, Wharton defended her work. She said that the American upper classes lacked the sense of social responsibility, the noblesse oblige still maintained by their aristocratic counterparts in Europe: “I must protest, & emphatically, against the suggestion that I have ‘stripped’ New York society. New York society is still amply clad, & the little corner of its garment that I lifted was meant to show only that little atrophied organ—the group of idle & dull people ... [whose] sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes.”17

Lily’s quest for mirth, or amusement, is both innocent and foolish. When she returns to town after her ill-fated excursion to the Trenors’ country house, her preoccupations, “for the moment, had the happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts” (p. 140). In a similar way, John Milton’s famous “L’Allegro” (1631) opens with the banishment of “loathed Melancholy” and the invocation of “heart-easing Mirth,” whose pleasures it then celebrates:

Mirth, admit me of thy crew

To live with her and live with thee,

In unreprovéd pleasures free....

These delights if thou canst give,

Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

But Ecclesiastes 7:4, the biblical text that supplies the title of the novel—“the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”—opposes Milton’s evocation of happiness and gloomily asserts that the wise realize that life is tragic; the foolish, like Lily, do not. Oliver Goldsmith’s tender, bittersweet song in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) also expresses the universal characters and themes of Wharton’s novel—a foolish beauty and treacherous men, profound melancholy and irremediable guilt:

When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can soothe her melancholy?

What art can wash her guilt away?

In her review of Howard Sturgis’s Belchamber, published a few months before The House of Mirth, Wharton expressed the theme of her own novel—lost illusions and destructive melancholy: “A handful of vulgar people, bent only on spending and enjoying, may seem a negligible factor in the social development of the race; but they become an engine of destruction through the illusions they kill and the generous ardor they turn to despair.”18 This is very close to her thematic statement in The House of Mirth when the disillusioned Lily realizes “for the first time that a woman’s dignity may cost more to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it” (p. 181). Wharton stated this theme for the third time in her last major novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), when she condemned people “who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who give rise to them.”19

Wharton indicates the dominant themes of the novel through another literary work, Jean de la Bruyère’s Caractères (1688), which Lily examines on her first visit to Selden’s apartment and sees again at the end of the book. It is the only book in Selden’s extensive library that Wharton specifically