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” Norma Hatch blatantly hatches plots to buy her way into society. The odious, social climbing Wellington Bry combines the name of the ambitious Iron Duke with bryony, a climbing plant with an acrid juice. Caroline, the first name of Carry Fisher, is the feminine version of Charles (Latin: Carolus), which Lily associates with the pleasure loving court of King Charles II. The twice-divorced Carry, a “fisher of men” whose alimony is paid by other women’s husbands and who lures Lily into dangerous liaisons with destructive women, ironically recalls Christ’s words in Matthew 4:19: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Gus Trenor, owner of the magnificent Bellomont estate, recalls the fabulously wealthy German-born financier August Belmont (1816- 1890), who was the agent in America of the great banking family, the Rothschilds. The name of Lily’s cruel aunt Julia Peniston. is as audacious, if taken in the crudest sexual sense, as that of Henry James’s leaking Mrs. Condrip, sister of Kate Croy, in The Wings of the Dove;21 both can be seen to suggest sexual undercurrents in apparently respectable society.

Lily Bart’s surname means “beard” in German; and in English “to beard” means “to defy” and “to oppose boldly.” Though Lily defies social conventions, her first name is the Virgin Mary’s symbol of purity and innocence, and she retains these qualities throughout the novel. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:28-29, Christ says: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin ... [but] Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Lily, a delicate beauty, is not meant to toil. She’d begged her father to have the florist send a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley every day; and when she’s forced to join the “underworld of toilers” at the milliner’s, she cannot bear the work.

The lily, one of Wharton’s childhood names, was particularly associated with beauty, and with the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements in the decades before her novel was published. In 1886 John Singer Sargent, who portrayed several members of Wharton’s social circle, painted one of his major works, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (in the Tate Gallery, London), which shows two white-gowned little girls holding Chinese lanterns in a flower-filled garden. In the first act of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881), the feminine lily is ironically associated with a precious young man like Selden, who walks “down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in [his] medieval hand” and whose “vegetable love” would be far too tame for Lily Bart.

The structure of the novel, which began to be serialized in Scribner’s Magazine before it was completed, is as skillful as its delineation of character. Wharton confessed to her editor that “the whole thing strikes me as so loosely built, with so many dangling threads, & cul-de-sacs, & long dusty stretches.”22 The novel sometimes seems trivial when portraying snobbery and social climbing, relies too heavily on chance encounters and sudden turns of plot, and subjects the heroine to a deterministic fate that’s heavily weighted against her. But the themes evoked in the opening chapters are brilliantly resolved in the conclusion. The novel takes place over two years: Book One portrays Lily’s slow rise in society and the false accusations against her; Book Two shows her rapid descent and unjust conviction.

The first chapter opens as Selden, in the first of many accidental meetings, runs into Lily waiting between trains in Grand Central Station. Instead of taking tea at Sherry’s as he properly suggests, they walk for a bit and wind up on his street. On the way he carefully observes her as if she were a particularly fine piece of exterior decoration. Luxuriating in the pleasure of her proximity, he admires “the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair ... and the thick planting of her straight black lashes” (p. 7). Though aware that her behavior has always aroused speculation, she’s tempted by the risk of entering his apartment, and he’s delighted by the spontaneity