Download ABSTRACT: Although the scientific themes of The

ABSTRACT: Although the scientific themes of The House of Mirth by Edith
Wharton have been long appreciated, no one has yet completed a deep and systematic
analysis of the influence of scientific ideas on the language and the thematic concerns
of the novel. This essay will closely examine the influence of science on Wharton’s
text with particular focus on the narratorial language. Reference will be made to
nineteenth-century scientists such as Darwin and Lamarck, as well as sociologists like
Spencer and Perkins-Gillman. It will conclude that scientific themes are indispensable
in The House of Mirth for arousing ideas of Social Darwinism and determinism, as
well as creating an air of clinical objectivity in a post-industrial world.
Edith Wharton had a great interest in the popular science of her period. Analyse the
influence of Darwinian and other scientific ideas on the language and the thematic
concerns of The House of Mirth.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the transformation of natural philosophy into
increasingly professionalised scientific method had profoundly impacted literary
thought.1 Scientific theories had radically altered the way in which humans viewed
their own progression; most significant was Charles Darwin’s theory of ‘natural
selection’, the idea that only those organisms that undergo ‘modification and
improvement’ will survive in the struggle for existence.2 Authors working alongside
the genre of Naturalism, such as Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth (1905), applied
Darwinian and scientific theories to human society, questioning whether heredity and
environment have a formative effect upon one’s character; as Charlotte Sleigh
contends, ‘realists described things as they actually were; naturalists claimed to
describe them as they inevitably were’. 3 In this respect, the writings of naturalists
reflect the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, and many studies, such as Francis Galton’s
The History of Twins (1875), favoured the influence of nature over nurture.4 It might
be argued, then, that scientific ideas in The House of Mirth highlight the
1
Charlotte Sleigh, Literature & Science (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 14.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1st edn (London:
John Murray, 1859), p. 201.
3
Sleigh, p. 109
4
Francis Galton, ‘The History of Twins, as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature’,
Fraser’s Magazine, No. 12 (1875), 566-76 (p. 576),
<http://galton.org/bib/JournalItem.aspx_action=view_id=68>, consulted 05/03/2013.
2
overwhelming determinism of environment and heredity, while examining whether
society has progressed from an evolutionary perspective; moreover, Wharton’s use of
scientific language contains the novel’s observations within an air of objectivity.
The influence of scientific ideas is apparent in the tone of objectivity that
Wharton fosters in The House of Mirth. Scientists in the nineteenth century were
increasingly interested in the pursuit of objectivity; in The Descent of Man, Darwin
wrote ‘We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our
reason permits us to discover it.’5 In The House of Mirth, objectivity is facilitated by
rejection of the first-person mode of narration, typical of Gothic fiction, and its
replacement with the omniscient third-person narrator. Sleigh argues that this mode of
narration perpetuates ‘the illusion that this was the only way to see – in other words,
the truth’,6 and this notion is certainly demonstrated in the novel:
Because a blue-bottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the
drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it
is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the
accuracy needful to its welfare… (p. 102)7
The detached narrator here uses the rhetoric of an objective scientific experiment: the
subject, Mr Rosedale, is transformed into a ‘blue-bottle’; the word ‘naturalist’, to
Wharton’s contemporaries, would mean a natural scientist, and evokes such figures as
Darwin or T.H Huxley;8 finally, the narrator refers to scientific procedure with the
phrases ‘artificial conditions’, ‘measuring distances’ and ‘drawing conclusions’. The
5
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John
Murray, 1871), p. 405.
6
Sleigh, p. 116.
7
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2002), p.
102. All further references will be to this edition.
8
Oxford English Dictionary,
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/125338?redirectedFrom=naturalist>, accessed 05/03/2013,
s.v. ‘naturalist, n. and adj’.
omniscient narrator clearly speaks as if it were clinically observing predictable
specimens, and as if its conclusions were undeniable.
Objectivity is further facilitated by the motif of scientific classification. In The
Descent of Man, Darwin argued that ‘Man with all his noble qualities...still bears in
his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’9 Wharton adapts this idea
through her characters’ adoption of classificatory rhetoric, as they repeatedly objectify
each other as primitive specimens. Janet Beer views Lawrence Selden as ‘the
classificatory intelligence of the novel’,10 and he is certainly positioned as such, since
Lily sees him as possessing ‘a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having
points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled’ (p. 48).
Moreover, Selden’s initial appreciation of Lily Bart displays his deftness at
classifying others:
He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex
were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness
had been applied to vulgar clay. (p. 5)
The tone of Selden’s analysis is clinical, to the extent that he completely dehumanises
Lily and the female gender with the bestial metaphor of ‘herd’, as well as with the
metaphor figuring Lily as clay. He then concludes ‘was it not possible that the
material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?’ With
scientific precision, Selden determines Lily’s inescapable predicament: while she may
possess extraordinary beauty, she is fundamentally a ‘futile shape’, as she lacks the
resolve or ruthlessness to succeed in any echelon of society. Lily herself adopts a
classificatory persona. She perceives the world around her as existing according to
‘the natural order of things’ (p. 133), her detached justification for the existence of
9
The Descent of Man, p. 405.
Janet Beer, in introduction to The House of Mirth, ix.
10
poverty. She also labels Percy Gryce as one of the ‘lower organisms’ (p. 18), and this
reflects his inadequate nature, as someone who is purely defined by his uncle’s
legacy. Lily’s initial observation of the Trenors illustrates the different ways in which
she classifies gender:
She looked down the long table, studying its occupants one by one, from
Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders,
as he preyed on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long
bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a jeweller's
window lit by electricity. (p. 48)
This passage highlights the gender dichotomy that Wharton’s classificatory language
constructs. Gus Trenor, with the adjective ‘carnivorous’, is positioned as a beastlike
predator, which anticipates his forceful sexual advances on Lily later in the novel.
Judy Trenor, meanwhile, is defined by her beauty, and is rendered as a sophisticated
ornament with the simile of a ‘jeweller’s window lit by electricity’, the image of the
‘window’ suggesting there is hardly any corporeal personality behind the façade. Lily
is unable to classify her primary antagonist, Bertha Dorset, as easily: she is ‘like a
disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room’ (p. 21), and this ethereal
description foreshadows Lily’s fatal inability to categorise Bertha and her motives.
Wharton uses racial classifications to promote the idea that one’s character is
strongly determined by one’s race. In The House of Mirth, there is a subscription to
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory that physiological characteristics acquired by an
organism over its lifetime may be transmitted to its offspring,11 demonstrated when
Lily speaks of her ‘lineage’ to Gerty Farish:
I won’t blame anybody for my faults: I’ll say it was in my blood, that I
got it from some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress, who reacted against
11
Eliza Slavet, ‘Freud’s “Lamarckism” and the Politics of Racial Science’, Journal of the
History of Biology, No. 1 (2008), 37-80 (p. 37), <http://www.jstor.org/stable/29737531>,
consulted 18/03/2013.
the homely virtues of New Amsterdam, and wanted to be back at the court
of the Charleses! (p. 197)
The figure of the ‘pleasure-loving ancestress’ – who represents a hedonistic AngloSaxon ancestor - reveals Lily’s Lamarckian belief that she is predisposed towards
certain actions as a result of inherited characteristics that persist in the blood. She is,
however, speaking partly in exaggerated jest, and the assertion that she ‘won’t blame
anybody’ for her faults betrays an implicit recognition of her own partial agency – she
has, after all, rejected many men. Furthermore, Wharton alludes to the contemporary
scientific racism of such sociologists as Herbert Spencer, whom Wharton labelled as
one of the ‘formative influences’ of her life.12 Spencer applied Darwin’s theory of
natural selection to humanity, arguing natural selection is ‘nature’s indispensable
method for producing superior men, superior nations, and superior races’. 13 While
rejecting the Spencerian notion that human evolution operates linearly in a positive
direction, Wharton partly adapts this idea in The House of Mirth to suggest races have
varying innate and immutable tendencies. For example, Mr Rosedale is portrayed
according to notions of inherited traits as a stereotypical wealthy Jew: he is a ‘plump
rosy man of the blonde Jewish type’ (p. 12), who has ‘his race’s accuracy in the
appraisal of values’ (p.14). In addition, the narrator describes how ‘instincts of his
race fitted him to suffer rebuffs and put up with delays’ (p. 107), where the noun
‘instincts’ conveys the idea that his Jewishness predetermines his patient character.
Although it is true that Rosedale is ultimately shown to be compassionate, it is
implied that his Jewishness renders him undesirable as a racial Other, especially as
Wharton called F. Scott Fitzgerald’s similarly unflattering stereotype - Meyer
12
Irene C. Goldman, ‘The “Perfect” Jew and “The House of Mirth”: A Study in Point of
View’, Modern Language Studies, No. 2 (1993), 25-36 (p. 29),
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3195032>, consulted 15/03/2013.
13
Herbert Spencer, quoted by Elizabeth Ammons, The Cambridge Companion to Edith
Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 73.
Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby (1925) – ‘the perfect Jew.’14 Rosedale is presented as
unacceptable to the Anglo-Saxon Lily – Anglo-Saxons popularly believed to be the
epitome of natural selection in humans15 - and she displays ‘intuitive repugnance’ (p.
14) towards him. Lily is too perfect to be reduced by racial typology: among the
ordinary women at Grand Central Station, Selden wonders ‘Was it possible that she
belonged to the same race?’ (p. 4). The death of Lily is the death of a breed of AngloSaxon too perfect for the modern world.
Habitat is similarly figured as a determinant and reflection of one’s character.
The narrator of The House of Mirth contemplates how ‘In whatever form a slowlyaccumulated past lives in the blood […] in the concrete image of the old house stored
with visual memories’ (p. 280); in other words, that domestic environments have a
strange formative power over the human body. Lily repeatedly and explicitly equates
her domestic surroundings with her physical and emotional wellbeing. When she
visits Selden’s bachelor pad, she remarks that Gerty Farish ‘is free’, in contrast to
herself, by virtue of their different homes. Moreover, Lily says ‘If I could only do
over my aunt’s drawing-room I know I should be a better woman’ (p. 7), where the
verb ‘know’ conveys a remarkable certainty that the improvement of her environment
should equal the improvement of herself. The drawing-room becomes a motif
symbolising self-oppression in high society, as when Lily laments how in ‘the
drawing-room she felt as though she were buried alive in the stifling limits of Mrs
Peniston’s existence’ (p. 88). Initially, Lily believes that one’s habitat is merely a
matter of choice: ‘she imbibed the idea that if people lived like pigs it was from
choice, and through the lack of any proper standard of conduct’ (p. 27). The phrase
‘lived like pigs’ - which sounds like an inherited idiom from her mother 14
15
‘The “Perfect” Jew and “The House of Mirth”, p. 25.
The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, p. 73.
demonstrates Lily’s belief that habitat reflects character; to live like the workingclasses results from deficiency in one’s moral education. Equally, the hotel
environment in which Lily temporarily works is that of the nouveau riche, a
democratised environment open to anyone with wealth. This habitat is entirely new
and alien to Lily, with Mrs Hatch and her friends appearing to ‘float together outside
the bounds of time and space’, occupied with a ‘blur of confused and retarded
engagements’ (p. 241); the abstract nature of this description indicates Lily’s inability
to acclimate to any environment outside her usual rarefied habitat. Wharton presents a
romanticised view of the working-class habitat when Lily is temporarily taken in by
Mrs Struther, who explains ‘with pardonable pride’ that they have a ‘parlour too’ (p.
275), the idealistic implication being that one can be much happier and healthier in
simpler surroundings.
Theories of natural selection and adaptation in The House of Mirth highlight the
struggle for existence in modern New York society. Spencer, in his Principles of
Biology (1864), coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’16 to illustrate how organisms
must adapt or die. Many characters in The House of Mirth, such as Lily Bart’s father,
are clear victims of society’s natural selection:
To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased
to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a
traveller who waits for a belated train to start. (p. 29)
‘Extinct’ is an especially clinical adjective to communicate the obsolescence of Lily’s
father; in addition, the second half of the sentence, via the locomotive simile,
illustrates the devolution of empathy and morality in an increasingly technological,
post-Darwinian world. Lily herself is able to adapt within narrow means in high
16
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1867),
p.60.
society. She is often able to manipulate conversation with men and deduce short-term
outcomes with uncanny precision, evident when she is described as ‘unfailingly
adaptable’ (p. 50) as she humours Mr Dorset with banal conversation, or when she
‘rightly guessed that Mr Gryce’s egoism was a thirsty soil’ (p. 19) in their
conversation about Americana. Ultimately, however, Lily cannot adapt to the
cutthroat morality of high society, as she refuses to use the Bertha-Selden letters to
reaffirm her social position, and marry Mr Rosedale, out of principle. By contrast,
Bertha Dorset is portrayed as fitter for survival as she lacks such moral scruples:
She could be as unscrupulous in fighting for herself as she was reckless in
courting danger, and whatever came to her hand at such moments was
likely to be used as a defensive missile. (p. 186)
In this case, Wharton uses vocabulary such as ‘unscrupulous’, ‘fighting’, and
‘danger’, to demonstrate the supremacy of Bertha Dorset over Lily, while the martial
metaphor of a ‘defensive missile’ figures Bertha as a sort of primeval human. Clearly,
the novel’s focus on natural selection underlines the moral inertia of a society that
would favour the survival of such people as Bertha Dorset over Lily Bart.
Both Lily, and the elitist society of which she is part, are portrayed as useless to
human progress. In a letter to William Roscoe Thayer, Wharton wrote she intended to
show ‘only that little atrophied organ – the group of idle and dull people’, in a
rejection of Spencer’s theory in The Social Organism (1860) that society organically
evolves in the direction of good. 17 Many characters in The House of Mirth are
ineffective outside their rarefied environments: Percy Gryce is emblematic of the
wealthy inheritor whose only value lay in his ancestor’s legacy, and his non-
17
Edith Wharton, quoted by Robin Peel, Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and
Fiction Before World War I (New Jersey: Rosemont Publishing, 2010), p. 263; Herbert
Spencer, quoted by Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and
Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 98.
contribution to society is apparent when the narrator says ‘it was impossible to think
of him as evolving any taste of his own’ (p. 18). Old money, represented by such men
as Gus Trenor, is on the precipice of extinction: Gus only makes money off the stock
exchange ‘thanks to Stepney’s friend Rosedale’ (p. 72), Rosedale representing a new
breed of shrewd stockbroker. In addition, Lily is unable to adapt to life in the working
classes: she has ‘helpless useless hands’ (p. 130), the tautology emphasising her
ineptitude for work as a milliner. Gryce is similar to Lily in that they are both ‘highly
specialized’ beings, which in Lily’s case is fatal:
Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the
highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its
narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. (p. 264)
The phrase ‘highly specialized’ refers to the Darwinian concept of species
specialisation. Generalist species, such as the dog, are able to survive in a wide
variety of environments and on varying resources; specialist species, such as the
Eucalyptus-reliant koala, may only survive in a narrow range of environments and on
fewer resources. 18 To be too highly specialised in the wrong habitat is majorly
disadvantageous, and the ‘sea-anemone’ simile indicates that Lily is incapable of
contributing to the working-class, since she was brought up for the singular vocation
of marriage.
To be highly specialised in the high society of The House of Mirth is more
dangerous for women than it is for men, since women have negatively adapted to
depend on men’s economic power. In Women and Economics (1898), Charlotte
Perkins Gilman argues that sexual selection - the Darwinian theory that many features
18
Scott E. Spoolman, Sustaining the Earth: An Integrated Approach (California: Cengage
Learning, 2009), p. 69.
of animals aid reproductive success instead of survival – has interfered with human
processes of self-preservation:
Our excessive sex-distinction, manifesting the characteristics of sex to an
abnormal degree, has given rise to a degree of attraction which demands a
degree of indulgence that directly injures motherhood and fatherhood.19
In The House of Mirth, Wharton dramatises this ‘excessive sex-distinction’ through
Lily’s lack of independence. It is impossible for her to survive without being indebted
to males. Gus Trenor clearly expects Lily to pay her debts through what Gilman terms
the ‘sexuo-economic relation’ 20 when he says ‘the man who pays for dinner is
generally allowed to have a seat at table’ (p. 128). The perpetual female obsession
with dresses highlights how, as a result of the sexuo-economic relation, women have
been reduced to the mere function of ornamentation. Lily believes that, at whatever
cost, one must be ‘decently dressed’ (p. 27), and she must maintain her appearance for
the singular purpose of acquiring as best a match as possible. Yet this drive to have
‘smarter gowns than Judy Trenor, and far, far more jewels than Bertha Dorset’ (p. 43)
leads to such fatal decisions as accepting money from Gus, and finally Lily’s
extinction. The alternative independent life of Gerty Farish and her social work at the
‘Girls’ Club’ (p. 117) - its good work embodied by the hopeful domestic scene of Mrs
Struther’s family (p. 275) - is clearly conducive to the evolution of society. Wharton
underlines a culture that nevertheless stigmatises Gerty, and ostracises her as
unmarriageable, as when Lily sees her only two options as ‘To be herself, or a Gerty
Farish’ (p. 23).
Scientific ideas and language in The House of Mirth advance cynical
conclusions regarding modern society, human progress, and the place of women. In a
19
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007),
p.17.
20
Ibid., p. 70.
post-Darwinian world, people are dehumanised and objectified as biological
specimens and species to be studied and commodified, their relevance dictated by
their specialisation or classification. Though Lily occasionally appears agential, she
ultimately cannot escape the manner in which domestic environments and inherited
characteristics have apparently predetermined her life; nor can she live long outside
the rarefied habitats of high society, or adapt to ordinary working-class functions. In A
Backward Glance (1934), Wharton wrote ‘A frivolous society can acquire dramatic
significance only through what its frivolity destroys. It's tragic implications lie in its
power of debasing people and ideas.’21 Through the death of Lily, and the victory of
Bertha Dorset, Wharton illustrates the moral devolution of a society that selects only
those who are unscrupulous for survival.
21
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Touchstone, 1998), p. 207.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2002)
Secondary Works
Bell, Millicent, The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003)
Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1st edn (London:
John Murray, 1859)
______________, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John
Murray, 1871)
Gagnier, Regenia, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market
Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Galton, Francis, ‘The History of Twins, as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature’,
Fraser’s Magazine, No. 12 (1875), 566-76.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Women and Economics (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007)
Goldman, Irene C., ‘The “Perfect” Jew and “The House of Mirth”: A Study in Point of View’,
Modern Language Studies, No. 2 (1993), 25-36.
Peel, Robin, Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction Before World War
I (New Jersey: Rosemont Publishing, 2010)
Ruston, Sharon, Literature and Science (Cambridge: D.S Brewer, 2008)
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University Press, 1995)
Slavet, Eliza, ‘Freud’s “Lamarckism” and the Politics of Racial Science’, Journal of the
History of Biology, No. 1 (2008), 37-80
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Spencer, Herbert, The Principles of Biology (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1867)
Spoolman, Scott E., Sustaining the Earth: An Integrated Approach (California: Cengage
Learning, 2009)
Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance (New York: Touchstone, 1998)