Fatalistic Tendencies

“I
wasn’t meant to be good.”-Lily Bart, The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is the tragic
tale of a woman (Lily Bart) in high society who is faced not only with
superficial issues, but with deep moral dilemmas that plagued all of American
society at the time. It was written in 1905, during the Gilded Age of American
history, when the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer.
Wharton herself was a victim of this vicious society in which women were raised
for one career: marriage. Disappointment and sadness characterized her own
marriage and sparked her literary career. Such firsthand experience gave
Wharton ample material with which to explore, not only the plight of women, but
the moral and material issues we as humans must face in society.
Why do we marry? For love? For money? These questions
cause the main conflict that besets Lily Bart and plagues her throughout her
life. Society, her family, her friends all tell her to find the richest man she
possibly can and use her abundant “talents” to acquire his hand in marriage.
They say this financial security is the only way for her to achieve safety and
happiness in her life. But this path would also require her to live a life of
monotony with a man she may not even love, and so she can’t seem to bring
herself to go through with it. This is a dilemma that Wharton herself
experienced. Is Lily so desperate for luxury and extravagance that she must
enter into the slavery of marriage? Her bitter demise over the course of the
book seems to be Wharton’s own way of expressing her disgust at society’s
obsession with material gains and money.
She implies that if Lily had followed her heart and not her pocketbook
she would have ended up happy. But instead, in pursuit of money, Lily is
tragically destroyed by the society that she believes could ensure her
“safety”.
Fatalism is the idea that we are all predestined to
follow a unique path in life, and that it doesn’t matter what opportunities or
tools are given to us, because our fate is already determined. Edith Wharton
explores this theme in great detail in this novel. On our first meeting with
Lily Bart she seems to have everything: social standing, wealth, intelligence,
opportunity, and above all beauty. We also find that in her past she has had
numerous chances to enter into a safety net of marriage that would dispel all
of her financial woes. In short, she appears to have everything necessary to lead
a successful life. But in the end she fails, and Wharton points to fatalism as
the cause. This idea was popular in the Gilded Age because it consoled the poor
who were perpetually stuck in ‘dingy’ conditions. Fate remains a question even
today as we try to find any trace of morality in our ever growing system of
material hierarchy.
Perhaps the greatest problem consuming the characters in The
House of Mirth is money. Money affects everything in their world: their
choices, their reputations, their quality of life, their love, their leisure,
everything; and the pursuit of money becomes their purpose in life. Lily Bart
has no money; orphaned and dependent to her aunt, she is desperate for the
freedom money would offer her. But, ironically, the only way to get this
freedom is by giving it up in marriage. To attain total freedom a woman must be
single, but in doing so she will give up all social standing. This question of
a woman’s place and role in society was a controversial subject of Wharton’s
time. In Britain, a genre of novels exploring this issue came to be called the
“novel of manners”, and Edith Wharton was one of the first Americans to delve
into it. In her harsh condemnation of this elitist society she points to the
ways in which money, which is supposed to elevate society, drags it down and
causes humans to act in a way where they regress to vicious and animalistic
tendencies. Money is the immobilizer of human progress. It is the very thing
that paralyzes Lily Bart, causes her demise, and, in a parallel, is the tool
humans will use to cause their own fatalistic doom.
This is a harsh reality that Wharton faces us with, but
that was her intention. As an ardent believer in realism, she gives a
dramatically depressing story that does not try to hide the flaws of human
nature and society. In contrast, she puts them on a luminous display to be
mocked with irony and to leave a chilling trace of guilt in the blood of all
its readers because of their own selfishness. It is not a pleasant book. There
is nothing fanciful or charming about it. It is vindictive and bitter, a harsh
outlook on the world by a victimized woman. But perhaps this is exactly what
society needs: not a book whose themes of human nature must be sifted through
with hours of discussion and interpretation, but a book that shoves the horrors
of society right under our noses and forces us to analyze our own behavior.
Wharton was right, “time’s feet are hastening relentlessly towards the door”,
and we must work to change our cruel ways before time walks out and the door
snaps shut.