'The House of Mirth' and Edith Wharton's "Beyond!"

Gabler-Hover, Janet, Plate, Kathleen, Philological Quarterly

1

In Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the heroine Lily Bart is prohibited from the self-invention she seeks by socially-constructed conceptions of who she must be. Lily is imprisoned in a projection of male desire, fantasized simplistically in polar terms: angel/monster,(1) virgin/whore, innocent/seductress; which implicate each other in an inevitable reciprocity of female entrapment. Lily's most ardent expression of her desire to escape such confining definition is also her most elusive. Critics have never identified "the word which made all clear" between Selden and Lily which Selden thinks he knows at the end of the novel.(2) Yet, this word is first suggested by Lily herself when she writes a note to Selden, and Selden breaks the seal: "-- a grey seal with |Beyond!' beneath a flying ship" (163).(3) Lily chooses the word "Beyond!" for her seal; Selden then appropriates it from her. In the fervor of his idealization of Lily after the tableaux scene, Selden rushes to interpret its meaning: "Ah, he would take her beyond -- beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul --" (163).

Intimations in The House of Mirth that there may be a transformative word in the text -- that language, in other words, can bring about a transformation -- occur earlier in Selden's conversation with Lily in the country. In his infamous "republic of the spirit" speech, Selden suggests that "|there are sign-posts [toward it] -- but one has to know how to read them'" (71). "|Well, I have known, I have known!'" Lily responds: "|Whenever I see you, I find myself spelling out a letter of the sign -- and yesterday -- last evening at dinner -- I suddenly saw a little way into your republic'" (71). Selden concludes, remarkably, that "|names can alter the colour of beliefs'" (73).

Selden once more alludes to Lily's suggestive "Beyond!" after he talks about Lily with his cousin Gerty Farish. Facetious upper-class society is Lily's "element, not his. But he would lift her out of it, take her beyond! That Beyond! on her letter was a cry for rescue" (167). But Selden does not keep his resolution. He thinks he sees Lily compromised fleeing from Gus Trenor's home late one evening; he then backs out from his planned liaison with her. As Lily sits tensely waiting for him, her mind again drifts to the communication between them; she worries that Selden "had misread her hurriedly scrawled note, taking the four for a five," and she "hastily resolve[s] to write more legibly in the future" (184). But writing more legibly is not the problem. Indeed, that women cannot use language clearly is a type of masculine red herring that might be used if a man did not want to really "hear" a woman's message. Legibility will not remedy the way Selden's ability to interpret "Beyond!" has been borne down and restricted by his own patriarchal values: he does not keep continuous faith with his first reading of Lily's "Beyond!"

As mentioned, Selden refers finally to "Beyond!" as "the word which made all clear" between Lily and himself after her death. Though Selden's own faith in Lily's word may falter, he is correct in assuming that his first interpretation matches Lily's referent for this word never spoken between them. "Beyond" haunts the text as Lily dies:

As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought -- she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well. (341)

Selden makes conscious what has been semi-conscious and preverbal for Lily. Lily chooses the emblematic "Beyond!" to seal her own letters tentatively: it is a strategic utterance of her wish for transformation mediated by the emblem. The sphere of art (as with the iconic emblem here) is the only sphere in which Lily can experience a transformation, as we shall see later.

But what type of triumphant journey can the motto "Beyond!" signify? How is the configuration "Beyond!" and the flying ship beneath meant to be interpreted in the novel and why is this logos shrouded in such secrecy? "Beyond!" in The House of Mirth has a rich metaphysical potentiality, yet this is threatened by the attempts of a reductive language to suppress it. In other words, "Beyond!" is the talisman of feminist metaphysics in the novel. it is a word with transformative power, yet this power is risked once utterance allows patriarchal language to reduce it.

A rich tradition in psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics informs the metaphysics of "Beyond!". It connotes a positive value, the triumph of some life-freeing force that has escaped the confines of some constrictive convention. It also suggests transcendence of the literal fact world. It is used variously, as in: "beyond" the delimiting labels of social convention (Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil);(4) "beyond" simple urges to the more complex motivations of the unconscious (Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle);(5) aesthetically, "lifted beyond ourselves into being as a whole" through the process of art (Heidegger on Nietzsche, The Will to Power as Art).(6) In a feminist perspective, "Beyond" often signifies beyond patriarchy: "beyond the fold of restrictive paternal love."(7) Several critics actually refer to "Beyond" in their discussion of Edith Wharton. Cynthia Griffin Wolff notes that Lily "attempt[s] to move beyond the superficialities of their [hers and Selden's] emotional relationship."(8) Elizabeth Ammons finds the mother in late Edith Wharton is valued for her "exten[sion] of her loving care beyond the limits of ego to another creature."(9) Such referents for "Beyond!" interweave to enhance and complicate its meaning in the novel. And characters in the novel can be judged in terms of how they participate in or frustrate this rich complication.

2. THE METAPHYSICS OF "BEYOND!" IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

At first it would seem that Lawrence Selden participates against the patriarchy in subscribing to the richer transformative possibilities adherent to "Beyond!" Its Nietzschean application connoting "beyond" social convention complements Selden's "republic of the spirit" and explains Selden's initially sympathetic interpretation of Lily's seal. Nietzsche argues against "herd animal Morality" (305) in Beyond Good and Evil. Selden in his outsider position to society and its conventions -- his disparagement of marriage, for example (72) -- lives "beyond," what Nietzsche calls, "the bourgeois world and its Yes and No."(10) Edith Wharton herself was an admirer of Nietzsche. Though it is in 1908 that she quotes Nietzsche's phrase "beyond good and evil" in support of her affair with Morton Fullerton,(11) it seems reasonable to assume that Wharton knew Nietzsche's work earlier, by 1904-5, and had it in mind when she developed the character of Selden. Lily herself is attracted by Selden's outsider stance, "piqued" by Selden's "air of friendly aloofness" (68). Selden accords "with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred" (68). Selden's social iconoclasm helps Lily think beyond the patriarchal values to which she is consciously committed. She speaks freely with Selden on an equal plane on matters of intellect. She thus abstains with him from the fawning dissimulation of inferiority she assumes with other men. Yet, it is Lily who reveals the hypocrisy in Selden's social stance. Selden, she notes, "|spend[s] a good deal of [his] time in the element [he] disapprove[s] of'" (72).

As Lily's remark implies, a link between Selden and Nietzsche ultimately ends in irony. Selden struggles against and finally fails in his relationship with Lily because of his bondage to social convention -- notably to society as it functions to prescribe …

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Publication information: Article title: 'The House of Mirth' and Edith Wharton's "Beyond!". Contributors: Gabler-Hover, Janet - Author, Plate, Kathleen - Author. Journal title: Philological Quarterly. Volume: 72. Issue: 3 Publication date: Summer 1993. Page number: 357+. © 1998 University of Iowa. COPYRIGHT 1993 Gale Group.

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