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I had never read anything by Edith Wharton before, and I happened to stumble across a copy of her first novel in one of my local Little Free Libraries around the same time I was hankering for some literary fiction. I figured this was as good a time as any to gain some experience with Wharton so I grabbed it and took it home.
I had never before rooted for a character to marry for money, but that’s exactly what I found myself doing while Lily Bart kept dragging her feet and complaining about trying to maintain her lifestyle on her meagre income. There’s mention of a girl friend who lives on her own in an apartment, but Lily cringes at the thought of living under such conditions. I’m not sure it’s ever mentioned what this friend does to earn a living, but apparently Lily feels that, whatever it is, it’s beneath her. She was raised to be decorative and marry rich. Apparently she’s really good at the former, and could easily accomplish the latter if she had just a bit more self-discipline. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may already know I don’t generally have much sympathy for characters that lack self-discipline.
Lily is also willingly naive and that gets her into trouble again and again. I get that we all make mistakes, but come on! Making mistakes is fine as long as you learn from them, but Lily apparently refuses to do that and so she manages to get herself entangled in one compromising situation after another. These repeated mistakes lead to Lily getting disinherited from her aunt’s fortune and her “friends” gradually refusing to be seen with her. She has become a social pariah even though her friends have blatantly committed much worse sins than Lily ever has. The difference is they know how to play the game. Lily, I suspect, knows how to play the game, but refuses to play by action dumb. I think her refusal is subconscious, but I also don’t have much sympathy for characters who lack self awareness.
Now, I’m a millennial, which means I was raised on a steady diet of individualism: people/the media urging me to “follow my heart” and “just be me” and “do what I love” and generally resist the pressures of a society with values different from my own. And, yes, I am a special snowflake. Deal with it.
Of course I recognize the hypocrisy of the society I grew up with telling me to resist the pressures of society, but that’s a discussion for another post. My point is I don’t condemn Lily for not falling in line. I condemn her for making her life harder than it needed to be. There’s always another way, but she uses her addiction to material comforts as an excuse for refusing to get a job and an apartment within her budget.
Eventually, she’s forced to get a job and live in a boarding house anyway. I won’t give away the ending, but it’s pretty obvious for anyone who’s familiar with how individual-vs.-society stories tend to work out. Because I never managed to feel anything but contempt for Lily, I didn’t really care what happened to her in the end. The final scene was poetic and picturesque, but failed to make me feel anything other than relief that I was finally finished.
What did you guys read this week? Any other disappointing classics?