Valérie BAUDIER, maître de Conférences à l`Université de

Valérie BAUDIER, maître de Conférences à l’Université de Toulouse-le Mirail.
Lily’s descent into Hell.
This presentation is a close reading of the passage dealing with Lily’s visit to Gus Trenor
(Book I, chapter XIII, p. 111 “She waited long enough…” to p. 117 “…the hearth.”)1
If Lily and Selden’s visit to the Brys’ magnificent and Eden-like garden after the
« Tableaux Vivants » performance was pervaded with poetry, Lily’s visit to Gus Trenor’s
house in the passage under study stands in sharp contrast to it with its crude prosaicness and
hellish atmosphere.
This scene operates as a pivotal point in the narration insofar as it brings about and
knits together the underlying themes of the novel: Lily’s descent into hell in a society where
appearances are reality and where to have is to be in an increasingly materialistic context.
I] The crumbling of appearances
A) Behind the façade
Right from the very beginning, Lily is aware that she finds herself in an unfamiliar
context where the usual conventions of social intercourse inherent in her world are absent: she
is not welcomed in the way she should be : the timing is wrong “she waited long enough on
the doorstep to wonder that Judy’s presence in town was not signalized by a greater
promptness in admitting her,” (111) the person and the costume are wrong “instead of the
expected footman (…) a shabby caretaking person in calico let her into the shrouded hall”
(111), then Trenor himself is the wrong host:“Trenor (…) appeared at once on the threshold”
(111). The noun “surprise,” as well as the adjective “unusual” recurring in the text, draw the
reader’s attention to the fact that, behind the familiar façade of the Trenors’ mansion nothing
appears as it should.
Not surprisingly, Gus Trenor leads Lily far away from the entrance of the house,
symbolically far away from the respectable façade of his house: “(…) the thought of being
alone with him, with her friend out of reach upstairs, at the end of the great empty house, did
not conduce to a desire to prolong their tête-à-tête.”(my italics, 112); “(…) he led her through
the house, to the large room at the back.” (my italics, 111).
Gaston Bachelard, in his well-known work La Poétique de l’Espace, studies and
throws into relief the positive, sheltering value of the upper parts of a house as opposed to the
dark, disquieting symbolic meaning of the basement. In this particular passage of the House of
Mirth, it must be noted that Lily’s hope of rescue and escape lies in finding Judy upstairs.
This is made clear when she says:” I shall go up to Judy” (113). By opposition, downstairs is
the nether world of Gus Trenor.
If the setting appears all wrong to Lily, Gus Trenor’s unusual behaviour is pointed out.
First wearing the mask of the amicable host, he addresses lily in a friendly way, bordering on
the paternal: “There’s a good girl(…)”(112), “And now, do sit down a minute, there’s a
dear”(112); in a real scene of seduction, he offers her luxurious goods - wine and tobacco – as
well as the warmth of the hearth. But then, when his tactics fails, another Trenor appears :
Trenor the traitor.
B) Trenor the traitor
By contriving to have a young, unmarried woman in his house at an improper time and
in improper circumstances, Trenor obviously dodges the rules of social conventions. Not
1
All the references are to the Norton Edition (1990) of The House of Mirth. 1 abiding by the rules of the social game, he therefore is not playing fair. Not surprisingly, his
lies and his tricks reveal his hypocritical nature, ‘hypocrisy’ etymologically referring to play
acting.
All his scheme to trap Lily is of a transgressive nature: he starts by invading his wife’s
territory; by taking Judy’s place in her chair, in her room, he somewhat betrays her in taking
up her private space. Then, by bringing an unmarried girl in his wife’s private space, he
indirectly suggests his wish to see her symbolically take his wife’s role.
In such a context of betrayal, his accusing Lily of “dodging the rules” and “not playing
fair”(114) sounds highly ironical. In fact, not having clearly stated the terms of the contract
binding him to Lily, he can change them at will. Wanting her to pay for the money he has
given her is therefore definitely not playing fair insofar as Lily was unaware that Trenor’s gift
of money was not the result of an investment of her own money. His words “it is all right”
(“you told me it was all right - (…) It was all right - it is (…)”(116) were taken at face value
by Lily for whom the given word has value. And it is because she had given her word to Judy
that she would come and visit her after Carrie Fisher’s informal feast that she actually –
though reluctantly – turns up on the Trenors’ doorstep.
In the whole passage, the power of words is at stake. What Trenor is looking for
throughout the scene is to exert his power over Lily in his claim of her as an object for which
he has given money. To reach his goal, manipulating language is his option. Interestingly,
when he tells LiLy: “I’ve got a word to say to you” (my italics, 113) we may wonder if the
word he has in mind is not a word made flesh… The reader here gets the impression that since
Trenor’s deals with money are expressed in his own all-relativizing language, then perhaps an
equation of language and money with fabrication and lying is suggested in Wharton’s text…
II] Looking for power
A) Changing the story
Trenor reproaches Lily for the distance she constantly puts between them: though he
has paid to enjoy her, she still remains out of his reach. “It’s always the same story” (112) he
tells her. And it is precisely that story of Lily’s inaccessibleness that he intends to change.
Yet, Lily does not want to hear his “tiresome stories” (69) as Judy, his wife, puts it ; Lily does
not care for Trenor’s words; they mean nothing to her as this man only represents for her “a
mere supernumerary in the costly show for which his money paid”(68). Here, we can see the
re-enactment of the scene after the “Tableaux Vivants” performance: Trenor wanted to talk to
Lily “I tried to come up and say a word” (112) and that is repeated here: “I’ve got a word to
say to you” (113). Formerly when Carry Fisher was given money by Gus Trenor, it was,
officially, to listen to his stories. Now that he has given money to Lily, he intends to be
listened to and heard. That is what he makes clear: “I mean to make you hear me out” (114).
Trenor is trying to impose his authority upon Lily by authoring his own story; and now
his story includes Lily: “I want to know just where you and I stand” (114). The coupling of
the personal pronouns “you” and “I” in this sentence speaks volumes. The very prosaic image
Trenor resorts to further emphasizes the idea of possession, of consumption: “Hang it, the
man who pays for the dinner is generally allowed to have a seat at table.”(114). Trenor is
ready to consume Lily as he would a ”jellied plover”2 and ironically when he tells her here to
follow him to the “den,” - “Come along to the den ”(111) - the polysemy of the word invites
the reader to read him as a beast taking its prey to its den. Lily is the consumption good he has
paid for and which he is ready to consume.
B) Resisting Trenor’s script
2
During the dinner-party at Bellomont, Lily focuses her attention on Gus Trenor’s “heavy carnivorous head sunk
between his shoulders, as he preyed on a jellied plover” (45) 2 While Trenor speaks the language of the market place and of “property”, Lily’s
language is the language of “propriety”. She constantly reminds him of the impropriety of the
situation; like a leitmotif, she repeats at different times during the dialogue: “If you’ll have the
goodness to call a cab for me” (112), “I must really ask you to ring for a cab”(112), “I must
again ask you to ask for a cab”(112), “Unless you call a cab for me at once”(113). She also
insists on the improper time : ”It’s past eleven” (112). In the same perspective, when she
pronounces the name “Judy,” she conjures up her friend in absentia, implicitly reminding
Trenor of his wife’s existence, thus tacitly hinting at his status as a married man. If Lily at
first does not understand Gus’s words, it is because they do not speak the same language. Lily
repeatedly expresses her lack of understanding: “I don’t understand what you want” (114), “I
don’t know what you mean” (114) she says or “Do you mean that…” (113). We have to
notice that when she finally understands what he wants, she, like Scheherazade, uses words to
“gain time”. As Wai Chee Dimock,3 suggests: “Private morality is defenseless against an
exchange system that dissolves the language of morality into its own harsh, brassy parlance.”
Here indeed, Trenor’s disregard for the social rules finds a parallel in his disregard for
linguistic rules. His ‘slanguage’, his relaxed speech echoes his relaxed moral standards. He
does not talk the way he should as he himself is well aware of. There is an unmistakable
contrast between Trenor’s speech and Lily’s. For example, for her, Trenor’s “quiet jaw” “let’s have a nice quiet jaw together” (112) - translates into a “tête-à-tête” (112), the
deliberate use of the French pointing to the distance between these two phrases. Similarly,
when Lily interprets Trenor’s brutal behavior in her own words, she says: “If you have
brought me here to say insulting things” (114) and here the reader is made aware of the great
difference between the two types of expression.
Trenor feels the distance Lily skilfully introduces through language; that is why he
answers: “Don’t talk stage rot” (114) or when he says: “don’t take that high and mighty tone
with me”(113). He thus expresses his wish to see her stop talking like the upper class woman
she is and who legitimately resists him.
If Trenor fails to talk Lily into submission, it is because he has no legitimate right to
talk to her in such a way. For an order to be obeyed, the person who formulates it must be
recognized as legitimately entitled to give this order. Here Lily makes it clear she does not
recognize Trenor’s authority because they do not talk the same language as they do not share
the same values.
C) The fight
The opposition between them takes the form of a verbal fight, the lexical field of war
pervading the text. Such phrases and words as “the two measured each other for a
moment”(113), “her opponent”(113), “sword play,” (114) “retreat” (114) “the brutality of the
thrust”(114) are interspersed in the text and act as many reminders of the battle opposing the
two protagonists.
In this confrontation, words have the density of the real; their impact goes beyond
their meaning. Their illocutionary force transforms them into violent weapons. “The angry
streaks on Trenor’s face might have been raised by an actual lash.”(113) “The brutality of the
thrust gave her the sense of dizziness that follows on a physical blow.” (114) “The words –
the words were worse than the touch”(116).
Inside, Lily is deeply wounded; the following sentence bears witness to the fact:” Her
heart was beating all over her body – in her throat, her limbs, her helpless useless hands” (my
italics 116). The dash in the sentence, which breaks its rhythm, suggests the broken, irregular
beats of Lily’s heart while the repetition of the possessive adjective “her” recalls its frantic
3
Wai Chee, Dimock, “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,” 78.
3 pulse. Besides, the synecdochial use of the nouns “throat,” “limbs,” “hands,” points to her
inner dismemberment.
What saves Lily is the impression of self-control she gives Trenor: while he
progressively transforms into “a primitive man”(116), whose impulses have the upper hand
over him, Lily manages to stand her ground thus showing her perfect control of her body: her
tears, cries, or entreaties would have betrayed her weakness and would have signaled her
defeat. It is when she eventually succeeds in asserting herself as a speaking subject that she
definitely wins this fight. By saying “I am here alone with you (…). What more have you to
say?”(116) she strips the situation of all the fantasy it had been steeped in by Trenor’s
delirium; by being the speaking “I,” she gains power, the power Trenor seems to have been
afraid of when he referred a bit earlier to her “mighty tone”. She is again the subject “I” and
no longer the object of his desire; at the same time he becomes again the “you” Lily knows.
“Old habits, old restraints, the hand of inherited order”(117) make this dis-Gus-ting Gus
disappear.
Beyond the words, this confrontation reveals the power of images. Trenor’s first
reproach to Lily is the image of the stupid man, the “ass,” she, according to him, has
contributed to creating of him : “I’m not sharp, and I can’t dress my friends up to look funny,
as you do… but I can tell when it’s being done to me” (114). Yet, he uses the same weapon
when his words transform Lily into a courtesan; when Lily reads lust in his eyes - “and fixing
on her a look in which resentment was the ingredient she least disliked” (112) - she
understands that he sees her as a desirable object, a sexual object. Similarly, when Trenor says
“Don’t stare at me like that – I know I’m not talking the way a man is supposed to talk to a
girl”(116) the reader understands that Trenor has seen in Lily’s eyes the horrible image of him
in the guise of a beastly man.
In a society where appearances are reality, the image one gives of oneself must be
carefully controlled. In people’s eyes, images form and become translated into words.
According to the speaker’s visual perception, these images are interpreted and, most of the
time, misinterpreted. Hence the danger of misrepresentation. In the text, the hypallage
“speechless stare” in the following phrase : “Trenor answered the look with a speechless
stare” (116) signals the end of the confrontation: by controlling her words and her image, Lily
has succeeded in reducing Trenor to silence.
Yet, Lily’s victory is but temporary. When she gets out of Trenor’s house she is seen
by both Selden and Ned Van Alstyne. As she had foreseen, the “hideous mustering of
tongues” (116) will eventually contribute to tarnishing her image, thus bringing about her
descent into hell.
In fact, what Trenor wanted in this scene was to be able to enjoy her as an object and
direct her as a kind of “Tableau Vivant” character. We notice therefore the dramatic quality of
this passage, which is highly reminiscent of the stage. In this eminently dynamic scene, many
sentences sound like stage directions. For instance, we can read, among many other examples,
“He drew unexpectedly aside, letting her reach the threshold unimpeded” (113) or “Trenor
had pushed a chair between herself and the door” (114).
By inserting drama in the interstices of her text, Wharton in this way endows her novel
with the dynamism of the stage. Her narrative is thus animated by the aesthetics of drama and
here in particular, the purpose is to reveal the crumbling of appearances in a society where
everybody is under the scrutiny of everybody else while everybody is constantly performing.
Seeing is believing, it seems, in The House of Mirth. Yet, and ironically enough, while this
passage is a warning about the deceptive potential of images, it invites the reader to interpret
it in several ways.
III] Interpreting the text:
4 A) The mythological dimension
Candace Waid in her illuminating study of The House of Mirth entitled Letters from
the Underworld, sees this scene as Lily’s descent into Hades, into a “deadly world of illicit
eroticism,” 4 and reads it in the light of the Demeter and Persephone myth dear to Wharton.
She points out in particular that Lily is not really in Judy Trenor’s house: she seems to be
trapped in a kind of house of death. Indeed, many textual elements point to the idea of death:
the hall appears “shrouded” (111) and the drawing room is “wrapped up in [an] awful slippery
white stuff”(111). Besides, Trenor’s rhetorical question, is quite revealing: “Doesn’t this room
look as if it was waiting for the body to be brought down?”(111). Waid’s reading is quite
convincing and we may perhaps add that Pluto was the mythological figure reigning in Hades;
not surprisingly Trenor is the plutocrat who believes he can buy things and people …
The mythological intertext Candace Waid perceives can also be evoked if we keep in
mind the image of Lily as a Dryad, as she appeared to Selden in the previous scene of the
“Tableaux Vivants.” Here Trenor’s bestial attitude – “He rose, squaring his shoulder
aggressively, and stepped toward her with a reddening brow” (114) – brings to mind the
image of a satyr, that mythological composite male being, partly human and partly equine in
form. In Greek mythology, typical scenes showed satyrs pursuing nymphs – dryads among
them – and accompanying Dionysos. Here Trenor chases after Lily and has apparently been
celebrating the God of wine, as is underlined in the text: “Trenor, a little heated by his unusual
flow of words, and perhaps by prolonged propinquinty with the decanters, was bending over
their silver labels”(111). At the end of the passage, once Lily has regained control over him
and he has cooled a little, we can read: “With his last gust of words the flame had died out,
leaving him chill and humbled. It was as though a cold air had dispersed the fumes of his
libations.” (116-117). Dyonisos was also known for the orgiastic rites, involving sexual
intercourse he celebrated with his followers; in this text, though Trenor does not actually rape
Lily, he is not far from doing so. Joan Lidoff, in her article entitled “Another Sleeping
Beauty,” sees this scene as “the only one in the novel written in the rising and completed
rhythms of sexual climax.” 5
B) The religious dimension
Yet, another interpretation can be made of this realm of death. In fact, Gus Trenor can
be seen as a sort of satanic figure. The biblical origin of the title of the novel seems to
encourage such a reading of the character. Furthermore, the evocation of fire cannot be
missed; when he tells Lily “you can toast yourself over the fire,”(111) it is difficult not to see
him as a devilish figure. Earlier on, when he was still at his club, he told Selden “It gives me
the blue devils to dine alone” (122). In the passage under study, he says to Lily “Judy’s got a
devil of a headache” (112). If we read carefully what he says in his dialogue with the young
woman, such words as “Gad”, “damned”, deuced”, betraying his vulgar way of speaking, also
indirectly – though ironically - conjures up God and the Devil in the text. He can also be
interpreted as the Devil when he tries to seduce Lily, then when he confiscates her time:
“won’t you give me five minutes of your own accord? (…) Very good, then: I’ll take ‘em.
And as many more as I want” (113)” and also when he admits to having tricked her, the Devil
being traditionally called “the great trickster.” This fact brings to mind Faustus’s compact
with the Devil when he comes to tell him that his time is up and he has to surrender his soul.
Not coincidentally, Lily has made a pact with Trenor by accepting his money.
Last, but not least, interestingly enough, the word “Devil”, originating from the Greek
“diabolos” etymologically means “accuser, slanderer”. Now, even if Trenor has not actually
uttered any false report to Lily’s injury, his mere presence with her in his house at that time of
night (wrongly) speaks volumes. The game is indeed unfair not because of Lily who
4
5
Waid 45
Lidoff 195 5 eventually pays her debt in the end, but because of Trenor who traps her, in the role of Satan
waiting for her body to be delivered into his hands: “Do come up to the fire, though; you look
deadbeat, really.” (my italics 112). After that episode, Lily is not the same and does not
recognize the “familiar alien streets”(117). As this oxymoron suggests, she is in fact herself
alienated, and doomed to fail.
Built on a dramatic crescendo leading to Lily’s final escape after a long and arduous
verbal battle, this text foreshadows the young woman’s subsequent failure in society.
Because she refuses to be an object to be bought by money and because she is talked about,
her life is not worth much any longer. This particular passage, more than any other in the
novel, brings to the fore the clash of values which occurs with the growing importance of a
mercantile American plutocracy. In a society where role-playing is a requisite, images are
endowed with tremendous importance. Translated into unreliable words, they may contribute
to the social destruction of those who are misinterpreted. If Lily was seen by Selden as a
poetic beautiful embodiment of art in the “Tableaux Vivants” scene (which is the companion
piece to this one), Lily must here resist the very prosaic reading Trenor has had of her. Behind
the respectable façade of a fashionable house, a terrible encounter between a beauty and a
beast takes place. Wharton skilfully brings drama here in her novel, thus creating a kind of
‘intertextuality of genres’ while her hints and images open her text to the reader’s manifold
interpretations. Nothing is fixed in this text: our imagination is actively stimulated. Wharton,
who thought that “reading should be a creative act as well as writing”, who counted on her
readers’ "meeting [her] half way and filling in the gaps in [her] narrative with sensations and
divinations akin to [her] own" has, here, perfectly reached her goal. 6
Bibliography
Dimock, Wai Chee, “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth” in Edith
Wharton's The House of Mirth, Carol J. Singley ed., Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 6385.
Lidoff, Joan, “Another Sleeping Beauty. Narcissism in The House of Mirth” in Edith
Wharton's The House of Mirth, Carol J. Singley ed., Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 181207.
Waid Candace, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991.
Wharton Edith, The House of Mirth [1905], Elizabeth Ammons, ed., New York : W.W.
Norton Critical Edition, 1990.
Wharton Edith, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Preface, New York: Scribner’s, 1937.
6
Although Wharton writes this in her preface to her Ghost Stories, p. 2, I think her words are particularly relevant in the context of this scene of The House of Mirth. 6