https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj_f7P6V-5c
Gillian Anderson has always been a wonderful actress. And I absolutely adore her in everything she has been in, like the television shows The X-Files and The Fall- except this movie. She is not the Lily I had pictured, and doesn’t hold the character in the regard Lily deserved. There’s no doubt that she plays the character with heart, with thinly veiled sadness and disdain. She perfectly emotes when the script calls for it, and a disgusted grimace is seen on her lips at all times. In the trailer, Anderson can be seen lifting her eyebrow and looking very sordid in moments with Selden (played by Eric Stoltz, most notably seen in Pulp Fiction as Lance, a heroin dealer). But to me, this was not the Lily that was portrayed in the novel. Gillian Anderson is missing the key ingredient to Lily’s character- forced subtlety in the midst of her intense naivety.
Allow me to explain. Lily is not a poor, lost soul struggling to find her place in married society like Edna Pontellier in “The Awakening”. She is not trapped by a marriage, but by the idea that she may never be married. That leaves some wiggle room for both her character to plot and scheme, to make mistakes by her own choice, and to be left alone if she doesn’t play her cards right (bad pun). Lily has mobility in her societal circle of women and men, moving between family members she deems most useful to her monetarily, though that mobility is being strangled. Her freedom to use both Trenor and Mrs. Peniston is waning, as her debt in gambling is catching up- her own freedom to choose her pasttimes has also caused her to become more desperate in finding a man. Lily’s naive ideas of how she’ll be saved from poverty middle between gaining a steady income from Mrs. Peniston and maybe marrying into the upper class. These ideas feed into that naive sense of security, masking her fears in a playful need to “win” the game of husbandry.
She comes off as vapid in her desires for monetary gain and silly in conversations that often steer back to herself. “What luck!” she proclaimed to Mr. Selden. “How nice of you to come to my rescue!” (6). She uses the man not only to entertain herself, but does so without a second thought. He told her that it was “his mission in life” in sarcasm, but who knows if she actually understood that sarcasm? Would she had believed he truly was in the train station just to entertain her solely? Maybe. And by the looks of how he is amused by her, and dotes on her, maybe she would have been correct in thinking so. She’s primped and preened, and though she’s lost both her parents, she’s still insulated from the consequences she’s slowly gaining from her choices and circumstances.
This leads to my last point. Underneath all the seemingly-vapid and self-centered mindset that Lily has, she also seems painfully aware of her dire situation. She’s clever in the respect that she, a woman who has a shrinking amount of mobility, knows she must find a solution. At the end of the chapter 9, Lily doesn’t squander the opportunity the cleaning woman giving her those letters between Edna and Selden. She’s constantly scheming how to gain Gryce as a husband. She’s clever, and she’s aware of how she seems to others. On page 68, she and Selden are talking. Lily confronts how he sees her by saying “you think me horribly sordid, don’t you?”. The way Gillian Anderson portrays Lily is the way Lily in the books believes she is seen. But her true character comes out in the next line, giving her a depth too difficult to portray on screen. “Perhaps it’s rather that I never had a choice” (68), she said, showing her awareness of her circumstance, and the duality she must portray to those she trusts and those in her social circle.
There was no possible way to translate the complex person Lily was written as by Edith Wharton, and put it on screen without losing some of the nuance. Her naive approach was truly a cover for that scheming person beneath. What the book did better than any portrayal could do was take a peek into her complicated motives and encapsulate the dual personality she had to create thanks to social obligations.
I agree that it is very difficult to capture the surface / depth duality we see in the book in a different medium such as film. The narration in the book does a great job of filling in the gaps–rendering what is really a sort of proto-soap opera into a deep and subtle portrait of Lily’s mind as it is inflected by her circumstances. Those layers of subtlety–suggestions of heredity, conflicting views of her, obvious scheming, persistent idealism–are certainly hard to capture if one sticks with the most basic “fallen-woman” story. I always think that this story exists where realism–which suggests characters with the ability to shape and change their circumstances–and naturalism–which suggests brute determinism and lack of choice–coincide. Great post! I inserted the image properly, and also embedded the video. You might add a caption to the picture, though, to gesture towards what you intended it to show the reader. Also, use links when appropriate!