One scholar in an article about House of Mirth and New York writes it aptly that, “The House of Mirth is a novel of New York Society, the world [Wharton] never completely discarded though she declared she had given it up.” A brief introduction to Edith Wharton’s life compels any reader of her most popular book to see striking similarities between Wharton herself and her main character, Lily Bart. Both Bart and Wharton had a “coming out” to the society in which set the rules, style, and aesthetic of the novel. Wharton, age 17, began her integration into high society with her attendance to elegant dances and events in every corner of New York. While not altogether clear in House of Mirth, it appears that Lily Bart arrived on the social scene in a similar way but at a later age than Wharton herself as the novel starts in her twenty-ninth year.
There are a lot of biographical similarities between author and character so much so that the difference between the two seem to stick out like a sore thumb. Both author and character were in a state of transition and constantly clawing their way back up a stratosphere. However those stratospheres were widely dissimilar: Wharton’s being literary and Bart’s being social status. “Both Lily and her maker were women in transition: Wharton consciously evolving from a literary notoriety to a novelist of the first rank, Lily failing as an ornament of the privileged class, fumbling toward an imagined view of herself in a larger society.” says Howard, the scholar of the text on New York high society and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.
Another interesting point to be considered is the task of getting married for both Wharton and Bart. One biography from Edithwharton.org talks of her marriage as one made in great haste to escape her fast approaching “old maid status”. This would eventually lead to their divorce some thirty years later. We see this in the novel with Bart’s incessant and calculated interactions with Percy Gryce in the first half of the novel. Her efforts to settle into a marriage to avoid her poverty and at the heavy hand of social pressures doesn’t go unnoticed by those around her either. Judy Tenor comments “Oh, Lily, Do go slowly.” (page 46) in regards to her pursuit of Mr. Gryce. There is a parallel between Wharton and Bart in the way they both preoccupy themselves, to a very obsessive extent, with getting married.
Honing in on these similarities, I feel compelled to ask why Wharton felt the need to assemble this story after her own and for what end? What are we, the readers, to make of the differences between Bart and Wharton. In this biographical context, who is Wharton without her character Lily Bart and who is Lily Bart without Wharton?
I really l like the idea that both Wharton and Lily are “women in transition,” albeit in different spheres. Lily’s financial future is far from assured, whereas Wharton had plenty of money in the bank for maids and leisure. But then Wharton does seem to use Lily’s struggle to ascend into unreachable realms of moneyed success as a figure for her own literary ascent. But House of Mirth largely assured the latter’s success, and, as we know, it sealed the fate of the former’s. In that sense, Lily seems a character whose problems Wharton may have witnessed in her circle, but did not directly experience. Or perhaps we might say that Lily embodies, in composite form, all the pressures that faced women of this period to some extent–Wharton included. Lily, that is, is more of a type than a biographical mirror for the author. Wharton takes a deliberately objective view, modeled on emerging models of ethnography, that seems to drive a clear wedge between author and subject.