Lily Bart is initially presented as an extremely proud, attractive woman. The start of the novel gives the reader the perception that she is very selfish and shallow. Her only concern appears to be of marriage and money. She appears to be on the hunt for a rich husband and is thoroughly concerned with her outward appearance and what other people are thinking of and saying about her. While thus far in the story, these presentations of Lily Bart’s personality seem to be accurate, her background and upbringing should be accounted for before judging her harsher traits too quickly.
Lily Bart was raised by her mother, who was nothing shy of obsessed with money. Her mother had a constant fear of living like a “pig” as they put it in the novel. This is assumed to be described as living a lesser lifestyle, with worn down clothing and possibly no maids. Lily was raised with her father scarcely present in her life. His role was solely that of the breadwinner, and it was considered a strange rarity when he would join his wife and daughter on any kind of family outing or even at the dinner table. It was obvious, even to Lily, that her mother had married her father for money and only for money. Love did not seem to have any place in any part of Lily’s life growing up.
Lily’s father died when she was nineteen, and shortly after that her mother, and she lived, as they put it “like pigs”. Lily had to endure her mother’s constant complaints and demands that lily marry a rich man. She spent a few years enduring ridicule from her mother, along with a constant emphasis put on her own attractive outward appearance by her mother until she died. Causing lily to go live with relatives, none of which were very eager to take her on.
Because of Lily’s upbringing, her longing to marry someone of deep financial stability and seemingly shallow obsession with her own appearance can only be expected. Her mother put the importance of marrying money and of Lily’s attractive looks of importance above anything else. So while Lily is definitely very shallow, and vain, she did not come to be that way from her own doing. Growing up at the hands of such detached and shallow parents, not much else can be expected of this girl. She is going after what her mother taught her is the most important thing in life – money.
Thanks for this useful introduction to this aspect of the novel–this theme of inheritance, and what makes us (or Lily, in this case) who we are. I think because you don’t really sink into the narrative situation of this early part of the novel (where Lily is, what brings these thoughts on, how her thoughts shift and change as she works through the dark recesses of her past) you don’t quite capture the depths of conflict that exist in her inheritance, torn, as it is, between her mother’s mercenary qualities and her father’s aloof idealism.
There is a strong argument to be made about the degree to which Wharton includes information on Lily’s upbringing as a way to frame her often inflexible elitism and pride as a matters of nurture rather than nature. This whole section early in the novel is fascinating. It begins with Lily reflecting on how she seems to have fallen when she realizes she has Percy within her grasp. The prospect seems almost too calculating, too cold to her, and she feels her ambitions must have shrunk. Then, she asks herself: “Why had she failed? Was it her fault of that of destiny?” Thus begins her meditation on her own past. It’s unclear what the “failure” here is–the failure to pull the trigger on a boring, moneyed marriage, perhaps? The failure, at 29, to be still unmarried even as those telling lines of age appear in the mirror? It’s a complex kind of failure that involves an illusive ideal of beauty and happiness that can never be fulfilled and a more practical desire for money and possessions.
In the meditation that follows, we hear about her father’s more literal financial failure, about her mother’s comment that Lily will “get it back with her face.” The narrator notes that Lily’s ambitions, though “were not as crude as Mrs. Bart’s. While Mrs. Bart harbored grievances against her husband’s less material passions–the narrator notes that he “had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as ‘reading poetry’–Lily also identifies an inheritance from her father here. “There was in Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes. She liked to think of her beauty as a power for good, a giving her the opportunity to attain a position where she should make her influence felt in vague diffusion of refinement and good taste…. she was secretly ashamed her of father’s crude passion for money” (36). Even as Lily dismisses this idealism as a bit of romantic, even childish thinking, this idealism clings to her even amidst her inherited fear of failure, of dinginess, of living like a pig. She was raised, then, split between something like Selden’s republic of the spirit and Rosedale’s world of pragmatism and unlimited capital. The one seems always to keep her from the other, these dueling inheritances. In between is a broad swath of mediocrity: Percy Gryce and his boring Americana where American history becomes merely collectible and commodified; George Dorset and his desperate but empty cries for rescue from his own monied hell. Where else in the novel do we see these dueling passions as Lily navigates the broad swath of mediocrity around her?
In a way, then, the matter of Lily’s inheritance is more complex. The narrative presence in the novel, which is often so judgmental of Lily, sees fit to offer this little detour early in the novel, and Lily herself, in later conversations with Gerty, seems to reaffirm her mother’s inheritance as the driving part of her identity as well. “But what is your story, Lily? I don’t believe any one knows it yet,” Gerty asks her friend in seeming desperation late in the novel as things begin to unravel (220). Where, Gerty wants to know, did the whole thing begin? Lily answers this question not in the narrow sense of the sordid Bertha affair, but in terms of her deeper story: “My story?–I don’t believe I know it myself…. Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose–in the way I was brought up, and the things I was taught to care for.” But she then immediately seems to reject that story, and instead talks about something deeper in her blood–“some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress”–as she calls it. Finally, she offers a more direct response: “the truth about any girl is that once she’s talked about she’s done for.” Here, rather than the story of overlapping inheritances, Lily seems to diminish the question itself. It doesn’t matter WHO “authors” your story; what matters is that she doesn’t seem to have any agency herself, and authorial control over her own story. The one moment of pure control in the novel–that great tableau vivants scene–is a sort of farce of control.