Sullivan, Ellie Ragland. "The Daughter's Dilemma: Psychoanalytic Interpretation and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth." Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth. Ed. Shari Benstock. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. New York: St. Martin's, 1993. 464-81

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1.I would argue that Lily Bart comes alive in art because she is infused with her creator’s own soul or passion-that is, the irreducible kernel of sorrow in Edith’s being that has turned to a lifelong suffering. Lily has only two signifiers by which to represent herself in the world-beauty and money. Her mother had taught her that her beauty would take care of her at the level of existence, that she could use her beauty to buy security and social success. But Lily is “mentally paralyzed” in not knowing how to put her beauty to use in her search for love, a husband, money, a protector, a sponsor, even a career. This is the particular suffering of the hysteric, who is unable to assume (to know or act on) her own desire. Others always speak for Lily and decide for her. In Lacanian terms, she is spoken by the Other -by the unconscious desire of her childhood familiars.

Working with the problem of the lack of an innate signifier for gender identification, Wharton weaves Lily out of identificatory features she had taken on from her own mother ( Lacan calls these features the first traits of sublimation, which from one’s own “ideal ego”), thus weaving together the threads of Wharton’s own being. Lily is not as intelligent and creative as Edith Wharton was. But she fits Wharton’s mother’s ideal of beauty as the key to success. Wharton herself was not “beautiful,” as she thought her mother to have been. Thus, Lily incarnates in a static manner (visualized in the tableaux vivants scene) what Edith herself must have taken to be the essence of a woman-beauty. Trying to answer the hysteric’s question-What is a woman? -at the level of physical beauty, Wharton describes Lily at the Wellington Brys’s party, where she is dressed as a simple portrait: ( 468~469)