Lidoff, Joan. “Another Sleeping Beauty: Narcissism in The House of Mirth” American Quarterly 32(1980): 519-39.

1.These fairy-tale expectations are generated by the emotional structure of the plot; they are thwarted by that same structure. Lily dies at the novel’s end, destroyed by the tyranny of social manners; but she is first the victim of the limitations of Wharton’s fictive world. Richard Chase has declared that “whenever it turns out to be a brilliant and memorable book, the American novel of manners will also be a romance.” The House of Mirth.  I wish to argue, is primarily a romance of identity. Though it purports to be a novel of social realism (which Gary Lindberg convincingly places in the tradition of the novel of manners), it is controlled by a deeper underlying dynamic. Before the society the novel portrays makes life impossible for Lily, the novel’s structure itself forbids the realization the character and plot seek. At the same time, Lily derives her extraordinary appeal from the nexus of primordial feelings the romance taps. ( 520)

2.The romance form generally permits resolution: an ending in which the hero reclaims the divided aspects of himself in a new personal and societal integration. Women’s heroic journeys often end in failure because society offers women no adequate forms of active adulthood. When reality thwarts the forward progress of maturation by perpetuating childlike passivity in adult roles, dissonance are felt subtly within the female psyche. Lily is unable to move towards integration; she remains locked in the regressive emotional state of primary narcissism, which in turn mirrors her fictive world. This early developmental stage is characterized by a fusion of one’s feeling and desires with the outside world. Difficult aspects of the self are projected onto others so that rather than becoming coherent and realistic, the self-concept remains idealized. In this initial mechanism of projection, romance and narcissism are alike; however, while romance allows for recognition and thus reintegration, narcissism prohibits this self -knowledge.( 521)3.Simultaneously, however, Lily derives her potency as a character from the very emotional configuration which dooms her. In her later, more perfectly structured novel, The Age of Innocence, Wharton controls in a more balanced way the feeling she releases with Lily Bart; but no single character in that novel has quite Lily’s appeal. Wharton’s language most clearly reveals the potent emotional sources from which Lily is drawn. Lily is described by a consistent pattern of metaphors of unrestrained gratification and sensual delight that belong to the universal fantasy of Eden and appeal with the force of lost paradise. Wharton surrounds Lily with libidinal imagery of wish fulfillment. She is presented to us cushioned in pleasure: “Her whole being dialated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in” (23). Having a totally sustaining environment, where “everything in her surroundings ministered to feelings of easy and amenity”(37), is not a luxury for Lily but a necessity. Her life is nourished, like an infant’s, by an amniotic bath of sensual satisfactions. Her images are fluid: “She was like a water-plant in the flux of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was carrying her toward Lawrence Selden” (51). With Selden, “the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, the free spirit quivered for flight…”and a “sense of buoyancy…seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet”(62).( 522~523)

4.The term “narcissism” is now in vogue in the currency of social criticism. As a psychoanalytic concept, it is undergoing reformulation at the hands of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg. I mean it here neither in the diluted common usage as “self-love” nor in the clinical sense as a specific pathological personality structure. While narcissism is dysfunctional as an overall personality defense, Kohut elaborates Freud’s formulation to argue that the infant’s universally shared primary narcissism can be perpetuated in adults as one in repertory of response, a residue we retain from the infant’s initial feeling of oneness with the mother. Lily partakes both of its appeals and its dysfunctions. Derived from the intense, instinctual level of experience, the narcissistic state is wedded to libidinal energy and sensual pleasure. A striving to return to the elation of this oceanic fusion informs mythologies of Paradise and symbols of Eden’s garden. Its sensuality and illusion of oneness exercise continuing appeal in sexuality and in mythologies of romantic love.

The libidinal imagery that defines Lily and her sense of specialness are those of the infant’s Eden; the fantasy she speaks to of eternal power, wealth, youth, and beauty derives from this paradise free from both work and mortality. Originally, the infant experiences all his needs as being gratified instantaneously and completely by the nurturing mother, whom he perceives as an extension of his own being. Believe his needs and desires to be congruent with the external world, the infant does not feel the necessity of producing effects by generating causes, of earning his own satisfactions. Wishes, not actions, motivate his world. The expectation of automatic fulfillment and delight translates into a sense of specialness, of exemption from the laws of causality that govern others’ fates.

The habit of perception characteristic of infant narcissism is called “primary process thinking.” For sequential, linear causality, it substitutes symbolism and holistic magic. Monolithic, this world view does not allow the possibility of change or development; everything seems absolute, permanent. All perceptions are rigidly polarized-black or white, on or off, with no tolerance for ambiguity or doubt. The emotional affects of narcissism are either elation or despair, without modulation. ( 525~526)

5.Lily encounters a host of inadequate mother figures as she sinks from one to another down the social scale. Maternal intimacy suffers the same fate in this novel as sexual intimacy, and is in fact the model for it. The women who are concerned about Lily are made unattractive and powerless. Gerty Farish, truly generous and reliable, is persistently undercut by being made working-class, poor and drab, and a martyr who lacks sufficient sense of emotional preservation. When Carry Fisher is seen with her daughter in a maternal light, Lily finds her affection rather distasteful (as she does Rosedale’s paternal pose in the same scene). Jude Trenor, an affectionate and giving friend at the start, is seen ultimately to be only a shallow, socially contingent creature who “ could not sustain life except in a crowd”.

While Lily’s good mother figures are only ambivalently good and tend towards satiric caricature, the bad mothers are selfishly neglectful or powerfully destructive. Lily’s Aunt Penniston, her official guardian whose home Lily finds ugly and impersonal, is caricatured with some of the vicious grotesquerie with which Flannery O’ Connor images her potent and oppressive mother figures (cf. p. 32). In the money-for-love metaphor of this novel, Mrs. Penniston, the essence of female passivity and repression, gives her niece erratic gifts of money that encourage dependence, rather than the trust  necessary for autonomy and self-regard (cf. p.36). influenced by Lily’s poor cousin, Grace Stepney, the wronged and vengeful fairy-tale stepsister, Mrs. Penninston disinherits Lily. In the end, both love and money fail. ( 535)