image CHAPTER 18
EDITH WHARTON’S TWILIGHT
In the midst of a stream of people passing through Grand Central Station in the afternoon, Lawrence Selden pauses, his eyes refreshed by the sight of the radiant Miss Lily Bart. Wearing, as he notes, “an air of irresolution” that might be “the mask of a very definite purpose” (3) she stands apart from the crowd. Unlike the others, she does not rush forward to the street, nor does she move back toward the platform. She is simply standing, arrested on this threshold, as if waiting for something. She strikes him as one who is determined to act, but as yet uncertain how to do so. The sight of this twenty-nine-year-old woman hesitating among the rushing crowd serves as the visual point of departure for Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). Selden approaches Lily, who always raises speculations in him whenever he sees her; he discovers that because she has missed her train to Bellomont, she is only too happy to pass the next two hours with him. Still ruminating over her vigorous and exquisite appearance, he escorts her out onto Madison Avenue, where a rapid shower has “cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly over the moist street” (5). Yet the minute the sun comes out again, Lily interrupts her companion’s mental speculations, asking him whether they might not seek refuge in one of the side streets where there is more shade, and where, by coincidence, his apartment is located. His building is called the Benedick, proverbial for a bachelor since Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
By stepping out of the sunlight and following Selden to his rooms, Lily involves herself in the murky attraction that emanates from him. Throughout the novel, his gaze will cast an unfavorable light on her dream of marrying into New York society; instead, it will cause her to privilege the scintillation of twilight as her stage and state of mind. At this point, Lily is still confident that her exquisite appearance will help her achieve the life of luxury for which she has been raised, but that she cannot finance with her own slim means. Selden, who considers himself a mere spectator to the world of New York wealth, assumes that because he is not rich, “he could never be a factor in her calculations” other than as a friend in whom she might confide. In perfect correspondence to this unmarried woman’s state of transition, her beauty is visually augmented on this auspicious afternoon by the fact that she displays it in the dark but cheerful interior of his library. She should not be here on her own and both of them know it, yet she is known for taking risks. She realizes she must begin a new life even though she seems to have no real options. To choose to earn her livelihood, as does Selden’s cousin Gerty Farish, would mean giving up the life of leisure inextricably enmeshed with her self-image. For this reason she can do nothing other than follow the rules of the New York marriage market to the letter. Nevertheless, she allows Selden to express his reservations because she herself begins to suspect that some inner force prevents her from sticking to her calculations.
Just in time to catch the next train to Bellomont, she leaves the young man who, like the double in gothic narratives, threatens to thwart her pursuit of happiness. At her friend Judy Trenor’s country estate, she hopes to persuade the wealthy Percy Gryce to propose marriage. A few hours later, she will again stand apart from the others in the silvery light of autumn dusk and imagine a day without financial worries. Yet the tableaux vivants that she incessantly performs in the elegant homes of her wealthy friends gives voice to the aporia at the heart of any life scheme taking its cue from twilight. The radiance emanating from her exquisite appearance keeps day and night suspended, and she remains on the threshold with the potential to move in one or the other direction. If she were to make a good match, she would be able to fully enter into an everyday of leisure and prosperity. If, however, she does not find a rich man willing to marry her, she will disappear completely from New York society’s sight. This would be tantamount to a living death, because the beauty on which her self-fashioning utterly depends, is equally contingent on the attention her wealthy friends are willing to pay her. Although Eliot’s Dorothea is willing to take a life of inconspicuousness into the bargain if this is the price she must pay for everyday happiness, the heroine of The House of Mirth refuses to cede to the ordinary everyday. She has convinced herself that “she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines; to become a worker among workers, and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded” (316).
Instead, Lily sparkles on the eve of the twentieth century, the last of a highly specialized species, a “rare flower grown for exhibition” (334). After her father died and his business was bankrupted, her mother placed all her hopes in Lily’s brilliant marriage prospects. With her clever self-performance, Lily enacts the luminescence of this inherited maternal dream. She cannot live an inconspicuous life because her eye-catching appearance is the only asset she possesses. If her survival in New York society is inextricably enmeshed with rare beauty, she can only exist if she shows herself to others. The perfect backdrop for this self-display is a twilight that neither conceals her in the pure dark of inconspicuousness, nor dissipates her in the pure light of the ordinary everyday. Instead, she occupies a threshold and it is as yet uncertain whether it leads into an eternal night or a new day. Change is imminent, even if the direction it will take remains unclear. At this point in Lily’s life everything is still open, yet action is urgently required. Lily knows better than anyone else that twilight is a fragile moment, whose charm, like her beauty, lies in its transience.
Like Middlemarch, Wharton’s passage to night’s end terminates in a final comment on how her heroine will be remembered. During the last two years of Lily’s life, on which The House of Mirth sheds light, she stands at an ethical impasse. She can’t make a decision, yet she knows she can’t remain undecided. She gambles away her chance with Percy Gryce and, owing to financial worries, gets involved in shady deals with Gus Trenor, her friend Judy’s husband. She realizes too late that he is speculating for her on the stock market hoping for sexual favors in return. To flee his ugly demands, she embarks on a second shady transaction, accompanying a friend, Bertha Dorset, to the south of France; Bertha needs someone to distract her husband while she pursues a clandestine love affair. Once Bertha can no longer keep her adultery secret, she unscrupulously maligns Lily. As a result, Lily’s aunt changes her will, bequeathing to her unruly niece only a fraction of the fortune she had hoped to inherit. Lily’s last-ditch attempt to make a living as a milliner fails as well and her poverty will ultimately place her in a position of having to make what can only be a false choice. If she accepts Simon Rosedale’s proposal of marriage, she will be morally compromised. He will only take her if she makes public Bertha’s love letters to Selden, which Lily was able to secretly obtain. Her social rehabilitation will be at the price of compromising her rival. Her only other option is equally compromising. To save face before her own moral self-judgment, Lily can use her scant inheritance to pay off Gus Trenor, a decision that would bring with it the poverty she so greatly fears.
In Middlemarch, all the ethical deliberations that allowed Dorothea to relinquish her dreams and leave her house of mourning took place at night. In a somewhat different vein, Wharton has her heroine use the night to set a course of action such that she misses out on every opportunity that might lead her into the safe harbor of marriage. At the end of her night, Lily will resolve the attitude of indecision that is so endemic to her nature by sliding into the arms of Morpheus. The world of twilight, in which she puts her expectations exquisitely on display, is only viable for as long as she can withhold the sexual promise signified by her rarefied beauty. It is no coincidence that an evening entertainment at the Brys, another wealthy New York family, offers her the perfect stage for this fragile and transient self-performance. In retrospect, her tableau vivant appears as the climax of the festivities, because she deftly blurs the “boundary world between fact and imagination.” Although the other women adapt their appearance to mythic figures painted by the old masters, Lily chooses the portrait of Mrs. Lloyd, by the British court painter Reynolds, staging herself in imitation of this late eighteenth century upper class married woman of leisure. The astonishing effect of her performance is that it “was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’ canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.”
The magic charm of this moment allows Selden to convince himself that “for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part” (142). Her tableau vivant also renders visible the fugacity at the heart of her being, not least of all because the simplicity of the dress foregrounds the shape of her physical body. Lily’s shameless self-performance has recourse to the rhetoric of magical thinking in that it allows her spectators to think that they can recognize the inner truth of a person in her material embodiment of an image. Yet Lily also renders visible the mutual implication of revelation and dissolution at issue whenever someone puts herself on public display. Aesthetic texts are fundamentally fascinated with the night because, as a stage and state of mind, it allows figurations to come to the fore that the rationality of the ordinary cannot think. As the star of this evening entertainment, Lily claims that artificiality is the force that determines her being, but also her destiny. She can either take shape radiantly in artfully lit scenes or disappear completely from sight, extinguished in the darkness of inconspicuousness. Wharton conceives the twilight world that her heroine cannot leave as a set of coordinates that stands in contrast to the one proposed by the Enlightenment project. Although on its map of knowability rational thinking allocates to the night those realms that it cannot determine with clarity, Wharton’s mapping assigns to the day the place her aesthetic language cannot embellish.
In The House of Mirth, the day is the time for increasing the wealth one freely spends at night. Money is earned by honest work or speculation on the stock market. Although, in the daytime, men conduct their business in such a way as to determine who will move up in New York’s society and who will be excluded from it, women are the ones who regulate the morals and manners of this world. They use the day to plan the evening events during which they can put their family’s wealth on display, by dressing in expensive clothes, organizing sumptuous dinners, and putting on lavish entertainments. Their world of luxury and leisure, overcast by moral shadows, can unfold itself only apart from the ordinary everyday, achieving its true glamour in artificially lit interiors. In contrast to the day, Wharton’s text paints these nocturnal scenes of splendor and intrigue by differentiating between those that are openly available to the public eye and those that must remain in the clandestine shadows because they serve as sites for shady transactions. The public nightlife of the upper classes not only offers Lily the perfect stage for a performance of her radiant beauty, but also serves as the place in which rumor casts her in an unfavorable light. Gossip, also a child of Nyx, perpetrates judgments that often lack evidence; thus, it belongs as much to the world of twilight as Lily’s tableaux vivants, given that both take on substance by sustaining the tension between reality and imagination.
In this twilight world, Bertha Dorset is Lily’s nemesis. She gets Percy Gryce to abruptly leave Bellomont by painting for him the image of Lily playing bridge for money with other women. Later in the novel in her account of the scandal in Monte Carlo, Lily is turned into the heroine of a risqué affair. By thwarting the calculations of her rival with her malignant gossip, Bertha also gives shape to the inner demons that repeatedly cause Lily to undermine her own intentions. Bertha not only represents the law of intrigue determining the night side of New York’s high society, she also compels Lily to realize how easily she might become the accomplice of a morally compromising alliance. In Monte Carlo, as a sign of her ominous premonition that things are about to turn into a crisis, Lily has the vision of a knife glittering in the twilight, which reminds her of Bertha’s earlier betrayal. The fact that she does not listen to this inner warning is less an indication that she is inattentive to the morally ambiguous situation in which she finds herself; instead, it reveals that it is impossible for her to decide in favor of taking on an unequivocal position in this society. As Judy Trenor had noted early on, Lily works like “a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic” (261). A fundamental doubt regarding the day and the prosperous marriage it is meant to hold for her keeps Lily in the twilight.
On Wharton’s map of New York society’s nightlife, public nights border on private ones that determine far more distinctly Lily’s ultimate abdication from this world. The most fatal of these nocturnal scenes involves Lily’s shady association with Gus Trenor, whom she falsely believes will help her overcome her financial difficulties. Judy had once asked Lily to meet her husband at the train station and, on their way back to Bellomont, Lily prolonged their drive beyond dusk so as to enter into a morally murky deal with him. In the fading light she appears to him as a picture of beauty in distress and so he assures her that, were she to trust him, he could earn a tidy sum of money for her on the stock market. The fact that the details of their agreement remain obscure corresponds to the moral twilight upon which they have embarked. Although Lily can use the fading light of dusk to pretend not to see the power she is unwittingly ceding to Gus, the crafty businessman will bring about a situation in which she will be unable to evade his lascivious demands. A few weeks later he asks her to visit him in his home on Fifth Avenue late in the evening, where she realizes that he has played a trick on her. To force her to finally pay up what he feels she owes him, he has neglected to tell her that Judy changed her plans at the last minute and stayed in Bellomont.
The humiliation Lily feels at being asked to grant sexual favors in reward for the money he has made for her on the stock market renders visible both her vulnerability and her complicity, plunging her “drowning consciousness” into emotional chaos. After having made his foolish demand on her love, Gus stands “like the sleep-walker waked on a deathly ledge” (155) in front of her, stammering that she must go away, thus letting Lily determine how their nocturnal meeting will play out. The collapse of his will restores control to her and she is able to leave the house. However, unbeknownst to her, Selden sees her and thinks the worst. In the hansom that takes her to Gerty’s apartment, “reaction came, and shuddering darkness closed on her.” In this midnight hour, her dream of a leisured life of prosperity turns into ethical doubt regarding the life scheme she has been pursuing up to now. Driving through the nightscape, she sees herself in a new light: “She seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves in her, the one she had always known, and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained.” As in her tableau vivant at the Brys’s evening entertainment, she appropriates the image of another. This time however, her choice is not a woman who has achieved the social recognition she desires, but the tragic Greek hero Orestes, lighting upon the Furies asleep in the cave of the oracle. She imagines that these remorseless daughters of Nyx will hunt her down, reminding herself that “the Furies might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the dark corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their wings was in her brain.”
This experience of nocturnal chaos corresponds to a moment of sober awakening. With open eyes, Lily takes note of the unbridgeable divide now separating her past life from the one to which this midnight hour has given birth; she conceives it as a struggle between day and night: “Everything in the past seemed simple, natural, full of daylight—and she was alone in a place of darkness and pollution” (156). Any return to her previous self-confidence will prove impossible, even if Lily has not yet reached her moral night’s end. Rather than assuming responsibility, which would amount to assuming responsibility for her own nocturnal furies, she undertakes a further flight into the imaginary. Illuminated by the mild glow of Gerty’s fireplace, she may not confess to her friend the intricacies of what just happened, but she does offer a revealing explanation as to why she cannot be by herself that night: “I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts” (173). Although she recognizes that the furies haunting her embody the night side of her social ambition, it is still impossible for her to make a choice regarding something she knows she cannot afford not to decide. She correctly suspects that, were she left alone that night, she would paint a portrait of herself that would make it impossible for her to deny that she has morally compromised herself. She is not yet ready, however, to renounce her rarified self-performances; thus, she stages a different living image for Gerty.
In contrast to the beauty in distress she had presented to Gus Trenor during their fateful coach ride and the self-confident royalty she had put on display at the Brys’s evening entertainment, she now casts herself as a siren, wishing to be saved from her self-chosen depravity. As though anticipating the way Billy Wilder’s femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson ultimately passes judgment on herself, she admits, “I am bad through and through—I want admiration, I want excitement, I want money” (175). But in contrast to the heroines of film noir, Lily also wants to claim her moral innocence. This night she has experienced the humiliating consequences of her dream of luxury and leisure. Yet she wants to pit her dream of salvation from moral sin and economic debts against the terrible recognition that she can escape neither the judgment of others nor her own self-judgment. Gerty is willing to support her friend’s flight into the imaginary, as though her appropriation of the Virgin Mary’s role as protective Madonna was meant to counteract Lily’s invocation of Nyx’s furious daughters. Having assured Lily that Selden will help her, Gerty asks her to share her bed, where they lie down side by side in the darkness. To protect her distraught friend from all evil dreams, Gerty silently slips an arm under her, “pillowing her head in its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child” (176).
The Jewish businessman Simon Rosedale could save Lily and his wealth could afford her the life of leisure she seeks. Indeed, the offer he makes the following afternoon belongs entirely to the day. It is a straightforward, if morally murky, business proposition. Although he is aware that she does not love him, he believes that they can help each other. In contrast to Gus Trenor, who requires the cover of night’s darkness to make his illicit demand for repayment, Rosedale lays the conditions for the redemption he proposes out in the open. To gild his own social ascension in the anti-Semitic upper society of New York, a wife possessing the rare refinement that Lily does would be an asset. The fact that she rejects his sober request once more renders visible how she prefers to tarry in the twilight of indecision. After the scandal in Monte Carlo she relents and, plagued by financial worries, she reminds him of this marriage proposal. Although the second offer Rosedale makes is morally far shadier, it nevertheless continues to be measured by the rules of the day. He is still in need of a decorative wife, although she must stand in a favorable light in the eyes of society. His new offer is still a business proposition. He can only offer his hand in marriage, thereby assuring her a shared tomorrow, if Lily is willing to use the letters she was able to procure in secret to blackmail Bertha Dorset into retracting the malicious gossip she has been perpetrating about her former friend.
Rosedale’s shrewd barter reopens the tempting vision of a future without worries but also confronts Lily with an ethical choice. Noting that “all her world was dark outside the monstrous glare of his scheme,” what horrifies her is not the proposal itself, but “rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost cravings” (271). Suddenly the path that would allow her to realize her life scheme is once again open to her. Yet she also recognizes the price she will have to pay. She can only defeat her rival by herself having recourse to the night side of morality. Her sober assessment of her situation forces Lily to recognize unequivocally the impossibility of becoming part of New York society without making moral compromises. The afternoon she spent in the shade of Selden’s bachelor rooms when he revealed his negative appraisal of the life of luxury she strives for introduced magical thinking into her carefully calculated marriage schemes. In her mind, Selden is the patron of her decision to tarry in a state of indecision, so that she might remain untouched by the illicit dealings that make up the actual everyday business of New York society. That day he followed her to Bellomont, arriving there unexpectedly at sunset and during the dinner his presence shed a new light on her surroundings. The marriage to Percy Gryce she had in her mind up to that point painted in rosy colors took on a dingy and shabby hue.
Throughout the novel, Selden also stands in for temptation; he is the only one who wants Lily to stop and take into account the fact that any allegedly brilliant marriage must end in an everyday that is as ordinary as the life Gerty leads as a single working woman. His disenchanting gaze seeks to make her accept that any day coming after her current period of transition (in which she resiliently fashions new living images of herself) is a day without dreams. All indecisiveness will be resolved. Ironically, Selden thus serves to boost her tendency to remain in the scintillating twilight world in which she might be able to sustain her existence as a lived image. The afternoon they spend together the day after their shared dinner at Bellomont is a “dawning of intimacy” (71) that interrupts Lily’s carefully calculated scheme of life. The piece of twilight Selden embodies for her thrives on the power of contingency to recalculate the clear provisions of the day and open up new possibilities that might mean giving up a plan already formulated. He becomes a living reminder of the idea that everything could be different. He not only evokes a darker future than the one she counts on by forcing her to take into account what she already knows; namely, that the prosperity she dreams of will bore her once it has become an ordinary reality; he also inspires a far riskier dream.
After they have shared a mock marriage proposal, during which Lily asserts “if marrying you is one of them, I will take the risk,” they rise from where they have been sitting to find that the “soft isolation of the falling day enveloped them.” Together they imagine what the intimacy might look like that would force both of them to recalculate their future prospects—Selden’s staunch bachelordom and Lily’s prospects of a marriage of means. They stand in silence for a while, smiling at each other “like adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height from which they discover a new world. The actual world at their feet was veiling itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear moon rose in the denser blue” (76). The world they can share is that of twilight, separate from the everyday in a double sense. It is marked by an unusual emotional intensity even while it lacks all grounding in reality. The alternative Selden can offer to Lily lies in the realm of sustained expectation, suspended between an abandonment of prior life schemes and an attempt to realize the new world that, in this hour of romantic enchantment, they have imagined together. The “black object” that rushes across their vision along the high road below in the surrounding twilight causes them to start from their absorption and recover their separate hold on the actual. Only the spark that flickers from his burning cigarette illuminates the silent agreement between them that leaves everything open. She asks him whether he was serious in offering marriage and he replies, “Why not?” adding, “I took no risks in being so” (77).
After this shared twilight, his appearance repeatedly has “the effect of cheapening her aspirations, of throwing her whole world out of focus” (92). His nearness, however, also makes her more brilliant, because it invokes “this glimpse of a twilight mood to which he alone had the clue,” repeatedly setting him in a “world apart with her” (99). After her performance at the Brys’s he goes with her into the “transparent dimness of a midsummer night,” leading the way to a deserted garden behind the house. The “unreality of the scene” is “part of their own dream-like sensations” (144). Only in the fleetingness of a magic moment can his kiss seal their intimacy, given that their love has no prospects in the day. This exquisite moment also underscores Lily’s indecisiveness as she appeals to Selden: “Ah, love me, love me—but don’t tell me so.” She then turns and slips through “the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the room beyond” (145). Selden, although too seldom in her life to make her act, is kept at bay so as to stand in for a possibility her rational calculations forbid her but that, in her dreams, she wants to keep open. Since their meeting at Grand Central Station he has inspired in her the idea of a transition into something new. Similarly for Selden, the prospect of saving Lily, born of the unreality of this nocturnal scene, remains a dream. Although he had hesitated to propose marriage up to this point, Lily’s tableau vivant allows him to enter a state of passionate self-absorption. In this living form he believes he has recognized a companion who could become the center of his life.
His conviction that she would give up her marriage schemes out of love for him recalls the scene of their first kiss, although now under a different sign. The “hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with sunset, but with dawn” (165). The degree to which this dream vision lacks all substance is rendered visible by the fact that every shadow that might mar his image of an immaculate Lily transforms his confidence into immediate suspicion. After the evening entertainment at the Brys’s he has convinced himself that he can distinguish between society’s judgment of her and his own insight into her true nature. However, when he sees Lily leaving the barely lit house of the Trenors in New York in the middle of the night, his love turns to contempt. The unpleasant light that rumor sheds on her takes its effect. Her dark silhouette, illuminated only by the back light from the entrance hall, represents a morally murky tableau vivant that he adjusts to his emotions. It reflects the feeling of jealousy that overcomes him at that moment, just as her perfect reenactment of Mrs. Lloyd’s portrait at the Brys’s evoked his fantasy that he was chosen to save her. To Selden, who only notices Lily when she is not standing in direct sunlight, the shadow hanging over this dodgy scene corresponds to his suspicion. As a dream figure whom he only seldom sees, Lily can either guarantee his perfect love or be nothing to him, and so he turns from her in disgust.
Suspending its heroine between her radiant public night life and her private twilight trysts, The House of Mirth also maps the moral nights Lily spends by herself. In Bellomont, a nocturnal settling of accounts begins that will pass through various stages as she moves to her personal night’s end. Having left the card game and returned to her room, Lily looks over her bank statements and is compelled to hold herself accountable for her losses. She tries to convince herself that she has had a bad streak of luck, falling back on the magical thinking her appropriated glamour privileges over diurnal reason. The bridge game serves as a trope for how Lily’s future depends on calculations she makes regarding her marriage scheme, but also on the favor of the women with whom she discusses this gamble. As she looks at herself in a mirror illuminated by candlelight, she detects two wrinkles around her mouth, traces of those financial worries that she cannot banish from her thoughts when she is alone. Separated from the admiring gazes of others, she will repeatedly use her nights to deliberate if she can ward off the threat of impoverishment through further speculations, whether these are at the gambling table or in the marriage market. She decides not to burn the letters compromising Bertha Dorset, choosing instead to store them in a dispatch box in her closet. In doing so, she pits fortune against the other two daughters of Nyx who relentlessly hunt her down: anxiety about money and the malicious vengeance of her rivals.
The night’s solitude offers up a stage and state of mind in which Lily is forced to confront her own thoughts; she can recognize both her debts and her moral guilt more clearly than in the day. After her ugly encounter with Gus, she realizes that to regain her self-esteem she will have to repay her debt to him. In the seclusion of her own room the following evening she begins to write a letter to Rosedale to accept his proposal of marriage, but changes her mind and instead accepts Bertha’s invitation to accompany her to the Côte d’Azur. During the night following the reading of her aunt’s will, she takes stock of her financial loss in an equally clear-sighted manner. She will not allow herself to palliate her situation and, reviewing “the train of consequences” in “an uncompromising light” (238), she admits that as an accomplice to Bertha’s immoral love gamble, she had put herself at risk. The condemnation of New York society she received was always in the cards. During these moral deliberations she repeatedly alights upon new schemes that might help her regain the position she has lost through her own miscalculation. As a result, the night becomes a time of wakefulness. It is increasingly more difficult to find the sleep that would allow her conscious mind to take a rest from her financial worries. Her nocturnal vigilance forces her to face the furies of both her financial debts and the ethical guilt.
Even if her insomnia does not bring the decision she needs to embark on a happier day, it offers an unequivocal insight into the aporia of her existence. The cost of living a life of leisure and luxury are as morally unbearable as the thought of giving up her dream of prosperity. Faced with the impossible possibilities available to her, she recognizes that her twilight world will always stand under the sign of indebtedness. Yet what also keeps her awake at night is the hidden fear that she might one day grow used to the debt she owes men like Gus. To act ethically means using the night to set up the course of events in such a way that she will not fall prey to moral laxity the next morning; something that is brought on, she believes, by her incurable fear of poverty. Staunchly tarrying in her twilight world corresponds to a rejection of an ordinary everyday that would either result in being deprived of or forgetting the ethical vigilance she can only cultivate at night. Her indecisiveness already contains a decision. She must not awake into a new day that might once again obscure this ethical discernment. She must shun any diurnal existence that would banish the furies that keep her awake at night; she must ensure she avoids this moral sleep that would prevent her from acknowledging what she cannot afford not to know. Yet because this wakefulness drains her physically and mentally, she must repeatedly suppress it. The sleeping drug she now relies on offers a short-term relief. The sleep it grants seems to her like the “depths of dreamless annihilation from which she woke each morning with an obliterated past” (310).
One last time, Lily considers using Bertha Dorset’s letters to her advantage and so she sets out at dusk to visit her rival. Passing by Selden’s place, she crosses the dark, empty street, drawn by the light in his window. Once again, his presence compels her to divert from a path that would lead into a morally compromised day. During her first visit she sought refuge from the heat of the September sun. Now the “shaded lamps and the warm hearth, detaching itself from the gathering darkness of the street,” gives a “sweeter touch of intimacy” (321) to his bachelor rooms. A “strange state of extra-lucidity” (322) guides her passionate desire to be understood by him. Repeatedly, his judgment of her prevented her from turning into a live embodiment of the immoral image many people have of her. Knowing Selden’s constraint, she immediately recognizes the impossibility of obtaining the sympathy she seeks. Yet she does not want to relinquish the memory of their exquisite twilight moments in which they had been able to find a way to each other. She confesses to him that several times his advice had given her the chance to escape from her life but she lacked the courage to do so. Knowing he had judged her made her realize that although it was too late for happiness, “it was not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed”; imagining him as her judge had become “like a little light in the darkness” (324). With this confession Lily anticipates the end of her life of indecision, admitting that the happiness she missed has seamlessly transformed into an insight that it is now also irretrievable.
Like Dorothea who, during her final nocturnal struggle, relinquishes her dream image of Will as the creature bringing light into the prison house of her marriage, Lily also takes leave of the image of herself she has seen reflected in Selden. The “Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time,” she explains, “but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you—I am going to leave her here” (325). Her implication is that he imagined a future for her that was different from her marriage schemes and whenever she was in his presence she could share this vision. In contrast to Dorothea, Lily’s abdication from this mutual dream does not lead to the question of what she should do that day in the interest of many days to come; instead, the decision Lily unexpectedly alights upon ensures that there will be no tomorrow for her. In the last tableau vivant she performs in the text, now exclusively for Selden and even more effective than her crowning self-performance at the Brys’s evening entertainment, she kneels on the hearthrug and stretches her hands to the embers in his fireplace. Then, with an almost imperceptible gesture, she consigns Bertha’s letters to the rising light of the flames. Selden enjoys once more the sight of her transient beauty. Long after the event, he remembers “the red play of the flame sharpened the depression of her nostrils, and intensified the blackness of the shadows which struck up from her cheekbones to her eyes” (326). He hardly notices the gesture at the time because, as he will also remember afterward, his “faculties seemed tranced, and he was still groping for the word to break the spell” (327). Although the charm this living image casts on Selden is so strong that he loses all command over his speech, for Lily this unnoticed gesture is tantamount to a renunciation of all nocturnal imaginings, whether of revenge or justice.
The magical thinking that had sustained her radiant self-performances turns into Christian illumination. Her salvation, she realizes, does not lie in the dream of being saved by Selden but in sacrificing herself to her dream of luxury and leisure. Twilight has long transformed into night when Lily begins wandering along the silent streets of Manhattan, tarrying a while in Bryant Park to defer the insomnia awaiting her in her room. As complete darkness falls on the square, Lily sits “looming black in the white circle of electric light” (329), attracting the curious glances of passersby. One of them is Nettie Struther, to whom Lily had given the money she needed to go to a resting home in the country and cure her tuberculosis. Frightened by Lily’s wan appearance, Nettie asks her to come home with her. She leads Lily into her kitchen to show her the daughter Nettie hopes will grow up to be like the elegant woman whose generosity restored her mother’s health and made it possible for her to give birth. In this nocturnal kitchen, a different kind of spell is cast from the one in Selden’s living room. The strength that shines forth from this mother proudly holding her child on her knees rekindles a spark of vitality in Lily. By taking Nettie’s child into her arms, she silently assumes a responsibility for life, which is to say, for an understanding of her own life as having passed something of herself on to this other person: “At first the burden in her arms seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as she continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the child entered into her and became a part of herself” (333).
This, too, is a nocturnal transaction. The living image of Lily holding the child in her arms is the embodiment of a dream she now shares with Nettie. In contrast to the quiet parting from Selden with which Lily silently sealed the irretrievability of their shared happiness, a birth is tacitly celebrated in Nettie’s kitchen. In Nettie’s daughter, Lily will live on, not as the rare creature Selden thought he had to save, but as the radiant benefactress whose gift made a new day possible for Nettie and her family. The charmed image of Lily fusing with the child of another woman is what accompanies her as she walks back into the night. Under the auspices of this enchantment by another woman she can finally dissolve her own twilight existence. Back in her own room she once more spreads out her precious wardrobe. As she puts each piece of clothing back into the trunk, she lays “away with each some gleam of light, some note of laughter, some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure” (335). She locks away all the insignia of her life of borrowed luxury. With the evening mail a letter from her deceased aunt’s bank arrives, including the check for her scant inheritance.
One last time Lily opens her check book and, as in “her vigil at Bellomont,” takes advantage of the nocturnal silence to do her accounts. The dwindling prospects of material ease and, more importantly, the inner destitution she can look forward to were she to lead “a shabby, anxious middle-age,” compels her to see her past self as “something rootless and ephemeral,” blown hither and thither with no “real relation to life” (336). She realizes that in Nettie’s kitchen she had her “first glimpse of the continuity of life,” standing in stark contrast to the lives of the prosperous friends who have all turned from her. In hindsight, all the men and women she knew were like “atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance.” In her heroine’s acknowledgment of the strength it took this working-girl to “gather up the fragments of her, and build herself a shelter with them” (337), Wharton offers her paean to the ordinary, whose force resides in the fact that, in contrast to Eliot, she denies it to her heroine.
The solitude she can no longer conceal from herself after her visit to Selden propels Lily toward a radical ethical act. If she can neither hope for a life of prosperity nor dream of escaping with Selden, she is left with only one choice, to abandon herself to “the emptiness of renunciation” (338). A “vivid wakeful fatigue, a wan lucidity of mind against which all the possibilities of the future were shadowed forth gigantically” calls forth her final accounting that conflates moral reckoning with an economic negotiation. Appalled by the “intense clearness of the vision,” she seems to have broken through the “merciful veil” of twilight, which had intervened between intention and action. She realizes that dawn threatens to bring with it her “habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate,” and she therefore prefers to bring about her own destitution that night. She encloses the check for her inheritance in an envelope addressed to her bank and writes out a last check to Gus Trenor. The latter, she places into another envelope addressed to him, with no accompanying words. She sits at the table, “sorting her papers and writing” (338); the “mysterious separation from all outward signs” she experiences corresponds to the material depletion of the world she has brought about in signing over her money to her creditor. The silence and emptiness around her make her feel “as though the house, the street, the world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless universe.”
She is not overcome by the ecstasy of dawn heralding a new day, but by a sense of exhilaration verging on delirium that gives her the impression that she had never “hung so near the dizzy brink of the unreal.” With everything around her disappearing into the night, Lily approaches the abyss that Maurice Blanchot calls the other night (autre nuit). She moves toward that self-dissolution to which all her dreams had always referred even while shielding this void from her conscious mind. The threshold Lily crosses leads to something new, to an existence beyond all expectations, to the redemptive release from all expectations; she has finally acknowledged how unsustainable they were. She is overwhelmed by an inner illumination “as though a great blaze of electric light turned on in her head” (339). Her nocturnal writing heralds not only the dawn of the other night of self’s dissolution in death lying beyond all earthly days and nights; it also anticipates the dawn of a modern notion of self-authorship, one that Virginia Woolf perfects two decades later, as the final chapter argues. The modern subject, arriving at her night’s end at an insight into the abyss of her existence and attaining self-understanding, transfers the world she spiritually inhabits into the writing of literature. In Lily’s act, this modern notion of self-authorship is performed in the one medium she perfected throughout her brief life. It is written not on paper but with her body.
According to Blanchot, the psychic experience of limit induced by the other night calls forth imaginings from which the material world recedes as a point of reference. It leads into an outside that is detached from all earthly grounding. The subject disappears in this outside, appears as having disappeared, replaced by the textual signs that prompt its disappearance. If up to this point, Lily orchestrated her appearance as a living image, she now takes shape as a self-engendered medium bringing forth such mental images. The “multiplication of wakefulness” made possible by the other night she enters into is a state in which she sees that “her whole past was reenacting itself at a hundred different points of consciousness.” Shaped by her mental images, it is at the same time detached from her, a separate spectacle. This doubling of the self announces the erasure of her actual bodily presence. Against this surplus of images, she pits the “brief bath of oblivion” that a raised dose of her sleeping potion promises. The House of Mirth begins with Lily fleeing from the autumn sun into the shadow of Selden’s room and culminates in her flight into a sleep that may be a “sleep without waking” (339). The desire for darkness outweighs the risk. Her mind shrinks “from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes contract in a blaze of light” (340).
The other night of death that will follow this spiritual illumination merely completes the self-erasure that the writing of the two checks and the sorting of her papers announced. The dizzying experience of the unreal that allowed her to see that the only world she could exist in was one that was separate from her, cannot be carried back into the realm of twilight she has perfected as her stage and state of mind. The spiritual illumination of this night, having led into the other night, can only culminate in a pure darkness whose emptiness is the same as pure light. Over the body she had so brilliantly put on display, she completes the reverse cosmogony that lets everything fall back into a formless darkness, “as though an invisible hand made magic pass over her.” Waiting for sleep to finally come, it seems “delicious to lean over and look down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness,” even while she notes that each “passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn,” so that it takes longer than usual for her to drop into abeyance. Finally, however, even the sense of loneliness and uncertainty vanishes, which had prompted this scene of self-abdication throughout the nocturnal scenes through which she has passed.
Two final dream visions rise from the darkness of her death-bringing sleep. Lily imagines Nettie’s child lying on her arm, feels the spectral pressure of its little head against her shoulder. In this moment of self-obliteration, she assumes one final tableau vivant—the mother, guarding her child’s slumber. Intuitively she “settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to pillow the round downy head, and holding her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping child.” Selden’s image briefly comes to her in the darkness as she tells herself that she has found some word that would make life clear between them. This vision of reconciliation lingers “vague and luminous on the far edge of thought” before it fades from her mind. By contrast, the hallucination of the child remains with her until she is almost completely lost in the “indistinct sense of drowsy peace.” For one brief moment she starts up, thinking she has lost hold of the child, only to notice that the “tender pressure of its body was still close to hers: recovered warmth flowed through her once more, she yielded to it, sank into it, and slept” (341). Dissolving her twilight world, Lily subjects herself to death as a mother who, in this final liminal moment, holds before her inner eye a husband and a child in the guise of the impossible possibility only the night can afford her.
Early next morning Selden hastens to her; he has found the word he meant to say to her the previous night. Convinced that it doesn’t matter that he let her pass from him without speaking it because it “was not a word for twilight, but for the morning” (342), he eagerly enters through the open door, only to find an “irresistible sunlight.” Pouring a “tempered golden flood into the room” it illuminates Lily’s final tableau mort. On the bed he sees “with motionless hands and calm unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart.” The “estranged and tranquil face” is that of a strange woman, who neither pales nor brightens at his coming. At first he believes that death’s impediment is nothing more than the “little impalpable barrier” (344) his restraint had drawn to keep them apart. Then he discovers the letter addressed to Gus Trenor and is once more filled with ugly suspicions. It is only upon scrutinizing her checkbook that he is forced to account for his own moral failure. Kneeling by her as she did in front of his fireplace he imagines, in a final reversion of magical thinking, that “in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear” (347).
Because it can only be addressed to Lily’s dead body, this secret word is indeed not a word for twilight but for the morning. It forces Selden to wake into a state of sober mourning. He can reconcile himself by interpreting her parting kiss on his forehead as oblique evidence of her love. Yet he must also ruefully acknowledge his own guilt. To wake from the twilight into which he had been drawn since their chance meeting in Grand Central Station two years earlier means assuming a responsibility that Wharton calls “the courage not to accuse himself for having failed to reach the height of his opportunity” (347). Relinquishing all reproaches against both Lily and himself is tantamount to renouncing the egoistic dreams that had been their shared ground. The understanding that passes silently between them lies beyond expectations and their disenchantment. Sustained by the certainty of death, this is Lily’s legacy to him, her corpse a frozen image of redemption, enacted for his morning.
For both Eliot’s and Wharton’s heroines, waking up entails carrying a piece of night into the day as its indelible ground and vanishing point. Lily’s self-dissolution on the eve of the twentieth century anticipates the modern recognition that to read the end of the night is tantamount to a self-engendered release from all nocturnal imaginings. The dispersal of the dreaming subject that goes hand in hand with reaching night’s end leaves its effects in the day. In Middlemarch, Dorothea sets up the course her life will take at night to ensure her future happiness in the days to come, even if this means an inconspicuous life in the ordinary. Gambling with her life, Lily uses the night to assure that in death she will have her final brilliant effect the day after. By relinquishing their nocturnal imaginings, both heroines reconfigure the night. Their fate renders visible how the night invariably catches up with all life schemes made in and for the day, even while drawing attention to the fact that any insight gained in and from the night must be refigured under the sign of the day. A willingness to take upon oneself a new day emerges as the ability to face the fatal consequences of one’s dreams and, by relinquishing them, to take responsibility for the insight born in the night. Dawn breaks for both of them so that out of the sacrifices made at night—indeed, a sacrifice of the night—something new can begin.