1. science
2. social science
3. philosophy

PERFORMATIVE PATRIARCHY IN THREE
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY
NATURALIST NOVELS
____________
A Thesis
Presented
to the Faculty of
California State University, Chico
____________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
English
____________
by
Jacob Thomas Boone
Summer 2011
PERFORMATIVE PATRIARCHY IN THREE
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY
NATURALIST NOVELS
A Thesis
by
Jacob Thomas Boone
Summer 2011
APPROVED BY THE DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
AND VICE PROVOST FOR RESEARCH:
_________________________________
Eun K. Park, Ph.D.
APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:
_________________________________
Tracy Butts, Ph.D., Chair
_________________________________
Teresa Traver, Ph.D.
DEDICATION
To my Mother and Grandmothers.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Tracy Butts for her selfless
attention in helping me complete this thesis, for guiding me to expand my own thinking,
and for pushing me to create work that I am proud of. Her devotion to students at this
university is exceptional and I have greatly benefited from her tutelage. I would also like
to thank Dr. Teresa Traver for her wonderful help as well. Her scholarly attention to the
mechanics of my writing helped me tremendously. I feel blessed at having such a
wonderful committee, especially during the summer.
I would also like to thank the English professors at Chico State who have
helped me greatly through the years, specifically Dr. Lynn Houston, Dr. Geoff Baker, Dr.
John Traver, Dr. Thia Wolf, Dr. Andrea Lerner, and Dr. Rob Davidson. It is because of
all of you that I feel I’ve grown as a scholar. Thank you for fostering and expanding my
love of literature.
I want to especially thank my family for their love and support. You are the
best!
I’d also like to thank all my friends who helped me through this process,
specifically Mike Giuffrida, Kelly Candelaria, Jeremy Gerrard, Linda Rogers, and
Christina Kraker. You are all wonderful people and I am grateful for our long talks and
for being able to bounce ideas off you. Cheers!
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Dedication ..................................................................................................................
iii
Acknowledgements....................................................................................................
iv
Abstract ......................................................................................................................
vi
CHAPTER
I.
Theoretical Introduction and Overview .........................................................
1
II.
The Reinscribed Narrative in Chopin’s The Awakening................................
20
Guides/Models .......................................................................................
Performances..........................................................................................
24
34
Fulfilling the Nature of Prescribed Narrative in Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie...................................................................................................
49
III.
“Guides” and Patriarchal Expectations as Precursors
to Action/Performance .....................................................................
Performances of Patriarchal Expectations and Lack
Thereof.............................................................................................
Results/Effects .......................................................................................
73
83
The Proscribed Narrative in Wharton’s The House of Mirth.........................
89
Lily’s Understanding of the World around Her.....................................
Lily’s Influences for being a “Proper” Woman .....................................
Prompts for Action and Performance/Resulting Inaction
Non-Performance.............................................................................
Results....................................................................................................
98
103
117
125
Endnotes.....................................................................................................................
129
Works Cited ...............................................................................................................
134
IV.
v
57
ABSTRACT
PERFORMATIVE PATRIARCHY IN THREE
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY
NATURALIST NOVELS
by
Jacob Thomas Boone
Master of Arts in English
California State University, Chico
Summer 2011
This thesis examines protagonists’ paths to “failure” (and “success”) in three
naturalistic novels that appear near the turn of the twentieth century: Kate Chopin’s The
Awakening (1899), Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and Edith Wharton’s The
House of Mirth (1905). Regarding the naturalistic elements within each text, I seek to
introduce an alternative to the conventionally recognized forces (biological,
environmental, sexual, etc.) which propel characters to the fates awaiting them at the
novel’s end. I complicate the requirement of literary determinism in naturalist texts by
appropriating the works of three theorists in order to demonstrate the ways in which
characters’ forced “performances” of cultural values creates the determinism necessary to
produce the tragedies inherent in these novels. In my analysis of the narrative courses of
essentially three female and one male protagonist(s), I argue that the abiding social
vi
ideology—that of patriarchy—determines characters’ fates. Louis Althusser provides the
theory of pervasive ideology that works in humans to commit them to accepting the
established social order. Teresa de Lauretis provides the theory of the ideology of gender
which works to give “meaning” to humans through establishing them as “men” and
“women.” Finally, Judith Butler provides the theory of gender’s performativity which,
through dominant society, both compels and oftentimes limits or destroys humans in their
ability to represent themselves as individuals. In effect, I suggest that these authors
demonstrated a world that coerces people to exist in the “accepted” way and how that
world is intolerant of “other” modes of being.
vii
CHAPTER I
THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION AND
OVERVIEW
As a subgenre of the ubiquitous and well-liked literary realism, naturalism has
sufficiently generated intense discussion of what it is and what it does (or is supposed to
do). Indeed, there appears to be a lack of a concrete definition of what exactly naturalism
is. I provide a few varying definitions of “naturalism” to tease out what it is or may do. In
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, “naturalism” is briefly defined as,
. . . a more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving
a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social
environments. . . . Naturalist fiction aspired to a sociological objectivity, offering
detailed and fully researched investigations into unexplored corners of modern
society. (146-147)
The definition also includes some of the key players of the movement—in
fiction: Émile Zola (naturalism’s vocal proponent), Guy de Maupassant, Theodore
Dreiser, and Frank Norris—but the definition isn’t expansive by any means.
One of the leading scholars in American naturalism, Donald Pizer, discusses
the predominating view of it (what he was told in his graduate studies) that American
naturalist authors took from Emile Zola his literarily experimental notion that “all
experience [i]s determined by heredity and environment” (Theory and Practice 2). The
school of authors in America who transformed his ideas into intelligible texts—the most
well-known of these being Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris—created
1
2
characters who are “shaped, conditioned, and usually destroyed by social and biological
forces beyond their control” (3). Pizer points out that he was told as a graduate student
that
. . . the early naturalists had not only falsely degraded the human condition because
of their commitment to materialistic precepts but had also been hopelessly confused
in their efforts to dramatize a fully deterministic universe[,] [t]hat their novels were
therefore both untrue and inept. (3)
Pizer contends that in “naturalistic” novels, the attempt to identify a consistent literary
determinism in the text—a determinism where characters in the novels are essentially
powerless to forces surrounding them or lack a will to do something about their
victimization—is rather reductive to the work of the text. Instead, he argues that
. . . a flexible concept of naturalism as a tendency or impulse reflecting the various
ways in which human freedom is limited or circumscribed and the various ways in
which this truth is made palatable by combining it with traditional notions of human
worth . . . will have to do . . . (9)
in the attempt to define this genre because naturalism is a powerful form of literature. He
insists “there is no neat definition applicable to the movement in America but [that it is]
rather a variable and changing and complex set of assumptions about man and fiction that
can be called a naturalistic tradition” (16). Pizer favors a looser definition.
Yet, the concept of determinism in the naturalist novel is one that is rather
interesting and one that has held some critics’ attention in the attempt to lend credence to
this genre (paradoxically since, as Pizer points out, a few critics thought that naturalists
failed to demonstrate a fully determined universe). In Determined Fictions, Lee Clark
Mitchell discusses this concept in more detail when he says, “Strictly speaking,
determinism means that no one has any freedom of will” (6). Mitchell notes how the
concept of determinism held many philosophers’ attention at the turn of the century (it
3
should be noted that it is an ancient philosophy). In 1900, one of its “most prominent
spokesm[e]n,” Ernst Haeckel, proposed that
The great struggle between the determinist and the indeterminist, between the
opponent and the sustainer of the freedom of the will, has ended today, after more
that two thousand years, completely in favor of the determinist. The human will has
no more freedom than that of the higher animals, from which it differs only degree,
not in kind. . . . We know that each act of the will is as fatally determined by the
organization of the individual and as dependent on the momentary condition of his
environment as every other psychic activity. (viii-ix)
Mitchell acknowledges that there were those who disagreed with this
seemingly reductive vision of human action (William James [134; note 9] and Samuel
Johnson [8 and 138; note 16]). However, he broadens the discussion to say that naturalist
characters do choose to act, but they “will always accede to their strongest desire
whatever it is they resolve to do” (9), which marks a conundrum of sorts that Mitchell
acknowledges. He writes, “actions are freely chosen, which requires an agent’s will, or
they are determined, which requires only a strong desire. . . . [T]he problem of
distinguishing between resolve and desire is the problem of free will” (138; note 18).
This suggests that characters only appear to have a choice in the matter at hand. If
naturalism is in part committed to determinist principles, then it certainly plays an
important role in understanding how naturalism call characters’ wills into question.
John J. Conder discusses philosophical determinism in his book Naturalism in
American Fiction. He defines it as “the general philosophical thesis which states that for
everything that ever happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else
could happen” (9). Essentially, certain causes beget certain effects which are unable to
produce an outcome different than the one that occurs. This premise can be extended to
the actions of human beings and, using Thomas Hobbes’s theory on determinism, he
4
writes that certain actions are the results of appetites or desires—or “physiological
changes in the brain”—where the “voluntary action is thus caused by the resolution of
these competing desires” (11). This brings up another conundrum when he asks, “how
can one judge morally an agent whose ‘nature and intrinsical quality’ have been purely
shaped since birth by an environment over which he has no control?” (12). This, of
course, stands in sharp contrast with a belief in freedom of the will and the concept of the
free agent, or “one who, when all things are necessary to produce a given action are
present, can nevertheless refrain from that action” (12). Conder contends that actions by
naturalist characters are in fact determined, whether they appear to be or not.
This determinism in naturalism reveals some interesting factors at work in
characters’ “failures” (I will also argue that the same goes for “successes”), especially
when that character is female. In the novels I discuss in this thesis—Kate Chopin’s The
Awakening (1899), Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and Edith Wharton’s The
House of Mirth (1905)—I contend that for female (and male) protagonists, the prevailing
route to failure (or success) is determined by the social institutions in place which are, in
turn, determined by “patriarchal ideology.” This ideology is the “accepted” worldview
wherein all actions and even thought processes theoretically work toward benefiting the
“established” order men have created and which also ensure its continued existence. As I
have demonstrated, naturalism discusses the ways that the environment shapes and
oftentimes destroys characters, but little is said of what exactly is responsible in the
environment for this destruction. I argue that there are identifiable structures exhibiting
power—and a “fictional” human dissemination of that power—of which characters reveal
the effects. This power in American naturalism, I contend, is white, heterosexual, and
5
male in essence and that literary naturalism demonstrates the ways in which that
dominance (either personal or cultural) works toward both male and female detriment in
these novels.
The protagonist’s struggle for agency (whether he or she is conscious of it or
not) in the naturalistic novel typically results in tragedy via traps of animalistic behavior.
Various factors—whether social, monetary, gender/sexual, and racial—combine in these
novels to reduce the human-separate-from-the-animal to the merely animal. This was
purposeful, according to Pizer, who writes that
. . . inevitable awareness pressed upon writers coming of age in post-Civil War
America that the conditions of urban and industrial life as well as the new
understanding of man’s animal origin seemed irreconcilable to the concepts of
human dignity and freedom inherent in traditional religious, philosophical, and
political belief. (Theory and Practice 7)
Some brief overviews of “naturalist” novels, so called, demonstrate the human as animal.
In Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), McTeague’s eventually estranged wife’s five
thousand gold coins begins to loom so large in his mind—the need for money comes to
be so great—that he ultimately murders her. Perpetually described as a brute, the
generally unreflective McTeague acts as an animal would; his subsequent actions in
fleeing San Francisco to his eventual demise in Death Valley demonstrate the same. In
Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), Clyde Griffiths’s learned and deepseated need for wealth and success lead him to the point where he believes the only way
he can live his life is to be free of the traps his action-of-the-moments have produced—a
pregnant woman (Roberta Alden) who threatens to expose him unless he marries her—
which facilitates his “desire” to be rid of her altogether. Clyde’s self-interest takes over
and his concerns shift to nothing but his own survival, which means death for Roberta.
6
Even though they appear later in the 20th century, a protagonist’s struggle for
agency in African American naturalist novels is seemingly different than those of the
white literary naturalists. Yet, black authors demonstrate the effects of white humans
treating black humans like animals, thereby revealing the animal in both races. In Richard
Wright’s Native Son (1940), Bigger Thomas’s fear of being caught in a white girl’s
bedroom—with her in it—facilitates his need to preserve himself at all costs, up to and
including inadvertently killing her. His being further trapped by the confines of the white
culture around him leads him to horrific actions we would be loath to admit we could find
ourselves committing if we were placed in a similar situation. In Ann Petry’s The Street
(1946), Lutie Johnson comes to her wit’s end in trying to monetarily secure the life
proposed by Ben Franklin for herself and her son. Repeated, daily “failures” and hassles
lead her into a fit of desperation so great that she murders a broken and abused black
man, Boots Smith, when he tries to rape her before giving her a loan she has been falsely
told she needs to get her son out of juvenile detention. At the very end of the novel, Lutie
recognizes that power “as is” among whites only allows for suffering and contempt
among blacks, that she has always had a “one-way ticket” to misery.
And yet, for all of literary naturalism’s drive to expose the destructiveness of
dominance (here known as white, masculine culture), it could be easily argued that the
strictures placed on humans from “acceptable” society at large remain steadily in place.
What separates the novels I’ve cursorily examined here from the others I will be
examining has to do with their upper-class social setting and the ways that longed-for
agency among its inhabitants reveals itself to contain mutant threads of the same power
structures. In other words, even the concepts of agency and freedom of the will in these
7
works—concepts we like to believe are true, according to Mitchell (14)—are white and
masculine. For Edna in The Awakening, Carrie in Sister Carrie, and Lily in The House of
Mirth, agency seems to be available, so long as it takes this form. Even then, however,
the agency and will these women protagonists attempt to employ still leads to decisions
which facilitate their destruction. While still present in the naturalistic novels I’ll be
working with, the animalistic drives or biological forces that generally befall or affect
protagonists in other naturalist works take second place to these characters’ forced
adherence to dominant socio-cultural ideology and its grievous effects. All characters are
seen to be subject to it.
This “subjection” to ideology is particularly important to the functional
achievement of these novels precisely because Chopin, Dreiser, and Wharton all reveal
the ways it hides itself in plain sight. As Louis Althusser discusses in “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses,” the obviousness of ideology goes unquestioned, merely
because it can. He says,
. . . it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc….). Like all
obviousnesses, . . . the ‘obviousness’ that you and I are subjects—and that that does
not cause any problems—is an ideological effect. It is indeed a peculiarity of
ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are
‘obviousnesses’) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to
recognize. (161, Althusser’s emphasis)1.
Althusser emphasizes how entrenched our acceptance to subjection is, and how most of
us generally do not question our inherent willingness to be recognized as subjects. As an
effect of ideology and a means to control a population
. . . beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class’” (139),
this obviousness reveals, as Althusser continues, how we are “always already
subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition,
8
which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and
(naturally) irreplaceable subjects. (161-162, Althusser’s emphasis)
His argument, here, humorously reveals the folly of our perception of our selfs and its
relation to its others, in that we actually believe we’re individuals under a somewhat
totalizing system. But, as an effect of power systems, the type of “obviousness” Althusser
describes certainly doesn’t lend itself to the open questioning of that ideology, especially
if one is not of the dominant members in society.
How this ideological subjection is achieved then has to do with the
pervasiveness of it. Ideology for Althusser is everywhere and in everything. Of capitalist
ideology he writes, “all the agents of production [the proletariat], exploitation [the
bourgeois] and repression [State authority] . . . must in one way or another be ‘steeped’ in
ideology in order to perform their tasks ‘conscientiously’” (128), which suggests an
active involvement of the subject’s conscience. Therefore, doing one’s duty—
“performing [one’s] task conscientiously” and (hopefully) seeing results which reflect
this—lends further credibility to the larger social system (by way of a casual observer
who observes it) that the “order of things” is right and effective. He contends that this
thought process (ideology) is essentially present in all social institutions, in both the
Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs, which operate through repression and violence;
e.g.: “the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc.” [136]) and the Ideological State
Apparatuses (ISAs; he makes an “empirical list” of social institutions but it certainly isn’t
exhaustive. He notes the religious [the different churches], the educational [the different
schools], the family, the legal, the political [political parties and system], the trade-union,
communications, and the cultural [literature, the arts, sports, etc.] ISAs as examples [136-
9
137]). These two apparatuses (RSAs and ISAs) operating under the same ideology work
together to reproduce “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence” (153) which promotes the appearance of order and naturalness under this
system. Althusser argues, however, that this ideology “do[es] not correspond to reality,
i.e. that [it] constitute[s] an illusion” of what is “real” about existence and production;
rather, it “do[es] make allusion to reality” (153), which means that ideology references
“how things are” in their present state and not “how they might be.” Therefore, ideology
must be constantly reproduced for society to continue functioning and existing.
In these novels, the process of becoming and remaining a “subject”—or for
women rather, an “object” with the illusion that she is a subject—of the capitalist
ideology and world of the novel is extremely important to identify if we are to examine
how the environment destroys (or rewards) an individual. The protagonist female
character in these novels either doesn’t initially see and/or gradually begins to see her
place in society (as is the case with Carrie and Edna), or realizes it more fully than others
(as is the case with Lily). This produces instances where she wants to either free herself
of her always already objectified status and limitations or to further immerse herself in
them. Consequently, Althusser’s illustration of the interpellated or hailed subject
allegorically demonstrates how one begins to recognize this subjection (162-165).
Though the interpellation scene that he describes is not explicit in the novels, there are
certainly scenes which illuminate the process of being called or hailed to accept a role
which results in (hopefully) becoming a subject. Thus, even the concept of agency—a
premise all main female characters want to see or begin seeing—is called into question,
even for the male characters.
10
Judith Butler examines Althusser’s interpellation model in “‘Conscience Doth
Make Subjects of Us All’” where she describes the role that conscience plays in
subjectivation. Given the facts of Althusser’s own life (his murdering his wife and his
subsequent running into the street to tell the police), Butler describes his “reversal of the
police scene in ‘Ideology’ (12)” where the policeperson hails the subject to accept the
terms of authority addressing him/her. She does so in terms of “conscience” derived from
religious authority, of which Althusser’s text gives a few examples. She says,
For Althusser, the efficacy of ideology consists in part in the formation of
conscience, where the notion of conscience is understood to place restrictions on
what is speakable, or more generally, representable. . . . Conscience is fundamental
to the production and regulation of the citizen-subject, for it is conscience that turns
the individual around to make itself available to that subjectivating reprimand. (13,
Butler’s emphasis)
Her concept of “what is speakable” will become important later in this thesis. For now,
though, a clear connection is established between the ways in which conscience, as
generated or supported by and through the pervasiveness of ISAs, operates to
preemptively subdue humans under repressive State authority. It’s true that Butler’s
concern here is not exactly the same as Althusser’s. As she maintains, his sense of the
reproductions of the relations of productions in capitalism (i.e., representing capitalism
and its workings as normal and accepted) is not as central to her concerns about the
development of subjects as is the “reproduction of subjection” (15).
Butler also reveals the nuances in Ben Brewster’s translation of
“performance” in his phrasing Althusser’s notion of “perform their tasks
‘conscientiously’” (128; “pour s’acquitter ‘conscienciusement’ de leur tâche”). She
11
writes it instead as “an acquitting of oneself” of guilt through labor (15-16). Thus, “the
‘submission’ to the dominant ideology,” as she goes on to describe,
. . . might then be understood as a submission to the necessity to prove innocence in
the face of accusation. . . . To become a ‘subject’ is, thus, to have been presumed
guilty, then tried and declared innocent. And because this declaration is not a single
act, but a status incessantly reproduced, to become a ‘”subject” is to be
continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt. (16,
Butler’s emphasis)
In my analysis of the novels comprising this thesis, Butler’s explanation of
subject-making as submission to dominant ideology through (a guilty) conscience is
important to understanding the ways that protagonist “failure” or “success” rests upon
denial or approval from those in the dominant ideology. Actions characters take reflect
this concept—for acquitting oneself of guilt or for adhering strictly to the rules dominant
society demands of its subjects in order to exist.
Edna, Carrie, and Lily (as well as the men who contribute to their demise)
must play by these rules whether their conscience agrees or not. We see in Edna the
mother “not fitted” for motherhood, whose growing consciousness allows her to discover
the life she is in is not her own (that she really had no choice in the matter) and that she
has been “a dupe” to the what is actually real in life. At the end of the novel, contempt of
all that has brought her to her one freely chosen act of suicide replaces the guilt she is
supposed to feel at not being what she has been told to be. In Carrie, we see a woman
who goes about her life, “duped” as well by the forms social dominance takes in her own
desire for rising to new social heights, and, at the end of the novel, is left no better off
than when we first met her, despite her material possessions. Though Dreiser doesn’t
fully ascribe guilt to her choices, she will forever need to “acquit herself of the task” of
12
being a culturally-approved woman in performing and reproducing the sexist cultural
values around her—this, of course, so she doesn’t end up like her foil Hurstwood. And, in
Lily, we see a woman who is not “duped” by the ubiquitous dominance around her, but
who cannot (and will not) submit to its demands in order to “free herself” from the
further constraints into which she has been involuntarily placed. Her repeated attempts to
acquit herself of guilt on her own terms—to prove her innocence in a false accusation—
and of her duty to act as society requires her to results in understanding that she will
never actually be able to do so, that it is a never-ending and destructive battle for all
involved. Given the higher social setting of these novels, freedom from monetary
constraints appears to be a factor in these characters’ desire to make choices. But, we see
that this is ultimately false since none of these female characters actually have sufficient
and sustainable monetary independence (it may seem that Carrie does, but as I explain in
the chapter devoted to her narrative, she is still dependent upon the whims of the popular
culture that has produced her for her livelihood). Being around money allows only
confrontation with the “always already” of subjectivation. But what is the manner of this
subjectivation and why is naturalism as a literary genre appropriate for demonstrating or
unraveling it?
I turn now to gender and its construction. Teresa de Lauretis supplies the link
of Althusser’s theory of ideology to gender and its construction. In Technologies of
Gender, she applies Althusser’s work on ideology to gender. Quoting him, she says that
All ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete
individuals as subjects.” . . . If I substitute gender for ideology, the statement still
works, but with a slight shift of the terms: Gender has the function (which defines
it) of constituting concrete individuals as men and women. That shift is precisely
13
where the relation of gender to ideology can be seen, and seen to be an effect of the
ideology of gender. (6, Althusser’s emphasis)
Lauretis’s project is to relate the construction of gender as “the product of
various social technologies, such as cinema, as well as institutional discourses,
epistemologies, and critical practices” (ix) so I won’t belabor the connection. However,
her use of Althusser’s theory on ideology demonstrates that
. . . [t]he sex-gender system, in short, is both a sociocultural construct and a
semiotic apparatus, a system of representation which assigns meaning (identity,
value, prestige, location in kinship, status in the social hierarchy, etc.) to individuals
within society. (5)
Therefore, the “meaning” and “value” of individuals is actively conferred upon
members within society by way of the prevalence of heterosexual ideology.
Keeping this in mind, I turn back to Althusser who discusses how “the ‘ideas’
of a human subject exist in his actions” (158, my emphasis). He establishes a clear
connection between a subject’s ideas and the ISA from which they ultimately derive. He
writes,
. . . the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his
material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which
are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the
ideas of that subject. (158, Althusser’s emphasis)
He describes the material nature of reality to demonstrate how actions
materialize, not from the notion that a person’s/subject’s ideas are his/her own; rather, a
subject’s actions stem from the pervasiveness of unified ideological thought (i.e., the
same ideology is essentially everywhere). Additionally, the actions those ideas result in
work to support the social system and institutions from which those thoughts arise.
14
The same can be said of gender. If a person is given “meaning” through his or
her gender by “represent[ing] [them]sel[ves] as male or as female [, it does] impl[y] the
assumption of the whole of those meaning effects” (Lauretis 5), which means that “male”
and “female” representations are supposed to agree, in a sense, with the society at large.
In other words, what a gender “is supposed to look like” reveals certain actions that are
“consistent” within the hierarchy that creates those meanings or definitions in the first
place; they synch up with the pervasive heterosexual ideology of gender. This leads me to
the concept gender’s performativity that Judith Butler has so interestingly exposed.
As a landmark work on gender, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble proves
relevant to the work of identifying the novels’ depiction of subjectivation. Working
through the terms of debate in feminist criticism on gender, its construction, and what is
“allowable” in gender representation—terms which she denotes as working largely
through “compulsory heterosexuality,” as Adrienne Rich has identified it—Butler
exposes how gender is more likely “performative” (177) than “fixed” (13)2 and therefore
“intelligible” (23)3. She describes feminist discourse presenting itself as “a presumed
universality and unity” for women, but counters this with the notion that it is false to
“insis[t] on a stable subject of feminism.” Conceiving feminism in this manner
“inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category” (7). Butler works to undo
the totalizing effects of patriarchal thinking in feminism—this need to have distinct
categories for sexuality and gender. Even though Butler’s work appears some 90 years
after these novels’ publications, and even though lesbianism as a theme does not overtly
appear in the novels, the performative concept in their works reflects the dominant
society’s conception of gender.
15
Butler describes the performativity of gender “as a corporeal style, an ‘act’”
(177). Both sexed bodies of “man” and “woman” fall under the domains of the
“regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality”
(173, my emphasis). According to Butler, the acts associated with being either sex are
compulsory and produce an imitation of what is considered “‘the normal’ or ‘the
original’[, which is] revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal no one
can embody” (176). Further undoing our cultural, hegemonically-derived notions of
gender, Butler goes on to say that,
. . . because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender,
and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a
construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to
perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is
obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend
not agreeing to believe in them; the construction “compels” our belief in its
necessity and naturalness. (178)
“Gendered” performances, as Lauretis similarly points out, are renderings of
cultural understandings of what “male” and “female” look like when either includes a
human body and a personality. Gendered performances also reveal individuals acting in
accordance with what is accepted or “intelligible” behavior to the broader society. Butler
notes that “not agreeing to believe in the cultural fictions” of gender’s somehow “true”
performances leads to punishment. This is because it is tantamount to refusing the
established social order.
Butler explores the
. . . hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that
for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a
stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is
oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of
heterosexuality. (194; note 6)
16
In other words, because heterosexuality is the “norm” in society, one that is
active/dominant and often intolerant of alternative representations of gender, men and
women must act in ways that express their being “appropriately” and always in terms of
their masculinity (if male) and femininity (if female). Thus, applying this theory in an
attempt to explain the nature of subjectivation and, consequently, of protagonist “failure”
in the novels, I argue that characters are required to comport themselves in accordance
with the established order (i.e., the patriarchal social order, where men determine and
have determined the rules of engagement in society for individuals) and its hegemonic
ideologies, often to their own detriment. What seem to be the “givens” of gender—men
acting as men “should” and expressing “masculinity,” women acting as women “should”
and expressing “femininity”—are, according to Butler, fictitious constructions of what
hegemonic ideology requires gender to be, and not conducive to the principle of agency.
Combining Althusser’s concept of dominant ideology which produces
subjects through capitalism with Lauretis’s claim that gender also has an ideology which
produces “subjects” in the form of men and women, and with Butler’s concept of
gender’s performativity (which leads to its disintegration if one disregards the gender
binary) makes it possible to identify how it is that a naturalist character’s “fate” is
determined in the novels I analyze for this thesis. I argue that the dominant ideology most
present in these novels is the ideology of patriarchy—that of the established order of the
world created by men, which resides in its institutions and practices, where women are
automatically excluded from gaining the real agency men have purely because of their
sex, and where men set the terms of their own limitations, often unknowingly. This
patriarchal ideology creates certain behavioral expectations of the sexes (and genders)
17
which reflects, in turn, performances (or lack thereof) of these expectations. I argue that
the protagonist’s performances of these expectations is what determines whether their life
ends in tragedy or (rarely) success. In other words, patriarchal ideology and one’s
adherence to it is what determines one’s outcome. I argue that the nature of causality has
its roots in actions that agree (or don’t) with the social system.
Because of this ideology, I argue that the authors of the novels I analyze are
subtly revealing the nature of a woman’s own story or narrative and how it is essentially
prescribed by dominant and patriarchal society—that is, it is already determined, her
story already written for her. The female protagonists of these novels may deviate from
this prescribed narrative, but that in turn reveals the way that her narrative is treated
afterward. In The Awakening we see a woman who turns away from the “acceptable”
behavior of women and tries living for herself. She learns that doing so is an
impossibility and society destroys her for not knowing the limits of women’s terms for
existence though she has been preemptively excluded from ever knowing those terms in
the first place. Because of Edna’s “deviant” behavior, her narrative is therefore
reinscribed by the dominant, patriarchal one, her original narrative lost to her society but
not to readers. In Sister Carrie we see a woman who is groomed for the public
performance of man’s values of women, only to become ultimately unsatisfied in having
achieved the heights of social relevance through repeated performances. Carrie fulfills
her prescribed role and is thus “rewarded” for doing so. In The House of Mirth we see a
woman who appears to know the terms by which she must act (as defined by patriarchal
ideology), but when events threaten to change her life she chooses not to follow the
“new” terms issuing from the men in her life and she forfeits her existence in the process.
18
Therefore, dominant society proscribes Lily’s alternative narrative and she suffers for her
failure to comply with the narrative that has been dictated to her. Obviously, each novel
is “scripted” by the author who wrote it, the author determining and writing the fates of
each of her or his protagonists. However, “scripted” in the sense I’m using it here reflects
the nature of narrative “choices” for women at the turn of the twentieth century and I
believe Chopin, Dreiser, and Wharton were attempting to illustrate this notion through
the more “deliberate realism” of naturalism before defined. This should help the reader in
seeing the alternative “determinism” at work in the texts in its various presentations.
For each novel, I define patriarchal ideology through the institutions or ISAs
that Althusser describes to reveal the pervasiveness of this ideology and the extent to
which it affects the decisions characters make, how they think of themselves and others,
or how they behave. I move on to discuss the resulting expectations of gendered behavior
for the protagonist(s) which stem from the ideology before described. I then discuss the
actual performances of those expectations which reveal both how characters fail in the
project to live-up to society’s standards for their gender or succeed and therefore recreate
their desire to be a subject of the ideology that produces their behavior.
Strong similarities are present between these works. All three “main” female
protagonists are between the ages of 26 to 29 at the completion of the novel. All three are
described as beautiful. All three have “important” male presences in their lives who
attempt shaping them to suit their needs. The three novels have plots which reveal paths
that lead down or up the socio-economic ladder. All three novels reveal the protagonist’s
struggle for monetary and social “establishment.” Edna seeks to free herself from it,
Carrie seeks to gain it, and Lily seeks to gain it but eventually disavows it.
19
While certainly not as fixed as the women in their lives are, the men in the
novels restrict themselves by their adherence to the dominant, patriarchal ideology. All
three of the novels’ “main” male characters act as guides for female characters of how to
exist within the matrix of the dominant culture. All three novels have male characters
(operating as foils to their female protagonists) who have prestigious careers creating the
illusion of security in an uncompromising, indifferent world. Consequently, the inability
of these main male characters to comprehend and therefore wrestle with patriarchy’s
deleterious effects in order to mitigate them leaves them “without” the women they claim
to love.
This is precisely why literary naturalism as a medium for the representation of
life does well to explain the nature of failure and destruction in “characters.” Because the
naturalism of these novels is bound by a “determinism” that resides in patriarchy, I argue
that Chopin, Dreiser, and Wharton were anticipating a world that might not be governed
by such brutal, animalistic ideals. In other words, revealing how America viciously is
opens up a discussion to see how it might be different (i.e., not indifferent,
uncompromising, etc.). Given the parameters of determinism which Mitchell and Conder
describe, it is not unfathomable to see how a shift in the concept of life as we know it—
that is, always already patriarchal and inherently violent toward Other modes of
existence—can improve the nature of American society.
CHAPTER II
THE REINSCRIBED NARRATIVE IN
CHOPIN’S THE AWAKENING
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) details over about a year’s time the life
of an upper middle-class woman, Edna Pontellier, who goes from living her life as if she
is in a dream state, to “awakening” from that dream, and finally to the point where she
eventually commits suicide. In this overly simplistic summation, however, there is much
that readers are privy to which reveals why it is that Chopin’s heroine kills herself. Within
Edna’s society, there is essentially one mode of “being” or role for women indicating
“success”: the combined role of wife and mother. Any other mode Chopin presents for
Edna in the novel is not sanctioned or “socially approved.” What is or is not “socially
approved” creates action(s) taken by characters which in turn reveals the naturalistic
determinism at work in the text and consequently Edna’s “failure.” She discovers that
Creole and patriarchal society make her ability to live in the world on her own terms
impossible. She attempts to distance herself from “established,” upper-middle class
society. She believes that she will free herself from forces which compel her to act
against her burgeoning independent self and Chopin reveals the constructedness of
“acceptable” behavior to which characters are subject.
In The Awakening, “patriarchal ideology” ultimately operates to keep women
subordinate to men and clinging to the prescribed role of “mother-woman” but it also
20
21
reveals men to be insecure in the terms of their own socially constructed behavior.
Chopin confronts patriarchal ideology in this novel and displays it through the various
social institutions like marriage, the church, and in business practices—the Ideological
State Apparatuses (ISAs)—that Althusser also identifies in his essay “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses.” For Althusser, these ISAs reproduce the capitalist values
of society and, while they are diverse in form, they are “unified . . . beneath the ruling
ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class,’” (139, Althusser’s emphasis) the
same bourgeois class of which Edna is an established member. (Edna will eventually seek
to un-establish herself from this class, hoping to live her life on her own terms.) Because
these institutions were created and/or owned by men and operate to give men power over
each other and especially over women, the ISAs as I identify them operate to reproduce
patriarchal social values which are omnipresent in the society of the novel and “subjects”
within that society are required to abide by those values. Thus, ISAs reveal oppression for
these women.
Edna’s awakening helps her to disregard the established order as it is found in
the institution of marriage. She refuses to go to her sister’s wedding because, as she tells
her husband, “a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth” (742). Edna
comes to recognize her own marriage as a sham, and may have in mind how “her
marriage to Léonce Pontellier was purely an accident . . . resembling many other
marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate” (708). Here, Edna acknowledges
Fate as nothing other than the forced compliance with social custom where young girls
are indoctrinated, “dupe[d]” as Edna finds out later (775), into believing that the only
way to exist in life is as a wife and mother.
22
The oppression Edna experiences through the religious institution ISA (the
Church) helps her to abandon her old ways of “behaving” in accordance with dominant
society. Edna goes to the Chenière Caminada for mass with Robert while she’s at Grande
Isle and “a feeling of oppression and drowsiness overc[o]mes [her] during the service.
Her head beg[i]n[s] to ache . . . and her one thought [becomes] to quit the stifling
atmosphere of the church and reach the open air” (720). It could be argued that Edna is
only tired from having slept only a few “troubled and feverish hours” (718). However,
the night before, the narrator has informed us, her husband stays out with her on the
porch of their cottage because she will not come to bed at his command. The oppression
she experiences from her husband and at church—the larger symbolic presence of
domination through “order” created in a male institution—is more likely what proves to
be too much for her. She needs the “open air.”
The most compelling instance of “patriarchal ideology” that Chopin confronts,
though, is the extent to which the “order” of American life historically established by
men affects Edna’s narrative. Chopin cleverly reveals that Edna’s narrative ultimately
isn’t her own (though it seems Edna briefly believes otherwise) and she does so by
demonstrating that Edna’s husband essentially owns it, even when she attempts
distancing herself from him to make her own. Once she moves out of her house, leaving
Léonce and taking up residence in her “pigeon house,” her husband reinscribes publicly
her narrative with his (the real story that she has left him and is pursuing her own life is
silenced) in order to keep his public image intact among his business associates. He puts
a notice in the paper “to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Pontellier were contemplating a
summer sojourn abroad, and that their handsome residence on Esplanade Street was
23
undergoing sumptuous alterations” (762), which “explains” that her story and his are one
and the same and will remain so in the future. The narrator states “he [i]s simply thinking
of his financial integrity” (762) and he begs Edna to consider “what people would say”
(761) if it were “noised about that the Pontelliers had met with [financial] reverses, and
were forced to conduct their ménage on a humbler scale” (762). His actions here—his
male influence, his “agency” and “prerogative” to subsume other narratives that conflict
with his own, the prominence of business in the male social order and existing in all
institutions—makes Edna’s ability as a woman to create her own narrative and impose
her own will and agency on the world impossible and inauthentic, as she comes to find
out. While it is true that “Edna admire[s] the skill of [Léonce’s] maneuver” in “sav[ing]
appearances” (762) it is also true that “saving appearances” of the order of things around
her is patriarchal ideology made manifest. It is “natural” and “obvious” to Edna. She
understands that men are compelled to have their dignity and, as I’ll explain later,
business prowess in tact at all times. Men are required to maintain and promote their
economic viability (or, as her husband has informed her earlier in the text, they must keep
up with “les covenances,” [731] the social niceties of wives receiving other men’s wives
who come calling, meant to enhance men’s business relationships).
Obviously, if Léonce had unlimited ability to do as he liked or were free from
the social expectations of his sex, he would adjust or rewrite his own narrative
concerning the possible social reactions that attend not having a wife in a society that
preemptively requires one. But, where men must keep up appearances for business and,
consequently, their livelihood or suffer the consequences, women must keep up their
“womanly” image as well. Being or appearing as anything other than mother and wife in
24
Edna’s society is, as she will find out, not necessarily prohibited (proscribed) as Mlle
Reisz demonstrates. However, Edna’s breaking ties with the terms of her existence—
disavowing the role of mother and wife she “blindly” accepted—is prohibited/proscribed
and her narrative is therefore reinscribed by the broader social order. The few characters
who witness her transformation from object in the marriage economy to unconfirmed
subject who believes she has “agency” aren’t fully aware of the extent to which this
social order is antagonistic to her. Only readers are privy to the real story—the narrative
she would like to create for her life but can’t—that otherwise goes unnoticed by Edna’s
society4.
Guides/Models
Chopin employs the use of what I call “guides” or “models” of what
demonstrates the forced adherence to patriarchal ideology. These take the form of
conversations, instructions, interactions, and the like in exposing how one is “supposed”
to comport oneself. She also employs “performances” of patriarchal ideology which, for
women, are meant to either restrict women to the dominant role of “mother-woman”
(Chopin’s term that I’ll explain further in a moment) or in rendering her as unintelligible,
undecipherable “Other.”
Léonce guides Edna to learn her role as his property and to learn the marital
conventions for wives in his culture. A clear example of this is in the first chapter of the
novel when Edna comes back from the beach and allows herself to be claimed as his
wife, and subsequently his property. Léonce scolds Edna for being barely recognizable
after she is out at the beach:
25
You are burnt beyond recognition,” he add[s], looking at his wife as one looks at a
valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She h[olds]
up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and survey[s] them critically . . . Looking at
them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving
for the beach. She silently reache[s] out to him, and he, understanding, t[akes] the
rings from his vest pocket and drop[s] them into her open palm. She slip[s] them
upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she look[s] across at Robert and
beg[i]n[s] to laugh. The rings sparkl[e] upon her fingers. He sen[ds] back an
answering smile. (697)
In this highly symbolic passage, Léonce reminds Edna ever so subtly that she is claimed
as his wife. We can gather from this initial scene that Edna knows her place in the
marriage and that she is his property. As Margit Stange correctly points out in “Personal
Property: Exchange Value and the Female Self in The Awakening,”
In the context of the property system in which Edna exists as a sign of value, Edna’s
body is detachable and alienable from her own viewpoint: the hands and wrists are
part of the body yet can be objectified, held out and examined as if they belonged to
someone else—as indeed, in some sense that Léonce insists upon very literally, they
do belong to someone else. (878)
Stange understands that Edna is an object and one that is “owned.” Léonce’s scolding her
that she is “burnt beyond recognition” is the catalyst in reminding her that there are
certain expectations for upper middle-class women and that Edna is not meeting them.
Stange continues that “[s]unburned hands, by indicating the performance of outdoor
labor, would nullify Edna’s ‘value’ as a sign of Léonce’s wife” (879-880). Léonce views
his property as becoming damaged and “unrecognizable” which makes him momentarily
nervous that she is ruining his value. Léonce has a reputation to uphold so he guides her
back into being recognizable as his property. Thus, she quickly resumes the identity
which was, for the moment, disrupted. It is significant as well that Edna looks to her
friend Robert after she puts on her wedding rings. The narrator’s interposing, “The rings
sparkl[e] on her fingers,” between looking at Robert and laughing and his subsequent
26
smiling back at her suggests that she warmly accepts being reclaimed as wife of Léonce
and that she can be claimed in the future. This is important later on in the story because
Robert clearly has plans for making Edna his wife, and he tells her such. Though Edna is
unconscious of this now, it is clear that she moves from such “guideposts” later on in the
story. Because her life with Léonce has been one of blind acceptance of his rules for their
engagement, once she is awakened, she will no longer accept such rules.
Within the gendered binary of the novel that Chopin is critiquing, a “normal”
woman must be a loyal wife to her husband and devoted mother to her children. We see
this as Chopin reveals early on in the novel the concept of the “mother woman.” In its
basic form, these women “idoliz[e] their children, worshi[p] their husbands, and estee[m]
it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering
angels” (701). Chopin’s use of the word “efface” here is significant because, though it
would seem that women do this of their own accord, this is actually an ideological effect
of men forcing women to adhere to the role they prescribe to them. As Butler describes it,
“because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end” (Gender Trouble
177), the “mother-woman” is seen as the gender type for women in Edna’s society which
creates individuals for ideological subjection and fulfills the need for society to continue
existing and “functioning” in the future. Freeing up men so that they can maintain their
dominance through business, women are forced to take on the responsibility of raising
responsible subjects.
Additionally, the idea that these women “estee[m] it a holy privilege to efface
themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” takes on sinister tones
in describing how even a woman’s spirit must reflect that which leaves her without an
27
identity of her own. In “Writing and Motherhood,” Susan Suleiman critically details the
real struggle for a woman to have any individuality once she becomes a mother. She
quotes feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow who, in turn, quotes psychoanalyst Alice
Balint on this subject. She writes:
The ideal mother has no interests of her own. . . . For all of us it remains selfevident that the interests of mother and child are identical, and it is the generally
acknowledged measure of the goodness or badness of the mother how far she
really feels this identity of interest. (623)
Chodorow comments:
This statement does not mean that mothers have no interests apart from their
children—we all know that this kind of overinvestment is ‘bad’ for children. But
social commentators, legislators, and most clinicians expect women’s interests to
enhance their mothering and expect women to want only interests that do so.”
Good mothering, in other words, “requires both a constant delicate assessment of
infantile needs and wants and an extreme self-lessness. Analysts do not consider
their prescription difficult for most ‘normal’ mothers to fulfill. (623)
In the time of Suleiman’s publication, her point demonstrates how static
women’s roles have remained in the eighty-plus years since The Awakening’s
publication. The “mother-women” in the novel are forced to adhere strictly to the role
defined for them and Adèle exemplifies this role. As many other critics have noted, Adèle
has no interests of her own, other than her children’s and this is “normal.” Even the work
that Adèle does in making winter clothes for her children during summer complements
and concretizes the very notion of motherhood—she is always “thinking of the children.”
Her actions both create and equate to self-lessness.
The pre-scripted role for women is to be always or only “thinking of the
children” which can be thought of in terms of how it relates to the process of speech
which, according to this society, must always affirm the social order. Turning back to
28
Butler in her explanation of the subject’s conscience in adhering to ideology as Althusser
described it, she expands his explanation of how learned actions in subject formation—
the “know how” for various professions that is acquired through the various ISAs,
namely the school (Althusser 147)—become rituals. These rituals create or help to inform
the subject’s belief and his/her “consent” to adhere to the ideology around the subject.
Butler writes that speech comes into play—“what is speakable” (“Conscience” 13)—as a
part of the process of subjectivation. She says,
The anticipations of grammar are always and only retroactively installed [in the
process of subject formation]. The grammar that governs the narration of subject
formation is one that presumes that the grammatical place for the subject has
already been established. (21)
In The Awakening, the problem of speech for Edna—as one who moves away from that
which ensures that she is a “subject”—reflects an initial acceptance of but ultimate
rejection of the ideology she is presumed to have been fully immersed in, even though
she is an outsider.
Edna’s “speaking” appears to be lacking early in the novel which reveals her
nature of complying with the social expectations around her. In “A Prologue to
Rebellion: The Awakening and the Habit of Self-Expression,” Joseph R. Urgo describes
Edna’s problem with speaking. He says, “From the very beginning of the novel Edna
finds it difficult to place her experiences and emotions into narrative form,” that “she is
essentially mute. For the first six chapters of the novel she says all of four sentences”
(23). He continues, “Edna’s inability to say what was inside her has resulted in her
continual clash ‘with the realities’ around her (198, Urgo’s citation), a clashing which
had invariably meant that Edna must submit and be silent. Among the ‘realities’ which
29
she must face, then, as she ‘awakens,’ is her unthinking submission to Léonce, and her
habit of keeping things to herself, of not speaking” (26). Edna’s non-speaking early in the
novel reveals her acceptance of life as she comes to know it and, as the narrator
comments, “At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that
outward existence which conforms, the inward life that questions” (705). Edna is quiet
and “conforms” and this probably stems from her father’s authoritarian rule over the
family and in “coerc[ing] his own wife into her grave” (746). Edna does begin
questioning, though. Where Urgo believes that Edna finds her voice to begin expressing
herself (28) or begin questioning the “order” of her existence, I contend that she is
continually rendered incapable of speaking cogently against the dominant ideology
because the person she is and will become does not have the approval to speak against the
terms of her subjectivity. In referencing the Butler quote above, “the grammatical place
for the subject has [not] been established” because the grammatical place doesn’t exist
for speaking against it.
Adèle as Edna’s guide, on the other hand, verbalizes acceptably what it is that
women are “allowed” to talk about. One such verbalization is about her “condition”—i.e.,
the condition of herself as being nearly always pregnant. What appears to Edna as
Adèle’s “freedom” in expressing her conditioned state reveals some important clues
regarding what she is comfortable talking about. Edna is “shocked” at Adèle’s describing
one of her accouchements to Monsieur Farival. Her “harrowing story . . . withhold[s] no
intimate detail” (702), and this seems to suggest a type of strength and independence in
being the “fully realized” mother. Adèle implicitly lets Edna know what is acceptable
language to use about the conditions their husbands put them in. The significance of the
30
telling of her stories of childbirth is that that is really the only acceptable form of
communication between women and men about the effects of married life. Notice that we
never see Adèle expressing that she is even at all dissatisfied in any way with her
marriage. In fact, we see quite the opposite. When Edna later goes to the Ratignolle’s
during one of their dinners she sees Adèle “keenly interested in everything [her husband]
sa[ys], laying down her fork the better to listen, chiming in, taking the words out of his
mouth” (735, my emphasis). Adèle speaks what her husbands speaks and we aren’t, as
Jennifer B. Gray acknowledges as well (58), witness to scene where their “domestic
harmony” (Chopin 735) reveals Monsieur Ratignolle to be taking the words out of
Adèle’s mouth. In all fairness, the narrator describes him as a “salt of the earth” type of
man, but Adèle’s lack of speaking anything negative about her husband is meant to
promote in Edna the same type of the use of language in what she must do and say as a
married woman in order to “acceptably” exist. This is in part why Edna “fails”: she
knows no viable model to create expression. In this sense, it is “a privilege” to be no one
but that which one’s husband and children deem her to be. Chopin is careful not to be so
overwhelmingly critical of women who want to be this to their husbands and children.
We only see criticisms of this when we find that Edna doesn’t want to be this type of
woman, but has no recourse within the confines of acting as a “mother-woman.” Her
“option,” then, will be to live as “Other,” the role that renders her further unintelligible to
“proper” upper middle-class society.
This option in the novel’s gender binary manifests itself in the form of
Mademoiselle (Mlle) Reisz. Edna will determine to live outside of her prescribed duties
as a mother and wife—giving up standard “womanhood” in a sense, much as Mlle Reisz
31
has—in order to pursue “her own way” of living. Though it would appear that Mlle Reisz
embodies the spirit Edna needs to “break free” of the boundaries of compulsory
womanhood, we can conceive instead that her behavior exhibits a characteristically
“male” form of agency, but with none of the socio-economic benefits that the men of the
novel receive. This is because Mlle Reisz has already broken her ties with the accepted
notions of what it means to be a woman and attempts living as she wants to, as an artist,
but she is greatly misunderstood. Chopin details a problem that is created when Edna
tries to “find out” who she is as a woman and attempts confronting the nature of her
existence, which subtly demonstrates what little means Edna has in being who it is she
wants to be. If the novel offers us a window into the lives of women at the turn of the
century, determining a woman’s “agency” to act in the world takes a back seat in order to
determine how one finds the means to exist at all and especially when that existence has
already been determined. We see that nothing really “fits” anyone when the world,
society, and the environment around a person has been tacitly prescribed and agreed upon
by the majority.
As Edna’s “guide” for adopting and integrating a mode of existence outside of
the socio-sexual norm for women, Mlle Reisz lives as a single, childless woman and finds
meager employment as an artist, a pianist. Though no one in the novel expresses anger at
her not being the “acceptable” version of woman, it is clear that no one enjoys her
company. She is described as a
. . . disagreeable little woman, no longer young, who had quarreled with almost
every one, owing to a temper which was self-assertive and a disposition to trample
upon the rights of others. . . . She [i]s a homely woman, with a small wizened face
and body and eyes that glowed. She ha[s] absolutely no taste in dress, and w[ears] a
32
batch of rusty black lace with a bunch of artificial violets pinned to the side of her
hair. (713)
Chopin is clear in describing Mlle Reisz as not physically attractive and she pairs her
unattractiveness with her disagreeableness to demonstrate how society constructs those
women who aren’t the physical perfection of woman as it is revealed in Edna and Adèle.
That she is “self-assertive” and “tramples on the rights of others” reveals the opposite of
“acceptable” behavior for women; it is behavior that more closely relates to the men in
the novel than it is with that of the “mother-women.” However, it is Mlle Reisz’s
unpleasant physical characteristics which have fed into her ability to live “outside” of
social conventions. Conversely, she also might be seen as unattractive because she
“chooses” not to fit in with conventional society. If we can conceive of the work of every
other woman in the novel as attempting to “fit in” with the social constructions of the
female, her life’s work has been to thwart those social imports. In effect, Mlle Reisz
disavows standard “womanhood.” In doing so, she appears to have the agency that a
single man has in attempting to live life on her own terms. However, her lack of
monetary success seems reflective of her society’s expectations for women in that her
extreme talent and ability do not get the compensation they deserve. In other words, her
living as the single man lives confuses the predefined role that women are “supposed” to
adhere to and she is obliquely punished for it.
Chopin simultaneously demonstrates Mlle Reisz’s disavowal of standard
womanhood and subsequent embracing of a life that is “Other-than-mother-woman”
which, by her example, becomes a prime catalyst for Edna in disregarding standard
womanhood as well. When everyone is at the main house on Grand Isle, Mlle Reisz plays
33
a musical piece and Edna is moved to tears. In contrast to Adèle’s piano playing, Edna
“sees” no “pictures” (714) in Mlle Reisz’s musical expressions, no scenes of people or
anything for that matter acting along with the music when Mlle Reisz plays. This lack of
a “picture” for Edna certainly reveals that she can’t envision what Mlle Reisz as artist
actively seeks to create in her playing because the artist-painter in Edna hasn’t been
actively called forth, encouraged, and therefore allowed to create new ways of
interpreting the world (even if they erase or challenge the viewer’s associations and
“meanings” in the process). However, the lack of picture also parallels the “forbidden
way” (mentioned in the brief sixth chapter) that Edna has been witness to in her growing
awakened state. Through Edna’s being unable to “see” anything when listening to her
music, Chopin cleverly expresses or mimics Mlle Reisz’s social experience in terms of
society’s impression of her and the fact that she is not the “typical woman.” In other
words, what Mlle Reisz has experienced as “Other” is the void of social relevance in
contrast to the extreme relevance of the mother-woman.
It is clear that Mlle Reisz has suffered for her art and this has been a vehicle
which gives fullness to it. Chopin implies, through Mlle Reisz’s passionate playing and
the idea that Edna sees nothing when she plays, much disappointment, heartache, and
lack of opportunity which are those effects we can infer as stemming from a lack of
physical beauty and not being the “typical” woman. She also implies that for Mlle Reisz,
there are and have been no easy answers or ideas or ways of processing the world when a
woman is not the “embodiment of every womanly grace and charm” as Chopin has
described Adèle. Edna has not had the same experience that Mlle Reisz has but, in her
growing awakened state, she knows that she craves feeling. She develops a relationship
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with Mlle Reisz once they all return to New Orleans so that she can observe her in greater
detail and learn the artist’s life. Mlle Reisz indirectly encourages her to have the artist’s
soul the courageous soul. . . . The brave soul. The soul that dares and defies” (740).
Believing that the artist can create such intense feeling, she will actively begin to avoid
the life of the mother-woman epitomized by Adèle and characterized by a “colorless
existence” or “blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visit[s] [the] soul,
in which [one] would never have the taste of life’s delirium” (735). Edna will want to
trade her current “colorless existence” for the one of the artist where there are “no
pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair” so long as “the very passions
themselves [a]re aroused within her soul” (714).
Performances
In her attempt to free herself of the constraints of the established patriarchal
social order, Edna’s actions will render her sexual and human form in terms of “Otherthan-mother-woman” which is “unintelligible” or unrecognizable to the broader social
order. This form of “Otherness,” as Mlle Reisz embodies, it is punished because it is
essentially a disavowal of the patriarchal social order. In contrast to these disavowals,
there are moments when characters attempt getting Edna to adhere to the “order of
things,” to support it and perform the gendered role prescribed for her by the dominant
heterosexual society. The acts that these individuals perform are in agreement with
“acceptable” behavior for each of the sexes under the dominant ideology. Therefore, the
accepted order of things (patriarchy) can be said to be performed. For men, this includes
acts which reveal double-standards for women and also those that attempt to keep women
35
in their “mother-woman” roles. This therefore doesn’t allow women to ever realize other
modes of existence (the one exception in the novel being Mlle Reisz, whom I would
argue is also punished). For women, this includes acts which reflect strong adherence to
the “mother-woman” role and which consequently keep patriarchal ideology firmly in
place as the nature of ideology forces individuals to believe that the way they exist
currently is the only way they can exist. Men “performing patriarchy” in their adherence
to its ideology may seem like a given, as the nature of patriarchy is a near worldwide
phenomenon. However, my employment of the term for this novel describes those
“moves” a man makes to either maintain the status he’s perceived to have or to ultimately
uphold that same system. As the social system as Chopin presents it reveals that it is in
fact a man’s world, these moves are miniature but entail far-reaching effects. However,
we see that men limit their experiences with those they supposedly love and even hurt
themselves in the process of performing patriarchy.
In some cases, these “moves” effectively block any type of criticism of the
social system by women (in this case, Edna). We see one particularly compelling
example of this on Grand Isle when a drunken Léonce comes home from the club and
scolds Edna for not being a more attentive mother to the child he believes is “consuming”
at that very moment. The incident brings her to tears. In essence, he performs his support
of the patriarchal system that establishes the woman’s role as the caretaker of the
children. Though Edna may not appear to be antagonistic to him the next day when he
leaves for New Orleans, it is clear that Edna is affected negatively by his actions. After he
returns to the city, he sends food gifts to Edna for her to share with the women at Grand
Isle. In doing this, however, he attempts to maintain his own social place and relevance.
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In other words, his social standing in the community and his actions to maintain it eclipse
Edna’s ever being able to express her “real feelings” about him to anyone. Chopin writes,
“Mr. Pontellier was a great favorite, and ladies, men, children, even nurses, were always
on hand to say goodbye to him” (700), which suggests that his public persona is full of
manly grace and charm. However, it is clear that his own wife doesn’t express such
affinity. In what we gather as a particularly ironic statement from Edna as the food gifts
are passed around, the narrator comments on Edna’s lack of ability in expressing
anything negative about him. The women “all declar[e] that Mr. Pontellier [i]s the best
husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier [i]s forced to admit that she knew of none better”
(700). Edna has no language to express her dissatisfaction with, in this case, the manner
in which he attempts to get her in-line with being a mother-woman. It would be hard for
Edna to argue that Léonce is a “bad” husband when he clearly provides so well, not only
for his family but also for his friends. Thus, Léonce’s actions prevent negative talk of him
in his absence, should Edna need to “vent” about her marriage problems; he reasserts his
position as benevolent head of the family. This, then, widens a gap that will continue to
widen as Léonce takes no responsibility for his actions, thus alienating himself from a
woman he claims to love. We see it is no “great” action he has done in sending this gift,
although he arguably does it to reinforce his position in society as a successful man.
Whether or not he does it to apologize for scolding her or for preventing negative talk, we
see the effect is generally the same: Edna keeps quiet.
This is again seen later on in the story when Léonce is worried enough about
Edna’s awakening state to visit the doctor, on “her” behalf, when he concerns himself
with her behavior. Apparently, she is becoming unrecognizable to him, her behavior is
37
“unintelligible.” His doing so would initially seem to be demonstrating an act of
selflessness in him, a drive in him to “help his wife” and their relationship. Even Dr.
Mandelet’s advice to him would seem, at first, to suggest a type of encouragement in
letting Edna be who it is she wants to be. However, a closer analysis of their interaction
reflects the patriarchal notion of how men “allow” women to be. As a representative of
the medico-patriarchal ISA5, he offers his counsel to Léonce in the hopes of assuaging his
anxiety. When he tells Dr. Mandelet of the trouble with his wife, Léonce explains that it
appears some new-fangled ideology has crept into Edna’s mind. He says
Her whole attitude—toward me and everybody and everything—has changed. You
know I have a quick temper, but I don't want to quarrel or be rude to a woman,
especially my wife; yet I'm driven to it, and feel like ten thousand devils after I've
made a fool of myself. She's making it devilishly uncomfortable for me,” he went
on nervously. “She's got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal
rights of women. (742)
According to Léonce, Edna’s behavior is genuinely affecting him and making him
“devilish.” This reaffirms the social construction of acceptable behavior in women in that
he believes she is not acting as she “should.” According to the men of this time, the
proverbial chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The household as it has been
constructed cannot work without a woman doing the job created for her, and for which
only she apparently can fill.
Dr. Mandalet’s response in questioning Edna’s behavior is even more telling
in that he calls the need in women for escaping the social constructs of their lives—what
he perceives Edna might be trying to do—as being part of a “pseudo-intellectual”
movement of women, that they must be thinking that they are “superior beings” (742).
His response suggests his disapproval for a woman even considering such a thing. His
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advice to Léonce is to get her around “her own people for a while; it will do her good”
(742) by effectively coercing her to go to her sister Janet’s wedding. The doctor’s
“wisdom” wants to bring her back to her old modes of existing, but neither of the men
realize that Edna is beyond the point of returning to the way she has been told to live her
life. Dr. Mandelet continues “let your wife alone for a while. Don’t bother her and don’t
let her bother you. Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism”
whereby he goes on to describe a woman’s nature. He says:
A sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know Mrs. Pontellier to be, is
especially peculiar. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully
with them. And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their
idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. This
is some passing whim of your wife, due to some cause or causes which you and I
needn't try to fathom. But it will pass happily over, especially if you let her alone.
Send her around to see me. (742-743)
Quite a few things are present and telling in his advice. Edna receives “special”
consideration as “sensitive and highly organized” but Dr. Mandelet’s language reflects
the idea of a woman being “fragile” and “confusing,” leading him to use the word
“peculiar” to describe her. Saying that “it would require an inspired psychologist to deal
successfully with [her]” implies the notion that the “science” available to him doesn’t
equip him enough to be of service for Léonce’s inquiry. And again, this demonstrates that
men privilege the “knowledge” of other men and that they exalt and refer to the social
hierarchy as men have created it in the attempt to deal with the problem of woman. The
problem as the narrator presents it, however, is that the men don’t understand that the
highly specialized “knowledge” of woman misses the point altogether. Neither man in
this case, try though he might, can “fix” Edna. They see that dealing with women is
“bungling,” feel that “women are moody and whimsical” and determine that what Edna is
39
experiencing is also “a whim.” They fail to see what Edna sees—that is, glaring
irreconcilable differences within her and the patriarchal world in which she finds
herself—that it is no whim what she is experiencing.
Léonce makes himself appear vulnerable in divulging such feelings to another
man—he does appear genuinely pained in even having to have the conversation in the
first place. He attempts to recover his masculinity after having effectively emasculated
himself to demonstrate how his business prowess is still intact. He subtly informs Dr.
Mandelet of his business plans, in the hope that it will compensate for whatever unmanly
activity he has just committed with the doctor. He describes his “big [business] scheme”
and will “let [Dr. Mandalet] in on the inside if he say[s] so” (743). For whatever business
he actually has in New York, his reminding the doctor that he has such promising
business, indeed that he’s willing to get him “in on the inside,” marks a clear connection
to his attempt to cover his perceived impotence as a married man. In this case, we see
Léonce substituting “business savvy” for being an “effective” husband, the same way he
has substituted it throughout his marriage to Edna and never really getting to know her
and who she is becoming. This effectively blocks his ability in being able to maintain, in
any form, a relationship with the woman he supposedly loves. Here we see the patriarchal
system doing a great disservice to men.
Adèle acts in accordance with patriarchal ideology to limit Edna’s advance
toward unacceptable social conduct with her growing relationship with Robert. In the
early stages of Edna’s awakening Adèle learns that she is not yet a woman of the
community in which she resides when she tells her that she “sometimes feel[s] . . . as if
[she] were walking through the green meadow [of her childhood] again; idly, aimlessly,
40
unthinking and unguided” (707). This suggests to Adèle that Edna is on a “path” that
hasn’t actualized itself in motherhood. Because of this, she attempts to block her from
realizing other modes of being, especially when it comes to Robert. Because Adèle has
seen the ways that Robert treats the married women, including herself, at Grand Isle
every summer, she tells him, “let Mrs. Pontellier alone.” When Robert asks her why, she
tells him, “she might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously” (709). Robert
does minor battle with her on this point as it injures his manhood, but Adèle’s goal of
keeping social customs in place is effective. It is one of the reasons we can pinpoint at the
end of the novel, after Edna has left her husband, as to why Robert writes Edna the note
saying, “I love you. Good-bye—because I love you” (776). Robert doesn’t want to mar
Edna’s social standing in any way, but his action mars her on the personal level wherein
she realizes that she will never be able to live outside of social parameters of
“acceptable” conduct. This, because so long as people concern themselves with social
expectations and standing, Edna is bound to believe that her desires have no place in any
world—either self-made or otherwise. Adèle appears to be helping Edna in preventing
her from making what she believes will be a grave mistake with Robert. However,
Robert’s subsequent adherence to the accepted worldview in upholding the codes of the
same social system of which he has been a part—the choice of leaving her—effectively
denies him the opportunity to be a partner to the woman he loves. It limits his ability to
live outside of accepted social norms and grow to understand or experience the world the
way that another human understands or experiences it. He chooses instead to remain, as
Adèle tells him, “the gentleman [all the women] know [him] to be” so that can remain fit
“to associate with the wives and daughter of the people who trust him’” (709). Even
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though he has described the condition of being an “adoring dog” to the women around
him earlier as a “hopeless passion” (703), he chooses to limit himself instead of finding
“true love” with a woman he loves and who could actually love him for the first time.
In spite of this, on Grand Isle, she eventually does become closer with Robert,
who awakens and fans the flames of longing in Edna to be free of the things for which
“Fate had not fitted her” (708), to strive to be free. We see that she goes swimming on her
own, and Chopin employs this as a metaphor for Edna’s desire to begin gaining her own
way through the world. When she returns to New Orleans, she begins to abandon her
Tuesday guest receptions (the “les covenances” mentioned earlier). She becomes more
frustrated with her life with Léonce and the children, and longs for the life she perceives
she should have had, had she not been personally and culturally coerced into marrying
him. She is eventually seen in public spaces, openly defiant of social conventions about
being with a man that is not her husband—this in the form of Alcée Arobin, who is the
quintessential “rake” of the story but who is not punished for his behavior since it is
“acceptable” within his society apparently. In effect, she acts with the agency that men
have and appears rather cavalier while doing so. By disregarding that which has been
socially-constructed for her sphere as the compliant, dutiful “mother-woman,” Edna
eventually forges a hybrid of “male” and “female” experience. She abandons her duties in
favor of those which stimulate her (her art work, a type of work that is not generally
allowable for a “mother-woman”) and processes the events of her life in a more
emotional manner (“typically” female behavior). The self-awareness that follows from
blending the agency she begins acting with (that which is usually granted to males in the
novel) and the prior terms of her existence as mother-woman that she wants to abandon is
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what eventually leads her, ever more, to the ennui she experiences near the end of the
novel. That is, the two aren’t allowed, according to society, to coexist together. Chopin
demonstrates that women cannot exist outside of the sphere described for them without
the knowledge of how the gendered polarity works.
If we can chart Edna’s growth from passive behavior into becoming—or
attempting to become—more active in the life she lives, then we can see how new
perceptions are shaping her into who she becomes when she leaves us at the end of the
novel. We see this clearly displayed when the narrator refers to her reading material on
the evening of Léonce’s departure for her sister’s wedding. Chopin writes,
Edna sat in the library after dinner and read Emerson until she grew sleepy. She
realized that she had neglected her reading, and determined to start anew upon a
course of improving studies, now that her time was completely her own to do with
as she liked. (747)
The import of Emerson’s ideas will begin to affect Edna. Emerson’s ideal—the
unencumbered, self-reliant, spiritually-transcendent, morally-conscious man—is
empowering to her. It is not just in her dealings with her husband or her children that this
is displayed. She adopts forthrightness in the way she communicates with others
throughout the rest of the novel, further emerging from the demeanor of a demure
woman. In essence, she begins acting in ways one would perceive a man to act which
therefore renders her behavior “unintelligible” with her physical sex.
When she goes to the races with Alcée Arobin, she places her bets and wins.
She also refuses to let him treat her as a mere plaything and commands his presence when
she is around him. When she goes to see Mlle Reisz, her hostess offers her some brandy
which she drinks “as a man would have done” (751). We see her later with Robert in the
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small café out in the suburbs, telling him the things he does which perturb her which
makes him uncomfortable. She tells him, “I suppose this is what you would call
unwomanly; but I have got into the habit of expressing myself. It doesn’t matter to me,
and you may think me unwomanly if you like” (771, my emphasis). It’s apparent that
Edna is beginning to believe that “a foolish consistency [in being, because of one’s
physical sex, the gender one is prescribed to be] is the hobgoblin of little minds” or that
trusting “thyself” is the “way” one must live her or his life, among many other possible
quotations from Emerson that Edna could be reading. However, Emerson’s philosophy
doesn’t account for how a woman is to live her life or even adopt such behavior for her
own self-actualization in this male-oriented and sexist society. In “Land’s End: The
Awakening and 19th Century Literary Tradition,” Priscilla Leder proposes that Edna is
“alienated” by Emerson’s “chauvinism” (she quotes Virginia M. Koudis, who speaks of
Emerson’s use of the “masculine pronoun,” “he”) which leads to her “escap[e] into sleep”
(246). Leder argues that this prevents her from absorbing the philosophical import
Emerson describes in becoming “self-reliant” or, as I would add to this idea,
understanding the full effects of “speak[ing] the rude truth in all ways” and the like.
However, it’s possible that Chopin is revealing the problem a woman faces in becoming
anything other than what she is “supposed to become” (the “mother-woman” that men
deem she should be), to speak what “should not” be spoken by a woman. In terms of her
society’s understanding, Edna essentially has no business reading Emerson since she is
not a man. She does not realize that acting in manner that is not in accord with “standard”
womanhood will only drive her to her undoing. Edna will come to discover that the
constraints of the world—those that keep a woman as a woman through adhering to
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patriarchal ideology—are thoroughly entrenched in everyone and everything and not to
be cast off by merely believing that they are. The “place” Edna longs to get to, the place
Emerson advises her to get to—it doesn’t exist unless she were to be a man.
In what appears to be a last-ditch effort to bring Edna back around to what it is
that a reputable woman is supposed to be, we see Adèle perform her support of the
established order in asking Edna to come to the delivery of her next-born child. After she
gives birth, she says “Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember
them!” (774) to say that Edna’s behavior of late has not been indicative of such. Adèle’s
desired effect has the exact opposite outcome in reality, as Edna has grown “uneasy”
while watching her give birth. The narrator informs us that
. . . she [i]s seized with a vague dread. Her own like experiences see[m] far away,
unreal, and only half remembered . . . She beg[ins] to wish she had not come; her
presence was not necessary . . . But Edna d[oes] not go. With an inward agony, with
a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnesse[s] the scene of
torture. (774)
This passage creatively symbolizes Edna’s problem with the nature of the “obligatory
frame of reproductive heterosexuality” and motherhood as Butler describes it. Adèle’s
desire to make Edna remember that she is a mother and that she “must do her duty” only
turns Edna further from those responsibilities. In this sense, Edna has abandoned her
culture’s conception of “womanhood,” realizing now fully her repulsion to the
expectation of women to always be the socially-constructed “woman of our dreams.”
The effect on Edna of Adèle’s giving birth is even noticed by Dr. Mandelet,
who questions her privately about her familial relationships afterwards. He asks if she is
going to go abroad and she says,
45
‘Perhaps—no, I am not going. I'm not going to be forced into doing things. I don't
want to go abroad. I want to be let alone. Nobody has any right—except children,
perhaps—and even then, it seems to me—or it did seem—’ She felt that her speech
was voicing the incoherency of her thoughts, and stopped abruptly. (775)
In “Narrative Stance in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,” Ruth Sullivan and Stewart Smith
describe Edna’s “incoherency” here as stemming from her “thoughtless[ness],
impulsive[ness], and ignoran[ce] of the consequences of her acts” (150). They reason that
Edna “apparently never gets around to” thinking about what character of woman she is
(150). However, I argue that Edna’s incoherence reflects that she has no means to speak
and confront the heretofore-analyzed embodiment of patriarchal ideology in the medical
ISA, Dr. Mandelet. As Butler describes this (in)ability to speak, “the grammatical place
for the subject has [apparently still not] been established.” Though she attempts being
somewhat honest and candid, her incoherency reveals her still-subjugated status when
confronted by “the law” of human’s sexual nature.
His response to her is that
The trouble is . . . that youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of
Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of
moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel
obliged to maintain at any cost. (775)
It only seems that Dr. Mandalet commiserates with Edna’s plight in not being fitted for
motherhood in the first place. He “informs” her of how haphazard her
state/Fate/disposition is, in that Nature “shouldn’t” have fitted Edna for motherhood only
to have her realize too late the illusions she has been under. Yet, he is ultimately calling
her back, through his ideological “authority” to that motherly disposition (offering his
counsel to her, saying “I know I would understand” [775, my emphasis], though we know
46
this is false since he is not a woman), regardless of how unaccountable “Nature” (read
here as deterministic, patriarchal ideology) has been to her.
In fact, I would argue that Chopin uses Nature almost as a decoy to describe
Edna’s problem with existence. Donald Pizer sees nature functioning to destroy Edna in
“A Note on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as Naturalist Fiction.” He sees her very
biology as producing her conflicted relationship with motherhood and her marriage to
Léonce (8-11) after she awakens. As Pizer states, “Edna has not been able to overcome
the hold which the biology of motherhood and the social codes of marriage have had both
on her emotions and on the beliefs and actions of others within the areas of life in which
she functions” (11). While this is true to some extent, Pizer’s statement ignores the extent
to which individuals of a given sex within patriarchal society are socially (patriarchally)
constructed and required to become the embodiment of their gender without question. As
we see, Dr. Mandalet is still calling her—hailing her, as Althusser describes and which
Jennifer B. Gray has pointed out—to fulfill the role, regardless of her disavowal of the
biological role “Nature” produced for her.
However, Edna remains firm in not being swayed back to that which she has
actively tried to abandon. She tells him, “oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after
all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life” (775). It’s clear
that to Edna, all the guideposts she has been witness to which inform her of being just the
one version of woman she has been taught to be have remained fixed. She has not
avoided them nor surmounted them. It’s as if all the work of becoming self-reliant and
independent has been for naught.
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Edna sees that wanting her own way conflicts greatly with those of her
society’s. When she finds that Robert is not back at the “pigeon house” when she returns,
she finds a note that Robert has left for her saying, “I love you. Goodbye...because I love
you.” (776). It would at first glance appear that Edna is being freed of yet another man,
and all of the mastery which he would inevitably put on her. However, Edna becomes
distraught over Robert’s abandoning her. As stated before, his behavior abides in the
rules of the dominant society. On the surface, we can assume that Edna’s “version” of a
relationship might not be fitting for him, considering that he sees her becoming his wife,
which Edna greatly protests (772). However, I would argue that Robert refuses to do that
which Edna longs for him to do—to free himself of the social constraints of propriety—
and become her unabashed lover. At this point, she has told him, “Now you are here we
shall love each other, my Robert. We shall be everything to each other. Nothing else in
the world is of any consequence” (773). It would appear, then, that Robert believes he
knows better. Expecting general derision from society in “taking” another man’s wife and
knowing how he will be perceived in his community, he effectively limits himself and his
ability to find “true love” with Edna. His actions reflect the notion that he defers to the
“wisdom” of the system by choosing to avoid losing his positive, good-natured
perception in society, as Adèle once pulled him aside to tell him. Thus, not only does
Robert lose a potential person with whom he could find happiness with on new and
unexplored territory, Robert’s decision helps seal Edna’s fate in her suicide. This is not to
say that Robert is directly responsible for her death in any way; it only reinforces to Edna
that she will never be able to find a person whom she loves who is willing to love her on
her terms.
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Edna will not be anything for anyone other than herself and fully understands
the transience with which she perceives her own passion. This principle is elucidated in
her thoughts of Robert as she walks down to the beach for her last swim. The narrator
says, “There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even
realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of
her existence, leaving her alone” (777). In this passage, she acknowledges that the
sensual nature with which she perceives Robert will fade in time—that the cycle will
repeat itself ad nauseum. All of her “becoming” that which has been told to her by those
who would seek to uphold the social and sexual hierarchy, as well as that which has been
told to her to defy and confuse it, has created no sense of person at all. The polarity rips
her asunder. In the end, her beauty, which enables her to deviate from accepted social
norms, has created only the illusion of escaping. She finds it is the same place she was
destined for in the first place: destruction. It is clear, at this point, that Mlle Reisz’s
advice in nurturing the soul that dares and defies can never become a reality for her. Not
only is Edna unwilling to be socially perceived as Mlle Reisz is, she can’t even imagine
her life “without love, sexuality, and connection” that Jennifer B. Gray has identified, to
“dare and defy” the people and expectations around her. In either case, Edna cannot
accept the world the way it is and always has been—that is, a world that would
preemptively fail her in being the woman she would become.
CHAPTER III
FULFILLING THE NATURE OF
PRESCRIBED NARRATIVE
IN DREISER’S SISTER
CARRIE
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) is largely comprised of two
narratives. One describes Caroline (Carrie) Meeber’s rise to fame near the turn of the
century; the other describes her husband George W. Hurstwood’s plummet from the neartop of the social hierarchy to the bottom. In contrast to the other novels discussed in this
thesis where women descend from lives of wealth and affluence into death and/or
poverty, Dreiser explores the opposite in this novel. Although Dreiser’s narrative tracks
in Sister Carrie stand in opposition to those of The Awakening and The House of Mirth,
the governing ideology of all three novels is, in effect, the same. This governing ideology
is patriarchy, although where Edna and Lily are destroyed in their narratives for rejecting
it, Carrie is “rewarded” in hers for visibly supporting it. Carrie’s narrative reveals the
extent to which the values of the men in her life have rubbed off on her, forcing her to
submit to those values if she is to get ahead. At the end of the novel, she has gained
wealth and fame—the “rewards” of this ideology—by both rendering herself as a sexual
object and disregarding her own self in the process. In effect, she becomes a vehicle—an
actor—for performing and reproducing patriarchal social values—values where women
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50
are only sexual in form and rendered capable only of speaking in language approved by
men. The agency she employs works toward assimilating herself within the objectives of
this ideology; she seeks to gain establishment through becoming a subject. On the other
hand, Hurstwood is mired in the illusion of power and agency. He believes in the social
status he has achieved through his job, in being the “head” of the household, and having a
wife and children who comply with social standards of gender roles. As the novel
progresses, he becomes trapped by the very ideology from which he has benefited so
much and eventually disavows it altogether, refusing to adhere to its rules for existence.
He is punished for this with his life.
Both Carrie’s and Hurstwood’s “agency,” despite evidence of Carrie’s
eventual and Hurstwood’s initial commercial success, have been used to either work
toward or have worked toward the same goal—to become wealthy, free of care. Dreiser
rather craftily situates what looks like agency in both characters, only to confound what
agency truly is (rendering that term essentially useless) so that he can demonstrate how it
is that the social system creates, fosters, and ensures continued dependence upon itself.
Complicating this, however, is that Dreiser points to men and the patriarchal social order
as the prime culprits for these two characters gross misunderstanding of what they are or
have been working toward in terms of independence, economic or otherwise. For both
Carrie and Hurstwood, the terms the social system sets forth for behavior severely restrict
their gaining any type of footing and therefore being on their own terms. Both narratives
reveal behavior that works in accordance with the social system which in turn reflects the
fates to which they are subject.
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In Sister Carrie, “patriarchal ideology” demonstrates itself through the
workings of capitalism and this works to keep women subordinate to men in society.
Dreiser reveals that American capitalism operates in the motives of all “subjects” within
this ideology and emphasizes maleness through the workings of capitalism. He displays
this in various social institutions like places of business, the family, and cultural
centers—the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) that Althusser identifies—and these
ISAs reproduce the capitalist values of society. While these ISAs are diverse in form,
they are “unified . . . beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling
class’” (139, Althusser’s emphasis). Though none of the main characters are from this
class, all want to be a part of it. We quickly see how patriarchal ideology permeates all
aspects of the novel and how, through ISAs and the nature of capitalism, it is a source of
oppression for many.
Regarding the institutions practicing capitalism which are “accomplished”
places of business, we see that Drouet, the first man Carrie is romantically involved with
and who influences her, likes going to Rector’s, “a restaurant of some local fame” (30). It
is a rather stylish and popular place to go to with
. . . its polished marble walls and floor, its profusion of lights, its show of china and
silverware, and, above all, its reputation as a resort for actors and professional men,
[which] seemed to him the proper place for a successful man to go. He loved . . .
particularly the company and acquaintanceship of successful men. (30, my
emphasis)
Dreiser continues that it is “a source of keen satisfaction [for] to him to know that”
famous male performers “are wont to come to this same place” or are “seated a few tables
off” (30). Moreover, Dreiser hammers home in characterizing Drouet that “At Rector's he
could always obtain this satisfaction, for there one could encounter politicians, brokers,
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actors, some rich young ‘rounders’ of the town” (30-31, my emphasis). Dreiser clearly
points to men as the “movers and shakers” of American life in Chicago and that men only
value their own way of processing their world, value their patriarchal heritage and
ideology. They converge in places like Rector’s and also in Fitzgerald and Moy’s, a bar
managed by Hurstwood, the second man Carrie is involved with and who influences her
tremendously. He personally knows “hundreds of actors, merchants, politicians, and the
general run of successful characters about town, and it [i]s part of his success to do so”
(32). As gatekeepers of success and prosperity, men must value other men’s success and
they do so through the ISA of the restaurant or bar. This particular ISA functions to
concretize men’s self-importance and the agency they believe they have. As Dreiser
describes Hurstwood’s “rise,” “His managerial position was fairly important . . . He had
risen by perseverance and industry, through long years of service, from the position of
barkeeper in a commonplace saloon to his present altitude” (32). Dreiser’s use of the
words “perseverance and industry” reveals a process in Hurstwood which is utterly
“steeped,” to borrow from Althusser’s essay (128), in learning whom to value: other rich
men. He works diligently and “perform[s] [his] tasks ‘conscientiously’” (Althusser 128)
in order to rise to “his present altitude” and be fit to associate with these important rich
men.
For the family ISA that Althusser describes, we see patriarchal ideology
manifested in Hurstwood and in his family who occupy “the first grade below the
luxuriously rich” of the American upper class (32) and which both conflicts with and
reflects Hurstwood’s power in the place of business ISA mentioned above. It also reveals
the disparity between “established” men and single females. Dreiser further characterizes
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Hurstwood in revealing his dysfunctional family home environment which is the “result
of a growth of [the family members’] natures which were largely independent and
selfish” (146). Dreiser continues, “Hurstwood [i]s a man of authority and some fine
feeling, and it irritate[s] him excessively to find himself surrounded more and more by a
world upon which he ha[s] no hold, and of which he had a lessening understanding”
(146). Dreiser points to the family’s dysfunction as stemming from capitalism and the fair
amount of wealth he brings home, because while he is at work all day, his family life
goes on without him. It frustrates him, but as a man, Hurstwood views his “authority” and
subsequent power as that which carries over from his place of business into his family
life; it must not be challenged or disturbed. In The Social Construction of American
Realism, Amy Kaplan sees this a little differently. She writes that Hurstwood “never
really had the control over his family he thinks he has lost” (147) and sees Hurstwood’s
“ambiguous social position”—as the manager who “has no financial control over the
business” he runs, who has “transform[ed] powerlessness into a display of power through
his studied pose of leisure”—“spawn[ing] desires in his family which he cannot fulfill,
and his impotency leads them to ignore him as head of the family” (147). While this is
certainly valid, Dreiser continues, saying that when quarrels come up in his household
. . . they ma[k]e clear to him his position. He [i]s being made to follow, [i]s not
leading. When, in addition, a sharp temper [i]s manifested, and to the process of
shouldering him out of his authority [i]s added a rousing intellectual kick, such as a
sneer or a cynical laugh, he [i]s unable to keep his temper. He fli[es] into hardly
repressed passion, and wishe[s] himself clear of the whole household. It seem[s] a
most irritating drag upon all his desires and opportunities. (147, my emphasis)
It’s clear he believes he has earned that authority—manifested in “desires and
opportunities”—because he is a man and this is the “natural” order of life. If it is
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challenged, Hurstwood uses physical power,
. . . flying into a hardly repressed passion” to subdue the offender. However,
Hurstwood and his family, we shouldn’t forget, are established and have established
themselves through capitalism whereas Carrie as a single female has not.
Hurstwood uses this knowledge to his advantage to influence her and get her to do
what he wants. While Kaplan writes that his “passion for Carrie can be understood
less as a romantic rebellion against convention than as a compensation for his lack
of authority at home. (147-148)
Hurstwood’s continually-practiced agency as the social system has established him
enables him to do more in terms of mobility than Carrie would ever be able to do.
Hurstwood’s establishment can therefore be seen as leading to his undoing because he
doesn’t consider how his actions affect his particularly tragic outcome.
The most compelling instance of “patriarchal ideology” that Dreiser confronts
is actually a demonstration of it in “the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.)”
that Althusser speaks of (137). “The Arts” include dramatic performances which include
the theatres Carrie performs in and I will discuss these specific scenes in some detail in
the “Performances” section of this essay. However, why exactly it is “patriarchal
ideology” made manifest has to do with the content of both Carrie’s speaking lines and
her actions within them. The cultural import from those “roles” is fully immersed in
man’s perception of woman (i.e., “woman” as it is constructed in the plays resonates
strongly with men and gives them pleasure). It reveals patriarchal ideology because the
content she performs is prescribed, not only in the sense that the lines/actions she
speaks/performs were written before she performs them (pre-scribed) but that they are
meant to offer—prescribe—to women in the viewing audience the “appropriate”
behavior/demeanor for women, to make them perform in daily life the performance they
see on stage. As Judith Butler writes in Gender Trouble, gender, as conceived within the
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“obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (173), is a performance which tries to
accomplish the “ideal” form of itself—which is “an ideal that [in everyday life] no one
can embody” (176, Butler’s emphasis). If, however, it’s not achievable outside of the
theatre, it certainly can be portrayed as such on stage in the cultural ISA where it is
accomplished and circulated as ideological currency, or “capital” as Dreiser writes (313).
Carrie’s becoming a success from her performances reveals Dreiser’s naturalistic
determinism at work in the novel. Her adherence to and reproduction of the prescribed,
gendered role where she is essentially an object is what determines her “success”
regardless of whether she forfeits her being in the process. Conversely, Hurstwood
eventually “gives up” behaving as a man who believes he has agency and is “punish[ed]”
for “fail[ing] to do [his] gender right” (Gender Trouble 178). Failing to adhere to the
codes of “maleness” determines Hurstwood’s tragic fate.
These behavioral modes reflect the naturalistic and deterministic forces that
shape Carrie in her rise to “success” and Hurstwood in his decline to “failure.” Though
brilliantly charting Dreiser’s life events, relationships, and personal history in how he
created Sister Carrie, Ellen Moers in Two Dreisers sees Carrie as a free agent for herself.
For Moers, Carrie has sexual appeal and beauty that grants her agency in the theatre
which she uses “if unwittingly” against the men—and specifically Hurstwood—in her
life (111). While this is present in the novel, Moers doesn’t account for how this form of
agency is in fact detrimental to Carrie and makes her an object wholly dependent upon
that which she has no control over, her physical nature.
Dreiser reveals the determining factors of Hurstwoods’s fate and grounds it in
social institutions. Moers points to Dreiser’s naturalism through his employment of Elmer
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Gates’s brain “science” on mental and hence bodily growth or decline—the “anastates”
and “katastates” of neurological chemicals (Dreiser 231). Moers reflects that according to
Gates, these were the byproducts of good thoughts and bad thoughts, respectively, and
they manifest positively (from anastate production) or negatively (from katastate
production) in bodily form and appearance. She notes that Dreiser needed “scientific
evidence” to demonstrate Hurstwood’s decline through his “false, depressing, and evil
emotions” (166). Although Moers smartly points to Dreiser’s influences for writing the
novel and acknowledges that Gates’s theory helped create for Dreiser the “ever
narrowing, ever deepening determinist spiral” (167) that he worked to reveal, she
neglects the full effect of the social institutions themselves as Dreiser presents them that
are within and around the passages of the novel she analyzes. Dreiser points to the place
of business ISA, the saloon or bar—specifically the people (men) “worth knowing”
within them—which I believe better reflects the “determinist spiral” at work in the text. I
imagine that Dreiser might be playing with his readers by offering a red herring—
“katastates”—for Hurstwood’s decline. Moers acknowledges that, once he steals away
from Chicago to New York and is not a success, Hurstwood compares himself to his old,
accomplished state which, as Dreiser writes, “produce[s] a constant state of gloom, or at
least, depression” (231). Moers’s remarks that this in turn “produce[s] the physical
changes—the dulling of an eye, the slowing of a step—that in turn diminish[es]
Hurstwood’s ability to charm customers; thus lessening the popularity of his Warren
Street saloon” (167) etc., thus demonstrating the chain of events which lead to his
business failure. But Moers stops there effectively letting the nature of capitalism off the
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hook. Yet, Dreiser is careful to refer back to the initial cause of why Hurstwood was a
success in Chicago and why he can’t be “happy” in New York. He writes,
The new friends he made were not celebrities. They were of a cheaper, a slightly
more sensual and cruder, grade. He could not possibly take the pleasure in this
company that he had in that of those fine frequenters of the Chicago resort. He was
left to brood. (231)
It is possible that the production of “katastates” may stem from his brooding, but the
point remains that Dreiser grounds Hurstwood’s happiness and success in the places of
capitalism; he especially needs the attention and esteem of other successful and thoughtprovoking men in order feel that he is a success. Hurstwood needs the established,
patriarchal order which is absent in the new bar he owns.
“Guides” and Patriarchal Expectations as
Precursors to Action/Performance
Under the capitalistic and patriarchal social system as Dreiser presents it in
Sister Carrie, there are certain ways that both sexes must behave and even mentally
process their own existence which work to keep capitalism and hence patriarchy—the
established order—in place. I term these “ways” as, rather, “expectations” that issue from
the patriarchal social system and its abiding ideology. They indicate a character’s
conscientious adherence (consciousness enacted by conscience) to, understanding of, and
inundation in the “accepted” order of patriarchal/capitalistic society. As Althusser says,
these expectations are “obvious” because they are an ideological effect of capitalism (and
by extension patriarchy) and they go unquestioned because they are the accepted “norm.”
Because Carrie is “A Waif Amid Forces” as Dreiser terms her in chapter one of the
novel, she must learn the expectations of women if she is to gain establishment and
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become “other-than-waif.” Yet, Carrie is not alone in this. Patriarchal ideology informs
other characters’ behaviors as I will demonstrate.
Although some critics see Carrie as naïve or ignorant—like Ellen Moers
(109)—Dreiser demonstrates that Carrie realizes there is a hierarchy in her brother and
sister-in-law’s house that she moves to, and that she is at the bottom of it. When she
arrives in Chicago after having met Drouet on the train, she realizes the dourness of her
sister and brother-in-law’s life. When she arrives at her new home, she quickly ascertains
that the level of responsibility she will need to take on as a new member of the house will
be very great. The narrator states,
She read from the manner of Hanson, in the subdued air of Minnie, and, indeed, the
whole atmosphere of the flat, a settled opposition to anything save a conservative
round of toil. If Hanson sat every evening in the front room and read his paper, if he
went to bed at nine, and Minnie a little later, what would they expect of her? (9-10)
Here, Dreiser subtly reveals the ideological effect where women are “subdued” which has
its own logic and would be as follows: “Hanson does x; Minnie does x; therefore, Carrie
is automatically expected to do x as well.” Dreiser draws his readers’ attention to the idea
that life in America for the working class is anything but a dream, certainly, but reveals
the logic governing it which is not lost on Carrie.
Even though Hanson is not overtly hostile to Carrie, Dreiser characterizes him
as a domineering man-of-the-house who adheres strictly to the “American way.” The
narrator states that even his wife has physically changed because of him: “[Minnie] was
now a thin, though rugged, woman of twenty-seven, with ideas of life coloured by those
of her husband’s, and fast hardening into narrower conceptions of pleasure and duty than
had ever been hers in a thoroughly circumscribed youth” (10, my emphasis). In Dreiser’s
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exposition, it is clear that Hanson’s influence over his wife will work in the same manner
to get Carrie in line with his conceptions for existence. There is to be no pleasure. The
evening when Carrie gets a job, the household is in “good spirits” (22) at the dinner table,
and Carrie asks if they can all go to the theatre. Even at her suggestion of it, the narrator
notes that “there was a slight halt in the natural reply” (22) in the conversation and that
“Carrie could feel that going to the theatre was poorly advocated here” because “doing
those things which involved the expenditure of money” are not welcome causes. When he
is finished eating, Hanson leaves the dinner table and Carrie begins the conversation
again, but Minnie “rattl[es] the dishes to drown the conversation” (23).
This suggests her fear of Hanson and his power at the mere suggestion of
diversion from the “conservative round of toil,” even if Carrie, who says she “has some
money” (23), pays their way. The stoic nature of their lives suggests an actualized
integration of the American and Protestant work ethic, but this integration makes no
allowances for the happiness of its members. Carrie will not thrive in this environment.
We might wonder whether anyone in the family is “thriving” given the language of
accepted toil.
Hanson and Minnie’s expectations of Carrie’s coming to live with them in
Chicago are telling as well. Minnie invites Carrie to come to Chicago
. . . not because she longed for her presence, but because the latter was dissatisfied
at home, and could probably get work and pay her board here. She was pleased to
see her in a way, but reflected her husband's point of view in the matter of work.
Anything was good enough so long as it paid—say, five dollars a week to begin
with. A shop girl was the destiny prefigured for the newcomer. She would get in
one of the great shops and do well enough until—well, until something happened.
Neither of them knew exactly what. They did not figure on promotion. They did not
exactly count on marriage. Things would go on, though, in a dim kind of way until
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the better thing would eventuate, and Carrie would be rewarded for coming and
toiling in the city. (10-11)
Nothing, at first, seems out of the ordinary regarding Carrie’s moving to the city as it is
“obvious” that there were extremely limited options for women in terms of employment
and existence. Yet, Dreiser demonstrates that Carrie’s narrative is already determined—
prescribed—through the “logic” of capitalism. With Hanson as the head of the house,
Carrie is figured as a drone in much the same manner that he is. That Carrie’s “destiny” is
“prefigured”—that Hanson and Minnie don’t see Carrie gaining a promotion, that they
don’t count on Carrie’s getting married—reveals how the cultural narratives of capitalism
and patriarchy determine and preempt a woman’s agency to exist as she hopes to. It is
likely as well that Carrie does not determine “the better thing” that “eventuates.” She is to
abide by this logic no matter what form it takes, however unclear for her that logic and
future may be. Ultimately, she is to be of “use”: here, for Hanson; later, for fulfilling the
cultural role and embodying the cultural narrative that is already determined for women.
Dreiser further reveals how the environment hinders Carrie. During her time
with the Hansons, Carrie becomes sick and loses her position. Carrie’s health and will are
made sick by Hanson’s domineering demeanor and the work she must do. Once she is
“free” of him—once she moves in with Drouet, a “drummer” of business who has more
money than the Hansons, who isn’t stoic in his demeanor, but who is very concerned with
appearances of wealth and status—Carrie begins to believe that she is in control of her
life. Where Hanson expects Carrie to pay for her existence, Drouet provides for her
nearly every expense—and expects unending devotion in return.
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Drouet creates a system of dependence upon him for her existence because he
has some money and “agency.” He also increases her desire for material goods by
demonstrating to her what she lacks. The narrator informs us that Carrie is
. . . an apt student of fortune’s ways—of fortune’s superficialities. Seeing a thing,
she would immediately set to inquiring how she would look, properly related to it.
Be it known that this is not fine feeling, it is not wisdom . . . Fine clothes to her
were a vast persuasion; they spoke tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves. (72)
The narrator is revealing here that Carrie values fashion and looking fashionable,
certainly, but Dreiser uses misdirection to demonstrate the hypocrisy of men in that they
think they aren’t affected in the same manner. Though this is “superficial,” the same can
quickly be said of Drouet, who also likes “superficialities.” According to the narrator,
Drouet “[i]s vain, he [i]s boastful, he [i]s deluded by fine clothes as any silly headed girl”
(46), which helps to explain later that, “Drouet had a habit, characteristic of his kind, of
looking after stylishly dressed or pretty women on the street and remarking upon them”
(72). Because Carrie is new to the city, because of her inexperience and her growing want
of fine things that the city represents, the narrator shows that Drouet only influences her
because he represents (to her) what is better than the poverty that she comes from. In this
scene he remarks to Carrie, on one of their first outings, “Did you see that woman who
went by just now?” . . . “Fine stepper, wasn’t she?” Carrie agrees, but she also sees “a
little suggestion of possible defect in herself awakening in her” (73). His (un)intentional
comparisons between women works in her to make her feel as if she is inadequate—for a
little while; he subtly imparts how he expects a “fine” woman to look.
In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels
discusses Carrie’s strong desire for money and fine things as equating with her want of
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power. Michaels details capitalism’s effects as requiring a never-ending cycle which
promotes desire in humans, though Carrie doesn’t know this at the start of the novel. He
begins to approach Carrie’s motivations for obtaining money as stemming from men, but
then reduces those motivations in a rather sexist manner. Concerning the above scene just
described, Michaels notes that “the nonconsuming passion of the man serves primarily to
provoke the consuming passion of the woman. . . . Drouet’s unhindered, nonmimetic
appreciation of the ‘fine stepper’ produces in Carrie, for Carrie, a ‘desire to imitate her’”
(57). At first, this seems to be a correct analysis of men’s influence over women as
producers of social values, but his idea negates the fact that Drouet himself is highly
influenced by the patriarchal social system around him—he mimics just as much as
Carrie does. Michaels continues that the “the logic of feminine desire culminates not in a
disdain for representation but in the desire to be what you see” (57) rather than explicitly
placing the blame of that “consuming passion” onto men or acknowledging how men are
just as susceptible to cultural symbols of “greatness” which Dreiser repeatedly represents
although subversively. Dreiser reveals that desire through capitalism affects both sexes,
but for the time being, Carrie is learning what exactly is valuable and learns it from men
in the process of becoming what she thinks will be a subject in this social system.
Yet, Carrie can and does compare “fine” men as well as Drouet can compare
“fine” women and Drouet clearly reveals to Carrie, without intentionally doing so, the
social expectations that patriarchal society generates and enforces. Later on in the
chapter, when she becomes “repentant” (74) of her “fall” and her decision to move in
with him, she begins to cry. Drouet notices this when he comes home from work and
invites her to “waltz a little to that music.” The narrator reveals her thoughts on this as
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“He could not have introduced a more incongruous proposition. It made clear to Carrie
that he could not sympathise with her. She could not have framed thoughts which would
have expressed his defect or made clear the difference between them, but she felt it. It
was his first great mistake” (75). Drouet’s characteristic forthrightness in believing he
knows how Carrie feels or what will make her “better” puts the notion in Carrie’s mind
that it is he who is inadequate. His expectation and (mis)judgment that he is and will be
in control of Carrie’s mood and wellbeing—and whatever fortune befalls her—
underestimates Carrie’s understanding of judgment/comparison and its effect. Her
meeting Hurstwood even later in the chapter helps Carrie realize that he is the “superior
man” (79) to Drouet, in his fashion, general behavior, and access to money. This
“superiority,” in Hurstwood, lends itself to an evaluation of the values of the uppermiddle class in which Carrie will eventually find herself, even without Hurstwood.
Patriarchy accounts for the social values of the upper middle class and Dreiser
reveals them synechdochically through Hurstwood’s family. These “values” reveal the
social expectations of men and women and it’s apparent that Hurstwood’s children have
learned them because of capitalism. George Jr. learns from his father how he should act
and Jessica learns from her mother how she should act. The narrator informs us of how
shallow and disintegrated the family has become. Hurstwood’s son is a wanna-be
playboy. The narrator states,
He had some ability, considerable vanity, and a love of pleasure that had not, as yet
infringed upon his duties, whatever they were. He came in and went out, pursuing
his own plans and fancies . . . He was not laying bare his desires for any one to see.
He did not find any one in the house who particularly cared to see. (61)
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Clearly, having money means having ability and mobility especially if one is male, as this
passage demonstrates. Because he has so much freedom in simply being a man, it is
evident that no amount of female influence, should his mother exert some in a manner
that conflicts with his ambitions, can alter his burgeoning manhood. That he finds that
“no one who cared to see” demonstrates how accepting the whole family is of “typical”
male behavior and this feeds the family’s dysfunction because his actions go
unquestioned. Later, the narrator describes George Jr. as
. . . manifest[ing] even greater touchiness and exaggeration in the matter of his
individual rights, and attempt[s] to make all feel that he [i]s a man with a man’s
privileges—an assumption which, of all things, is most groundless and pointless in
a youth of nineteen. (146)
Everything in his life affirms his maleness and he understands it fully, even at such a
young age, because it is everywhere and in everything; patriarchal ideology is not lost on
him. Though the narrator describes George Jr.’s assumptions about life as “groundless
and pointless,” we see that it is not so; that is, Dreiser resists beating us over the head
with the accepted ideology in order to have readers form their own conclusions. Clearly,
Hurstwood’s son has learned the codes of male behavior and employs them as a man
would/“should.”
On the other hand, Hurstwood’s daughter Jessica learns the codes for femalesocial behavior through her interactions with the boys and girls at her school and from
her mother. These values enhance her desire to rise. The narrator describes her as such:
She was in the high school, and had notions of life which were decidedly those of a
patrician. She liked nice clothes and urged for them constantly. Thoughts of love
and elegant individual establishments were running in her head. She met girls at the
high school whose parents were truly rich and whose fathers had standing locally as
partners or owners of solid businesses. These girls gave themselves the airs befitting
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the thriving domestic establishments from whence they issued. They were the only
ones of the school about whom Jessica concerned herself. (60-61)
From this description, we can clearly see that the model on whom to value as friends and,
it can be inferred, potential lovers has not been lost on Jessica. Because she cannot act as
her own agent to create her own life in the way that her brother George Jr. does (since
patriarchal society psychologically preempts that option for women), she depends upon—
rather, expects—the patriarchal social system to do so for her, thus further enforcing her
continued dependence on men. Her attentiveness to her training and the actions which
follow it demonstrates “how things are” in the society around her. The above passage
reveals that Jessica only makes friends with boys and girls whom the capitalist system
establishes as the “right type” of friend. She embodies the expectations of being a woman
in her class.
Not even two pages later in the text are we witness to the effects of this type
of “selection” under capitalism. Jessica and Julia Hurstwood enter into a crude and vapid
conversation about such “friends.” The narrator tells us that Jessica “distinguishe[s] very
carefully between the young boys of the school, many of whom were attracted by her
beauty” and reveals her predisposition to dislike “Herbert Crane [who] tr[ies] to make
friends with [her]” (62). She won’t be his friend because, as she tells her mother, “He
hasn’t anything” (62). Similarly, a play that Jessica hopes to be in at her school reveals
her dislike of girls who “haven’t anything.” She comments to Mrs. Hurstwood “They’ve
got Martha Griswold in it again. She thinks she can act,” to which Mrs. Hurstwood
replies, “'Her family doesn’t amount to anything, does it?’. . . ‘They haven’t anything,
have they?” Jessica responds, “‘No . . . they’re poor as church mice’” (62). The exchange
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reveals the preoccupation with wealth which limits one person’s interactions with
another. Jessica’s answer that they are “poor as church mice” appears to be the “logical”
end of the argument. In essence, Martha Griswold is reduced to “a church mouse”; any
talent she might have suffers because of her lack of money.
That Jessica’s desire for a part in a play is combined with her thoughts on
other girls who can’t “act” merely because they are poor is significant for two reasons.
The first demonstrates the ways that the capitalist system divides females (but males as
well), even at a young age, and pits them against each other as the social hierarchy
dictates. This ensures that women will never be able to be unified in their approach
against the “accepted” way of thinking. The second appears to be Dreiser’s nod to what
he will expound on later in Carrie’s theatrical reproduction of the values men find
compelling—that is, Carrie doesn’t come from money, but as I will demonstrate, she can
certainly “act.” Jessica’s suggesting that she can “act” better because she comes from
(some) money seems to be doubly meaningful in Dreiser’s conception of acting out
patriarchal ideology. That is, she who has more money—or who is more motivated by
money—is better able to represent patriarchal ideology to a society who recognizes it as
rendered “intelligibly.”
As stated earlier, Jessica’s guide for learning this perfidious ideology comes
from her mother, who has learned it from the prevailing ideology (thus the cycle ensures
itself). Dreiser presents Mrs. Hurstwood as only concerned with the status of herself and
the status she can gain from her children. If Mrs. Hurstwood is so genuinely the opposite
of the “mother-woman of [society’s] dreams” that Adèle Ratignolle embodies in The
Awakening, this is only because Dreiser reveals the ways that devotion to capitalism
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determines behavior, “motherly” or otherwise. Chopin may be a bit subtler in this regard,
but Dreiser reiterates that all characters in the novel are preoccupied with survival and
money makes survival possible. Dreiser makes it plainly obvious just how much Mrs.
Hurstwood has been influenced by her society. The narrator states that
Her knowledge of life extended to that little conventional round of society of which
she was not—but longed to be—a member. She was not without realisation already
that this thing was impossible, so far as she was concerned. For her daughter, she
hoped better things. Through Jessica she might rise a little. Through George, Jr.’s
possible success she might draw to herself the privilege of pointing proudly. Even
Hurstwood was doing well enough, and she was anxious that his small real estate
adventures should prosper. (61)
The narrator readily offers that Mrs. Hurstwood is a social climber, that she has reached
the ultimate stage in the social climb, and able to go no further on her own “merit.” The
desire to rise socially has been so strongly ingrained in her that she knows the only way
to reach that final stage will be through her children (her son’s “abilities” and her
daughter’s marriage to a wealthy man) or her husband because society has determined
that she can’t do it on her own. As an extremely socio-economically conscious mother
who actualizes both inwardly and outwardly exterior social values, she is forced to pursue
that which fosters her continued dependence.
Dreiser couches the Hurstwoods’ relationship through Hurstwood’s reflection
on the matter and in terms of a business exchange. The narrator states that “[their]
residence could scarcely be said to be infused with this home spirit” (60) though there are
plenty of nice, rich things to fill it. He doesn’t hate his wife at first, but there is in essence
no great passion between them as their passion for things has taken the place of fulfilling
human relationships. The narrator states that “there [i]s no love lost between [the
Hurstwoods]. There [i]s no great feeling of dissatisfaction” (63). However,
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once in a while [Hurstwood] would meet a woman whose youth, sprightliness, and
humour would make his wife seem rather deficient by contrast, but the temporary
dissatisfaction which such an encounter might arouse would be counterbalanced by
his social position and a certain matter of policy. (63)
What seems like a lack of genuine spousal love obviously reveals that Hurstwood has the
wandering eye of sexual desire—a desire that, as Walter Benn Michaels argues in Sister
Carrie, is wrapped up in and complicated by capitalism (48). The narrator is clear in
stating the psycho-social reasons of why he doesn’t leave his wife: because of his job, not
because he loves her, but this also reveals social expectations for male behavior. He
shouldn’t act on his choice in “encountering” a young, sprightly woman because his
employers “wan[t] no scandals. A man to hold his position must have a dignified manner,
a clean record, and a respectable home anchorage” (63). Thus, all in Hurstwood’s life
works toward his perceivable status—or, it should, theoretically.
The narrator elaborates on Hurstwood’s understanding of and (ultimately
non-) submission to the social-sexual expectations of the system of which he is a part.
Before he ever begins his relationship with Carrie, he believes that “getting caught” for
adulterous behavior is foolishness. The narrator states,
When some one of the many middle-class individuals whom he knew, who had
money, would get into trouble, he would shake his head. It didn’t do to talk about
those things. If it came up for discussion among such friends as with him passed for
close, he would deprecate the folly of the thing. ‘It was all right to do it—all men do
those things—but why wasn’t he careful? A man can’t be too careful.’ He lost
sympathy for the man that made a mistake and was found out. (63-64, my
emphasis)
Dreiser carefully grounds this double standard in the ideology of capitalism and
patriarchy, where, again, male desire attempts circumventing the “order” it has
established—one wife, the family, etc. Obviously there is no problem with actually doing
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a “wrong” deed, though broader society—and his wife—says the opposite. Whether he is
aware of it or not, what is telling here is that he believes in the sexist double standards he
and other men like him secretively espouse. According to the male brain as Dreiser
presents it, as long as the wife doesn’t find out, infidelity in marriage is actually
allowable, accepted, and expected. The only problem in his mind is not following through
with covering his tracks.
However, when Julia discovers Hurstwood’s infidelity, Dreiser reveals the
heartache she experiences when she believes that her ability to even exist is called into
question. It is not just business for her. That “her company [is] not wanted” (149) by her
husband injures her marital expectations along with her prime commodity, her looks, and
how she has used them to benefit him. The narrator has earlier informed us that Mrs.
Hurstwood “keeps her person rather showily arrayed,” which Hurstwood doesn’t mind
since “this [is] much better than plainness” (63). Yet, no amount of “showiness” will
keep him from cheating on and leaving her. As man of the house and manager of a posh
bar, Hurstwood expects his wife to be showy. Ultimately, her function is purely to
maintain his status among those men who are just below the super rich on the
socioeconomic ladder. She feels pain at knowing that Hurstwood is out
. . . riding, most likely, with some other woman, after announcing himself as busy to
her. As a consequence, she recall[s], with rising feeling, how often he ha[s] refused
to go to places with her, to share in little visits, or, indeed, take part in any of the
social amenities which furnished the diversion of her existence. (148, Dreiser’s
emphasis)
Clearly, Julia Hurstwood sees how expendable her husband thinks her to be. The narrator
notes that she would have liked to be a part of his life while he is out gallivanting around
town and even counts on him for “diversion.” Upon realizing that he is being unfaithful,
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that “he did not look at her now with any of the old light of satisfaction or approval in his
eye,” she believes
He was taking her to be getting old and uninteresting. He s[ees] her wrinkles,
perhaps. She [i]s fading, while he [i]s still preening himself in his elegance and
youth. He [i]s still an interested factor in the merry-makings of the world, while
she—but she d[oes] not pursue the thought. She only found the whole situation
bitter, and hated him for it thoroughly. (148)
Not only has Hurstwood damaged her expectations of him, it’s evident that she believes
he is trampling on her only source for “negotiation” within this patriarchal social
system—her beauty, her one source of capital.
Ironically, when she finds out about his sexual infidelity, he rushes full-speed
ahead into even direr straits than what he only mentally acknowledges about men who
break this male social-sexual code. Feeling trapped by his wife (who begins exacting her
revenge by locking him out of his own house and by beginning proceedings for “divorce
and alimony” [169]) and his desire for Carrie, he steals $10,000 from his employers and
Carrie. This clearly demonstrates that Michaels is correct in his assertion that the effects
of capitalism produce desire and that having money (illogically) minimizes it (35).
This is to say that patriarchal ideology makes its own complications and men
in the novel certainly don’t have it exceedingly “easy.” There are other expectations that
aren’t even biologically possible which men must adhere to. The narrator comments on
this state of affairs for men in their progress from life to death, saying,
A man's fortune or material progress is very much the same as his bodily growth.
Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood,
or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching old
age. There are no other states. (230)
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Clearly, the need for being on “the up and up” is ever present for men; their actualizing
this belief apparently determines their success. If men are to simply exist in their later
stages of their lives, they are expected to continue to (re)present themselves, through their
business, as virile and healthy. However, as it is plainly evident that this is not possible in
life’s later stages, the narrator provides capitalism’s “solution” to this predicament.
Younger men act as proxies for these older men and
. . . look upon the interests of the fortune as their own, and so steady and direct its
progress. If each individual were left absolutely to the care of his own interests, and
were given time enough in which to grow exceedingly old, his fortune would pass
as his strength and will. (230)
We see that men obviate this problem of age through other men, maintaining a legacy
that would otherwise deteriorate in their age-related decline. This foreshadows
Hurstwood’s fate since the actions he takes with Carrie—stemming from his unquenched
desire—destroy him.
Concerning Carrie and her position as object of desire for both Drouet and
Hurstwood, Dreiser foreshadows their inability to remain with Carrie because of their
unacknowledged attachment to their own ways of thinking about male-female
relationships. Drouet and Hurstwood discuss how they’re supposed to treat a woman but
neither of them really understands the full import. After they all go to a play, Drouet and
Hurstwood discuss a scene in the play called The Covenant. The narrator informs us of
the
. . . ironical situation, and this was due to Drouet alone. The scene [discussed
depicts] the wife listen[ing] to the seductive voice of a lover in the absence of her
husband.
“Served him right,” sa[ys] Drouet afterward. . . . “I haven’t any pity for a man
who would be such a chump as that.”
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“Well, you never can tell,” returned Hurstwood gently. “He probably thought
he was right.”
“Well, a man ought to be more attentive than that to his wife if he wants to
keep her. (98)
Dreiser plays with his readers on a few levels here. While it is immediately understood
that Drouet is, in effect, the cuckold in this particular instance—the “chump” who “ought
to be more attentive to his wife” as he seems to understand only in his mind—Dreiser is
also referencing a future point when Carrie will lose interest in Hurstwood due to his
severe inattention to her. Hurstwood’s saying “He probably thought he was right” is
highly ironic as well. We see that he, too, believes the decisions he will make and that
actions he will take when living with Carrie are “right.” Though she doesn’t necessarily
make a cuckold of him, she does eventually gain interest in Ames, the man whom she
assesses as “much stronger and better than Hurstwood and Drouet” (237). Neither of
these men, though they verbally acknowledge the codes for how to treat a lady, actually
treats Carrie right. And because she is efficiently trained by both to always want that
which is better and more sophisticated, Carrie will ditch the proverbial ball and chain that
her relationships become.
Near the novel’s end, we see that Carrie begins questioning the social realm to
which she raises—the Waldorf hotel, her stage performances bringing her there—and the
patriarchal expectations she has taken for granted. However, her stage friend/roommate,
Lola, works to keep Carrie unquestioningly tied to the way of thinking that has brought
her here. In a scene where she begins thinking about the weather outside when a winter
storm is on its way, she remarks to Lola, “Isn’t it bad?” (349). Lola replies, “Terrible! . . .
I hope it snows enough to go sleigh riding.” It is evident that Lola and Carrie are not on
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the same page in terms of what they are thinking about. Carrie is thinking about
homelessness in the dreadful New York winter (having been so poor herself) and asks
Lola, “Aren’t you sorry for the people who haven’t anything to-night?” Lola responds
that she does care but that she can’t do anything about it since she doesn’t have anything
with which to do something. Carrie tells her “You wouldn’t, if you had” and Lola
protests, “I would, too. . . . But people never gave me anything when I was hard up”
(349). What is intended here as a salve to Carrie’s conscience about unswerving
dedication to fame and success as the men in her life have trained her to want it (through
the system of capitalism as it has been established by patriarchal ideology) reveals the
system’s effects on women—that there is no need to feel compassion for very long since
that is the nature of the system. Lola’s comment suggests that since no one cared about
her in her time of need, why should she be concerned with the needs of others? Again,
this is an ideological effect. Carrie does seem genuinely concerned with this social
problem, but Lola is there to remind her—to guide her into believing—that she need not
concern herself with capitalism’s cruel realities. Therefore, the sad aspects of American
life near the turn of the century dwarf Carrie’s capacity for compassion. Carrie responds
to her “absently” (349) which suggests a stalemate in her thoughts and a surrendering to
the fierce problem of patriarchal, capitalist-centered social problems.
Performances of Patriarchal Expectations and
Lack Thereof
Patriarchal expectations, the cultural import of behavior for the sexes as
revealed in the decisions characters make, are manifested through actions as the novel
presents them. These actions essentially express cultural ideals of what it means to be a
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specific gender, to make it “intelligible” to the broader society through what Judith Butler
terms “the heterosexual matrix” which she defines as “the grid of cultural intelligibility
through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized” (Gender Trouble 194, n6). In
Sister Carrie, characters reveal that they are always trying to express their gender in ways
that agree with the larger culture’s conception of “man” and “woman.” In the novel, men
have their masculinity to preserve, display, and perform through business and women are
vessels constantly made dependent on men which operate to reproduce verbally and
kinetically what men have determined woman’s place in culture is. They “perform” their
culturally-derived femininity.
As stated before, the men in Carrie’s life are actively driven by visible displays of
wealth. Drouet “performs” what he thinks looks like success. At Hurstwood’s place
of business, “[h]e lean[s] over the splendid bar and swallow[s] a glass of plain
whiskey and purchase[s] a couple of cigars, one of which he light[s]. This to him
represent[s] in part high life—a fair sample of what the whole must be. . . . Drouet
[i]s not a moneyed man. He only crave[s] the best, as his mind conceived it, and
such doings see[m] to him a part of the best. (30, my emphasis)
Because he is motivated by symbols of greatness and, as I’ve demonstrated earlier,
believes himself to be great, he “acts” in the bar how it is that he sees other men acting
and does what other men do which cement in his mind what is “the best.” He certainly
wouldn’t want to look like a fool in front of successful men so he adjusts his behavior to
mimic the best. His foil, Hurstwood, however, is one who has come to know the
established modes of male behavior and has found establishment in the struggle. The
narrator characterizes him as one who embodies success in social climbing. Dreiser
writes that
He had been pointed out as a very successful and well-known man about town.
Hurstwood looked the part, for, besides being slightly under forty, he had a good,
stout constitution, an active manner, and a solid, substantial air, which was
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composed in part of his fine clothes, his clean linen, his jewels, and, above all, his
own sense of his importance. Drouet immediately conceived a notion of him as
being some one worth knowing. (31)
Dreiser’s language that Hurstwood “looks the part” further concretizes the notion of
performance, and acting out the values of men. Hurstwood’s high visibility in this public
space edifies the mere notion of the effects of success. His having “a good, stout
constitution, an active manner, and solid, substantial air” easily demonstrates that
monetary success benefits men’s health—it has made Hurstwood strong. It also equates
to social dominance which thus singles him out as someone “worth knowing” among the
impotent, weak individual men who are not and have not yet been made strong by the
capitalist process, and who are not, by default, “worth knowing.” The near-top of the
social hierarchy, as Hurstwood easily represents it, obviously demonstrates the pecking
order where there in actuality is no place for men who don’t succeed.
As everyone is essentially a rung on the climb up the social ladder, good for
nothing other than getting ahead, Carrie learns to represent herself according to how she
sees the broader valuing of women, however superficial it renders her. She literally acts
out and represents the cultural role that patriarchal ideology prescribes for her. Therefore,
Dreiser’s representation of determinism is cleverly revealed and it need not be thought of
in terms of overt hostility done to her. Carrie becomes famous in the theatre for
depending upon an ideology that avoids giving her any type of social standing outside of
her physical nature and the initial effectiveness of her representing it. She looks the part,
fulfills the role of society’s expectations for women, and gets the “reward,” though her
buy-in to the “benefits” of capitalism so she can survive ensures that future “successful”
women must also display physical perfection and act as men deem they should. As David
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E. E. Sloane points out in Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser’s Sociological Tragedy,
“Carrie’s importance in the scheme of the novel is at least in part that she is a blank
personality, reflecting the world rather than shaping it” (96). Consequently, her fame is
wholly contingent upon mirroring society’s expectations of how woman “should” be. She
begins receiving “mash notes” from men who are enamored of her and Sloane
rhetorically asks, “Is her attractiveness ‘sudden,’ in fact, or is it the result of a fairly long
apprenticeship, marked at each stage by the next higher level of male finding her
attractive” (59, my emphasis). As men and patriarchal ideology at large have determined,
Carrie’s success reflects “a fairly long apprenticeship” or training in what men value.
In her foray into the theatre—the cultural ISA before described—at Drouet’s
encouragement, Carrie will reproduce what men have written as the cultural narrative
(read, “determined” narrative) concerning what a “good” woman is. Because she “looks
the part,” she lends support to this reproduction. At her debut in Under the Gaslight, an
actual melodramatic play that Dreiser reworked from Augustin Daly (Moers 107), Carrie
plays the part of Laura, who Moers notes “is a child of the slums (later discovered to be a
blue-blood) who is adopted by the aristocracy and spends most of the play in those
rarefied circles” (110). Laura vies for the affections of a man, Ray, whom she wants to
marry but can’t because of her family name. Though her acting starts out a bit rocky,
much to Hurstwood’s and Drouet’s discomfort, Drouet goes back and offers her
“encouragement.” He tells her “you mustn’t be nervous” (127), which seems harmless
enough. However, what he is really asking her to do is to paradoxically gain confidence
in fully immersing herself in the role of a demure, “helpless object” (129) and a woman
“who [is] weary and in need of protection” (132). Such is what the role calls for; such is
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the performance she provides. As the play progresses, Drouet and Hurstwood find that
they love seeing her that way. The audience does as well because after the play they
“burst[s] with applause t[o] call Carrie [back] out” (134). His advice helps her become
the center of attention for what becomes her sentimental and heart-felt delivery, but it is
also a performance that easily agrees with the “acceptable” behaviors for women in
society.
Carrie’s spoken lines more succinctly reveal the work of rendering men’s
conception about women as “intelligible” in her portrayal of a woman who is seen, by
Hurstwood, as “hopeless, pathetic, and yet dainty and appealing” (133). Over the course
of her delivery, both Drouet and Hurstwood find themselves full of “love” for her.
Hurstwood believes that
. . . he [is] seeing something extraordinarily good. It [is] heightened for him by the
applause of the audience. . . . He th[inks] now that she [is] beautiful. She ha[s] done
something which [is] above his sphere. He fe[els] a keen delight in realising that she
[is] his. (129)
Drouet goes so far as thinking to himself that “[h]e would marry her, by George! She was
worth it” (134) when she wasn’t before. Sandy Petrey elaborates on these responses. In
“The Language of Realism, The Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister
Carrie,” he discusses the change in Hurstwood’s and Drouet’s opinion of Carrie because
of her change in appearance and its public nature. He writes, “[w]hen they saw Carrie
decked out in the paraphernalia of disguise, Hurstwood and Drouet responded with even
more fervor. The men who had felt jejune desire for Carrie as Carrie fell madly in love
with Carrie as Laura” (106). Petrey suggests that the play masks and therefore provides
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the starkest contrast with reality and I would argue that it clearly shows how illogically
these two men are driven by visual appearance alone.
During the climactic final scene where Carrie expresses her deep love of Ray,
she says, foregoing everything else, that “the one thing [a woman] can really give or
refuse [to a man is]—her heart” (133). She continues, saying “tenderly” to Ray,
“‘Remember . . . love is all a woman has to give,’ and she la[ys] a strange, sweet accent
on the all, ‘but it is the only thing which God permits us to carry beyond the grave’”
(134). This sends Drouet and Hurstwood into “the most harrowed state of affection”
(134). Their thoughts and responses speak volumes to the type of woman they value,
especially in terms of her newly created public value which Dreiser uses to hearken back
to capitalism and the value ascribed to a commodity because of its demand. The addition
of the spiritual element of love as Carrie recites it confirms even more the prescribed
nature of love between men and women within patriarchal ideology—that these ideas are
in fact handed to us from a higher power and that the fulfillment of that role for women is
a woman’s giving herself to her man. It means that a woman’s only purpose in life is to
submit to her man.
Not only is Carrie’s language appropriate to her culture’s understanding of the
place for women in society, it also demonstrates a strong contrast with her lived
experience. Petrey says that
. . . [m]elodramatic speech provokes emotions so intense that their description
heightens awareness of the lack of anything comparable when characters are not
disguised. Outside the theatre and in the world, money rather than feelings orders
Carrie's, Drouet's and Hurstwood's intercourse. (106)
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Carrie’s representation in the theatre certainly differs from the real life she is not
representing. Because it is apparent they believe she is addressing them in her objectified
status, they now “want” to gain ownership of her. Yet, if Hurstwood’s history has been
telling at all up until this point in the story, it is likely that once he “owns” her, money
will go back to ordering his life and world, much like it has with his own wife, with
whom he has begun “to feel is a disagreeable attachment” (Dreiser 65). Despite all this,
when he watches Carrie’s performance, he is smitten.
After Hurstwood steals her away from Chicago and flees to New York, fails in
his business endeavor, works as a scab for the mass transit system, is injured in a fight,
becomes very sick, and eventually gives up, Carrie asserts to herself that “she [is] not
going to be dragged into poverty and something worse to suit him.” She realizes “she
could act” (261). In her subsequent attempt in working in the theatre, she becomes an
unspeaking chorus girl, she begins her ascent into stardom. An opportunity to distinguish
herself from the rest of the women around her presents itself and Carrie breaks theatre
rule by interpolating the appropriate language into the play. A “vizier” “parad[es] [his
“oriental beauties” on stage] before the new potentate as the treasures of his harem”
(301). In his own break of theatre rule, “the leading comedian and star, feeling
exceedingly facetious, sa[ys] in a profound voice, which create[s] a ripple of laughter:
“Well, who are you?” As Althusser describes in his essay, Carrie is interpellated/hailed
into being and she responds in language that affirms her status, not as “subject” but as
object. Carrie has a “belief in herself [which] g[i]ve[s] her daring, courtesie[s] sweetly
again and answer[s]: “I am yours truly” (301). The narrator describes this action as “a
trivial thing to say, and yet something in the way she did it caught the audience, which
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laughed heartily . . . The comedian also liked it, hearing the laughter” (301). What is
striking about this scene is that her language affirms that she has successfully learned the
expectations for language and behavior for females. (As Butler would state it, “the
grammatical place for the subject has been established” ([“Conscience” 21]). Her
“clever” remark propagates social values that women, especially attractive women, are
men’s property “truly.” The narrator notes that her reply is confident. That “a dull one
would have been reproved” (301) demonstrates that any break in the established language
of the play must only be that which supports the sexist rhetoric within the play and those
in charge of its production. It would be hard to imagine it a “successful” interpolation if
her response was anything but an assertion that she is ready for sex with him. Thus, she is
rewarded, her “work” encouraged. She makes a name for herself by becoming that which
places her in a position of dominance over the other women around her. Of course, if she
is to get ahead, she must distinguish herself from the rest of the females.
In another performance in a new play, Carrie discovers—or, it is discovered
for her—that which catapults her to stardom: her frown. This completely random facial
gesture has nothing to do with her intellectual capabilities or her ability to deliver lines
believably, which she is able to do. It only has to do with the superficialities of her
physical nature. In fact, the narrator describes it as occurring completely by accident.
During a rehearsal, Carrie overhears that her part in the play might be made irrelevant “if
it don’t go” well with audience (312). So, she frowns from the realization that she might
be out of a job. However, the producers of the play see her doing it, realize its potential,
and find it funny. They tell her to “try frowning all through. Do it hard. Look mad. It’ll
make the part really funny” (312). Carrie does so and realizes “there [is] nothing to her
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part, after all” (312). During the actual performance, the audience notices it and,
according to the narrator, “The portly gentlemen in the front rows began to feel that she
was a delicious little morsel. It was the kind of frown they would have loved to force
away with kisses. All the gentlemen yearned toward her. She was capital” (313). This
scene reveals the highly precarious nature of women in the theatre at the turn of the
century. In “Dreiser and Women,” Clare Virginia Eby acknowledges that “to most of the
male characters, Carrie is a sex object, yet she also shows herself to be an aspiring career
woman and actress” (144). For all that Carrie accomplishes, however, Eby does not
acknowledge that Carrie is again reduced to a sex object. She says that “
Dreiser gives Carrie the last word on this collective fantasy; as she remarks to
roommate Lola Osborne, ‘Aren’t men silly?’ After spending the entire novel
attached to one man or another, she proves that she does not need a man to
complete her. (144-145)
I would argue that this scene demonstrates that Carrie is made fully dependent,
not on one man but on the collective whole of men. As this role launches her into the
place of her dreams, the idea that “there is nothing to her part after all” demonstrates that
she can do nothing—can say nothing or deliver any lines effectively—which actually
reveals her talent. In this instance, she is just a pretty face completely at the mercy of the
men in the audience. Her sexually objectified nature—her physical body and facial
expressions—makes her “a delicious little morsel” who is consumed and able to be used
as “capital.” In keeping herself on the path upwards to high society, she must sell herself
as such. Carrie reproduces the accepted view of women’s place in society, her
performance renders her sexuality intelligible to men.
It is significant as well that the managers of the production disregard the
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concerns of the male actor who complains that Carrie “ruins [his] work” (313). When he
tells them that he’ll quit if they don’t take her out of the play, they tell him, “It’s only a
little fun on the side” (313) which clearly demonstrates what they really think of her
performance. The audience’s involvement in this cultural and ideological production—
that of encouraging a role for its own selfish and sexist purposes—is the real capital here.
This production trumps the concerns of a man when it normally would only be concerned
with mitigating his complaints. In other words, the ideological exports of keeping women
in their place are simply too valuable not to be included. The production is a huge
success, and various critics praise it for its “drollery.” Dreiser describes one critic from
the press who notes how Carrie’s performance “was not intended to take precedence” but
that “the little Quakeress was marked for a favorite the moment she appeared and
thereafter easily held attention and applause. The vagaries of fortune are indeed curious”
(313, my emphasis). The “vagaries of fortune” are, indeed, not “curious”—not when the
“comical” sight of a woman who frowns initially at the thought of being homeless and
destitute harmonizes so easily with the expectations of audience members. Put another
way, Dreiser employs a different critic who tells citizens through the press, “If you want
to be merry, see Carrie frown” (314). Carrie’s frown panders to “portly men’s” sexual
drives, yes. However, it also symbolically parallels their broader desire of seeing a
woman frown—to make her hopeless and frustrated, and it being comical—while
rendering her utterly useless in creating values by and about women that are in any way
different from the status quo.
Clearly, capitalism sells its ideological wares to a voracious public just as
much as it sells material goods. Amy Kaplan sees Carrie’s actions here as granting her
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leeway at essentially no cost to her and I’m not sure that is in line with the full effect of
Dreiser’s text. She writes,
. . . lthough the life of the actress may represent the ultimate form of
commodification, for Carrie it represents the utopian element of this
commodification in which she offers a version of herself for the consumption of an
audience without being touched or consumed by them. (157)
For whatever acting represents for Carrie, I believe Dreiser was trying to point out how
women are ideologically assigned essentially one role—always a role that is prescribed—
in the quest to exist. That is, in all places she is forced to identify herself as only an object
in order to survive. Rendering herself as such and not even being aware of the full import
of it because it is an effect of patriarchal ideology reveals the very real tragedy of her
narrative. She may not be touched by men, but she certainly is consumed. I imagine
we’re supposed to feel a little unsettled at the extremely limited options for women to
create the terms of their own existence in the same way that men are.
Results/Effects
The resulting “success” Carrie encounters, however, grants her continued
leverage against romantic involvement with the men in her life, of being “sucked back
in” to their dominance. In a later meeting with Drouet, once she’s “made it,” she can
disregard him in much the same way he disregarded her when they were together. He
tries telling her how he thought he and she “were going to get along fine [in] those days”
(337). She tells him, “‘You mustn’t talk that way’” . . . bringing in the least touch of
coldness.” He protests with “‘Won’t you let me tell you—’” and she distinctly tells him,
“No . . . I’ll have to leave you” (337) which suggests a general distrust of the men who
have influenced her. She has been sufficiently trained by them and gains “power” through
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money, however limited it actually is, and only because she has leverage in the form of
being culturally relevant for the time being. Yet, her rise through the social hierarchy will
guarantee the loneliness she experiences and which categorizes the final scene of the
novel. It might appear that she’ll still be influenced by and work to make a new
relationship with Ames, the engineer friend of Mrs. Vance whom Carrie met when she
first moves to New York. Ames appears to be helpful to Carrie’s growth in positive
ways—he encourages her to get into comedy-drama so she can really show her acting
chops. However, according to Donald Pizer, after the novel’s initial completion Dreiser
“remov[ed] an intimation that Carrie and Ames would find happiness together” which
“was necessary given his emphasis throughout the novel . . . that Carrie’s relationships
with men eventually become encumbrances hindering her further search for fulfillment”
(New Essays 8). It doesn’t go too far to say that Carrie’s new position as cultural
commodity will make her “lonely at the top.” Additionally, it is hard to imagine that she
will remain famous when her looks fade. It is unlikely that society will find an interest in
her once she’s old and no longer physically attractive. Dreiser allows us, through the
workings of naturalistic determinism, to fill in the future blanks and it doesn’t seem
impossible by any stretch of the imagination that what befalls Hurstwood at the end of
the novel will also befall Carrie.
Where Carrie works to reproduce male-centered values, Hurstwood, who has
fallen so far out of favor with the patriarchal machine, loses all interest in support of it.
He grows strongly resentful and becomes homeless. His resulting suicide suggests a
complete dissatisfaction with society, now that he is on the bottom of it. His movement
from being cultural “producer” to “reproducer” stands in sharp contrast to the very
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notions of manhood. In contrast to The House of Mirth and The Awakening, where the
protagonist kills herself in what can be inferred as a tragic moment of what seems real
“agency” or even “the will to will” it is a man at this novel’s end who finds no place and
no way to live on his own terms. In fact, the only thing it seems that Hurstwood can do of
his own accord is to kill himself and Dreiser reveals how one’s “decision” to deviate
from behavioral norms means death for men just as much as it does for women. Once he
begins living as a homeless man, he obliquely realizes he will always be at the mercy of
the social system, always relying on the “kindness” of others for his livelihood. Even in
this, though, we see an inversion of male values. Before his “fall” from grace, he was
able to support himself and his family, wielding influence in those around him. Near the
end of the novel, we see him essentially emasculating himself, in his society’s sense, for
sustenance. He goes to find Carrie at the theatre in the hopes that she will give him
money and this reveals the opposite of the accepted norm for men who are supposed to
produce wealth, not passively accept it. While he’s waiting to see her, he “ke[eps] saying
to himself” “She can’t refuse to help me a little” (327). Now, we find that he is dependent
upon Carrie. Whereas she was fully dependent upon the kindnesses of men for her
livelihood earlier, we see Hurstwood learning what Carrie has been learning all along.
This role reversal of provider/providee reveals his complete lack of agency.
This scene presses on to one that elicits a scathing critique from Dreiser of
American social values. Dreiser mocks his readers’ beliefs about “charity” and “good
deeds” in revealing the social system’s real values about those who are less fortunate on
the socioeconomic scale. The monetarily destitute Hurstwood stumbles upon a scene
where an “ex soldier turned religionist” (329)—the “Captain”—helps secure lodgings for
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a group of men who are no longer able or willing to work as men “should” for their
livelihood. The Captain makes a spectacle of his performance, even though it appears he
is doing a “good deed.” In an inversion of economic process, he asks the gathering,
wealthy “watchers and peepers” (329) to “put th[ese] m[e]n to bed” (330). If they could
obtain employment for themselves, these men would normally receive money through
acts of business from their employers. Here, they are dependent upon another man, a man
who commands their attentions and the attentions of the passersby, in the humiliating
display where he acts as an auctioneer or barker for “charity.” He receives money—a
matter of mere “eighteen cents” (333) for each man—“slowly” (333) from fortunate
passersby. He eventually secures enough money for the bedraggled group, including
Hurstwood. Here, Hurstwood, the “ex-manager,” is being managed. That people gawk at
the spectacle—though it seems “good,” even compassionate—ensures in those who
witness a continuance of adhering strictly to the established capitalistic order so that one
doesn’t find himself in such a predicament in the future. The nature of this public display
imparts the “goodness” of charity under capitalism to these passersby but the display also
requires inequality among the haves and the have-nots in order to demonstrate the
economic system’s goodness. It pretends to address the effects of poverty while never
addressing the causes of it. That is, the male-derived capitalist system needs financial
inequality—and a lack of real concern of inequality— not only to continue its
prominence but to demonstrate its “aptitude” when dealing with the unfortunate.
Hurstwood eventually asks himself, “What’s the use?” (353) in trying to survive and
turns on the gas in his rented room, killing himself at forty-three years old.
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Dreiser leaves us with Carrie in a state of realized perpetual longing. Much the
same way Edna in The Awakening finds herself in perpetual longing for and despising of
her relationships with men, with no recourse or reprieve, Carrie realizes that “Chicago,
New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of the stage—these
[a]re but incidents. Not them, but that which they represen[t], she long[s] for. Time [has]
prove[n] the representation false” (353). Jackson Lears describes this longing for that
which she doesn’t have but couches it in terms of her being a somewhat thoughtless
woman rather than being conditioned to want by men and the patriarchal social system at
large. In “Dreiser and the History of American Longing,” he writes
[C]haracters in Dreiser—especially female characters—sometimes do learn a little
something, even enough to wonder whether the cosmic struggle for survival makes
any moral sense. This moment of wonder seems most likely to occur, in Dreiser, to
women or less powerful men . . . [for] Carrie [it occurs] at the height of her fame.
Even as she escapes poverty and anonymity, she sits in her rocking chair and
wonders whether life is ruled by anything beyond mere chance. (77)
I would argue that Carrie doesn’t think of life being ruled by “mere chance”; rather, she
is, as Lears notes, “unsatisfied,’ not because life is ruled by chance but because the
satisfaction she thought she would have achieved in adhering to the ways of men never
delivers. Carrie realizes that her fate “was forever to be [in] pursuit of that radiance of
delight which tints the distant hilltops of the world” (354)—that, through capitalism, the
men in her life have trained her to value desire, as Michaels has generally pointed out,
rather than fulfillment. Dreiser reveals that the unbridled “pursuit of the radiance of
delight” has gotten Hurstwood an unmarked grave in the Potter’s Field on Hart’s Island.
He has no identity, no presence, no future, no one to even mourn him in death for his
break with the established order. Carrie’s conscience reveals that she at least questions
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what it is that she is doing in her pursuit of her dreams where it appears that others don’t.
However, the idea that her future will remain economically viable is, at best, uncertain,
given the whims of the social system. What is certain is that she will always be alone and
at the mercy of those who deem her socio-cultural reproductions still relevant.
CHAPTER IV
THE PROSCRIBED NARRATIVE IN
WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF
MIRTH
As the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart
differs significantly from her counterparts in The Awakening and Sister Carrie in what
becomes both her ultimate refusal to adhere to the prescribed role for women and her
paradoxical clinging to them. The arc of the novel’s storytelling reveals, over about a
year’s time, Lily as a young woman from the upper-middle class who struggles to marry
a man of the upper class in order to maintain the lifestyle she has been taught to value.
Wharton has Lily fail in the quest to “land a wealthy man,” writing her narrative on the
downward path to poverty and resulting in her ambiguous suicide. Lily initially adheres
to gendered roles for single women because she accepts the social order as a given and
doesn’t initially see the full effects of patriarchal ideology or how it hides its supreme
detriment to her. Also, she needs the “establishment” that marriage “promises.” However,
the end of the novel reveals her refusal to be like anyone else who adheres to and
propagates the vicious social codes of patriarchal ideology as the novel presents them, in
part because of her often cited training in female propriety. She chooses not to act under
anyone else’s advice to free herself through paradoxically delving deep into socially
constructed behavior and she pays for this with her life.
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This is where the apparent naturalism of the text perceivably breaks down as
Lee Clark Mitchell writes in Determined Fictions. He demonstrates that naturalist
characters are compelled to act on their desires, whereas realist characters choose not to
act (8-9). Mitchell considers interpreting The House of Mirth as a realist rather than
naturalist novel for this very reason (13). However, Lily’s growing self-awareness as
Wharton situates it against her society’s “understanding” of behavior for women does
allow her to objectively view its workings, if only obliquely, which leads her to recognize
the ways in which those behavioral roles work toward her undoing. Yet, her society
won’t allow her to use the knowledge she gains; her non-action leads to her sacrifice.
Wharton uses Lily to confront the nature of her forced adherence to the social system and
those who promote the strictures confining her to her always already objectified status in
order to demonstrate the arbitrary distinctions which define both men and women.
In The House of Mirth, “patriarchal ideology” presents itself as ultimately
operating to keep most women at odds with each other and which reveals that a woman’s
ability to exist in the world is wholly contingent upon her marriage to a man. Wharton
demonstrates the terms of “establishment” and how necessary it is for women to gain it
through marriage. Lily is in a highly precarious place in her society because she lacks this
establishment in the upper class and Wharton reveals how finding that establishment
through a man is always already her ultimate aim since she is not allowed to find it in
society’s upper echelons on her own accord. This ideology is inherited (patriarchal) and
ingrained in all social institutions, though “institutions,” while present in the novel, are
harder to pinpoint because Wharton presents them as constantly working together, the
worldview they represent operating in the background of nearly all the characters’
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motives. Regarding the state of capitalism in the text, Amy Kaplan correctly points out in
The Social Construction of American Realism that during the time in which the novel is
set, “the rapid growth of wealth destabilized the upper classe[s] and the interdependence
yet stratification of society as a whole made its inner workings and interconnections all
but invisible” (89). Kaplan reinforces Wharton’s clever storytelling in her blending of
“obvious” social and economic forces to the point where they are essentially
unrecognizable in individual form.
In The House of Mirth, I argue that most characters aren’t aware of their
inundation in capitalistic and hence patriarchal ideology but that Lily is the exception.
Benjamin D. Carson sees this as well. In “That Doubled Vision: Edith Wharton and The
House of Mirth,” Carson writes that Wharton “was not so blinded by—she was not so
‘inside’—myopic aristocratic ideology that she could not see the charade women were
expected to act out” (698). He sees Wharton demonstrating this through Lily’s growing
understanding of the world around her which leads to her tragic fate. Carson applies to
the novel Teresa de Lauretis work regarding gender’s constructedness and how gender
has its own pervasive ideology. He contends that Wharton “challenges the ‘consciousness
of oppression’” (699) of gender roles for women and argues that Lily “is actually aware
of the ideology of gender working to produce her” (714). This is true. Lily continually
sees more of the ways in which men and the society that comes from them have
preemptively limited her from ever really “being.” Kaplan notes that the novel
“represents high society as a predominantly female realm, whose relation to the hidden
male arena of business and equally shadowy world of working women must be charted
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by the narrative, with Lily deployed as scout” (89). Wharton works, then, to expose the
extent to which the “hidden male arena” affects the “predominantly female realm.”
Wharton confronts patriarchal ideology in the novel and displays it through
the social institutions of the family (which operates in tandem with the institution of
marriage and the institution of the press) and, more pointedly, the stock market. These
institutions are the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) that Althusser also identifies.
ISAs reproduce the capitalist values of society and, while diverse in form, they are
“unified . . . beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class’” (139,
Althusser’s emphasis), the class to which Lily strives to become an established member.
Because these institutions were created and/or owned by men and operate to give men
power over each other and especially over women, the ISAs as I identify them operate to
reproduce patriarchal social values which are omnipresent in the society of the novel;
“subjects” within that society are required to abide by those values.
For the institutions of marriage and family, we see the press—the
communications ISA that Althusser identifies (137)—actively involved with propagating
the values of upper-class society. For a “simple country wedding,” Wharton describes
“the Van Osburgh marriage” as quite an event. Wharton writes that “guests are conveyed
in special trains” to the ceremony, that
. . . the hordes of the uninvited have to be fended off by the intervention of the
police,” and that “representatives of the press . . . threa[d] their way, note-book in
hand, through the labyrinth of wedding presents, and the agent of a cinematograph
syndicate set[s] up his apparatus at the church door. (94)
Wharton makes it quite clear that marriage is a cultural and economic production. Kaplan
recognizes this as well. She writes that “the wedding has the dual function of
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consolidating class unity and staging a gala spectacle for a mass audience . . . In the role
of mediator, the press, on the one hand, represents elite society by making it visible to the
classes beneath them” (90-91). Because visibly displayed wealth holds the interest of the
public, the ceremony of “consolidating class unity” is its own ideologically capitalistic
endeavor that imparts to the general public the social values of those at the top of the
social hierarchy. I would also argue that the ceremony operates to subtly impart the
accepted order of man “saving” woman through marriage; the press circulates/disperses
all intended consequences of marriage to an apparently voracious public. The affect is not
lost on Lily, who, having “attended too many brides to the altar,” resolves that “when
next seen there she mean[s] to be the chief figure in the ceremony” (94). Here, the
function of the press as circulator of cultural values works in Lily’s mind to help her be
the next cultural commodity.
Another aspect of the institution of marriage refers to a valuable commodity
which emerges from it in the form of “inheritance” or legacy. Wharton describes the
social system historically dominated by men’s access to and retention of capital as
placing undue prominence and value from the have nots (Lily, and many others) or who
never had onto those who have. The earliest example of this lies in Percy Gryce, a man
whom Lily is supposed to marry because he holds established value—or rather, inherits
established value—in the form of “millions” (98) and in the rare literary Americana
“already noted among bibliophiles” (24) that his uncle bequeathed him. Wharton
describes his gaining social relevance through this inheritance as operating in lieu of his
having developed any real character. She writes that,
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Mr. Gryce’s interest in Americana had not originated with himself: it was
impossible to think of him as evolving any taste of his own. . . . [T]he existence of
the [literary] collection was the only fact that had ever shed glory on the name of
Gryce, and the nephew took as much pride in his inheritance as though it had been
his own work. (24)
Wharton demonstrates that Gryce gains self-edification and power in a process which
runs counter to America’s grand narrative of the “self-made man” and, according to the
values of the upper class, we see it still makes him “worthy” of regard in others merely
because of his access to capital. Lily is “bored” by him but must “submit to more
boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare
chance that he might do her the honour of boring her for life” (28). In a sense then,
Wharton identifies that, among men of the upper class, self-value is only demonstrable
through capital; value for women is only achieved through marriage to a wealthy man.
When Lily discovers that Percy will marry Evie Van Osburgh, “the youngest, dumpiest,
dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters” (98) of the wealthy and established Van
Osburgh clan, she becomes incredulous. She thinks, “Why should this clumsy girl be put
in possession of powers she would never know how to use?” (98) which suggests that
legacy and inheritance extend so much further beyond the money that’s involved. Not
only does it put women at odds with each other, it also reveals a power that is not
accessible without it.
The most compelling instance of patriarchal ideology in The House of Mirth,
though, concerns Wharton’s explanation of the forces precluding female agency and the
privileging of characteristically male knowledge in the form of the stock market ISA.
Though Althusser doesn’t define this ISA, it can be thought of as the most prominent
form of Ideological Apparatus working to support the capitalistic values of the State.
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Wai-chee Dimock sees this as well. In her frequently cited essay, “Debasing Exchange:
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth,” she discusses how the capitalistic system of the
market dominates the environment and the characters in the novel which she sees in
characters’ actions. Dimock notes, “The power of the marketplace resides not in its
presence, which is only marginal in The House of Mirth, but in its ability to reproduce
itself, in its ability to assimilate everything else into its domain” (783). This is true as
instances of “exchange” can be seen throughout the novel, regardless of whether they
actually take place on Wall Street. Dimock notes as well that, “Power in The House of
Mirth, many critics have suggested, is patriarchal. They are right, no doubt, about the
basis for power, insofar as power is economic and insofar as money making is a male
prerogative, but the actual wielders of power in the book are often not men but women”
(784). At first this seems right because married women seem to have some control over
their lives and are also able to affect other women’s behaviors (namely Lily’s), but I
would also argue that the market as it has been initiated by men has far more presence
than Dimock suggests. There is a predominating “maleness” to these market forces which
reveal that those who are in control of the market—men—are able to mirror these sorts of
treatment of women as commodities. Additionally, the fact that men are the generators of
power and the idea that women are wielders of it is only true so long as the man stays
married to his wife. Should he divorce her, she no longer wields power the way she does
when she is married. An example of this lies in Carry Fisher, who is “a fisher of men”—
an inversion and pun of Jesus Christ who was also a “fisher of men” but for obviously
different reasons—“whose alimony is paid by other women’s husbands” (Meyers xxiii,
Wharton 85), and who is wholly dependent on men for her existence.
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Expanding on the market’s “maleness” in the novel, the stock market ISA has
the ability to make even the rich “fe[el] poor” (129). Wharton writes that its “peculiar law
. . . proves railway stocks and bales of cotton to be more sensitive to the allotment of
executive power than many estimable citizens trained to all the advantages of selfgovernment” (129-130). What we can infer are the “bread and butter” of the stock market
as Wharton presents it—the transportation and the textile industries—are still subject to
the control of a few in power (men, again) rather than to the demands of the larger
society. In Lily’s mind, “the Wall Street world of ‘tips’ and ‘deals’” operates in “vast”
and “mysterious” ways; according to Wharton, Lily “ha[s] no more notion than most of
her sex of the exact nature of the [stock market’s] transaction[s]” (88). Because she needs
money to cover her living expenses, because her rich guardian Mrs. Peniston provides her
with a scant income, Lily gets Gus Trenor to “speculate” for her. Preemptively
disallowed from knowing how the stock exchange works, her speculating through a man
who is not her husband will turn her into the “perfect vulture” (93) that Judy Trenor,
Gus’s wife, describes Carry Fisher as (who also uses Gus to “speculate” for her although
Judy is aware of it; more on her later).
Because of her actions, rumors circulate that Lily is having an affair with Gus
(whom she finds repulsive, it should be noted) which helps push along the destruction of
her character once Lily’s nemesis, Bertha Dorset, falsely accuses her of having an
adulterous relationship with her husband (though Lily remains a virgin throughout the
novel). The risky behavior she engages in with gambling and then stocks—and its
resulting effects of a destroyed reputation—reveals how cutthroat the consequences of
not knowing the terms of exchange as set by men can be for women. Dimock argues that
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the exchange system as Wharton presents it punishes Lily for being blind to the “real”
rules of the market itself, where, along gender lines, “violating” the rules—namely,
sexual in terms of Bertha Dorset’s affair with the poet Ned Silverton and Gus Trenor’s
attempted rape of Lily—is the norm. Dimock puts it rather succinctly by saying that Lily
“is penalized, then, not for breaking the rules but for observing them” (787) because
“play[ing] by the rules [means] one must break the rules” (785). Walter Benn Michaels
sees this quite differently in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. He asserts
that Lily Bart is an agent for herself who thrives on chance and actively seeks it out in the
market, through gambling, and in other risky behavior. As Donald Pizer writes in his
review of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Michaels “finds that Lily . . .
unconsciously endorses rather than resists a marketplace economy of experience” and
thus “produces interpretations that run counter to the felt response of several generations
of readers” (Theory and Practice 206). Michaels plays with our assumptions about Lily’s
motivations to action and insists that Lily is compelled by her “passion for the market”
(Michaels 230) rather than seeing the market controlling her. Because Michaels’s project
reflects some naturalist authors’ concern with capitalism and its effects, I find his
perspective “interesting,” but not because I see Lily as a “love[r] of risk” (233). Rather, I
see Lily as highly influenced by the force of the stock market and the market in general
as an institution developed by men because it permeates all corners of life in America and
which has automatically determined she should “fail” in it simply because she is a
woman.
Lily’s entrance into the established world of male commerce/exchange
demonstrates that patriarchal society has already proscribed that entrance as a woman
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lacking establishment (i.e., unmarried, “irrelevant”); she needs to learn the rules that men
have established through marrying them. In other words, Lily’s narrative has already
been decided (prescribed) in the sense that she must get married if she is to exist; going
against it—getting money for existence in any way other than through dependence on a
man and only as a commodity—is a punishable offense. Lily’s non-adherence to the
patriarchal social order determines her fate (tragedy) which is Wharton’s naturalism at
work in the text.
Lily’s Understanding of the
World around Her
Early on in the text, Wharton reveals Lily’s self-awareness and her awareness
of the environment in which she lives. In a conversation between Lily and Selden, Lily
reveals her state and the state of women in the upper class. In terms of “agency” for
females specifically, the narrator demonstrates ironic disadvantages women like Lily face
as a socialite attempting to establish herself through marriage to contrast them with the
advantages Selden has as a single man who is not a member of New York’s upper class.
Wharton reveals that single women like Lily are in a rather precarious place: they aren’t
allowed to have the “luxury” of living splendidly or unencumbered by others; they are
completely at the mercy of the men in their lives who deem them “marriageable.” When a
woman does live by herself, she is considered less “worthy” of the attentions of men and
less desirable in the marriage market. Lily points this out to Selden in the first chapter
saying, “How delicious [it is] to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable
thing it is to be a woman.” Selden replies, “Even women . . . have been known to enjoy
the privileges of a flat” (9, my emphasis) which suggests a real lack in actual numbers
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and that it in fact is a privilege. Lily immediately fires back, “Oh governesses—or
widows. But not girls—not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!” In the generalizations
she makes, Lily understands social divisions along a hierarchy for women. Lily’s social
grooming, as Wharton makes us aware, does not pose this type of life as viable for her.
More specifically, Selden responds saying that he “‘even knows a girl who lives in a
flat,’” (9, my emphasis) which, as Lily states it, is Gerty Farish, his cousin who works
doing charity but who is, according to Lily, not “marriageable.” The material realm Lily
seeks through marriage is contrasted with Gerty’s when she says, “besides, she has a
horrid little place, and no maid, and such queer things to eat. Her cook does the washing
and the food tastes of soap. I should hate that, you know” (9). Lily’s comments here
reveal the extent to which upper class “values” have made an impression upon her—but
she also realizes patriarchal society’s limitations for women who seek to make a living
for themselves. Lily identifies Gerty as living in a substandard manner because Lily has
“correctly” learned the codes by which women are “successful”—that is to say, becoming
married and living luxuriously through their husband’s access to wealth. Her explicit, if
somewhat lighthearted, disdain of “alternative” lifestyles for women, clearly reflects how
entrenched she is in upper class values, values she hopes will come in handy when she is
a confirmed member.
Selden seems to understand this as well. The narrator describes his reflections
on this scene, saying,
. . . he was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin
Gertrude Farish had chosen. [Lily] was so evidently the victim of the civilization
which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles
chaining her to her fate. (11)
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Selden’s views on this are rather telling. It appears that he has sympathy for Lily and her
plight in being fully enmeshed in and fully conditioned by this social system. Yet, the
idea that Gerty chose this life, rather than it being the only one available to her given her
status as somewhere above working-girl and below socialite, suggests his failure in fully
comprehending the severe limitations imposed on women. This is certainly something
which bears important relevance later on in an important conversation Lily has with
Selden (discussed later). For Selden, it’s a matter of choice that Gerty’s life and Lily’s are
so incompatible. As Lily is vaguely—at this point—aware and will more fully find out,
there is really no choice at all in the matter. However, wanting to appear amenable to the
social system and to the men in her life, Lily eases off her statements. She apologizes for
what she says of Gerty and then says, “[w]e’re so different, you know: she likes being
good, and I like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I daresay I
could manage to be happy even in her flat” (10). Her evaluation of the perceived
differences between herself and Gerty reflects the notion that she might enjoy living as a
single woman but that she is not “free” to do so; there are expectations for women like
Lily. Gerty must live within the parameters of her station in life, knowing that she must
rely on her goodness to possibly “get a man.” Lily’s training has led her to believe that
her good looks afford her much more opportunity in marriage than has been afforded to
Gerty.
Lily asks Selden a little later in their meeting about what appears to her to be
his hum-drum life, his responsibilities, his work. She says, “Do you mind enough—to
marry to get out of it?” Selden responds with a laugh saying, “God forbid!” Lily’s
response to him at this interjection sets up an opportunity to speak of this inequality
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acceptably. She says, “Ah, there’s the difference—a girl must, a man may if he choose”
(14). Here, she playfully teases him but it is clear that she understands the nature of
”establishment” and the she can only gain it through marriage while he can seek it on his
own terms.
Lily understands social convention for men and women and their
corresponding expected behaviors. The narrator and Lily continue on the mere basis of
appearance and self-representation:
She survey[s] him critically. “Your coat’s a little shabby—but who cares? It doesn’t
keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a
woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. . . . Who wants a dingy
woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we
can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership. (14-15)
In New York’s upper class, a woman’s “job” is her appearance—it is a duty to be
performed diligently. She must be “pretty” and “well-dressed” because her only purpose
is to be the physical object of representational wealth, both in reflecting her status as the
wealthy product of her upbringing so she can get married and then reflect the wealth that
her eventual husband provides. A few critics have addressed this idea in accordance with
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class wherein women are representatives of
their husband’s wealth and “do” his leisure for him. For instance, in “The Conspicuous
Wasting of Lily Bart,” Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes “[a]s Veblen likes to remind us . . .
the painstaking display of uselessness for which such a [leisure-class] woman has been
raised is itself a kind of job” (719). She continues, “[Veblen] knows quite well that he
lives in a ‘patriarchal regime’ which still treats a woman as her husband’s ‘chattel,’ and
he is particularly shrewd about the way in which her dress serves to emphasize the fact by
obviously disabling her from any independent activity” (720). Clearly Lily’s job is to
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comply with these social constructions for women of the class she wants to be a part of,
to perform her job that prevents her from working “productively”; gaining a man’s hand
in marriage is her paycheck or compensation. For Selden, his visibility—his relevance—
lies in his career, and it doesn’t matter much what he looks like or how he presents
himself.
Lily doesn’t mention to him the idea of even wanting a career outside of
becoming the most prized potential spouse among a group of women. It is not until much
later in the story when she (unsuccessfully) works in fashioning spangles to hats and has
only her aunt’s legacy of ten-thousand dollars keeping her going that she begins to want a
real career and a viable source of income—her own “charming little front shop” of “her
finished creations” (300). She fantasizes that this would make her independent of men,
but she also realizes that the nature of capitalistic competition within the system preempts
that option (she also realizes that the legacy has already been spent to repay Gus Trenor
[313]). For the time being, however, of Lily’s conversation with Selden regarding the
differences of behavioral expectations for men and women, Lily casts off this “negative”
attitude; she has to remain positive that she’ll be able to land a man. Though it’s clear she
gains feelings for him throughout the novel, at this juncture, her conscience for adhering
to the rules of the social system—even in the face of its limitations for women—
precludes her from wanting to get into his “good graces” as potential spouse. Lily knows,
as far as society is concerned, that she is just a pretty face. That face, she’s been led to
believe, must secure more financial freedom than what Selden could offer her. Wharton
reveals this to us early on to demonstrate that, even at the very top of this social system,
those women who might appear to have leeway and agency are still only ceremonial in
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function, only figureheads of wealth and success. Their prime purpose, especially in
Lily’s case, is to lend credence to the success of the male system—to reproduce the
cultural values of success through being a beautiful wife of a man who has financially
demonstrated his worth.
Near the end of this conversation, Lily demonstrates her knowledge of the
way that society traps women through forced compliance with patriarchal ideals.
Regarding the coming party at the Trenor’s, Selden asks her why she goes if, as
according to her, they bore her. She responds, “It’s part of the business—you forget!”
(15). The business to which she refers is a compulsory act in the broader business of
making women appropriate potential spouses. Lily’s going to this party demonstrates her
acceptance of these norms at this point. She goes along with them knowing that her
demure coquettishness is a valuable commodity in her social circle that potential spouses
can exploit. Aware that her femaleness must be comprised of these cultural ideals, Lily
hopes to use that which limits her to her advantage.
Lily’s Influences for being a “Proper”
Woman
So, how is it exactly that Lily knows so clearly what is expected of her? In A
Feast of Words, Cynthia Griffin Wolff correctly sees Lily not as a person but an object
who “ha[s] nothing more to offer than a superb capacity to render [her]sel[f] agreeably”
(115). Because of this Wolff sees Lily as not wanting “to know the full implications of
her plight” (118) and consequently Lily “avoid[s] serious moral reflection [which] is, of
course, a principal cause of her social downfall” (119). Wolff admits that “it is not
altogether easy to trace the origins of Lily’s failure” (115), but I argue that there are
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formative characters that are traceable to Lily’s failure. Wharton offers to her readers that
Lily learns, has learned, and is continually forced to learn from a few characters in the
text the codes for femininity of which her above conversation with Selden implies she is
aware. The most dominant of these are Lily’s mother and Mrs. Peniston (Lily’s paternal
aunt); to a lesser extent (though all influences work toward Lily’s same tragic end) are
her peers, Selden, and Carry Fisher.
Lily’s mother has strong desires for wealth and has trained Lily from a very
early age in the ways to acquire it. She sees her daughter’s beauty as being able to
provide for the family in ways that Mr. Bart cannot due to his eventual economic failure
and untimely death. Because both Mr. and Mrs. Bart are so caught up in capitalism’s
system of values and appearances, both of them suffer for it, according to Wharton, who
casts Mrs. Bart in more aggressive and “negative” tones than her husband. Describing
Lily’s parents, Wharton writes,
Mrs. Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not recall the time when her
father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with streaks of grey in his hair, and a
tired walk. It was a shock to her to learn afterward that he was but two years older
than her mother. (32-33)
Mr. Bart’s physical appearance has clearly been affected in constantly
working to provide for the family. In turn, the physical consequences of pursuing the
“rich” life that all members within the family have been or are being taught to value
essentially goes unnoticed. In fact, he works so much that “It seemed to tire him to rest,
and [during summer vacation] he would sit for hours staring at the sea-line from a quiet
corner of the verandah, while the clatter of his wife's existence went on unheeded a few
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feet off” (33). Mr. Bart’s life and the life he works incessantly to provide for his family
share no similarity. He is a cog in the wheel that gives the illusion of wealth and agency.
The narrator reveals that Mrs. Bart is a “wonderful manager” of the household
among her friends and that she “was famous for the unlimited effect she produced on
limited means; and to the lady and her acquaintances there was something heroic in living
as though one were richer than one’s handbook denoted” (33). However, in order to
maintain the appearance that the Barts aren’t “living like pigs” (34), Mrs. Bart requires
that her husband provide her with Paris dresses, turquoise bracelets, trips to Europe and
trips back to America with trunks filled with goods, etc. When Mr. Bart informs them
that he “is ruined” (36), “to his wife [,] he no longer counted: he had become extinct
when he ceased to fulfil [sic] his purpose” (36). This certainly seems cruel on her part,
but it must be remembered that, to Mrs. Bart, “living like a pig” essentially means not
living at all. As the narrator notes, “To be poor seemed to her such a confession of failure
that it amounted to disgrace; and she detected a note of condescension in the friendliest
advances” (37). Mrs. Bart’s conscience to be the manager of a household—to, in
accordance with Butler’s better translation of Althusser, “acquit [her]self of guilt”
(“Conscience” 16) through not visibly “failing” or being “disgraced” in front of others
under the system of capitalism—drives her to act in ways that seem rather cruel. The
ideology of capitalism which stratifies people into lives of wealth and lives of poverty
according to their monetary worth has permeated every aspect of Mrs. Bart’s life. Here,
capitalism’s mission is accomplished.
From her mother, Lily has internalized and then actualized the social
expectations of women in her social class. The narrator reveals Mrs. Bart as having
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already appropriated her daughter’s beauty as the prime commodity that she believes will
act as a lever to get the family out of poverty. The narrator describes Mrs. Bart’s thoughts
as such:
Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily’s beauty.
She studied it with a kind of passion, as though it were some weapon she had
slowly fashioned for her vengeance. It was the last asset in their fortunes, the
nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt. She watched it jealously, as
though it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she tried to instill
into the latter a sense of the responsibility that such a charge involved. She followed
in imagination the career of other beauties, pointing out to her daughter what might
be achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful warning of those who, in
spite of it, had failed to get what they wanted: to Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could
explain the lamentable dénouement of some of her examples. She was not above the
inconsistency of charging fate, rather than herself, with her own misfortunes. (3738)
Lily’s mother has clearly determined the course of life for Lily the child and
everything works toward exploiting that course for her monetary “revenge.” Lily’s beauty
is her only source of collateral on the marriage market. Not only does the passage
function to foreshadow Lily’s fate since she will not “get what [she] want[s]”—hence,
according to her mother, Lily is “stupid”—it also functions to reveal the determinism at
work in the text. Because Lily has been trained from a young age to be only a pretty face,
“a mere custodian” of her “charge” to live up to the examples of beauty that have come
before her, Lily develops no “practical” or “useful” skills (other than having a good
amount of verbal savoir-faire and excellent social charm) which she can “fall back on”
should she fail in her marriage endeavors. Lily eventually must work for a living because
she is disinherited from Mrs. Peniston’s will and because her friends have also
disinherited her when Bertha Dorset falsely implicates her in an affair. On her way down
the social ladder, she realizes after being dismissed from her job as a milliner because she
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is “clumsy” (304) that “she had been brought up to be ornamental, [so] she could hardly
blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose” (315). Lily’s fate is ironically
determined to be tragic by the factors over which she has no control (both the social
standing in which she was born and her mother’s push to exploit her beauty), which she
has been taught to think will save her and her family. Lily’s “failing” to find an
“invest[or]” in Selden or “collector” in Gryce and Rosedale as Dimock and Yeazell point
out (786,719, respectively) reveals that Mr. and Mrs. Bart have ultimately “failed” in
their ability to render Lily as the ultimate commodity. As a major factor determining the
outcome of Lily’s life, capitalism extends into her being selected as a mate; a lack of an
investor means a lack of future.
Wharton reveals Mrs. Peniston as one of the most cold and spiteful characters
in the novel. Lily will recognize that when she needs help or compassion from her
guardian that she “ha[s] no heart to lean on. Her relationship with her aunt [i]s as
superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs” (158). Lily’s aunt is
concerned with no one but herself and she embodies both the harsh cultural expectations
for women and exhibits a domineering, masculine presence which seeks to keep Lily
adhering to those expectations. When Lily becomes an orphan upon the death of her
mother, Mrs. Peniston announces “with a sigh” that she’ll “try [her] for a year” (39).
Wharton exposes how their relationship develops in terms of material exchange: she
expects Lily to
. . . spend all of her money on dress, and she supplement[s] the girl’s scanty income
by occasional ‘handsome presents’ meant to be applied to the same purpose. . . .
Mrs. Peniston like[s] the periodical recurrence of gratitude [from Lily] evoked by
unexpected cheques and was perhaps shrewd enough to perceive that such a method
of giving kept alive in her niece a salutary sense of dependence. (42)
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Mrs. Peniston’s charge as guardian is a means to control Lily and make her highly
visible, which she both needs and enjoys. Yet, where Lily is made dependent upon Mrs.
Peniston for her monetary viability, Lily is also a social crutch for Mrs. Peniston, “who
lean[s] helplessly on her niece in social matters” (132).
Wharton describes Mrs. Peniston as a “looker-on” at life rather than an active
player in it (41, 129), there to observe from the “watch-tower of her upper window” on
Fifth Avenue all “social fluctuations” and their effects (129). Again, Wharton
characterizes her as a place holder for social values, especially those concerning women
and even more so for Lily. When Lily returns from the Van Osburgh wedding, Mrs.
Peniston upbraids her for not knowing all of the details of the event. She tells her
Really, Lily, I don't see why you took the trouble to go to the wedding, if you don't
remember what happened or whom you saw there. When I was a girl I used to keep
the menu of every dinner I went to, and write the names of the people on the back;
and I never threw away my cotillion favours till after your uncle's death, when it
seemed unsuitable to have so many coloured things about the house. I had a whole
closet-full, I remember; and I can tell to this day what balls I got them at. Molly
Van Alstyne reminds me of what I was at that age; it's wonderful how she notices.
She was able to tell her mother exactly how the wedding-dress was cut, and we
knew at once, from the fold in the back, that it must have come from Paquin. (116,
my emphasis)
Though she is not as actively involved with social events as she used to be, it is clear that
Mrs. Peniston needs to know the details of her class’s performances of femininity, and
she expects Lily to know and do the same. She ensures that the codes of femininity are
still in place, active, and fixed. She indirectly offers the “successful” example of Molly
Van Alstyne to Lily as the unswerving dedication of “noticing” all the various ways that
women are supposed to look (Paquin, as my text notes, is “a well-known Parisian fashion
house”). According to Mrs. Peniston women are to be evaluating everyone and
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everything that takes place because the standard for women is to know how to look and
know what things to fill her mind with.
Mrs. Peniston becomes incredulous and angry when her cousin Grace Stepney
gossips to her about Lily’s non-sexual relationships with men because Lily has apparently
not learned the rules of social observation that her aunt has told her—that, as a lady, she
is to observe and is herself able to be observed. The narrator notes her thoughts on this as
such: “In her youth, girls had not been supposed to require close supervision. They were
generally assumed to be taken up with the legitimate business of courtship and marriage,”
(136, my emphasis) which suggests a cultural practice for girls of the upper classes
whereby they are to strictly adhere to behavior that is never visibly sexual and, moreover,
always free of scandal. For the “fast girls” of her day, “there could be no graver charge
than that of being ‘unladylike.’ The modern fastness appeared [to her as] synonymous
with immorality” (136). Lily’s perceived “loose” behavior and that she, as “a young girl
[,] let[s] herself be talked about” (136) is “horrible” and the same as with sinning; social
relevance through purity is the religion here. To Lily, “in her set such gossip was not
unusual, and a handsome girl who flirted with a married man was merely assumed to be
pressing to the limit of her opportunities” (138). A generational conflict of sorts appears
present here. Mrs. Peniston thinks “however unfounded the charges against her, she must
be to blame for their having been made” (136) which reveals her to be a stand-in for the
institutionalized man—because she holds the establishment that Lily seek—who places
blame onto females for “unfortunate” events which befall them. It is no surprise that
Wharton employs a name that suggests masculinity by connoting the male sex organ.
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Consequently, the conversation with Grace Stepney about Lily’s behavior
becomes a moment which determines Lily’s tragic fate. Lily’s apparent non-adherence to
her aunt’s values in favor of her initial adhering to the value system of her friends is what
leads up to Mrs. Peniston’s choice to disinherit her. Yet, Lily does believe that she is
responsible for events which befall her. When Gus attempts to rape Lily in exchange for
the nine-thousand dollars he has given her (which she thinks she won from his investment
of her money in stocks), Lily resolves that “to restore her self-respect, she must at once
repay the whole amount” (180). Apparently, Lily has been made to feel responsible for
the sexual advances of a man like Gus. Clearly patriarchal ideology in the stock market,
which both hides its workings from women and affects them without their even knowing
it, has worked itself deeply on Lily and Mrs. Peniston, who cold-heartedly refuses to help
her cover her debts. (Lily doesn’t dare tell her that Gus has almost raped her when she
asks for help.) Mrs. Peniston doesn’t feel pity for members of her own sex because the
social import of patriarchal ideology of men in power prevents it. She reveals to her aunt
that she plays cards for money but that she “never really cared for cards” (184) and this is
true. We’ve seen that her friends have compelled her to engage in behavior that Mrs.
Peniston does not considered “ladylike.” Lily
. . . f[inds] that her hostesses expec[t] her to take a place at the card-table. It [is] one
of the taxes she ha[s] to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses and
trinkets which occasionally replenish[] her insufficient wardrobe. And since she
[plays] regularly the passion [grows] on her. Once or twice of late she had won a
large sum, and instead of keeping it against future losses, spen[ds] it in dress or
jewelry; and the desire to atone for this imprudence, combined with the increasing
exhilaration of the game, dr[i]ve[s] her to risk higher stakes at each fresh venture.
She tri[es] to excuse herself on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at all
one must either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she kn[ows] that
the gambling passion [is] upon her, and that in her present surroundings there [is]
small hope of resisting it. (30)
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Lily’s “compulsion” to gamble stems from internal (i.e., the self-awareness she has) and
external sources which expect her to adopt behaviors she can’t possibly afford or sustain
in her position as a young single woman. The establishment she lacks in comparison to
women like Bertha Dorset, “whose husband shower[s] money on her,” and Judy Trenor,
“who could have afforded to lose a thousand a night” (31) reveals that the world of
appearances must be kept in place, that Lily must save face and look amenable to risk
although it affects her much more than it does her “friends.” We see that her winnings go
toward maintaining her personal upkeep, as she has been trained to do so and which she
needs to do if she is to remain a viable commodity on the marriage market. She engages
in behavior that only appears to have the financial agency men in the novel have which
they are allowed to have since they all have lucrative careers.
The irony of this is that her success in gambling lends her a high visibility
among her friends which later allows her character to be called into question when she is
implicated in adulterous misconduct. Her “unladylike” conduct will feed into a dramatic
and unfounded reinterpretation of her character and the woman everyone thinks they
know, while neglecting the fact that they’ve created her “questionable” character.
Consequently, Mrs. Peniston’s assumption of Lily’s character when she asks her for help
is tellingly stated: “I consider you are disgraced, Lily: disgraced by your conduct far
more than by its results” (184). The real results are unseen at this point. Lily goes to
Europe on invitation from Bertha Dorset to get away from Gus Trenor and “Mrs.
Peniston . . . vehemently oppose[s] her niece’s departure” (235), which seals Lily’s fate
of being disinherited and sets her decline even more into motion. It would seem, then,
that Mrs. Peniston’s decision to disinherit her niece by giving her only ten-thousand
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dollars of her estate instead of “the residue” (i.e., the fortune) that goes to Grace Stepney
is symbolic of the legacy that her aunt forces her to submit to during her life. In other
words, Mrs. Peniston’s disinheriting Lily goes beyond returning the spite she feels Lily
gave her in going to Europe. She symbolically rescinds every “value” she has ever
imparted to her—values where girls are only pretty objects and whose only goals are to
land a wealthy man—because Lily apparently won’t protect them and ensure that they
exist in the future. Ah, the nature of “legacy”!
Wharton plays with her readers in offering to Lily what might seem to help
her out of the constraints to which she is bound in the form of Lawrence Selden. He
discusses with Lily what he views as her ability to transcend the rat-in-the-cage role she’s
been taught to value, and acts as a guide of sorts to her. His ultimate goal in doing so is to
marry her. He is, however, categorically unaware of the ways in which a woman is
compelled to act in his society and fails to see how entrenched her society’s social
expectations for women are in Lily despite being able to speak of them. Lily’s old habits
will die hard, literally. Yet, he offers her his “insight” which is fully derived from the
agency he has been granted as a male anyway. He hopes she might give up clinging to
what he sees limiting her so that she can join his “republic of the spirit” (where one is
free “from everything—money, poverty, ease, and anxiety, from all the material
accidents” [74]), so that she can be like him, and marry her. As Wharton writes of what
he wants in a woman, “His craving was for the companionship of one whose point of
view should justify his own, who should confirm, by deliberate observation, the truth to
which his intuitions had leaped” (164). Selden apparently wants to marry a female
version of himself. In all fairness, of the men with whom Lily interacts, Selden appears to
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be the best possible man for Lily to build a relationship with. However, even he still
exhibits character traits which seek to get her “in-line” with what appears as his almost
anti-establishment/anti-patriarchy ideals. So, if Lily should marry him, she’ll trade one
form of oppression for another.
When they go on their walk through the woods, Lily discloses her idea of
success being, “to get as much as one can out of life” (74). This contrasts directly with
Selden’s view of it, which is “personal freedom” (74), which is to essentially not “want.”
Lily anticipates what Selden might think of her in “choosing” to place herself in direct
dependence with the ramifications of the “material accidents” referenced above. She
says, “You think me horribly sordid, don't you? But perhaps it's rather that I never had
any choice. There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the spirit.” Their
conversation is working a newly-acquired perception within her wherein she thinks she
has the power, and Selden will encourage her, to change her motivations and state of
mind. Selden suggests that all she need do is simply stop believing that she is dependent
upon the needs of the actual republic around her and start to act of her own accord. He
replies “There never is—it’s a country one has to find the way to one’s self” (74), which
simultaneously sets the tracks his life takes/has taken on the “higher plane” of existence
yet reveals why she can’t get “there.” A lifetime of complying with appropriate female
modes has resulted in Lily’s never being able to think of anything but acting in
accordance, while remaining in the figurative home country. Lily may try to change
spiritually but is prohibited from doing so. More pointedly is Dimock’s claim that, in
Lily, Selden is looking for but never gains the “spiritual capital” or “assurance” (786) that
he would need from her to marry her. Dimock writes, “The ‘republic of the spirit’ turns
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out to be less a republic than a refined replica of the social marketplace, of which Selden
is a full participating member” (787).
When Lily begins to face difficult obstacles which threaten to destroy her, one
character who is poorly spoken of in private places becomes an important person in her
life: Carry Fisher. Mrs. Fisher operates differently as a model of sorts for exploiting the
capitalistic, male-derived system of inequalities as Wharton presents them in the novel;
she essentially plays the game before it can play her and will encourage Lily to do the
same. Carry is allowed to remain relevant within her group of friends because her
behavior—marrying and divorcing for the alimony it provides—is sanctioned under the
capitalist, male-derived socio-economic system. Lily understands that Carry’s behavior is
something “the world decries but condones” (86). According to Judy Trenor, she “hasn’t
the least moral sense” (93), yet Judy is friends with her and so is Gus. Judy tries keeping
her away from her husband because she knows that she “ble[e]d[s] him severely” (85) of
his money. Gus thinks of her as “a professional sponge” (91).
Yet, Lily also acknowledges that it is
. . . in fact, characteristic of Carry that, while she actively gleaned her own stores
from the fields of affluence, her real sympathies were on the other side—with the
unlucky, the unpopular, the unsuccessful, with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the
shorn stubble of success. (264)
When Lily’s friends effectively disown her, it is Carry who attempts helping her regain
her footing in her society. Carry apparently understands what it means to be and have
been made to be dependent on the men in her life and she works within this system to
benefit herself. In other words, she exploits like she has been exploited. She offers Lily
advice to remedy her situation: marry a wealthy man “‘as soon as [she] can’” (252). This
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elicits a somewhat negative response in Lily. She tells her “Do you mean, like Gerty
Farish, to recommend the unfailing panacea of a ‘great man’s love’?” (252), which
suggests an ever-growing disillusionment with the institution of marriage and with men.
Carry responds with “‘No—I don’t think either of my candidates would answer to that
description” (252), suggesting that Lily could simply marry for monetary leverage in
order to bring herself out of her ostracized place among her friends. Carry tells her that
the world is “not a pretty place” (266) and says that with either man she may choose—
and for whatever reason she chooses them—“the only way to keep a footing in it is to
fight [the system] on its own terms” (266). Carrie openly displays her own dog-eat-dog
training in the ways of men, suggesting the old adage, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
The first potential spouse Carry mentions, George Dorset, is too “odious”
(253) for Lily to think of since she has been falsely accused of having an affair with him.
However, Carrie says, “if you want to punish [Bertha] you hold the means in your hand. I
believe you can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don’t care for that particular
form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from Bertha is to marry somebody else’”
(267). It is significant that Carry’s language about “retaliation” will be brought up again
in nearly the exact same language by Rosedale because, as I will demonstrate in the next
section, characters in the novel realize that Lily is not at all vicious like the other
characters (especially Bertha) even though they apparently want her to be that way.
Bertha is described as “dangerous” (48, 81), she “poison[s]” (82) people’s perceptions of
others through her talk, and “she delights in making people miserable” (48). One of these
people is Lily. Yet, if Carry’s advice for a woman to live in this society is at all telling
here, it’s that women must turn on each other—must punish each other in accordance
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with the decrees of men—in order to survive. Bertha is just as much a product of her
patriarchal social training as anyone else, and the animal nature in her, called out by the
“benefits” of capitalism and visible wealth, shows its proverbial claws.
However, Carry’s suggestion of Simon Rosedale “g[i]ve[s] expression to a
possibility which, in the last weeks, had more than once occurred to her” (253). Upon
further reflection when Carry leaves, Lily finds that “a new hope ha[s] stirred in her.
Much as she disliked Rosedale, she no longer absolutely despise[s] him. For he was
gradually attaining his object in life, and that, to Lily, was always less despicable than to
miss it” (254). Thus, a man who has long been a source of abhorrence to her has now
become her only option. That he is “less despicable” because he is “attaining his object in
life” speaks volumes to Lily’s growing understanding of how little agency she can exert
herself in this society. Carry’s advice resonates with Lily because she realizes what Carry
has realized for years, in spite of all the bad “talk” of her: play the game. Lily can see that
her earlier assertion to Gerty Farish that “the truth about any girl is that once she’s talked
about she’s done for” (239, my emphasis) is not true in Carry’s case and has not limited
Carry in the way that it has limited Lily. The difference lies in what Carry does for
money—marrying men and playing the game, even to divorce, which Lily is now
considering. She begins thinking of settling for Rosedale, then, because she realizes he
affords her the ability to remain “ornamental” in nature while pulling her out of her own
growing poverty. She feels this is a far better fate than attempting to make her own way
in the world and on her own terms—it’s an impossibility as she comes to find out.
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Prompts for Action and Performance/
Resulting Inaction and
Non-Performance
Patriarchal ideology determines the social expectations of behavior for the
sexes. These expectations lead to performances of those expectations which allow me to
talk about Judith Butler’s concept of gender in her work Gender Trouble. She writes that
gender, as conceived within the “obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (173)
is “always a doing” (33) which tries to accomplish the “ideal” form of itself—an “an
ideal that [under the regulatory practices of heterosexuality] no one can embody” (176,
Butler’s emphasis). In other words, the nature of heterosexuality has produced a certain
way to behave. For women of the upper class or who hope to remain in the upper class,
this “way” is to acknowledge that men are their only way to exist; for men, it is to keep
those terms functional and compelling. In the novel, Wharton demonstrates that there is
an ill-defined ideal, but characters come close to achieving it and they essentially know
when they’ve done so. The ideal form is the established form and even men are subject to
it.
For instance, Wharton writes that Rosedale, a Jewish man and (consequently)
an outsider to Lily’s social circle who is slowly working his way into it, “ha[s] learned to
speak with just the right note of disdain of the big Van Osburgh crushes” (254). This
suggests that “acceptance” by the majority has its basis in accurate performance of social
behavior which includes making one’s vocal cords operate correctly. Wharton is clear
that, although he has “his race's accuracy in the appraisal of values” (18) and, as Gus
Trenor states it, “will be rich enough to buy [all the big players in the stock market] out
one of these days” (89), there is a way to speak or behave if one is to gain acceptance into
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high society. He becomes successful not only because of his finances but because of his
adherence to these rules for speaking and behaving, regardless of how much of a social
pariah he is at the start of the novel.
Consequently, Lily’s self-awareness and her awareness of society’s
expectations for non-established women reveal what the ideal looks like. Initially, she
desires the “benefits” of marriage for how it is acted out through material appearance
under capitalism. Regardless of how much of a bore she considers Percy Gryce to be, the
narrator reveals a type of weight being lifted from her shoulders in the idea of possibly
marrying him. Lily thinks that
. . . [s]he w[ill] have smarter gowns than Judy Trenor, and far, far more jewels than
Bertha Dorset. She w[ill] be free forever from the shifts, the expedients, the
humiliations of the relatively poor. Instead of having to flatter, she w[ill] be
flattered; instead of being grateful, she w[ill] receive thanks. There [a]re old scores
she c[an] pay off as well as old benefits she c[an] return. And she ha[s] no doubts as
to the extent of her power. . . . The system might at first necessitate a resort to some
of the very shifts and expedients from which she intended it should free her; but she
fe[els] sure that in a short time she w[ill] be able to play the game in her own way.
(53)
The extent to which Lily is entrenched in the established “law” of capitalism and
patriarchy is especially telling here. With the combination of her beauty and ample
amounts of money, she relishes in the idea of being put above the rest of the women
around her. Not only are these the ideal conditions under which one is to operate, they
also reveal how one is to act essentially. As even Judy will tell her, once Lily is married
is when she can “pay back” (81) other women (specifically Bertha Dorset) who have
crossed her. Lily does plan to exercise “the power” that will inevitably come with Percy’s
money and her marriage to him. She identifies herself as an appraisable commodity in the
business of becoming a married woman in order to someday “play the game in her own
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way.” She finds a type of comfort in knowing that she’ll be able to administer the vicious
treatment she’s received instead of receiving it. At this moment, all Lily has to keep her
motivated is systematic retribution. Much like Carrie in Sister Carrie and Edna in The
Awakening, she dreams of being outside of the social laws which keep her in her place. In
Lily’s case, though, she desires to free herself from that which governs her life so she can
reproduce and exact it on others, performing the same oppression she despises.
And yet, Lily’s performances—especially those conforming along gender
lines as just described—are strikingly absent in the novel. There are a few instances
where Lily does represent and perform “high” femininity; one such scene is her often
discussed portrayal of Mrs. Lloyd in Joshua Reynold’s painting Mrs. Lloyd during the
“Tableaux Vivants” section of the novel. In it, Lily fully meets patriarchal society’s
predetermined acme of feminine physical description. When she takes her place on the
stage at the Bry’s mansion, male and female characters express a “unanimous ‘Oh!’ (144)
and Lily is the center of attention. The “triumph” of the performance gives her an
“intoxicating sense” of “power” (146). Yet, Lily is (and the other women are) later
reduced to commodity when her cousin Ned Van Alstyne says, “Gad, what a show of
good-looking women; but not one of ‘em could touch that little cousin of mine. Talk of
jewels—what’s a woman want with jewels when she’s got herself to show?” (148). While
this statement is not said directly to her, performances that women are actually allowed to
carry out are only those that deal with reproducing “intelligibly” to men their
commodified form of sexuality. Late in the text, Lily’s narrative demonstrates a sharp
turn away from engaging in this behavior and this is proscribed/prohibited by society.
Competing for the attention of men and/or sexual power over men (as Bertha Dorset
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does) is both the sexual norm and requirement for women in the novel and Lily is
punished for, as Judith Butler says, “fail[ing] to do [h]e[r] gender right” (178).
Because of Bertha Dorset, Lily loses her social standing while she and her
friends are in Europe and she never recovers from it. Bertha is responsible for ruining
Lily’s chances with Percy by introducing him to the woman he marries, Evie Van
Osburgh. Then, she falsely implicates Lily in adultery with her husband George though
she is the one who engages in extramarital affairs. When her other friends abandon her,
Bertha also ruins Lily’s ability to become and remain friends with the Gormers, the
nouveau riche couple whom Lily is initially loath to become friends with because they
lack the historical establishment of wealth that she seeks. Lily, who has every right to
seek revenge, never employs the physical proof of Bertha’s adultery with Selden (i.e.,
Bertha’s letters to him) to restore her name. Lily chooses not to pay forward the extortion
she has faced earlier in the novel from the charwoman who wants money in exchange for
those letters, thinking that Lily wrote them. In other words, Lily does not engage in
blackmailing a woman the way she was blackmailed. In effect, the discarding, both
literally and metaphorically, the opportunity to restore her name is, in essence, her rebuke
to the decrees of Fate, which handed her the ability to return retribution for the injustices
she withstands from Bertha. It seems that even Fate encourages her to engage in what
becomes destroying other women. Yet, even with Rosedale’s explicit encouraging her to
do so, along with George Dorset’s pleading with her to do the same, Lily abstains.
When Lily meets with each of these men, they will both offer their plans for
her to “set things right,” either between Bertha and herself, or to get “rid” of Bertha
altogether. When she meets George Dorset in a chance encounter, he begs her to “free
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him” from his guilty conscience for being, according to him, ‘powerless’” (258) in
stopping Bertha’s sacrifice of her. He believes and attempts to demonstrate that he is “a
prisoner [she] alone can set free” (258). He tells her in language that appears to free her
from the risks associated with exposing Bertha that “[he] need[s] is to be able to say
definitely: ‘I know this—and this—and this’—and the fight would drop, and the way
cleared, and the whole abominable business swept out of sight in a second” (259). Later,
he tells her that “it lies with [her] to [make things] different. It’s just a word to say and
[she] can put [him] out of [his] misery” (262). He will not employ his own clearly
defined agency to correct the accusation that he has been unfaithful and depends on a
non-established woman to do so.
When she meets Rosedale, nearly the same conversation occurs. She tells him
that she’s ready to marry him. He refuses temporarily on the premise that his marrying
her, in her tainted state, will mar his professional image. Though he admits “[he]
do[es]n’t believe the stories about [her]” (271), the irony of the situation is that Rosedale
who is a wealthy stock-broker will not trade on Lily’s virginal name. Instead, he tells her
to “use those letters of hers [she] bought last year” (272) in order to “‘get square with
[Bertha]’” (272). He continues in nearly the same language Carry Fisher has told her that
George Dorset would marry you tomorrow, if you’d tell him all you know and give
him the chance to show the lady the door . . . but you don’t seem to care for that
particular form of getting even. . . . In a deal like that, nobody comes out with
perfectly clean hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to get Bertha Dorset
to back you up, instead of trying to fight her. (273, my emphasis)
Rosedale’s language is so near to Carry Fisher’s that it suggests the pervasiveness and
acceptance by both sexes of the ideology of women punishing each other. It is his first
thought that Lily take George as her husband and therefore “show [Bertha] the door.” It
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certainly shows that Carry is highly adapted to the ways that men treat women and expect
women to treat each other. Although he says he understands why she wouldn’t want to
“get even” in punishing Bertha, his following statements suggests otherwise. He tells her
that
It’s one thing to get Bertha Dorset into line—but what you want is to keep her there.
You can frighten her fast enough—but how are you going to keep her frightened?
By showing her that you’re as powerful as she is. All the letters in the world won’t
do that for you as you are now; but with a big backing behind you, you’ll keep her
just where you want her to be. That’s my share in the business—that’s what I’m
offering you. You can’t put the thing through without me—don’t run away with any
idea that you can. In six months you’d be back again among your old worries, or
worse ones: and here I am, ready to lift you out of ‘em tomorrow if you say so.
(275)
For whatever credit he hopes to do in restoring her name, he also attempts making her
fully realize that she is nobody without him, that she cannot act of her own accord. His
asking her to get Bertha “in-line” is also seeking to get her in-line under him, probably to
make her forever dependent on him for “saving her.” Acting as “the big backing behind
her” but having her do the dirty work, he will, in effect, get two women in line under his
direction. Lily also knows what Rosedale wants and how he wants to treat other women.
Long before she was ever on the downward slope to the suicide awaiting her at the
novel’s end, Rosedale presses the suit of marriage to Lily. His intentions are revealed
when he tells her,
I generally have got what I wanted in life, Miss Bart. I wanted money; and I’ve got
more than I know how to invest; and now the money doesn’t seem to be of any
account unless I can spend it on the right woman. That’s what I want to do with it: I
want my wife to make all the other women feel small. (187, Wharton’s emphasis)
His desire to “make other women feel small” through showering money on Lily certainly
reflects the competition between women that men foist on to them, even by physically
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undesirable men such as himself. He will gain “power” by visibly displaying his wealth
through Lily which will further keep women at odds with each other and make them
believe their only assets are their looks and their rich husbands. It is a very insidious
ideology indeed.
Lily’s responses, both mental and verbal, to both men are, similar. Both reveal
her precarious nature involved with “getting even.” To George’s suggestion, she thinks
that “[r]evenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke—there was something
dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity” (259). Her readiness to engage in
“revenge” in order to be “rehabilitated” demonstrates how easily her society has situated
types of violence against females as acceptable. Yet, the narrator informs us that,
“suddenly fear possessed her—fear of herself, and of the terrible force of the temptation.
All her past weaknesses were like so many eager accomplices drawing her toward the
path their feet had already smoothed” (259), suggesting again the determinism in the text
stems from the influence of men and the ubiquity of patriarchal ideology. To Rosedale’s
suggestion, she thinks that confronting Bertha “[will] reduce the transaction to a private
understanding, of which no third person need have the remotest hint” (274). Clearly, Lily
is genuinely concerned with the damage control which might arise out of the effects of
“getting even.” Lily even begins believing in Rosedale’s view, seeing for the first time a
new paradigm. She thinks,
Put by Rosedale in terms of business-like give-and-take, this understanding took on
the harmless air of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a revision
of boundary lines. . . . Lily’s mind was fascinated by this escape from fluctuating
ethical into a region of concrete weights and measures. (274)
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That her mind “was fascinated” by a visible shift in her values, away from ethics and into
more “concrete” exchange further reveals that Rosedale confuses the issue at hand. He
equates confrontation between an established woman and a woman who is in a highly
precarious position to “just business” without knowing what is really involved.
His explicit language of dominion over not only Lily but of other women as
well shakes Lily out of her “tranced subservience” (275). The narrator comments that
. . . her would be accomplice assumed, as a matter of course, the likelihood of her
distrusting him and perhaps trying to cheat him of his share of the spoils. This
glimpse of his mind seemed to present the whole transaction in a new aspect, and
she saw that the essential baseness of the act lay in its freedom from risk. (275, my
emphasis)
As an effect of being disinherited, Lily’s conscience has changed from mere acceptance
of events as they happen to really questioning them beforehand. The terms by which
Rosedale implores her to “make peace” with Bertha (through what is in essence
blackmail) sidesteps the “dirty work” he’s asking Lily to do. He makes it sound as if it
will be a simple conversation between Lily and Bertha to put things back to “normal,” but
we know it will likely be nothing of the sort because of Bertha’s vicious, selfpreservationist character. Lily wants to act of her own accord, to exert her own will to
correct the matter, but can’t. She realizes that Rosedale is only in this process to make
himself look better; he doesn’t really care about her at all.
She tells both men the same thing essentially. To George, she says that “there
is nothing in the world [she] can do” (259) and that “[he’s] mistaken; [that she] know[s]
nothing; [that she] saw nothing” (263). To Rosedale, Lily draws back and affects being
unconcerned by his proposal. She tells him, “You are mistaken . . . both in the facts and
in what you infer from them” (275). In comporting herself with her conceptions of what it
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means to be a non-established lady in the highly limited space she occupies, Lily
preemptively frees herself from being the one to act against Bertha. The burden of
“fixing” a woman society has created rests on Lily’s shoulders and Lily refuses do its
bidding. Lily sounds like a broken record in her reply, but she simply will not engage in
the same behavior that Bertha has engaged in. She will not fulfill her prescribed role in
the way women are to treat each other even though it leads to her destruction. Lily simply
doesn’t want to “play the game” of men against women and women against women
anymore. The narrator makes it is clear that she chooses not to do this because she
doesn’t want to hurt Selden. However, a deeper, more compelling explanation is that she
simply refuses to engage in the behavior others employed toward her disadvantage. She
refuses to “buy into” the ideology of the world around her anymore, knowing that she
damns women if she does and damns herself if she doesn’t. Burning Bertha’s letters in
Selden’s fire the last time he will see her alive signals that Lily has finally transcended
the social laws, but only into death.
Results
Critics vary in their interpretations of why Lily becomes a suicide at the end
of the novel. Is it biological or environmental determinism which leads to Lily’s death?
Jennifer L. Fleissner discusses the pressure of “time” and how it is wrapped up with
biologically naturalistic determinism in her essay, “The Biological Clock: Edith Wharton,
Naturalism, and the Temporality of Womanhood.” She notes that the original titles of the
novel were “A Moment’s Ornament and The Year of the Rose” which “emphasize their
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focus on Lily’s purpose in life: to be a ‘beautiful object,’ to ‘adorn and delight’” (528).
She notes that
Wharton’s language of the ‘moment’ and the ‘year’ suggests [that] the novel [is]
concern[ed with] the temporal location of being situated on the cusp between
marriageability and terminal spinsterhood. Understood as a flower, the twenty-nineyear-old Lily would seem to face intractable natural limits in her attempt to secure a
husband before the bloom is off the rose. (528)
This unfortunate pressure, and Lily’s resulting death/suicide, allows Lily to both remain
“unsullied” and “to inhabit an eternal spring” (529). Here, suicide obviates compliance
with social norms which, I would argue, suggests that Lily’s noncompliance with finding
a mate “in time” determines her tragedy.
In “The Naturalism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth,” Donald Pizer
sees Wharton’s naturalistic determinism in the novel but also contests that “pessimistic
environmental determinism—of man as not merely related to or dependent on his social
setting but as destructively imprisoned by it” (242) is the only element governing the text.
He sees
Wharton [and other naturalistic writers] as not [desiring] to depict life as fully and
destructively conditioned for all mankind; [she] rather wish[es] to render the
powerful effect of environment and heredity on various specific kinds of
temperament and experience. (244-245, my emphasis)
The specific kind of temperament which is destroyed is Lily’s. However, he argues that
the way Wharton ends the novel—what he sees as evidence between Lily and Selden that
“human love exists” (246) despite Lily’s suicide—reflects that Wharton’s naturalism was
“not committed to a doctrinaire or prescriptive notion of environmental determinism”
(247). However, Wharton’s use of “social conditioning with greater attention to codes
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and conventions of belief” (247) reveals the antagonistic world as ultimately unconcerned
with higher human concerns like love.
In her essay, “From Tea to Chloral: Raising the Dead Lily Bart,” Bonnie Lynn
Gerard takes a similar view that Pizer does. She views Wharton’s naturalism as reflected
in Lily’s “d[ying] a victim of her own lack of moral courage, which is to say, a victim of
the social environment that created in her such a lack” (410) but, conversely, that
Wharton “endorses naturalism . . . hesitatingly and incompletely” (411). Gerard argues
that “even when her material prospects look their bleakest, and Lily is offered the
opportunity to save her hide, figuratively and literally, she refuses” (415), suggesting that
Lily is easily “confused” between social propriety and the means to survive (416). Gerard
notes that “although the plot of the novel continues [on a] naturalistic trajectory, Lily’s
responses to her environment chang[e]” (421), suggesting that she does try to adapt to it.
Even though “Lily [becomes] dust” (423), Gerard argues that Selden still lives and that
Lily’s death reflects her having become “self-aware” (423) via the altruism she
experiences near the end of the work. While I agree with Pizer and Gerard that the novel
has some elements which resist the fully naturalist narrative, the suffering that Lily
experiences has no redeeming value for her, regardless of the integrity she demonstrates.
And, if Lily is the heroine of the novel, her experience is the one that matters; everyone
in the novel, no matter how “understanding” they appear at the end of it, has grossly
misunderstood her. Nature and society are apathetic to her destruction.
I argue that Lily’s understanding of the coercion she faces from society to
become its socially constructed woman makes it so that she cannot fully adapt and
therefore live. Carson says that
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Wharton’s decision to let Lily die at the close of the novel suggests that women like
Lily at the turn of the century were still struggling to articulate and cope with the
knowledge of their paradoxical position within an ideological terrain that was both
determined by their material reality and the constantly reproduced ideology of
gender in which they lived. (714, Carson’s emphasis)
Carson’s analysis is astute, but I would argue that Lily’s struggle to exist cannot
eventuate in unfettered existence because Wharton is demonstrating that for women to
fulfill their always already determined role means that they really don’t exist. Yes,
women in the novel exist, but only in terms of their (ex-)husbands. That Lily refuses to
adapt to her society, to commit to being that which she rejects signals to us as readers that
what she rejects is instead the woman that patriarchy and men construct. The unnerving
feeling we get from Lily’s suicide works to impart that this is what (patriarchal) society
does to those who desire to be different than the accepted “norm.” However, readers
might see that society as it is does not need to be intolerant to behavior which it doesn’t
understand or uncompromising to those who are already at a disadvantage purely because
of their sex or gender. The House of Mirth, like the other novels I’ve analyzed in this
thesis, suggests that we need not operate or perform under such fatal ideology in order to
exist.
ENDNOTES
ENDNOTES
1
We can appropriate Althusser’s text in examining the relationship of
ideology to subject-making in these turn of the 20th century novels, regardless of how late
“Ideology” appears after them. Though the first publication of this essay occurred in
1969, Althusser charts how the bourgeoisie—those that began to control the means of
production in the turn away from aristocratic and feudal society—began to use political
ISAs to develop and ultimately maintain a stranglehold of power through repressive State
apparatuses (RSAs). He offers examples of the historic, brutal force with which the State
carries out its practices “of repressive execution and intervention ‘in the interests of the
ruling classes’ in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies against the
proletariat” (132). In Europe, these were “the massacres of June 1848 and of the Paris
Commune, of Bloody Sunday, May 1905 in Petrograd, of the Resistance, of Charonne,
etc.” (133). Althusser demonstrates the ways in which the moneyed classes control and
subdue, through RSAs, the classes of people without money. While none of the novels in
this thesis deal with this type of brute force, the novels all deal with the terms of
dominance in upper-class society and the forces (relationally “brute” or otherwise)
leading to protagonist demise. Althusser’s discussion of class struggle is ultimately for
demonstrating the manner in which class opposition is defeated on the larger scale.
However, in the smaller, more intimate dimensions of storytelling, I argue that characters
are forced to submit in similar ways, or lose their lives.
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131
2
Butler writes, “Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a
discourse which, it will be suggested, seeks to set certain limits to analysis or to
safeguard certain tenets of humanism as presuppositional to any analysis of gender.” Her
point is crucial here because, as she does point out, the terms of debate reside within
dominant, cultural conceptions of sexuality, the “obligatory frame of reproductive
heterosexuality” (173) as she describes it. The terms of the debate, then, do not
acknowledge anything other than its accepted forms.
3
Butler writes, “‘Coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical
or analytical features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms
of intelligibility. Inasmuch as ‘identity’ is assured through the stabilizing concepts of sex,
gender, and sexuality, the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the
cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear
to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by
which persons are defined.” Butler’s emphasis on the constructedness of identity through
institutions and the maintenance of those institutions hearkens back to Althusser’s notion
of ISAs and their reproduction of the dominant culture’s values. Thus, what a “woman”
should “be” like, what her motivations are, how she treats other women, where we even
get those notions, etc., is symptomatic of the society and time period in which she lives.
The same goes for “men.”
4
Jennifer B. Gray understands the import of ideology and the manner in
which it affects all characters in the novel. In her article, “The Escape of the ‘Sea’:
Ideology and The Awakening,” Gray stretches Althusser’s concept of “hailing” by the law
to multiple “hailings” designed to continually keep women under male authority. She
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employs this Althusserian interpellation in examining the novel’s character “subjects.”
Noting that Edna is not a subject but rather an object in the marriage economy because of
her gender (59), Gray charts three distinct “roles” she sees Edna attempt to successively
embrace: the mother-woman, the artistic-woman, and the free-woman. Edna is hailed by
both Léonce (60) and Adèle (71) to accept her role as mother-woman, but she begins to
resist this role when she is hailed by Mlle Reisz (64) to accept the artist-woman role, a
role requiring her to give up “love, sexuality, and connection” (66). According to Gray,
Edna begins dabbling in the role of free-woman after but cannot fully do so because it
“threaten[s] the hegemonic patriarchal ideology, for it allows a woman to be freely sexual
and individualistic, in accordance with the goals of feminist ideology” (67). However, her
constantly being hailed to accept the mother-woman role (which does not fit her) acts
antagonistically to her newly-discovered individuality and results in her suicide. While
Gray’s observations are astute and in-line with my concept of forced adherence to
patriarchal ideology, I argue that Edna begins to act with the agency of the culturallyapproved “man” which renders her as “Other” in her society and consequently
“unintelligible” because of the severe limitations within the gender binary.
5
Althusser doesn’t describe this ISA, but Judith Butler does so, without
referencing the actual term “ISA” in Gender Trouble. In her analysis of a study done by
Dr. David Page of MIT in 1987, Butler discusses how he attempted to promote the
“master gene” in sex determinism as the male chromosome Y, which again places
females as “passive” and males as “active.” Of this, she says, “The concentration on the
‘master gene’ suggests that femaleness ought to be understood as the presence or absence
of maleness or, at best, the presence of a passivity that, in men, would be invariably
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active” (139). Butler’s rhetorical analysis of the more-recent medical community clearly
reveals how entrenched in patriarchal ideology its own thinking has been.
WORKS CITED
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