In her essay, “The New Woman”, Elizabeth Ammons categorizes Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth as an economic novel; a popular literary theme in the United States in 1905 when the novel was written. Wharton’s is a critique on the commerce of marriage. Ammons writes that both The House of Mirth and The Fruit of the Tree—the former revealing the downfall of marrying while the latter reveals the perils of failing to do so—together build Wharton’s argument that the mechanism of marriage is fundamentally and irreconcilably repressive. Marriage in and of itself cannot be justified, in its nature it is a “patriarchal institution designed to aggrandize men at the expense of women” (Ammons 26).
Ammons draws attention to Wharton’s relative happiness in marriage at the time she wrote The House of Mirth, her stability and building fame as a writer, and her audience, eager to read the feminist themes with which she worked. The Women’s Movement at the turn of the century ushered in the “New Women” of fiction. They were exuberant and glamorous, but soon overshadowed by a second wave of “New Women”. Among them, Ammons places the likes of Edna Pontellier and Lily Bart: tragic heroines carrying omens of the trials of womanhood to their respective deaths. Ammons writes that it was this “serious feminine scholarship” concentrated on themes of marriage and work that took hold of American audiences between the turn of the century and the end of the Great War (27).
Ammons lends the basis for many of Wharton’s central themes to the preceding work of two groundbreaking authors: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Thorstein Veblen. Gilman’s Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution studies the unnatural and unhealthy dependence of woman on man. Ammons draws a strong connection between Gilman’s likening of contemporary marriage to the relationship of prostitute to client, and Wharton’s treatment of marriage as an economic exchange of goods and services. For her part, Veblen shares with Wharton the conviction that “the leisure class serves as the ideal to which all classes aspire in any given culture,” which Veblen expresses in The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions” (Ammons 28).
Ammons pays particular attention to three major themes running throughout The House of Mirth: the mercantile language of marital discourse, Lily’s resistance to proprietorship, and women’s dependence on Wall Street and the men that run it. Ammons posits that a man’s “ownership of a woman is not a luxury, but a necessity. She is his means of disseminating Wall Street power beyond the limited masculine world of Wall Street” (Ammons 33). As Lily Bart’s tragic downfall reveals, the status of the high society woman wholly depends on her ability to marry a wealthy man of equal or greater social standing, while the man’s status does not rely on money alone, but the possession of a woman able to transform his wealth into social capital. When discussing marriage, Wharton’s characters speak in strictly mercantile language. Ammons supplies the example of Mr. Simon Rosedale and his frank proposal to Lily in Chapter 15 of Book 1: “If I want a thing I’m willing to pay: I don’t go up to the counter, and then wonder if the article’s worth the price” (Wharton 187). Here, Lily is an object to be obtained and her only utility is to advance one man’s social standing. She is oppressed by this system while simultaneously dependent upon it; it is truly her “vocation”, the only thing she was raised to do (Wharton 12).
The use of mercantile language connects strongly with Ammons’ next point: that behind Lily’s failure to marry is not a failure at the “game”, but the result of a deep objection toward the thought of being any man’s property (35). This overpowering distaste for oppressive gender dynamics explains why all of Lily’s potential relationships fall apart. Percy Gryce is hers for the taking, but by her own subconscious command, she lets the opportunity fall away. Ammons asserts that the same phenomenon occurs with George Dorset, Simon Rosedale, and even Lawrence Selden. Ammons calls attention to Selden’s tendency to want to save Lily, objectifying her by alienating her from other women with the thought, “was it possible that she belonged to the same race?” (Wharton 7). Ammons likens Selden’s romantic impulses in response to Lily’s portrayal of Mrs. Lloyd to Pygmalion, “a storybook hero who also fell in love with a statue he envisioned bringing to a higher order of existence” (36). Selden, though the mysterious and lovable quasi-hero of the novel, is not exempt from the proprietorship of marriage that deeply repulses Lily.
Next, Ammons highlights the unnatural and counterintuitive hierarchy of women, where those who work the hardest have the least and those who barely seem to work have the most. The system that keeps women reliant on men’s money and favor is the same system that produces “divisive and relentless competition for that money and favor” (Ammons 39). Women are pitted against each other in the silent struggle to maintain social status and financial security at the expense of healthy human relationships. Ammons argues that it is Wharton’s intent to stress that women feel no natural necessity to harm each other, which she demonstrates in several instances using Lily’s interactions with Gerty Farish, Carry Fisher, and Nettie Struther. Utilizing these women of varying social class, Wharton answers Selden’s question from the beginning of the novel: Lily does in fact belong to the same race as all other women, and all women are forcibly subordinate to man just as Lily and her female counterparts are.
Ammons leaves her discussion of The House of Mirth and shifts focus to The Fruit of the Tree with the image of Lily Bart clutching the infant daughter of Nettie Struther to her chest as she passes away in her sleep. In this “union of the leisure and working classes lies a new hope—the New Woman that Wharton would bring to mature life in her next novel” (Ammons 43). The New Woman, Justine, is the protagonist of The Fruit of the Tree. She boasts a combination of characteristics unlike any one individual in The House of Mirth, she is “a thoroughly New Woman”: beautiful and well bred, but also economically self-sufficient and truly loyal to her friends’ best interests (Ammons 45). Ammons examines two crucial differences between Lily Bart and Justine Brent. The first is that Justine achieves her own version of the Republic of the Spirit—something so unattainable to Lily—through “physical and mental activity and the challenge of responsibility, both of which her profession disciplines and channels into useful service” (Ammons 47). The second is a notable switch away from the mercantile language of the commerce of marriage in The House of Mirth towards Justine’s more natural, liberated, and independent self-perception.
Though Justine’s perceptions of herself and her relationship with her husband are progressive in nature—she feels self-reliant and free to do as she pleases—Ammons notes that the New Woman is never fully realized in Wharton’s fiction because “marriage and the New Woman are antithetical” (Ammons 49). Justine delivers this message to readers as she acts on the ideals that Amherst has only claimed to adhere to. She takes hold of the freedom she believes herself to possess in marriage to him, and in doing so shatters all illusions of liberation and equality. Ammons recalls Wharton’s concept of marriage as irrevocably repressive. She writes: “Amherst cannot accept Justine’s action because she performed it on her own initiative, out of her own sense of moral autonomy, and did not feel bound to seek his approval after the fact” (Ammons 50). Justine’s marriage suffers as she attempts to practice her independence, proving that the two are irreconcilable and fundamentally incompatible. Wharton’s New Woman is never fully free; she remains an illusion so long as she exists in a system that requires her subservience to man in the commerce of marriage.