SOURCE: Moddelmog, William E. “Disowning ‘Personality’: Privacy and Subjectivity in The House of Mirth.” American Literature 70, no. 2 (June 1998): 337-63.

In the following essay, Moddelmog examines Wharton's narrative strategy of demonstrating the difficulties inherent in portraying female subjectivity by distancing herself, her other characters, and her readers from Lily's inner life.

What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one?

—Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

The pivotal moment of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) occurs during Lily Bart's second visit to Lawrence Selden's flat. Having decided to use Bertha Dorset's love letters to Selden as ammunition to regain her own social standing, Lily finds herself passing by Selden's building and is drawn to his “quiet room.”¹ The flat seems to Lily a kind of domestic retreat; during an earlier visit it had struck her as “part of the outer...