Summary

In “Lily Bart’s Baby” (45), Cusk applies the concept of motherhood to the author Edith Wharton and her 1905 novel The House of Mirth. According to Cusk, Wharton uses her main character, Lily Bart, to explore the question of what a woman is if not “a wife, a mother, a daughter” (45). The main character, Lily Bart, is a poor orphan who cultivates a charm that allows her to live on the resources of others but fails to secure material benefits for herself through marriage. As she is dying from an overdose of laudanum, she hallucinates that there is a child by her side (a baby belonging to a servant-girl she held earlier that night). Cusk suggests that through the possession of a living thing, Lily finds a sense of closeness and commitment that she...