The House of Mirth 1131deeper individuality is often at odds with societal
constraints. Her status as an unwed young woman
without sufficient income inhibits her ability to fol-
low her individual desire, as “whichever way [Lily]
looked she saw only a future of servitude to the
whims of others, never the possibility of asserting
her own eager individuality.” Part of the novel’s
complexity is that, though alluded to by the other
characters and the narrator, it is difficult to define
what Lily’s individuality consists of because it is
contingent on and limited by society.
Lily would be happy to refashion herself to
create and expose her individuality, but she can-
not think beyond the society in which she exists:
“There were moments when she longed blindly
for anything different, anything strange, remote
and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagina-
tion did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a
new setting.” Her individuality represents a kind of
deeper subjectivity to which she cannot gain access
because of the constraining superficiality that sur-
rounds her. Furthermore, Lily’s sense of self, her
individuality, is defined by the perceptions of others:
“Mrs. Bry’s admiration was a mirror in which Lily’s
self-complacency recovered its lost outline.” Later
in the novel, when conversing with Gerty, Selden
recognizes the interdependence of the individual
and society remarking that Lily “has it in her to
become whatever she is believed to be—you’ll help
her by believing the best of her.” Throughout the
novel, there is a sense that Lily possesses a unique
individuality, but it is always predicated on her rela-
tion to society and is never completely established
or exposed.
The moment in which Lily seems to present her
individuality occurs in the most famous scene in the
novel—her appearance in the tableaux vivant at a
gathering at the Brys’ home. Before Lily’s appear-
ance, the narrator explains that the other women are
successful in maintaining the illusion of the scenes
in which they figure because the “personalities of the
actors had been subdued.” By contrast, Lily’s portrait
is “simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss
Bart. Here there could be no mistaking the pre-
dominance of personality.” The complexity of this
scene is due in part to the fact that Selden and other
onlookers claim to see the “real Lily Bart” when she
is acting as a two-dimensional object. The narrator
observes that Lilyhad shown her artistic intelligence in select-
ing a type so like her own that she could
embody the person represented without ceas-
ing to be herself. It was as though she had
stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s
canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead
beauty by the beams of her living grace. . . .
The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its sug-
gestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of
poetry in her beauty, that Selden always felt
in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he
was not with her.The descriptions of the tableau, itself an artistic
rendering of a piece of art, are full of the language
of aestheticism, and perhaps superficiality. Insofar
as society represents the superficial realm that Lily
cannot break out of, there is a certain irony in the
fact that the “real Lily” is most visible when she is a
still object of beauty. That her real self is most visible
in the tableau scene suggests that her real self, her
individuality, is only a mirror of the superficial values
of the society in which she resides.
The suggestion that Lily’s very individuality is
what prevents her from attaining the social wealth
that would allow her to actually express that individ-
uality is a guiding paradox of the novel. Lily moves
between being helpless as an individual whose
desires are constructed solely by her society and
being so individualistic that she thwarts her chances
of being a part of society. Mrs. Fisher observes this
phenomenon: “ ‘Sometimes,’ she added, ‘I think it’s
just flightiness—and sometimes I think it’s because
at heart she despises the things she’s trying for. And
it’s the difficulty of deciding that makes her such an
interesting study.’ ” Lily, too, is aware of the paradox
of her desire to be part of moneyed society and her
desire to break from that society: “[Living on the
rich] doesn’t sound very amusing, does it? And it
isn’t—I’m sick to death of it! And yet the thought of
giving it all up nearly kills me—it’s what keeps me
awake at night.” Lily is an active agent who, because
of her dislike of the very thing she strives for, pushes
herself to her demise, as well as a passive victim