A ROUGH GUIDE 15the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat one’s self in one of the
damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it was not painted against the wall’. It was an ersatz
landscape, indicating an ersatz society – both, we are to assume, characteristic of late
nineteenth-century New York, and both projected onto and seen from within the tragic life of
Lily Bart.
This intricate connection between landscape and society was not simply a literary
convention. Edith Wharton, like many other people at the turn of the century, believed in
a form of domestic environmentalism. In other words, she believed in an active
relationship between the built environment and society – that the architecture and interior
design of buildings reflect and actively shape people’s character and behaviour. In The House
of Mirth, the drawing room is singled out as a reflection of the woman of the house. Lily
describes her aunt, with whom she is living, as a woman whose ‘imagination is shrouded, like
the drawing room furniture’. She daydreams about redecorating the room: ‘If only I could do
over my aunt’s drawing room, I know I should be a better person.’ Lily never fulfils this
dream, and in fact finds herself in less and less commodious surroundings throughout the
novel, reduced to working in a millinery shop and living in an unpleasant boarding house.
Lily’s identity and one source of power was her appearance; ‘framed’ within a landscape of the
drab browns of factories,she is doomed.
Although gender relationships today may allow for more independent subjectivities on the
part of women, we still do live in a world where women’s identities are ‘read’ from their
bodily appearances, and from the appearances of the worlds that surround them. And while
we may not theorize relationships between built environments and society in such forceful
and uncontested terms as the late nineteenth century, we do try to ‘read’ powerful societal
relationships such as gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality from the visual world. Yet
Wharton’s depiction of Lily Bart’s plight alerts us to the incredible vulnerability of an
account based solely on the visual. How does one accurately, authentically, interpret the
visual? What really is the relationship between the material/visual world and the discursive;
between surface and depth; between outer appearance and inner meaning? I plan to use
Wharton’s depiction of Lily Bart as a woman caught between her inner self and outer
appearance to highlight the anxieties caused by the new cultural geographies of late nineteenth-
century New York, and conversely, to suggest that an examination of those geographies can
help us make sense of gendered identities. In other words, by providing one ‘story’ of the
often anxious relationship between landscape, gender and identity, I hope to suggest the use-
fulness of exploring geographies of cultural anxiety. The tension between surface and depth,
appearance and meaning, came into full light within the relatively new and flourishing con-
sumer culture of late nineteenth-century New York, and those tensions were played out upon
and were displaced onto the women of the city.
Late nineteenth-century New York City was indeed a place characterized by superficial-
ity. It was not quite a ‘shock’ city in the sense of industrial Manchester, whose factories,
pollution and poverty elicited extreme reactions, but the landscape and society of New York
City nonetheless struck commentators as something unusual and new, akin to what archi-
tectural historian Reynar Banham (1971) wrote of Los Angeles in the 1960s – it was instant
architecture in an instant landscape. Growing northward at a rate of approximately two city
blocks a year in the first half of the nineteenth century, the city seemed forever in move-
ment. Slowed only by episodic economic downturns, New York’s ebullient real estate and3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 15