16 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHYbuilding industries took full advantage of the wealth flowing into and out of Wall Street,
and the vanities of aspiring socialites and other members of the nouveaux riches, to con-
struct appropriate settings to display that wealth (and along the way, of course, to create
more venues for wealth creation). Standing out from the rows of speculative brownstones
and small shops and factories were homes built to resemble European castles, department
stores disguised as Venetian palazzos, and office buildings draped in Renaissance cloaks.
By the 1860s, whole sections of the urban landscape were dedicated to consumer-related
and leisure activities – to shopping, eating and drinking, strolling, carriage riding. Hotels,
bars, restaurants and theatres began to line the streets around Union Square, elaborate
department stores and boutiques clustered on Sixth Avenue, men’s clubs dotted Fifth
Avenue reaching up to the Park, where lovers strolled, men raced their carriages, and
women and children socialized. This was a landscape that spoke of fast living and fast
money; a place inhabited by, in Karen Haltunnen’s (1982) words, confidence men and
painted women; a landscape, in other words, of insincerity. Contemporary commentators
questioned who was really behind the yards of silk and lace, beyond the façade of
Corinthian columns and gilded bas-relief. What source of wealth was able to fund those
mansions and carriages and clubs?
Such a decidedly ‘phoney’ landscape and society was subject to various forms of criticism.
The House of Mirthcan be read in this light: Wharton offers a harsh condemnation of a
society governed by appearance. It is this phoney landscape and society that eventually
destroys Lily Bart. Throughout much of The House of Mirth, Lily Bart’s identity seems to be
forever changing, completely reliant on her surroundings. Yet at the end of the book she real-
izes that she has an inner, ‘real’ self, removed from those contingencies – an identity that she
cannot deny. She recognizes the importance of a unitary self, and sets it apart from most
people’s subjectivity that she knows, including her parents: ‘Her parents too had been root-
less, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to
shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth
being dearer to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing tra-
ditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and
tenderness for others’ (1986: 307). Part of Lily’s tragedy is that she realizes her inner, ‘true’
self too late to act upon its directives.
Wharton seems to be issuing a warning about the importance of maintaining an identity
rooted to place and a core set of values – an identity that is not dependent on context and that
does not change with the whims of fashion. She is, of course, giving voice to a long-held view
of subjectivity – one that scholars have argued is rooted in early modernism. Lily’s demise is
predicated upon an identity completely tethered to the material world, completely dependent
on visual context, and therefore ever changeable. According to Wharton, this is an unsus-
tainable form of subjectivity, a condition similar to what contemporary scholars argue is at
the root of agoraphobia. According to Joyce Davidson (2000), agoraphobics experience an
acute anxiety over the slippery nature of the self and how it is constituted in relationship to
that which is outside the self. Agoraphobics experience a lack of separation between them-
selves and the places they inhabit, and since they cannot control that which is outside them,
they feel out of control of themselves as well. As Davidson explains: ‘agoraphobic anxiety
seemingly threatens the dissolution of the self ... when it surfaces it erodes the boundary
between “inside” and “outside” ’ (2000: 218). With the world caving in on you, threatening3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 16