A ROUGH GUIDE 17to destroy you, the only recourse is to retreat hurriedly to the space you can control – that of
the home.
Most agoraphobics are women: they constitute about 89 per cent of the sufferers
(Davidson, 2000). Why? Davidson suggests that it is because of women’s socialized tenden-
cies to be ever aware of themselves as potential objects of visual consumption. In this way,
women are always sensitive to how they and their surroundings appear before others; sensi-
tive, therefore, always to the visual. Some women may use this sensitivity to how they are
being seen by others for their own empowerment. In the first half of The House of Mirth, Lily
Bart is presented in this light. In one of the most compelling scenes in the book, Lily partici-
pates in a tableau vivant – a pageant of sorts where women socialites dress up and perform
as works of art. Appearing as Reynolds’Mrs Lloyd, she is a huge success since her choice
allows her to present her beauty at its best, and because she appears almost without artifice.
In fact, as Mr Selden and her friend Gerty Farish remark, she is more herself in this perfor-
mance than otherwise: ‘She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her
own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself ... It
makes her look like the real Lily’ (1986: 129–30). When Lily can control her setting,
as she is able to do in the hyper-performance of the tableau vivant, she can be herself; in the
everyday world of the drawing rooms of the nouveaux riches, a world she does not control,
she does not know who she is. But because, as Selden reflects, ‘this was the world she lived
in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured!’ (1986: 130), Lily has
no recourse. If not quite an agoraphobic at the end of the novel, Lily nonetheless suffers
greatly from a society that judges only by what it sees. Wharton passes her own judge-
ment on that society – a time and a place where women bear the social andpsychic costs of
artifice.
Yet most nineteenth-century commentators on the New York scene bore other judgements.
They condemned not society at large, but the women themselves. Indeed, many depicted the
fashionable woman of the city as the embodiment of urban immorality. A common motif of
late nineteenth-century urban writings was an exposé of the city’s fashionable women – a style
of writing part gossip column, part tabloid. In one of the most virulent of these chronicles,The
Women of New York, or The Underworld of the Great City,published in 1869, the author sets
out, in over 600 pages, to ‘inform the public and reform society’ (emphasis in original). The
goal of the book is stated clearly in the preface: ‘the women of the Metropolis are boldly and
truthfully unveiled, and every phase of society is thoroughly ventilated. Where sin and
immorality have tainted women in high life, and where fashionable wives and daughters have
yielded to the enticer’s arts, it tears the fictitious robes from their forms and reveals their habits
of life, their follies and frailties.’ Notice the choice of words used here: unveiled, ventilated,
tainted, fictitious, reveals – all words that point to the deceptiveness of the world of fashion-
able women, behind which is hidden a more real, moral and truthful world. Through hundreds
of ‘real-life’ examples, the book provides an exegesis of the city’s woes, uncovering its evils
in the bodies and hearts of its fashionable women.
But why was the focus on women? As Karen Halttunen reminds us, late nineteenth-century
anxieties about ‘reading’ character from outer appearance were expressed through the figure of
the confidence man as well as the painted woman. These men were gamblers, petty thieves,
dandies who, through tokens of professed sincerity, won the confidence, and then took advan-
tage of naives in the city. But the focus of moral outrage was on the fashionable woman. It is not3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 17