Character Analysis Of Edith Wharton's House Of Mirth

Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality—the unanimous "Oh!" of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of Reynolds 's "Mrs. Lloyd" but to the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart. 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 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 impulse to show herself in a splendid setting—she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo 's Cleopatra—had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a picture

The reader is familiar with Lily Bart’s fate as an expensive, quickly ageing woman subject to the marriage market and without any sense of security about her future. The scene occurs midway through the novel and it expresses in a succinct paragraph a number of thematic elements of the novel; namely, Lily’s marketing of herself within upper class New York Gilded Age society, Lily ambiguous relationship to this market and her insistence on her own independence, and the anxiety of the American self-definition in light of the influence of European

This anxiety is at the heart of Lily’s conflict with her society. The choice of the |Mrs. Lloyd” painting also hearkens to this theme. Reynolds made the choice to depict his subject wrapped in the cloths of antiquity. In his epoch, at the late 18th century, the neoclassical genre was in its heyday and just as the New Yorkers of the Gilded Age looked to Europe for cultural esteem, so too were the neoclassicist looking backwards, but to ancient Rome and Greece. The anxiety of influence in the scene from the novel is thus tripled upon itself so that the reader experiences it as the influence of Rome, on Europe, on New York, and finally on Lily. As the tip of this inverted pyramid, Lily must perform a fine balancing act and be representative of the natural beauty of classical forms, the elegance and refinement of aristocratic Europe, and the culmination of both in the great American experiment. She literally represents herself as all of these facets in the tableaux vivants, and as such achieves a sense of “eternal harmony” that Selden notes in her in that