Feminist
politics at the turn of the twentieth century took many forms,
including civil disobedience that was revisited in the 1960s
by the civil rights movement. One of the most powerful forms
of feminist protest came from the pen of Edith Wharton, whose
novels dramatized the shallowness of money-driven American
society in the Gilded Age, which she well knew as the spouse
of a banker, whom she later divorced; rather than participating
in the feminist movement, however, she spent much of the later
years of her life in Europe. The House of Mirth,
directed by Terence Davies, brings to the screen a semiautobiographical
novel (published in 1905), whose title appears to convey a
happy promise found in Jeremiah 33:10. The film, the third
effort to put the story on the screen (following up the 1918
silent and 1981 television versions), focuses on attractive
but orphaned scion Lily Bart (played by Gillian Anderson),
who was much admired in New York high society in 1905, when
the story begins. In 1907, when the film version ends, Lily
is ruined and tragically takes her own life. How she went
downhill so quickly was thus a paradigm for the future of
American women if they failed to attain the basic rights of
political and legal equality. As the plot unfolds, we see
that Lily was duped into losing some $9,000 in gambling debts.
The only reason she played cards was to make herself available
as an attractive wife to someone, but to pay off her debts
Gus Trenor (played by Dan Aykroyd), a married man, wanted
her for a mistress, an offer contrary that Lily found disgraceful.
When an offer of marriage without love came from rich Sim
Rosedale (played by Anthony LaPaglia), Lily again declined,
but of course she was doubtless rejecting him because he was
Jewish. She was then used by adulterous Bertha Dorset (played
by Laura Linney) to regain the attention of her husband George
(played by Terry Kinney), but placed in a position where she
was accused of extramarital sex with George because the rules
of high society would permit no other inference. As the tagline
of the film says, "When a woman has the beauty men admire
and women envy . . . it is wise to tread carefully." Having
held out to find a man who would love her for herself, and
vice versa, the scandal precluded any possibility of marriage,
and Rosedale could not accept Lily’s later effort to beg him
to marry her. In addition, Grace (played by Johdi May), caregiver
to Lily’s rich aunt, Mrs. Peniston (played by Eleanor Bron),
plotted against her. When the aunt died, Lily received only
enough to pay off the debts; Grace, who received the bulk
of a large fortune, then kicked Lily out of her ancestral
home. Hired as a personal assistant to a social climbing woman,
Mrs. Hatch (Lorelei King), Lily was fired when Mrs. Hatch
was accepted in high society and thus found an association
with Lily to be an embarrassment. Finally, taken on as an
apprentice in a millinery factory, Lily was discharged because
her work was unsatisfactory. Destitute, she could have used
purloined love letters to blackmail herself back to financial
solvency, or so he was advised by Rosedale. Instead, Lily
took poison, as there was no other honorable option for an
unemployed women who was too proud to accept financial assistance
at her most desperate moment from a longtime friend, bachelor
playboy Lawrence Selden (played by Eric Stolz), whom she believed
in 1905 was too middle class for her ambitions yet would have
married in 1907 if he had the decency to ask her. But Selden
is the only one in the film who expresses genuine emotion,
confessing through tears his own hypocrisy alongside Lily’s
dead body. In our own day, although women have achieved considerable
freedom, the conservative effort to force victims of incest
and rape to bear unwanted children by overturning Roe v Wade
continues as a reminder that the movement for female emancipation
so eloquently placed on the agenda by The House of Mirth
is still unfinished. MH
I
want to comment on this film
