Groping for God: Elusive Spirituality in House of Mirth and Summer
American author Edith Wharton might have written House of Mirth (1905) and Summer (1917) twelve years apart, but both novels are deeply preoccupied with God—or, perhaps more accurately, with the lack of thereof. Lily and Charity, two young, vulnerable women, are at pivotal moments in their lives. And as they embark upon their coming-of-age journeys, each young woman strives to understand her own moral and spiritual worth in the eyes of an absolute higher power. But in their respective social worlds—elite New York and rural New England—the powers that be are anything but absolute. As the ethics and religious institutions and the other structures which govern the material world prove to be ridden with injustice and hypocrisy, it becomes evident that Lily and Charity can only find God within themselves. However, to reach a place of inner spiritual understanding, it turns out, is to reject the godless material world, therefore putting everything at risk. In the end, God exists only in the ashes of Lily and Charity’s lives.
The distinct lack of spiritual fulfillment that Lily and Charity experience in these novels is heightened—perhaps even defined—by the tensions between their inner spiritual experiences and their external relationships with social structures and institutions. This is not necessarily a unique or surprising tension to encounter in Wharton’s fiction; as Carol Singley explains in her book Matters of Mind and Spirit, “although Edith Wharton thought of herself as a novelist of manners” (1)—a novelist who writes about the mechanics of social life and society at large—the categorization diminishes “her deeper levels of insight into human nature” (2). That is not to say that novels like House of Mirth and Summer are not concerned with the social world, but to focus only that would be to neglect the strong interiority that each novel contains. Wharton explores morality in her fiction from two different perspectives—“not only fiction’s ‘ethical sense,’ which refers to society’s standards, but a deeper ‘relation with the eternal laws,’ from which the ethics are derived” (Singley 6). Wharton’s division of morality into the external and the internal is reminiscent of American philosopher William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in which James observes “one great partition which divides the religious field. On one side of it lies institutional, the other personal religion…the [latter] relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker” (26). Lily and Charity long for the latter, but because they are young and without guidance, they struggle to find the difference. In their search for their own “relation with the eternal laws,” Lily and Charity both turn to external manifestations of religion in their lives—organized or “institutional” religion, as James put it.
When it comes to organized religion, Lily and Charity are worlds apart; although both are Episcopalians, Lily comes from a set of elite, privileged Episcopalians, whereas Charity’s rural New England parish struggles to stand its ground against the rising tide of newer denominations. A “little nucleus of ‘church people’ that had survived in the sectarian wilderness” (67), North Dormer does not even have its own clergyman, borrowing Mr. Miles from Hepburn every other Sunday. Meanwhile, some residents of North Dormer forgo the Episcopal Church in favor of the “ginger-bread-coloured Baptist chapel at the other end of the village,” (67) and on the outskirts of town, “Gospel tents” are set up by wandering evangelicals (118). None of the characters in the story belongs to these rival sects, but their presence alone is enough to make the spiritual inclinations of the central characters more uncertain. As Meredith Goldsmith put it, there is a “tension between the bourgeois Episcopalianism of North Dormer, the consumerist Protestantism of Nettleton, and the mixed possibility of evangelicalism or heathenism in the rural areas” (11). Although the Episcopal community is determined not to let other spiritual communities “undermine” (67) them, the possibility that they might be undermined is always around the corner. Charity especially is confronted by this possibility at key moments, such as her chance meeting with the wandering evangelist or her introduction to the moneyed culture of Nettleton with Harney.
On the other hand, due to a lack of competition from other Christian denominations, the face of the Episcopal Church in House of Mirth is hardly distinguishable from the face of religion at large. Indeed, the denomination of the church that the Wetheralls and Percy Gryce and other members of Lily’s set attend is never named or specified. No other denominations come into play throughout the story, hence specification is unnecessary. We can only assume that the wealthy New York socialites belong to the same kind of “benign” Episcopal community that Edith Wharton, herself a member of New York high society, belonged to (Singley 8). This religious setting, according to Carol J. Singley, is a flexible one that complements the materialistic and social goals of New York “aristocracy”: “aristocrats felt that material and social well-being also guaranteed them God’s grace (8). It even allowed them to accept a Darwinian outlook on life, one that pervades Wharton’s narration of House of Mirth, referring, for example, to Percy Gryce as one of the “lower organisms” (24), and to Lily as “highly specialized” compared to the dinginess, crudeness of this average section of woman” (7). The narrator’s voice bleeds easily into free indirect speech, representing the thoughts of characters such as Selden or even Lily herself.
The New York Episcopalians’ ready acceptance of Darwinism and other popular ideas of the time demonstrate the extent to which religion is inseparable from all of other external conventions of social life, a union of morality and society that is present in both novels. The characters use their religious institutions to measure social worth in a way that seems more reflective of class and racial systems than of any personal relationship with God. In North Dormer, Charity’s Episcopal Church is attended by “all the best people in North Dormer,” (67) another instance of free indirect discourse. The statement, placed in parentheses, has a viciously sarcastic edge to it; by neglecting to qualify the word “best,” she makes it clear that “best” is not necessarily a measure of true spiritual or moral standing. Instead, “best” could easily signify social or economic superiority, especially in Charity’s eyes. To Charity, North Dormer’s Episcopal parish is a powerful defense against social alienation; because the Episcopal Church signifies social superiority, her attendance there can help her overcome the sense of social inferiority that plagues her constantly. Similarly, Lily relies on her own Episcopal community as a means of social climbing. Hoping to impress the eligible bachelor Percy Gryce, she heads to church with the Wetheralls, even though she and the rest of her social circle are usually lackluster in their attendance. In her mission to marry a wealthy man, Lily is sure to drop rather dishonest hints that “this neglect of religious observances was repugnant to her early traditions” (56). Lily’s actions seem to suggest that she is simply not interested in religion, but this is not the case. Even the Wetheralls, who attend church consistently, are described as “human automata” who only go to church because their “circle was so large that God was included in their visiting-list” (57). The church itself is yet another aspect of Lily and the Wetheralls’ shallow social life, and it has very little hold over one’s internal morality. It not only holds very little intrinsic moral or spiritual value, but it also actively dehumanizes its machine-like parishioners.
However, this relationship between the social world and organized religion is not necessarily the thing that makes organized religion so ineffective in aiding Lily and Charity’s spiritual journeys. Rather, it is the fact that organized religion, in spite of its social significance, actually holds much less social power than its followers might want to admit. As discussed earlier, North Dormer’s Episcopal community is constantly beset from all sides by rival denominations; even as the Episcopalians bask in their own self-importance, the Presbyterian Church and the Gospel tents loom in the background. And even though the Episcopal Church in Lily’s world lacks this kind of interdenominational competition, a threat rises in the form of a wealthy Jewish man, Rosedale. Unlike Lily, Rosedale cannot use church attendance as a means of social climbing. But over the course of the novel, Rosedale’s supposed ethical and cultural failings are ignored more and more simply because his wealth is becoming so incredibly vast. Of course, Rosedale is a symbol of far more than just religious difference—he also stands in for the threat of new money, the viciously despised racial Other, and the rapidly changing twentieth century economy. Irene C. Goldman theorizes, “Wharton uses Rosedale’s Jewishness to illuminate economic issues and social hypocrisies in the society that would otherwise remain underground” (26). To take Goldman’s ideas a step further, one of the social hypocrisies that Wharton unburies is the ineffectiveness of Christianity in defining who gets or doesn’t get a place in New York high society, despite the predominantly Christian identity of that society.
Although Wharton’s understanding of Rosedale and his social position could easily be informed by her own bias and is certainly not reflective of the real world at the time, Rosedale’s social success suggests that the social world in House of Mirth is informed more by money than by religion. The social world behaves as if it is self-sufficient, but the underlying force keeping it afloat is capitalistic wealth. Both Lily and Charity are denied the comforts of social life in part because they do not have the means to afford what their peers and socially superiors can afford, and organized religion does nothing to counteract that imbalance of resources and power. Meanwhile, Rosedale, who inspires so much moral discomfort in Lily, uses his money to overcome the worst of prejudice.
While Wharton does not necessarily argue that the social world is unimportant or entirely inconsequential to one’s own sense of personal morality, the instability of religious authority even within the social world makes it an ineffective tool in providing spirituality guidance for Lily and Charity. Once again, Wharton’s approach echoes William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. In his discussion of religion, James chooses to “ignore the institutional branch entirely…and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple” (26) because he believes “personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiastism” (27). Wharton avoids making such a black-and-white choice. However, her depiction of the failures of religious authority suggests that she, like James, puts more spiritual confidence in personal religion than in the institution.
However, unlike James, Lily and Charity do not have the liberty to simply cast out organized religion in favor of their personal moral and spiritual pursuits without some backlash. Although religious authority is faulty in both cases, it still holds enough social power to actually be used against them. On the surface, both Lily and Charity are respected members of their religious communities. But Lily and Charity fail to understand that the spiritual meaning that they crave is entirely separate from the religious institution and the social world that it is intertwined with. As a result, their efforts to explore their own spirituality cause them to fail in the eyes of religious authority. Religiously charged language is employed by others—particularly Mr. Royall and Lawrence Selden, who are the most emotionally impactful men in Charity and Lily’s lives respectively—to exclude them from religious understanding.
In Charity’s case, Royall uses religious language to harshly strip her of any spiritual potential. Royall makes Charity’s constant feelings of anguish and inferiority over her Mountain origins even worse by describing her relatives as not even “half human” (53). Much to Charity’s shame, in a conversation with Harney he calls the Mountain people “that scum up there” (51). More significantly, he uses the word “heathen” to describe the Mountain twice, once in reference to their lack of religious observance (51), and once in reference to Lily’s own mother, who actually left Nettleton to live with Charity’s father (153). Although Royall does throughout seem to regard Charity as more of a human than her mountain brethren, he tells Harney that Charity was brought to North Dormer to “be reared like a Christian.” The word “like” is one of comparison, and a reminder that no matter how pure her upbringing is, it will never make up for her birth; she can never really be a Christian, only like one. Pitifully, Charity’s own name is a constant reminder of her inadequacy. She is deeply aware of it the fact that she was named Charity to “commemorate Mr. Royall’s disinterestedness in ‘bringing her down,’ and to keep alive in her a sense of dependence” (16). The name has taken all spiritual autonomy away from Charity; she must always remember that she was born from “heathens,” and therefore rendered incapable of making a virtuous way for herself without the stifling approval of her adopter. As Laura E. Rutland puts it, Charity is in a “kind of perpetual bondage to him.” And yet, his own sexual interest in Charity makes him not only the worst bearer of religious judgment, but an actual danger to her safety. Any kind of moral judgment from him is twisted by hypocrisy, and “the horror is that he does so with the full complicity of the community, who can excuse anything he does on the grounds that he saved her from the Mountain” (438).
Although Selden takes a completely different approach from Royall, he, too, is not lacking in hypocrisy. Rather than portraying her as an inherently unvirtuous person, as Royall does to Charity, Selden turns Lily into a spiritual object. Upon viewing her portrait, a literal objectification of her beauty, he sees in Lily’s beauty an “eternal harmony.” The image of her, onto which he can project his spiritual beliefs, is more spiritually capable than the real Lily and what Selden patronizingly calls the “trivialities of her little world” (144). Later, Selden tries to separate the Lily he thinks he knows from the rumors he hears about her by turning her into an idol: “‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’—even the hidden god in their neighbor’s breast!” (164) However, the deified Lily that Selden imagines is no more real than the immoral, scandalous Lily that society’s rumor mill tries to portray. She is nothing more than his own “self-absorption,” and his desire for “the companionship of one whose point of view should justify his own” (164). To Selden, Lily is like the lilies-of-the-valley in Matthew 6:28-29, which “neither toil nor spin,” but exist passively in the spiritual glory of beauty.
But the real, human Lily does toil, and, ironically, Selden’s lofty vision of her as a spiritual object does nothing to aid her in her quest for spiritual understanding. Instead, it denies her the freedom to look for spirituality on her own, without the burden of his idealistic male gaze. When Lily asks him if she can gain entry to his own spiritual community, he denies her. Selden’s “republic of the spirit,” a place that measures “success” to be a complete freedom from material things, is very reminiscent of Christ’s kingdom of heaven, something Selden confirms when he tells Lily, “It’s as hard for rich people to get into as the kingdom of heaven” (75). Because Lily hopes to marry for money, Selden tells her bluntly that he will not let her into the republic.
The irony of Lily and Selden’s conversation about the Republic of the Spirit is that it takes place during the church service that Lily would have attended had she not been lured away by a desire to spend the afternoon with Selden. Lily misses the opportunity she had to win the wealthy Mr. Gryce through a false show of religious devotion because she sees in Selden a new spiritual opportunity, a path to finding God that circumvents her fragile, godless religious community. She realizes in this moment that her path toward spiritual revelation is her own, separate from the path of the Church and the society that it accompanies. As she explains to Selden late in the novel, the Republic of the Spirit has informed Lily’s search for spiritual meaning: “I have never forgotten the things you said to me, and that sometimes—sometimes when I seemed farthest from remembering them—they have helped me, and kept me from mistakes; kept me from really becoming what many people have thought me” (325). However, Selden, the founder of the Republic, does nothing to help Lily embark on her quest. At every available opportunity, he takes society’s side over hers, allowing vicious rumors to taint his opinion of her and his willingness to help her. He cannot bring himself to think of her as a person who, like him, might try to cultivate a personal relationship with the spiritual world. Still, Selden’s ideas create the spark that inspires Lily to rebel against the social world that she’s always taken for granted.
In Summer, Charity similarly uses rebellion to look for spiritual meaning. However, Charity is not tempted to rebel as early in the story as Lily. At first, she is unable to distinguish her longing for spiritual recognition from her her longing to be accepted or even superior to her peers in the religious community that she so acutely feels she does not belong to. She dreams of marrying Harney in a church, “walking down an aisle” (28) with him where her union with him can be witnessed both by her community and also by God. However, although Charity spends much of the novel hoping for a church wedding, she is accused of sin before she ever breaks of the rules of religiously sanctioned love. After she is seen lingering on Harney’s doorstep, Royall, assuming the worst, tells her, “I’ve watched this thing coming, and I’ve tried to stop it. As God sees me, I have…” (83) Royall’s use of the phrase “as God sees me” is offhand, but it has some intriguing implications; it is a suggestion that God’s presence can be found in the violation of religious law. Later, in Chapter 11, Charity encounters a Gospel tent, from which an evangelist emerges, asking her to “lay your guilt before Him.” Charity is indignant: “‘I on’y wish’t I had any to lay!’ she retorted, with one of her fierce flashes of self-derision.” (118) And yet, at the end of that same chapter, Charity does the very thing that is supposed to make her guilty in the eyes of God—she has sex with Harney for the first time. Like Lily’s choice to abandon church and thus abandon her pursuit of Percy Gryce, Charity’s choice make evident that personal religion and institutional religion are morally and socially at odds with another. According to the social world, Charity and Lily are extraordinarily guilty. But neither seems entirely convinced that God is of the same opinion. However, Charity takes guilt a step further than Lily; her actions are far more drastic. In the context of the false accusations that have previously been leveled against her, Charity’s choice is not only an act of rebellion, but an attempt to draw the attention of the God who has supposedly forbade such choices. Instead of waiting to find out if everything the people around her have told her about God is true, Charity takes charge of her relationship with God, challenging Him to “see” what she’s done and judge her worth.
This new sexual element in Charity’s relationship with Harney makes her feel a godlike power. She takes pleasure that “she, Charity Royall, was the only being on earth who really knew him” (129). Physical pleasure is the only window that Charity can find into the spiritual world; as Rutland puts it, “Charity has from the beginning been deprived of at least two means of spiritual experience—religion and the world of art and culture. What remains to Charity is her body, her capacity for rich sensory experience” (434). And Charity takes advantage of this capacity as much as she can until her sexual partner is taken away from her. That being said, just because she is no longer experiencing bodily pleasure does not mean that her capacity for spiritual revelation is gone; her understanding of God through the body is still yet to come. In the meantime, the revelation of Harney’s engagement to Annabel Balch gives Charity a consciousness of a higher power which she has never experienced before. In her misery, she realizes that “the power that had swept them together had been as far beyond resistance as a great gale loosening the leaves of the forest” (170). Like the wind, this power is invisible, and its absolute nature is indiscernible, but its presence is known. In a way, it is what Charity has been looking for all along, but it comes at a cost. Her joy must be followed by heartbreak in order for her to fully realize the spiritual significance her love affair.
Lily, too, feels powerless, buffeted about by uncontrollable external forces. Strangely, however, Lily calls the power that Charity likened to the wind “the great machine I called life” (327), and despairs that the system that has dropped her like a useless cog or screw. It is not clear whether what the powerlessness Lily feels is in God’s hands or in the hands of a manmade human society—or some combination of both. Of course, Darwinian language already has its place in the religious culture of New York Episcopalians, but the narrator complicates it by subtly implying the presence of a God who lingers behind it all, describing Lily as “fashioned to adorn and delight” and “an organism as helpless as the sea-anemone torn from its rock” (319). The jumble of forces at work here is confusing, but a divine force is nonetheless suggested in Wharton’s passive voice. “She had been fashioned”—but by whom? Wharton hints that something or someone must have created her, without specifying who that might have been.
Reminiscent of Royall’s passing phrase (“as God sees me”), Lily and Charity both are “seen” by God; even through such oblique terms, they realize in the wake of their misfortune that they are both powerless creations of an all-powerful higher. However, what Lily and Charity are missing is the ability to “see God”—to feel, define, and understand the presence of this mysterious divine power. Both try to take actions that would aid them in their search for spiritual power. Not only does Lily makes a set of decisions that lead to her societal ruin, but she also rejects Rosedale’s offers to restore her reputation because they go against her personal morals (although we should take care to note that those morals are certainly informed by racism, classism, and anti-Semitism). Meanwhile, Charity does exactly what Royall fears as a means of getting closer to the God who supposedly outlawed such behavior. Neither of these attempts at spiritual understanding yields direct results; all that each young woman receives directly is social disaster. If anything, the mistakes each young woman makes in her pursuit of spiritual meaning are destructive. Lily loses any chance of making up for all of the material wealth that her family lost, and Charity finds herself pregnant, alone, and unable to prove her worth to her peers.
Perhaps, then, we might be tempted to conclude it is futile to try to search for God because society as made it impossible to do so without ensuing disaster. And indeed, neither Lily nor Charity ends up having any singular moment of divine revelation, nor does either of them come to any definitive philosophical conclusions on the meaning of life. However, God’s presence is made known subtly through disaster. It is in their worst, most vulnerable moments that both Lily and Charity manage to catch small glimpses into the spiritual world. The most striking and perhaps the most distinctly revelatory of these moments is Charity’s, when she goes to the Mountain and witnesses the death of her long-lost mother. On the journey, Charity remembers the evangelist she encountered on the road earlier and feels “no sense of guilt” (176), having lost all fear of a vengeful God in her rebellion. What frightens her more is death, particularly the way it has utterly destroyed her mother’s body and, consequentially, her humanity, leaving her “like a dead dog in a ditch” (186). The comparison echoes something Royall said earlier in the novel about Charity: “I’d better have left her in the kennel where she came from” (154). Charity knows that whatever has dehumanized her mother—poverty, inequality, death—could dehumanize her, too.
Charity is especially struck by a line in Mr. Miles’s funeral service: “Though after worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God” (186). Mr. Miles’s prayers, which he continues to deliver even while Charity’s Mountain relations argue about the stove they bought in Creston, ironically address the transience of life and the meaninglessness of material possessions in the face of the death. His prayers echo Ecclesiastes, the book of the Old Testament which addresses the inevitability of death and describes much of the human a “vanity of vanities” (1:2). Charity compares her dead mother to a dog, and, similarly, Ecclesiastes remarks on the depersonalizing and dehumanizing quality of death: “The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other…all go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again” (3:19-20). However, God is not absent, even in these dire circumstances. Rather, Ecclesiastes argues that to find God is to recognize and acknowledge death: “Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth” (7:3-4). This passage is, of course, the inspiration of the title of House of Mirth.
The funeral on the Mountain is Charity’s induction into “the house of mourning.” Lily’s induction, however, is of a different nature, the obvious fact being that she does not merely witness death but experiences it. As Lily drifts into sleepily into the drug overdose that will end her life, she envisions herself lying in bed with a baby, inspired by the little child of Nettie Struther. The meeting with Nettie Struther and her baby is a pleasant surprise to Lily; their humble happiness, a direct result of Lily’s own doing, to her, seems to be “the central truth of existence” (339). In the last moments of her own living existence, Lily takes comfort in the imagined version of Nettie’s baby. Although, at one point, “a dark flash of loneliness and terror tore its way” (342) and makes Lily think the baby is gone, she realizes with relief that the phantom child is still there, and she dies in peace. The presence of a baby in death is highly ironic, but it’s an irony that can be found in Charity’s story as well as Lily’s; when Charity witnesses the death of her mother, she is already carrying her unborn child. In fact, the child is what inspires Charity to go up to the Mountain to find her mother in the first place, and it is after seeing the poverty of the mountain that Charity finally marries Royall. Mr. Miles reads in the funeral service, “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery” (189), and Charity is thereafter inspired to take the one path that enable her to raise her child in relative prosperity, away from the squalor of the Mountain.
By the end of their spiritual quests, Lily and Charity have both come to a visceral understanding of the misery of the vulnerable mortal body and its inevitable spiral into death. But they also have witnessed the creation of new life, and the continuation of the cycle. In the very same moment, they witness the loss experienced in the finality of death and the love experienced in the dawning of life. And it in this transience, this space where life and death are experienced together, that Lily and Charity see God. Notably, House of Mirth is not the only title that alludes to transience. Summer, too, albeit a simpler title, is also an exploration of loss. After her marriage to Mr. Royall, Charity recalls “sitting beside her lover with the leafy arch of summer bending over them,” but “the illusion was faint and transitory” (203). The vision departs, leaving behind the disturbing reality that all of these joys have been lost.
The revelations that come at the ends of Lily and Charity’s spiritual journeys are uncomfortable, to say the least. Their coming-of-age stories are marked by the realization that the social world—the world of “manners,” as readers of Wharton have often referred to it—is a obstacle to true spiritual meaning. Lily and Charity both make the conscious choice to forego society’s ethical expectations so that they might have the means to explore their own personal spirituality. Of course, due to the power of manners, this decision results in social disaster, misery, and a heightened awareness of death for both young women. At the end of each story, it is clearer than ever why organized religion and personal religion have become so at odds with each other; the power of society and its ability to ruin the lives of those who do not conform to its moral standard stands in the path of those who seek their own personal moral standards. It is hard not to feel discouraged by Lily and Charity’s tragic endings.
However, I argue that Wharton offers a subtle kind of optimism, a faith in God which persists in the midst of tragedy in these two novels. Because of the transience between life and death that Wharton portrays so beautifully, misery and fear do not exist unaccompanied by love and joy. God can be found in Lily’s invisible child, who provides her with the warmth of new life on the road to death, and God can also be found in the warmth of Charity’s summer memories. And it is perhaps not unfair to say that had they not learned to see God in death, neither Lily nor Charity could ever have learned to see God in life.
Works Cited
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Goldsmith, Meredith. “‘Like the Heathen’: Liminality, Ritual, and Religious Authority in
Summer.” Edith Wharton Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2018, pp.1-12
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. 1902.
eBooks@Adelaide, 2009. https://csrs.nd.edu/assets/59930/williams_1902.pdf
Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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The Edith Wharton Society 