“‘What is Truth? . . . [I]t’s the Story that’s Easier to Believe’”:
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: What it Teaches Us about Disinformation
Most readers of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, published in 1905, are struck by her focus on the corrosive effect of new money on the American landed gentry; they see her novel as a scathing critique of her own class and its rapid dissipation at the turn of the twentieth century. They “belonged to a class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well, dressed expensively, and done little else.” As a literature professor, I had read and taught the novel many times before I noticed that while monetary capital does play an important role, the real currency driving the plot is information.
Information, rumor and innuendo are the landed gentry’s most powerful tools. Stock tips, in particular, provide access to stock market gains upon which the landed gentry now rely in their craven attempts to keep up appearances. A disinformation campaign causes the undoing of Lily Bart, the beloved protagonist of the novel. And finally, Lily Bart’s refusal to weaponize information is what effectively seals her demise. In light of this, I have been reflecting on what the novel says to us more than a century later about information, its uses and misuses. It does seem as though we could use some counsel on this front.
The novel begins in Grand Central Station in New York. Lily Bart is in between trains, moving from one country house to another. She is beautiful, but “there was nothing new about Lily Bart.” She is 29, still unmarried, her looks beginning to fade. She makes some whopping bad choices in her pursuit of a husband who must provide her with “a great deal of money.” Sometimes her poor choices are born of moral laziness, sometimes a profound lack of self-awareness, sometimes a hazy moral rectitude out of step with her times which leaves her vulnerable. Readers become so attached to her because she is a lot like us, trying and often not succeeding in navigating a complicated and fast-changing world. One of her choices appears straightforward at first; she purchases love letters that do not incriminate her but do implicate her erstwhile love, Lawrence Selden, and his former mistress Bertha Dorset. In the wrong hands, this information could ruin them. Even the scullery maid who sells Lily the letters “had a vision of the elaborate machinery of revenge which a word of this commanding young lady’s might set in motion.” Lily knows the salacious letters are a loaded gun, and she nobly takes them out of circulation, even for her own use.
Bertha Dorset, however, has no scruples; she is rich, ruthless, powerful; she will do anything to maintain her position in high society, which is funded by her anemic, cuckolded husband. When she is on the precipice of having another affair exposed, she uses rumor and innuendo to divert attention away from her and toward Lily Bart. Because it is more convenient to believe Bertha who is far richer and is dangerous in her willful self-protection, she succeeds in saving herself by sullying Lily. No one actually believes Bertha, but it’s in no one’s self-interest to cross her, and likewise it’s in no one’s self-interest to save Lily who is flat broke. The narrator notes, “Bertha Dorset’s social credit was based on an impregnable bank-account.” Lesson #1: information might be objectively true or false, but its reception is utterly subjective and often self-interested. Lily laments, “What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe. In this case, it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset’s story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera-box, and it’s convenient to be on good terms with her.”
If you recall, Lily has the loaded gun, but she never fires it, even after she begins a downward spiral from celebrated socialite into impoverished pariah because of Bertha’s machinations. With the information she has (about which Bertha is blissfully ignorant), Lily could have restored her own position, married well (meaning married money), and destroyed her nemesis. Rosedale, who knows everything, is exasperated: “’The wonder to me is that you’ve waited so long to get square with that woman, when you’ve had the power in your hands. . . . Why don’t you use those letters of hers that you bought last year?’” Instead, adhering to a vaguely articulated and obsolete moral code based on what she snobbishly refers to as “inherited tendencies,” Lily burns the letters and dies shortly thereafter of an accidental (or maybe not) drug overdose. She went high when Bertha Dorset went low, and she perishes. Lesson #2: While Lily’s decency is admirable, her moral compass is a lazy construction that she can only vaguely describe; not fighting back might make her feel morally superior, but it leads to her sloppy and tragic death. Relying on socially accepted platitudes will never win the day against disinformation. The lesson is not to go low; it’s that the high road needs to be thoughtful and strategic, not reliant on flimsy platitudes.
Surprisingly, it is to Simon Rosedale, the much-maligned financier in The House of Mirth to whom we can turn for how to better navigate this complicated terrain. He is utterly clear-eyed about the world, about himself, about how to wield information with finesse, and about how to operate with decency. He cheerfully says, “Getting on to things is a mighty useful accomplishment in business, and I’ve simply extended it to my private affairs.” He admonishes Lily to “look the situation straight in the eye.” Interestingly, Wharton describes him in such a highly unlikeable way and with such flabbergasting anti-Semitism that it takes more than a few readings of the novel to see that he is the one who offers readers the most wisdom. He is described as “a plump man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac.” The contempt is palpable; still, Simon Rosedale is one of only a very few characters who displays real kindness to Lily, who offers her a brilliant roadmap out of her predicament that would quietly neutralize Bertha Dorset, and who uses his reliable knowledge of the stock market and society to patiently advance his own social advancement without collateral damage to others. Gus Trenor, one of the most odious characters in the novel, predicts accurately that “the people who are clever enough to be civil to him now will make a mighty good thing of it. A few years from now he’ll be in it whether we want him or not, and then he won’t be giving away a half-a-million tip for a dinner.” Indeed, by the end of the novel, “his wealth, and the masterly use he had made of it, were giving him an enviable prominence in the world of affairs, and placing Wall Street under obligations which only Fifth Avenue could repay.” With Simon Rosedale, information is a tool, not a weapon, but he wields the tool with staggering subtlety in full recognition and anticipation of the weapons that are out there pointed at him. He may be crass, but he offers Lesson #3: be clear-eyed about your adversaries, know thyself, be thoughtful about what it means to be decent, and actively strategic and on your guard always.
But what does it mean that we, as readers, are groomed to dislike Simon Rosedale so viscerally? Early on, we are told that he is a “man who made it his business to know everything about every one, whose idea of showing himself to be at home in society was to display an inconvenient familiarity with the habits of those with whom he wished to be thought intimate.” He is depicted as a tactless, social-climbing pest. No reader finishes the novel aspiring to be Simon Rosedale. Rather, we want to go back in time and save Lily ~ from herself and from her horrible frenemies; that said, quietly and perhaps even against her own well-bred instincts, Edith Wharton points the reader to Simon Rosedale as the beacon of how to navigate the rough information terrain of the twentieth century and the wild west terrain of the twenty-first. I think she was clear-eyed; she just didn’t like what she saw.