Womanly virtues Wednesday: No real intimacy with nature

January twenty-fourth just past was the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth. Let's have a look at chapter six of The House of Mirth in her honour. This is how it begins:

THE AFTERNOON was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air, and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which diffused the brightness without dulling it.
In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill; but as the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the long slopes beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached a zone of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with scattered trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters and purpling sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver of ash-leaves, the country unrolled itself in pastoral distances.

Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the creeping glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang it, and the shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a beech-grove. The boles of the trees stood well apart, with only a light feathering of undergrowth; the path wound along the edge of the wood, now and then looking out on a sunlit pasture or on an orchard spangled with fruit.

I hear an echo, two echoes really, in that text. The obvious one is the opening of Tintern Abbey. It's the wrong season, but the scene that Lily Bart here surveys sounds like the one Wordsworth does at the opening of his poem:

The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door ...

And I think Edith Wharton means for us to see the comparison in order that she may contrast her heroine with the Romantics and Romanticism. For the very next paragraph begins this way:

Lily had no real intimacy with nature ...

And Wordsworth means to suggest intimacy with nature. I think Wordsworth was fooling himself, mistaking his alienation with modern society for intimacy with nature but that is a subject for another day. The important thing here is that Wharton wants us to know that Lily Bart is not natural. She is not easy or given to naturalness but there are times when nature seems to match her moods. Here is the next paragraph in whole:

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove. Two or three red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees, and the white wooden spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder of the hill; while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road ran between the fields. 

If she and her companion, Lawrence Selden, were to sit down we should expect them to talk of love. And they do just that.

Before I get to that discussion, however, the second echo. Edith Wharton kept a commonplace book and she wrote out long sections of Plato's Phaedrus in it and there is a very intentional echo of it here. Again, it is the wrong season but that is part of her point—it is very much the wrong season for love for Lily.

In Plato's work, Phaedrus and Socrates descend from the road they are on to a little stream and sit in the shade of a Plane tree. In this section of The House of Mirth, Lawrence and Lily leave the shade of the woods where there is also a faint chill and ascend to the open slope to find a "zone of lingering summer".

And Lily, while she may find the scene a fitting background to what she is feeling, is not noticing all that we might notice. She is not noticing that her immediate sense also matches her general place in life for her beauty is a bit like a lingering but about-to-leave summer.

Now, if this is really drawn from The Phaedrus would should expect erotic love and then cicadas to make an appearance.

Let's start with erotic love. Our two companions reach a comfortable place after their ascent and sit down:

Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape. Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat against the level sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head, which rested against the side of the rock. He had no wish to make her talk; her quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of things. In his own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling the sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene at their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his, was throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.

Yes, Wharton does want you to think what you are thinking. It's the most natural thing in the world to think of at that moment. Lily does think of it.

She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dulness she had fled from? Lily had no definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings. 

But it isn't going to happen for these two. Which is rather a shame for the glory of a woman such as Lily Bart laying back with her lips parted and breathing quickly is something to contemplate and a minor miracle for anyone lucky enough to there when it happens.

Instead, we learn that Lily has had a few fleeting feelings of love but never got past the barrier between it and her. And then our novel goes on to be about something else.

For, as with the Wordsworth echo, the point of the comparison is to draw our attention to the contrast. In the Phaedrus, Socrates convinces us that giving yourself sexually to a non-lover for pragmatic reasons is wrong. Lily is going to attempt exactly the opposite with tragic consequences.

Now on to the cicada. Here is a favourite paragraph from The Phaedrus that I have quoted before on this blog:

By Herè, a fair resting–place, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane–tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane–tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze:—so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.

Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is what a cicada looks like.

That black bug is somewhere between one to two inches long. It's a big black bug. It doesn't quite make an appearance in Wharton's text but the unmistakeable suggestion of one does.

They stood silent for a while after this, smiling at each other like adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height from which they discover a new world. The actual world at their feet was veiling itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear moon rose in the denser blue.

Suddenly they heard a remote sound, like the hum of a giant insect, and following the high-road, which wound whiter through the surrounding twilight, a black object rushed across their vision.

Lily started from her attitude of absorption; her smile faded and she began to move toward the lane.

This "cicada song" is really a car driving by. It doesn't actually disrupt anything. Lawrence and Lily have been coming close to love but there are two barriers. One is her lack of naturalness and the other is society and the expectations of a young woman like Lily who would like to remain in society.

The rest of the novel is a novel of manners about that society and Lily's rather gruesome fate in it. To be honest, I don't like the rest of that novel much. It's universally praised as one of her greatest novels but I think it would have been better to have Wharton write about the first barrier. The lack of "naturalness" in Lily and how that invisible barrier worked against her.

For isn't that is a struggle for every woman? It's not just that society, for even our supposedly liberated society, will not tolerate too much "intimacy with nature" from a woman. And yet, we have to believe her capable of it, or we will also reject her. And the fear of that failure, shall we say "inner" failure, is really just as important and far more intriguing than society.

The good news is that she did in a great book that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves called The Reef. And I'll be blogging it here every Wednesday and Friday starting this Friday.