SOURCE: Sapora, Carol Baker. “Female Doubling: The Other Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.” Papers on Language and Literature 29, no. 4 (fall 1993): 371-94.

In the following essay, Sapora examines the conflict in The House of Mirth between the image of women as works of art or decorative objects and women's attempts at self-actualization.

At Mrs. Wellington Bry's evening of tableaux vivants, when the curtain suddenly parts on a picture that is “simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart,” we are told that the awed spectators pay tribute not to Reynolds's “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the “flesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart” (Wharton, Mirth [The House of Mirth] 131). Each person in this “house of mirth” is convinced that now he or she has had a vision of “the real Lily.” As readers, we, too, are eager to see just who Lily Bart really is. With...