Edith Wharton, "The House of Mirth"

“It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper empoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.” (310)

            Lily Bart fears poverty for greater reasons than mere economic weakness; throughout the course of the novel, she continually points to two additional worries that accompany poverty: unhappiness and loneliness. Near the conclusion of the novel, Lily reflects on her reluctance to surrender the luxuries of wealth and finds that it is not her fear of monetary powerlessness, but her hesitance to lose the sense of solidarity and comradeship with her social set. As she realizes, “she had learned by experience that she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines; to become a worker among workers, and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded” (293).

            Unhappiness is a driving force in Lily’s attempts to hold onto her accustomed lifestyle of the rich. In expressing her frustration to Gerty, Lily articulates her belief that poverty is a miserable state of being: “’Well, poverty, for one—and I don’t know any that’s more dreadful’” (259). From the images of poverty ingrained in her by her mother’s perception to a vision of Gerty—the epitome of the independent woman—as homely and plain, Lily correlates poverty, or financial independence, with unhappiness. Without the material wealth and bountiful luxury of her former life, Lily believes see cannot attain happiness.

            Loneliness also proves a motive for Lily to feign her place within the social sphere of the Dorsets. With material wealth, Lily could create a seat for herself among the elite, could engage in a sense of oneness with those on the same class strata as herself. Although one could argue that Miss Bart never actually belonged to such a class of people, her performance kept her among them. When she is presented with the possibility of poverty, Lily is desperate to maintain her connection to the exclusive class of the affluent. Gerty is conscious of Lily’s predicament: “Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend but in a life completely reorganized and detached from its old associations; whereas all Lily’s energies were centered in the determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion could be maintained” (261). In renouncing these “associations,” in accepting poverty and finding hope in a reorganized life, Lily would be alone. It is partly her fear of isolation and alienation from her old associations, the aspects of life with which she readily identifies herself, that keeps her from succumbing to her fate of poverty.