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AnjaliBhatThirdPaper 3 - 29 Jun 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< | | | | -- AnjaliBhat - 15 May 2009 | | | Lily's story suggests that selling out comes in many forms. The less obvious forms might be as deadly to happiness and conscience as the obvious. It's tempting to say everybody should just avoid all of the selling out, but it's not that simple. For Lily, avoiding all selling out would mean dropping out of 'society,' or marrying Selden. The first would cut her off from the luxurious beauty she idealizes—another type of sell-out. The second would make her dependent on Selden, which would necessitate its own compromises since Selden is often ungenerous in his estimation of Lily.
Some degree of compromise might be inevitable. But Lily's determined unawareness of the importance of her everyday sell-outs leads her to betray her ideals more than she otherwise might. It allows her to make choices she otherwise might not. Her story shows how willful ignorance can kill integrity just as much as active betrayal. This is something to remember while contemplating selling out, or not, in the future.
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- Not every life compromise is a blow against moral integrity. And moral integrity is not the same thing as sexual propriety. The world punishes the flouting of convention more than it aids or enforces moral integrity. So far, I think, your views and those of Edith Wharton coincide. But it seems to me that thereafter your insights begin to differ more substantially. Wharton too understands that Lily is weak, but her weakness is stronger than that of the men around her. Wharton seems to want us to be acutely conscious that Lily would be able to do very well indeed in the world if she were able to get an education and possess, say, a law license. Catch her selling out then! would be Wharton's view.
- Oddly enough, however, it isn't yours. You wonder whether Lily is failing a little bit in the shrewdness of her evaluation of socially compromising offers—largely because she doesn't share your clarity that anti-Semitism is passe, although you are both very clear that there's something exceedingly wrong with fucking for money. But Lily's love of luxury is no more a weakness than the mercenary motives of the men who are allowed to pursue them openly, and one sees that wielding their weapons she would make a splendid fight for herself. To you—to whom every form of equality that would make Lily thrive has been already conceded, and who will soon have the license that Lily would have been able to use to achieve everything she desired, including the freedom to have men without being dependent on them—one might expect a different set of conclusions to follow:
- Feminism is the name of the power that separates your world from the world of Lily Bart; and
- Selling out is only something you need to do when you haven't got equity;
- Your license is equity.
- The novel is a tragedy because Lily is a woman. She has, like many of Edith Wharton's greatest depictions of human beings, chosen a path that only a woman unlike Wharton herself could have chosen, and she has paid a fearful price for her choice. Wharton, too, has paid prices that are heavy for her to bear, but in the end she accepts compromises against personal happiness rather than moral integrity, and becomes--like her friend, Henry James, who inhabits a surprisingly similar psychic universe--a very sensitive observer of the inner moral life of other people. But Wharton seems to be the feminist between you: she thinks Lily is a victim of the way men run society, and she wants Lily to be able to put the questions behind her and live the way you are free to do.
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