The House of Mirth
“They all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world. The real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”
Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence
“My genius seems to be to do the right thing at the wrong time.”
Lily Bart in The House of Mirth
Tragedy / Comedy
Tragedy, Aristotle contends, depicts people as more noble and courageous than they are in reality. By contrast, comedy is said to show people as worse than they really are – that is, as objects of derision and ridicule. The House of Mirth (both novel and film) by these measures is a very dark comedy, a parade of folly and narcissism. Lily Bart, the story’s heroine, suffers a tragic fate. But she is too petty, self-serving, and inauthentic to appear to us as the protagonist of a tragedy. Rather, she is the victim of a perverse comedy of manners.
Terence Davies
Three things to introduce the British film maker Terence Davies: first, Davies has said: “If I did a car chase, it would be two cars moving very slowly”; second, all of Davies films, with the exception of his documentary Of Time and the City, take place before 1955; third, Davies tells us that he rereads T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets once a month.
Generally anointed as the United Kingdom’s greatest post-World War II film maker (after Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) Davies was an outsider – he described himself as a “spectator and not a participant in life.” Although he worked in cinema for almost fifty years, Davies struggled with funding throughout his career; most of his pictures were heavily subsidized by the British Film Institute with supplemental financing from various foreign consortiums specializing in art-house fare in Germany, France, and Italy. This is not surprising. Davies range is very narrow, as Jane Austen once remarked on her own work, a few inches of ivory. House of Mirth was probably his most commercial venture; released in December 2000, it earned 5.1 million dollars worldwide against an estimated ten million dollar budget. Davies occupied a rarefied niche in the film industry and his subject matter is profoundly circumscribed – most of his movies are about shy, homosexual artists and their emotionally stifling families. Put in these terms, its surprising that anyone would pay money to see Davies’ films – that he succeeded in producing nine feature pictures is a testament to his grit, determination, and the unique esthetic values in his work.
Davies was born in 1945 into a lower middle class family in Liverpool. His father was an abusive drunk and bully. Davies revered his long-suffering mother. (He personally cared for her until her death in 1997). He was a frail and sickly child, the last of ten siblings. He describes the death of his ‘psychotic’ father from cancer when he was seven years old as the highlight of his childhood and the moment of his personal liberation.
Lonely and maltreated in school, Davies abandoned formal education when he was 15. He went to work as a clerk in a Liverpool trading firm. (This was also an unhappy time in his life; throughout his teens and early twenties, Davies struggled with his homosexuality – he was Catholic and pious as a young man and regarded his sexual orientation as shameful.) When he was twenty-six, Davies left Liverpool for the first time in his life, migrated to London, and enrolled in an acting school. Later, he attended the National Film School, and made his first picture, the amazingly sophisticated short subject, Children in 1976. Children was the first picture in a trilogy of memoir (and memory) movies based on Davies’ childhood and adolescence in Liverpool; the other two films in the series are Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983). On the strength of these films, Davies was able to cobble together financing for a full-length picture, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). This film, which was highly acclaimed, chronicles the violence inflicted on Davies’ mother and brothers by their father, and, then, the patriarch’s death, an event that considerably brightens the picture and cheers up its characters. Davies followed with the astonishing and lyrical The Long Day Closes released in 1992 – this movies depicts Davies’ childhood after the death of his father in a series of remarkable vignettes, generally scored to musical accompaniment from the early 1950's; the movie is Proustian and non-narrative and splendid in all respects. In The Long Day Closes, Davies provides and ecstatic account of the happiest period of his life, from the death of his father in 1952 to his eleventh birthday in 1956. Again, Davies had achieved a success d’estime and was invited to Hollywood where he made a film based on John Kenneth Toole’s apprentice novel, The Neon Bible (1995) – this movie was too eccentric to earn back any of its production cost and, more or less, resulted in Davies being unable to work in Hollywood after that fiscal debacle. (The movie, set in the deep South, is about a sensitive boy and his childhood travails.) In 2000, House of Mirth was released to great critical praise at the Edinburgh Film Festival – although set in New York, the movie was entirely filmed in Glasgow and Scotland. (Davies said the movie was a ‘horror film’ about the destruction of Lily Bart and that it reflected his grief for the loss of his mother.) This picture was followed by an idiosyncratic and extremely poetic and effective adaptation of Terence Ratigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea (2011). (In 2008, Davies made a documentary about Liverpool, Of Time and the City, a film poem or “city symphony” that is quite similar in its ecstatic texture to The Long Day Closes. This film is also generally regarded as a masterpiece.)
For at least 30 years, Davies had been laboring to finance a movie based on a Scottish novel, Sunset Song. He finally was able to make this movie for release in 2015 – it’s a lugubrious effort, perilously close to self-parody, involving a highly sensitive and poetic young woman and her brutal father. This picture was followed by another movie, a bio-pic, about an oppressed young poetess, A Quiet Passion released in 2016. A Quiet Passion, about Emily Dickinson, features the poet as victim, also persecuted by her overbearing father. It’s a ridiculous movie that shows Davies completely tone-deaf to both Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the American grain. Benediction (2018) is about the British war poet Siegfried Sassoon – it also features lots of suppressed homosexuality and suffering and is close to unwatchable. When he died in October 2023, Davies was working on Mother of Sorrows, another film about the sufferings of an artistic homosexual with a kind mother – this film would have been set in the AIDS era in the eighties.
Notwithstanding my distaste for Davies’ work after The Deep Blue Sea, his great 2011 melodrama, I’ve seen all of his pictures and admire most of them. Even the bad stuff, contains shards of splendor. He was brilliant and made challenging, innovative films until the vein comprising his subject matter (sexually repressed and socially isolated artists in torment) simply ran out around 2015.
Edith Wharton
Like Davies, Edith Wharton was a virtuoso of suffering – at least until she was about 50 years old.
Edith Jones was born in 1862 into an old New York City family that was in decline – the Jones’ had made their fortune in real estate, mostly inherited from ancestors who had been the beneficiaries of Dutch land grants in Manhattan and Long Island, The death of her much beloved father, when she was 20, heightened Edith’s conflict with her mother – the two women mutually detested one another.
To escape her mother’s influence, Edith married “Teddy” Wharton in 1882. Wharton was an ineffectual playboy, addicted to collecting small lap dogs and various kinds of sport. Edith was married to him until 1913, when she petitioned a French tribunal in Paris to grant her a divorce. The marriage was disastrous in every respect. Edith had no idea about sex and seems to have not known how babies originated until several months into her marriage. (Edith wrote in her 1934 memoir, A Look Backward, that when she asked her mother about sex, the woman responded by saying that her daughter had toured Europe, seen all sorts of statues including those of nude men, and that she could infer everything that she needed to know from those experiences.) Teddy, undoubtedly sexually frustrated himself, took mistresses, embezzled money from his wife, and, ultimately, went insane suffering from something like manic depression.
Edith had written poetry as a teenager and, even, had some verse published under the name of an uncle. Her mother, however, forbade from writing. In her late thirties, Edith began to write short stories and completed a novel in 1901 when she was about 40. Her second novel, The House of Mirth, was an enormous critical and popular success – she made a million dollars on revenues from sales of the book published by Scribners. (The book was a bestseller on the order of novels by Stephen King today.) While still married to Teddy, Edith embarked on a calamitous love affair with Morton Fullerton, encouraged by the novelist Henry James who had introduced him to her. Fullerton, one of James best friends, was a foreign correspondent in London where Wharton was, then, living. He was also a promiscuous bisexual. The love affair persisted until about 1910 when Wharton was 48. By this time, Wharton had written (and published) several novels, many short stories, and a number of essays. With her closest friend, Walter Berry, Wharton toured ruined French villages near the Western Front and published several books as a war correspondent. (Berry, who was about 15 years older than Wharton, was an unrequited love – she is buried in Paris near Berry’s funeral plot.) Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for her novel The Age of Innocence.
Wharton was educated (or miseducated) like her heroine Lily Bart in House of Mirth. She was trained to be well-dressed, expert in etiquette, and charming – her vocation was defined as attracting and marrying a wealthy man. She would have suffered the fate that she imagines for Lily Bart if she had not risen above her social milieu with its demoralizing aspirations by becoming a famous novelist. It is said that she crossed the Atlantic more than 60 times and, after her divorce from Teddy Wharton, lived primarily in Paris. During her residence in the United States, as was the custom for the moneyed classes in “The Gilded Age,” she divided her time between a villa on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and various estates in Rhode Island, Maine (Bar Harbor), and the Berkshires. (In fact, with her fortune earned from House of Mirth, she designed herself and built a palatial country house called “The Mount” at Lenox, Massachusetts – Teddy ended up with this property, where Wharton had written House of Mirth and several other books, after the divorce and he sold it to pay debts; the place is now a historic site dedicated to Wharton.) While in America, Wharton, nonetheless, spent holidays in Paris, Cannes, Monte Carlo, and various spas in Germany and Switzerland. She spoke German, French, and Italian fluently.
Despite her Victorian upbringing, Wharton was highly sexual and, in fact, in the last thirty years several specimens of erotica that she penned have come to light. She had taste, and talent for, pornography. Wharton was plain with pugnacious-looking underbite. I have seen fifty or more pictures of her, including portraits as a girl – she is not smiling in any of these images. In most pictures, she looks unhappy and dour; in one group picture, with Teddy, she tries to smile for the camera but her mouth is contorted into a weird rictus.
After her death, Wharton’s work was eclipsed for a couple of generations. But she was rediscovered by feminist writers in the sixties and, since that time, most of her books have remained in print and, indeed, are taught in courses in American literature.
The Novel
Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth is a majestic achievement, a kind of Edwardian cathedral written in florid, aphoristic prose and replete with vivid characters. (Wharton composed her books and essays writing in bed each morning from 9:00 to 11:00, when she rose, attired herself and, then, accomplished her social engagements. But there is nothing sleepy or indolent about her writing – she stabs and slashes with a poison pen; her wit is always on display and it is waspish and toxic.) The novel is ambitious and intensely imagined. Written in an omniscient third person, Wharton slips blithely between characters, tracing the inner thoughts of both male and female figures in the book with equal aplomb – for instance, she flits back and forth between Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, providing access to their rhetorically sophisticated streams of consciousness with great agility. Everyone in the book thinks in, more or less, the same instrumental terms – her character’s thoughts are a disheartening melange of self-interest and, in Lily’s case, doomed amour propre (Lily implicitly thinks herself better than the fate and milieu to which she succumbs.
The great theme of many of the novels depicting polite society in the late Victorian and, then, Edwardian era is the interrelationship between society and character. To what extent does a person’s upbringing and social class determine his or her fate? Are we the masters of our destiny or, rather, the victims of circumstance beyond our control? This thematic material provides the basis for Dickens’ novels, the great Russian writers (particularly Tolstoy’s meditations on causation), and, later, Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In essence, the great novels of the 19th century with their long dying fall extending into the twenties (and, indeed, beyond), explore the question of free will. Wharton’s House of Mirth falls squarely within this tradition, focusing on the question of whether Lily Bart’s destruction is the result of her hubris and perverse rejection of the social game in which she is immured or, rather, a pre-ordained consequence of social forces, more or less, completely outside of her control. After all, Lily has been educated for one vocation – that is, marrying a wealthy man who can keep her equipped with the lavish means that she regards as necessary for her existence. She is charming and beautiful, but wholly useless except as a trophy for display in some oligarch’s mansion. Unlike the other denizens of this Gilded Age trap, Lily’s tragedy is that she is self-aware, acutely conscious of the limitations that the corrupt society that she occupies imposes upon her. Wharton dramatizes a conflict between Lily’s noble aspirations and the venal options inflicted upon her. The book’s central motif is that Lily can survive and, even, prosper but only at the expense of her ideals. In the end, she faces the choice between poverty and debasement – she can only survive by playing the sordid part of a blackmailer. Integral to the novel’s depiction of Lily’s decline and fall is Wharton’s conviction that Lily is so sublimely beautiful and charming that she can seduce without effort any man that crosses her path – she is splendidly equipped to navigate the vicious world of Fifth Avenue society, but simply chooses not to do so. In this respect, she bears a curious relationship to Herman Melville’s ascetic scrivener, Bartleby – inexplicably, Bartelby “prefers not to” do what is necessary to survive on Wall Streets and perishes from inanition. Melville’s story "Bartleby the Scrivener" is a Kafkaesque (that is, expressionist and symbolic) version of the great renunciation that characterizes Lily Bart’s doom in House of Mirth. (Melville came from a prominent family in New York and was very distantly related to Wharton.)
Lily Bart’s plight, as well, belongs to a world in which women are without rights and, mostly, without any intelligible education. Stripped of any meaningful work, Wharton’s society women are reduced to vicious rumor-mongering and scheming against one another. Their dependence on male largesse converts these women into intriguers – the dual nature of this futile intrigue is shown in the matching characters of Carrie Fisher and Bertha Dorset. Both women occupy niches in society that are morally questionable but complementary. Fisher is a sort of “fixer,” a go-between, a role that she occupies due to her ambiguous role in High Society – she is dubiously free to move between different strata in her world but at a price: people generally regard her disposable and morally ambiguous. Her counterpart, Bertha Dorset is an adulteress but so fearsome in her Machiavellian skills that other women are terrified of both her wrath and conniving – Wharton’s men are mere cardboard cut-outs (for the most part); they are too stupid and vain to understand that the world that they think that they dominate is, in fact, a creation of the women around them. (Contemporary critics said that Wharton couldn’t successfully imagine men and their sensibility – critics said that Wharton’s men are just versions of “her women with moustaches.” I think this misunderstands Wharton’s perspective – the men are colorless in large part because they are, if anything, even more uninteresting then their trophy wives. None of them seem to be usefully employed and, in fact, Wharton’s gentlemen are more languid and slothful than the women – they seem to be butterflies subsisting on the idea of business (but not really doing anything businesslike as least as far as they are depicted in the book.) Wharton’s men are dull because, in this milieu, they can’t be anything but dull.
The plight of Lily Bart in House of Mirth reminds us of the paralysis afflicting women and their role in society prior to World War One. Lily Bart’s dilemma, that is, her halting and ineffectual pursuit of matrimony, is not substantially different from the situation in which Jane Austen’s heroines found themselves a hundred years earlier. (Austen’s sardonic style is mirrored by Wharton’s witty and bitter irony.) I was surprised to read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, a family novel published two years before House of Mirth in which the father and a girl’s brothers in a north German mercantile family essentially sell a young woman to a suitor in exchange for financial gain. The heroine of Buddenbrooks, a book depicting the Biedermeier era in German (roughly 1840 to 1890), occupies a social role not conspicuously better than the role of women under the Taliban in Afghanistan – they are essentially commodities offered on the marriage market for the profit of the men in their family. Lily’s plight is even worse – her destruction doesn’t profit anyone. There’s no man to protect her and no man who will profit from her sale. Unmarried, Lily is superfluous and all her strivings are futile.
Nonetheless, Wharton constructs an ending to the novel that vindicates Lily and, in fact, affirms her centrality to a web of relationships that redeems her from “the rubbish heap” to which she believes she has been consigned. In fact, Wharton devises the novel’s denouement in terms of a complicated system of reciprocal influences. As Lily, exhausted and, apparently, drug-addicted, wanders the streets of New York, she encounters a young woman connected to Gertie Farrish’s charitable work, Nettie Crane, now married and known as Nettie Struthers. Nettie was considered by Lily as “one of the superfluous fragments of life destined to be prematurely swept into... the rubbish heap.” But Nettie has resisted this fate – “she would not be cast into the rubbish-heap without a struggle.” Remarkably, Nettie was saved by her admiration for Lily Bart, a person that she perceived from afar as independent and indomitable. Nettie’s idealized vision of Lily Bart as a free woman has caused her to think that the world is, at least, possibly a “just place”, that is, a place in which merit and hard work are rewarded. Nettie says that when she was in trouble – possibly facing unwed motherhood – she used to “remember that (Lily Bart) was having a wonderful time anyhow and that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere.” In fact, Nettie is now happily married (something that has eluded Lily) and has a child. (Her baby is named “Marie” after Marie Antoinette, an ambiguous image of another woman in the mold of Lily Bart; Nettie has seen a stage-play about the French queen and admired the actress playing that role – another manifestation of the book’s thesis that women are always required to play parts assigned to them.) The system of reciprocal admiration and influence that governs the book’s last twenty pages is made manifest in Lily’s response to Nettie: “It will be my turn to think of you as happy – and the world will seem a less unjust place to me.”
Wharton asserts that good examples create systems of mutually reinforcing reciprocal obligation. For instance, Lily has lived in such way as to embody virtues that she ascribes to Laurence Selden – his example has ennobled her, even, though, in actuality Selden is not an admirable figure at all; Lily’s admiration has made him admirable. When Selden rushes to Lily’s bedside, too late to save her, he sees his thwarted relationship with her as a love that had “saved the whole out of the ruin of their lives.” So the image of Lily’s virtue and beauty (also idealized – Lily is a morally flawed character) has the effect of ennobling Selden. Again, Wharton insists upon structures of reciprocal ennobling idealizations that comprise the ultimate reality in the social milieu that she portrays – and that, I think, justify the project of the novel itself: that is, presenting images of reality that can ennoble the readers of the book. Reciprocation also exists in Lily’s last moments – she imagines cradling Nettie’s baby, a phantom of an infant that she will never have, and thinks of something that she must tell Selden, a word that she has forgotten and, in the stupor of her last moments, can’t quite recall. In the final chapter, we see Selden rushing to Lily’s dingy flat, anxious to speak a “ word “ to her – that is, his mission to express the “word” to her parallels, and is reciprocal, to her desire to say her “word” to Selden. Wharton ends the book with Selden kneeling at Lily’s bedside “penitent and reconciled”, sensing in the silence “the word which made all clear.” Lily fantasizes a redemptive word, but doesn’t know what it is. Selden rushes to Lily hoping to speak a “word” to her but arrives too late. This structure of reciprocity binds the characters together. (in Davies' film adaptation, Lily tells Selden during their last encounter that she has lived so as to comport with his idealized view of her. Early in the film, in their first love scene, Selden praises Lily for being unconcerned about who is and who is not accepted in society. Selden appreciates Lily's intelligence is understanding the "rules of the game" and her spirited independence in being willing to flaunt those rules. In this respect, the film shows us that Selden's love for Lily has inadvertently destroyed her. Lily's indifference to the norms of the society in which she lives leads to her doom.),
Wharton’s melodramatic climax invokes Edgar Alan Poe. The novelist’s diction changes and the prose seems influenced by Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” or some other story by that writer involving abnormal mental states, for instance, “The Telltale Heart.” Lily’s nerves are strained to the breaking point. She is highly agitated and can not sleep. She longs for the surcease from existence supplied by the chloral sedative that she is taking on the basis of Mrs. Hatch’s prescription. As the chloral takes possession of her mind, Wharton explores the effects of the drug on Lily’s consciousness – the tone of the writing suggests some combination of Poe’s lurid depiction of mental illness and Keats’ notion of being “half in love with easeful death...” that is, the drowsy numbness induced by hemlock in “Ode to a Nightingale.” Throughout the last couple chapters, Wharton’s writing is quite different from the texture of the prose earlier in the book. A good example is the apparently terrible prose describing Lily’s observations of Nettie’s infant. Wharton says that Nettie prepares a ‘bottle of infantile food” that is “applied to the baby’s impatient lips...”; Lily notices that, as the child eats, “(an) ensuing degustation went on...” When the baby has finished eating, she “sunk back blissfully replete...” Lily looks on with an “irradiated face.” This is truly awful, but, I think, closely calculated. Lily Bart is too refined to use words like “teat” or “nipple” or “suck.” Instead, Wharton uses these laughable circumlocutions – the point is that Lily, perhaps, aspires to motherhood, but the actual details of feeding a baby are simply too vulgar for her to even imagine. Even in extremis, Lily remains a victim of her upbringing and social class.
Names used in the novel have a similar quality. Lily is first seen in Grand Central Terminal having missed a train – another missed train in France also results in catastrophe for Lily; she is accused by Bertha Dorset of adultery with the hapless George because Bertha herself has been out all night (allegedly due to a missed train connection – but, in fact, consorting with Ned Silverton.) Therefore, it’s no coincidence that Lily’s nemesis, the author of the $9000 debt that destroys her, is Gus Trenor (“train-ore”). Sim Rosedale, possibly Simon Rosenthal (“rosy vale’), is obviously Jewish on the basis of his name. Implicitly, he offers a “bed of roses” to Lily, although she rejects his proposal. Carrie Fisher, the avuncular divorcee and go-between, is a “fisher of men.” Most remarkably, Lily Bart has an androgynous name – Lily (floral) and Bart (for bearded); she doesn’t fit into to the intensely gendered high society because she is somehow “phallic” – her name combines female and male attributes. (“Bart,” a simple one syllable name, reminds us that Edith Wharton was born a “Jones”, suggesting some affinity between the novelist and her creature.) Even more astounding is the name of Lily Bart’s guardian – she is called Mrs. Peniston. There’s no doubt in my mind that Wharton is “pulling our leg” (or some other appendage) by calling the prudish and judgmental aunt a “penis”.
The Film
Terence Davies adaptation of House of Mirth exists, I think, by virtue of Martin Scorsese.
Davies always struggled with accumulating money to make his films. Most of his movies were thought to commercially unviable. But Scorsese had made a movie based on Wharton’s The Age of Innocence seven years earlier that yielded a reasonable profit. Scorsese’s adaptation of Wharton’s 1920 Pulitzer prize-winning novel (set in 1870's New York) cost 34 million dollars. It almost made back its budget in the United States and turned a profit in world-wide distribution – the picture earned 68 million with international receipts. Scorsese’s success with his 1993 Wharton adaptation suggested that an investment in the much cheaper Davies’ picture (it was budgeted for 8 million dollars, a modest sum in 2000) might turn out to be advantageous. (With international partners, the movie was mostly financed by Showtime for cable TV broadcast – but the success of the picture at Edinburgh Film Festival resulted in a theatrical release.) And, so, Davies was able to amass the funds to make the film, shooting the picture entirely on location in Glasgow, Scotland and environs since his budget couldn’t allocate funds for travel to the United States. House of Mirth was shot mostly in Glasgow, generally in art museums – a Glasgow art museum, for instance, stands in for Grand Central Terminal in New York City; exteriors were shot in the nearby Scottish countryside with local estate houses providing exteriors. Several social clubs, defunct at the time of the film’s production, offered their under-utilized premises as locations as well.
A comparison between Scorsese’s Age of Innocence and Davies’ House of Mirth is instructive. A good point of comparison are the opera scenes in the two films. Scorsese stages his film’s opening sequence in an actual opera house, shows a large audience, and captures scenes from the performance (it’s Gounod’s Faust) in his film. Like Davies, Scorsese uses a number of point-of-view shots since the point of Gilded Era opera was seeing and being seen, in some cases shooting in ways that simulate the perspective through opera glasses. Scorsese has the budget to use elaborate crane shots and shows the audience and stage analytically from a directly vertical perspective –that is, looking down on the action from a bird’s eye view (these shots have a Hitchcock flavor). Davies can’t show the seated audience since his budget doesn’t include money for large numbers of extras. He provides a majestic shot in slightly slow motion of the audience members in their resplendent plumage marching up the stairs, highlighting Lily’s glamorous red dress. We don’t see the orchestra or the stage and there are no shots surveying the audience. Instead, Davies stages the sequence accompanied by the overture of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti as a series of images showing the separate opera boxes in which Lily is seated with Gus Trenor and Rosedale surveyed by Lily’s Aunt Peniston and her cousin, Grace Stepney. A fragment of the audience is shown, about a dozen people in which Mr. Selden is located. The mise-en-scene involves Davies cutting between the sumptuous opera boxes which are, in effect, tableaux shots with figures enveloped in darkness. The scene showing the audience climbing the stairway into the building (and, then, ascending further within) impart to the imagery a wearisome aspect – this is a social ritual that, perhaps, no one enjoys very much, climbing laboriously up to see a performance that really isn’t the point of the exercise. (And, in fact, Lily and Gus Trenor leave the opera before the First Act even begins.) Cosi fan tutti (“They are all the same”) is Mozart’s most cynical and cruel opera – the fact the scene isn’t about music but adulterous flirting is wholly consistent with the subject-matter of the Mozart work.
Scorsese’s script written with Jay Cocks is studiously faithful to Wharton’s story. The script uses extensive voice-over (read by Joanne Woodward) that employs Wharton’s voice to make ironic comments on the action and tell us what characters are thinking. Davies doesn’t provide Wharton’s commentary, nor does he use voice-over to establish what people are thinking – one possible exception is a shot in a train returning from Trenor’s estate at Bellomont in which Lily seems to recall words spoken at the previous social engagement. However, this sequence is presented as Lily’s memories of something that has just occurred and is a short-hand way of establishing the hidden meaning of what we have just seen.
Davies, like Scorsese, adheres closely to Wharton’s novel. He makes several changes, but they are inconspicuous. First, there is only one kiss in Wharton’s novel between Lily and Mr. Selden – that occurs about 120 pages into the novel. Davies’ amplifies the erotic yearning by showing two kisses – the one that Wharton describes but another encounter, early in the picture (at about the 20 minute mark) in which Mr. Selden and Ms. Bart kiss outside on the path to the church after Lily has spurned Mr. Gryce. In Wharton’s novel, Grace Stepney said to be as glamorous “as roast mutton” exists primarily to be the priggish beneficiary of Mrs. Peniston’s legacy to the prejudice of Lily; Gerty Farrish, another remote relative, leads an exemplary if “dingy” life (to use Lily’s term of disapprobation) – she loves Mr. Selden and envies Lily’s relationship with that man, redoubling her efforts to help Lily as an exercise of perverse Schadenfreude after becoming aware of Selden’s devotion to Miss Bart. Davies combines the two characters into a single figure, here Grace Stepney. Miss Stepney both longs for Selden and ends up with Mrs. Peniston’s wealth once Lily is unceremoniously (mostly) disinherited.
Davies’ attention to detail is astonishing. The Marcello concerto that affords the theme music returns from time to time, sometimes transposed into a different key. (We hear the slow movement from Alessandro Marcello’s "Oboe Concerto in D minor" composed around 1730). When Lily lingers alone in her rooms at Mrs. Peniston’s house, we see her lit like a figure from Vermeer (Davies’ asserts Vermeer influences in his management of light in the film) and, then, tentatively play a few notes on a piano in the flat – the notes she plays comprise a part of the theme from concerto. In the outdoor scene in which Lily and Selden embrace under the tree during her walk to church, Scottish birds were singing loudly and were recorded on the soundtrack. Davies’ erased those sounds and laboriously substituted a recording of birds singing on America’s East Coast – he didn’t want to movie to have the wrong kinds of bird songs in it. Davies spent much time scouting locations in Glasgow to locate three side-by-side apartment buildings with high, twelve-step stoops – this is because entries to New York apartments at the turn of the 20th century were much taller than Scottish door stoops. I didn’t know this? Did you? And who cares? (By contrast, Davies’ engages in anachronism with regard to the opera scene involving Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti – that opera wasn’t premiered in the United States until 1922; therefore, using its overture in a scene set in 1905 is anachronistic. In the book, Wharton doesn’t specify the name of the opera). A trio aria from this opera also underlies the bravura passage in which Davies makes the transition from cold and rainy New York or, perhaps, Providence, Rhode Island and the sunny Mediterranean at Monte Carlo.
Three cinematic devices dominate Davies’ adaptation. These are the extensive use of mirrors, slow right to left tracking shots, and numerous dissolves. Whenever possible, Davies doubles Lily by showing her reflected in a mirror. The mirror seems to open space, but, in fact, emphasizes the closed nature of the society that the film shows. Mirrors aren’t windows and merely reflect the interior space, imbricating it and folding it inward. Further the mirror signifies Lily Bart’s dual nature: she is both within the social milieu shown in the film, but, also, stands apart from it, exercising her critical intelligence to anatomize the false position that she occupies – like Sim Rosedale, the nouveau riche Jew, Lily is a feature of high society, but not really integrated into it. Her consciousness of her ambiguous standing is established by the mirror shots in which she is both a part of the scene but also standing to its side.
Davies’ moves the camera, slowly sweeping in the direction that we read (left to right), to establish a lyrical tone. These sorts of shots generally accompany scenes between Lily and Selden. The camera motion suggests a parallel motion of the spirit or sensibility toward something that is never actually attained. Therefore, these languorous and poetic tracking shots evidence the unconsummated aspect of Lily and Selden’s romance. Often tracking shots of this sort conclude with a slow dissolve. The film contains dozens of dissolves to establish transitions or to overlay one character with another figure, fusing together Lily and Selden, for instance, in a cinematic coupling that can’t occur within the film’s narrative. Dissolves, although disrupting the narrative continuity – it’s a showy technique that draws attention to itself – nonetheless, also affirm the film’s closed nature. There’s no outside to the society that Davies and Wharton portray – it’s claustrophobic, looping into itself like a colorful Moebius strip. Ultimately, everything is fused together – images overlay images, and there’s no escape from the high society depicted in the movie. It’s all one substance. (By my count, there are 32 shots that dissolve into other images; 12 slow tracking shots from left to right and five tracking shots that move in the opposite direct -- that is, right to left. One crane shot moves the camera from a high vantage down to show us Lily working sewing spangles onto a hat in milliner's shop; this vertical camera movement clearly delineates Lily's fall, her motion downward in her social milieu. Tracking shots have an additional emotional effect of de-centering the protagonists, rendering them as simply another bit of decor in the overstuffed interiors shown in the film.)
The most aggressive use of dissolves occurs in the caesura at the movie’s one-hour mark. This passage equates to Wharton’s division of her book into two parts – just as Lily seems most cornered, rejected by Selden (who doesn’t come to the tea to which she invites him) and heavily indebted to Augustus (“Gus”) Trenor, Wharton allows Lily to ostensibly escape to the French Riviera; she leaves her straitened circumstances after being rebuked by Mrs. Peniston, departing from rainy New York to the warm, glittering Mediterranean. This break in the novel is depicted in a spectacular transition sequence invented by Davies as a stylistic division in the movie, a sort of lyrical intermission placed exactly where Wharton splits her book in half.
After Lily is disappointed by Sim Rosedale’s appearance in lieu of the wished-for Laurence Selden, the camera moves in the director’s characteristic slow tracking motion from left to right, scanning the room reflected in a mirror on the wall. (The shot duplicates an earlier scene in which the camera moved away from Lily, tracking to the left as she surveys her face in a mirror; this camera motion, however, concludes with the maid entering the chamber with the blackmailer who holds hostage Selden’s letters to Mrs. Dorset.) As the camera glides to the left, the shot dissolves into an image of an empty room, furniture ghostly under white sheets. There follows two more tracking shots, the camera moving at the same deliberate pace from left to right, but each shot dissolving into more distant shots of the empty interiors of the mansion and the abstract spectral shapes of the dust-mantles over the furniture. The final shot in this sequence is far enough away from the walls to show a window opening onto a milky opaque sky. This shot in turn dissolves into a tracking image across a garden that, in turn, dissolves into an image tracking (still left to right) across a masonry bridge above a watercourse. The shot dissolves again into a closer tracking image of rain pelting the surface of the small river. The white blisters of raindrops bursting in the river, then, dissolves into sun spangles on water, dissolving again into a moving shot (still right to left) in which the prow of the yacht, the Sabrina figures, the tracking camera, then, tilting upward to show a seaside tower against a glowing void of bright light – a concluding image that looks like a painting by Claude Lorrain. The transition, accompanied by a trio from Cosi fan tutti, has begun in an occupied mansion in New York, then, moved through the mansion after its inhabitants have gone to Europe for the Winter with the empty rooms giving way to a wintry rainstorm and, then, the sun decorating the limpid waters of the Mediterranean. It’s a spectacular passage that entirely extracts the viewer from within the film, moving us to a wholly new milieu in which, it seems, that Lily’s fortunes will change with the dramatic change in scenery. (In fact, this implication turns out to be a cruel joke, because Lily’s situation merely goes from bad to worse as a result of the Riviera sojourn.)
This transition, more or less marking the film’s mid-point, invokes three touchstones. The motif of yearning is established by the trio from the Mozart opera, obviously music about romantic love and longing. Second, there is the prose-poetry passage involving the summer house abandoned to the elements during World War One in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. (Davies has said that what is most important about any film is that which can not be shown – Woolf’s elliptical management of the transition in which several deaths occur, off-stage as it were, embodies this principle. Third, the image of the camera tracking across water dimpled by falling rain on a small stream alludes, I think, to Renoir’s A Day in the Country in which rain falling onto a river signifies the transition from the film’s present to a memory of the day that it represents (and which also reflects the difficulties of the short movie’s production – it rained all Summer during Renoir’s work on that film.) This elegant, and intensely moving, sequence in House of Mirth was controversial: Davies’ producers demanded that he cut the sequence since the film was, some thought, overlong at two-hours and fifteen minutes. In his commentary on the DVD version of House of Mirth, Davies says that he ‘had to fight’ to keep this passage a part of the movie. The Long Island to Monte Carlo transition, which also marks the passage of time, has the effect of offering respite to the audience from the Machiavellian maneuvering of the characters, decompressing the viewer and offering some release from our (and the heroine’s) anxiety about the situation which seems to have evolved into a deadly trap from which Lily can not escape. But the fact that the transitional sequence is composed of slow tracking motions from right to left and dissolves, that is, the characteristic film grammar of emotion in House of Mirth, signifies that there can be no real escape. And the spectral imagery of the ghostly white furniture and the cold rain pelting the stream foreshadow the doom that hangs over the second half of the movie. And the first several shots in the Riviera sequence, involving Selden’s unexpected appearance (he turns up here when he didn’t appear at Mrs. Peniston’s mansion to which Lily had invivted him), further exacerbates our sense of confinement – here in Europe, it will be simply be the same conniving and slander as on Fifth Avenue, but in a different place.
Of course, Davies and company couldn’t afford a trip to the French Riviera. All exteriors purporting to show the French coastline and manors in that location are contrived by CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). Similarly, the big exterior shot in New York when Lily meets Sim Rosedale by accident under the elevated train is also populated by CGI phantoms and digital buildings – the only thing real in that shot is a long stairway descending from the train platform that existed somewhere in Glasgow. The film’s second half reverses some the pictorial grammar established in the first part of the movie. There are two long tracking shots, but this time staged from right to left; the film literally “undoes”
what it has previously accomplished in the first half. One of these shots is a right to left movement that shows the beneficiaries to Mrs. Peniston’s Will waiting for the lawyer to read the testamentary bequests – this reversal of fortune “undoes” Lily and so is filmed with camera moving contrary to the paradigm established earlier in the movie. Similarly, Lily’s catastrophic decision to burn the blackmail letters is shown in a right to left tracking shot, moving across Selden’s parlor to the hearth where the papers are thrown upon scarcely burning embers. (The large cheery fires from the first half of the movie are now banked and sullen.) When Lily is shown taking Mrs. Hatch’s sedative for the first time on-screen, the camera tracks right to left again, an uncanny movement that ends on a strange abstract pattern of curtains, iron-work, and fire escapes, a kind of nocturnal cage in which the heroine seems trapped. Davies films Lily in full frontal approach to the camera, passing through an ornate shadowy gateway after rejecting Rosedale’s “no strings attached” offer of assistance. This image mirrors the second shot in the film in which Lily moves through the steam roiling around a brutal-looking locomotive in Grand Central Terminal. (This opening shot cites Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in which a yellow cab prowls through steam leaking out of a manhole-cover in Times Square.) In the movie’s opening sequence, the screen is covered by parasols, a striking image that Davies intends for us to remember. As Lily walks along the street, disconsolate, she is pelted by the rain as she approaches the Benedick apartments – now she is literally unhoused and exposed to the elements, again a sharp contrast that Davies draws with the film’s beginning. (This parallels Wharton’s symmetrical construction of the novel: the book begins with Selden seeing Lily in the train terminal; the novel ends with Selden seeing Lily dead on the bed in her rented room.)
The music underlying the movie’s last few scenes now deviates from the classical (Hayden and Mozart) and baroque (the Marcello oboe concerto) in the first half of the movie. Several sequences are scored to Morton Feldman’s modernist atonal piece “The Rothko Chapel”. In the first scene in which we see Lily taking chloral (laudanum as it’s identified in the movie), there are sounds faintly heard from the teeming street and, then, in a very strange cue, an Estonian resistance song from World War Two (“Still, Still”) played in a version that has been intentionally disfigured and aged to simulate the sound of a 1907 wax cylinder recording. Davies intended to end the movie prior to the final title (“New York 1907") with street scenes showing that Lily’s tragedy occurs in the midst of life indifferent to her story. But money had run out and, so, Davies elects to freeze-frame the shot of Selden kneeling at Lily’s bedside, draining all the color out of the image as the screen darkens. This ending is equivalent to Wharton’s final paragraphs in the novel, an unintentional fidelity to the book arising from Davies’ low budget.
Davies, who loved poetry, directed his cast and crew by reading verse before important scenes so as to set the tone. It’s no surprise that the scene showing Lily’s suicide was prefaced by Davies reading from Keats “Ode to a Nightingale”. Before shooting the final scene with Lily’s body and the mourning Selden, Davies read aloud Mahler’s 1901 notes to his Resurrection (2nd Symphony). About the final movement, Mahler wrote: “All is quiet and blissful. Lo and behold, there is no judgement, no sinners, no just men, no great and small; there is no great and small; no punishment and no reward. A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with blissful knowledge and illuminates our existence.” (Davies misremembers the quote in the DVD commentary on House of Mirth and badly botches the citation.)
Gillian Anderson on Davies’ death (October 7, 2023)
Gillian Anderson told Variety: “Davies gave me my first ‘proper’ film job. I was 30/31 between season six and seven of The X-Files. This obscure director, whose work I happened to be obsessed with, offered me a leading role not because he had seen my work but because he’s said, my face fit the era.” (Davies said that Gillian Anderson looked like a portrait painted by John Singer Sargent – in his commentary track to the DVD, Davies repeatedly says that he framed and filmed Anderson to make her look like Barbara Stanwyck; at another point, Davies says that Anderson reminded him of the female figure in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting “Beata Beatrice.”) “Whatever Mr. Davies’ impetus to invite me to ditch aliens for Wharton was a dream come true and I remain forever grateful.”
On his website, someone posted two quotes on the day after Davies’ death”
Pulvis et Umbra Sumus – that is, Horace: “We are only dust and shadow.”
“And, if thou wilt, remember / And, if thou wilt, forget.” – Christina Rossetti.
An obituary of Davies published in The New York Times says that the director hated his homosexuality, lived alone after 1980, and “that he left no known survivors.”
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