"Hold me, Gerty, hold me": Lily Bart's Queer Desire

Abstract:In her provocatively titled article from 2007, Katherine Joslin asks "Is Lily Gay?" Such a line of questioning is part of the queer turn in Wharton scholarship, which aims to complicate traditional criticism often based on heterosexual or binary assumptions. This study uses Joslin's bold and exciting question as a starting point in an effort to extend the argument further. It proposes a queer reading of The House of Mirth that takes into consideration Edith Wharton's own contradictory attitudes toward queer sexuality, situating the text within historical notions of queerness from the turn of the century. Lily Bart is then "queered" through the use of Georg Simmel's theories of flirtation, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's literary love triangles, and close readings of the novel's "queer episodes" that tease out the meanings behind Wharton's sensual language. The study predominantly questions Lily's failure to cooperate with fixed notions of futurity—in this case signified by marriage—proposing that this refusal serves to destabilize linear heteronormative growth and positions her in a state of queered flux. Such a reading therefore attempts to reconsider traditional heteronormative understandings of The House of Mirth.