Introduction

Deborah Wynne, in her study of Victorian women and portable property, notes that in the absence of full property rights or economic means, women turned to less substantial objects as a substitute at a time when more durable forms of ownership remained unavailable to them: ‘Denied full access to the ownership of real property, women made do with securing their identity on […] personal, portable things’ (2010: 35). Pitted against an architectural paradigm, portability, here, becomes index not only to insubstantiality but also, by extension, to impermanence and ephemerality. The idea of making do might suggest that more insubstantial or ephemeral objects construct selfhoods that are somehow lacking or, at least, less robust. Yet Wynne goes on to note that such ‘things’ might equally be seen to offer a more ‘flexible alternative to real estate’ (2010: 35). The emphasis in this latter quotation is less on making do and more on acknowledging the unfixed or fluid opportunities and freedoms enabled by ephemeral materiality over and above so-called ‘real’ property, what José Esteban Muñoz has theorized in terms of ‘a modality of anti-rigor and anti-evidence’ which he aligns with a ‘queer impulse’ (1996: 10, 6). This approach entails harnessing the potential of an ephemeral mode and outlook rather than seeing it as a poor substitute for a more anchored or stable form of material possession. At its most radical, it is an approach that involves recognising, as proposed by Sarah Wasserman, ‘that even temporary formations can carry with them the possibility of real action’ (2020: 37).

My contribution to this Open Library of Humanities special collection considers Edith Wharton’s negotiation of the various implications of ephemeral constructions of feminine selfhood, particularly in her portraits of women of reduced means whose moral standing is questioned in proportion to their failure to secure an anchored social position. I compare two of her female protagonists whose packed cases are posited as mobile archives of ephemeral experience: Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905) and Susy Lansing in The Glimpses of the Moon (1922). Comprising curated collections of ‘personal, portable things’ (Wynne, 2010: 35) – from passing gifts that speak to the compromised and precarious position of the guest, to defunct items of clothing that conjure past moments of happiness – their cases form material summations of the components and contours of an unrooted, transitory life, while also conforming to Jeremy Braddock’s conception of the collection as an ‘authored work’ (2012: 6; emphasis in original). I loosely interpret ephemeral materiality here as a form of materiality that implies impermanence and a lack of enduring attachment rather than a secure and attached kind of settlement, domestic or otherwise. In particular, the fall from grace of Lily Bart is rendered, in part, as a function of Lily’s inability to see in her own trunk of personal ephemera a form for her deliverance rather than her demise. Drawing on the portrait of Carrie Meeber in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and with reference to Wharton’s later re-writing of the character of Lily through the figure of Susy Lansing, the essay will argue that, in Wharton’s work, the act of ‘managing’ a bag – construed, here, as vessel for a more ephemeral, insubstantial and mobile mode of material existence – stands for a kind of female self-sufficiency that is often most conspicuous in its absence.

Lily offers a necessary and instructive counterpoint to those historic and fictional examples of women who brandished bags as emblematic of a freedom from proprietary mores and expectations (Ridge, 2014). Her luggage is indicative of a failure to establish herself in marital and domestic terms, rather than of a liberating portability. For both Lily and Susy, portable and personal ephemeral objects represent an unwanted form of disenfranchisement but, equally, point to an alluring mode of episodic and experimental possibility beyond the scope of an established domestic or social order. As a comparison of the two novels reveals, the future welfare of Wharton’s transient female protagonists (Lily and Susy are representative here) depends on which version of this narrative they choose to adopt: whether they conceptualise their own ephemeral archives in terms of exclusion, or of dynamic and subversive potential. The narrative outcomes of these texts depend, furthermore, on the kinds of ephemeral materials the protagonists carry with them; as I will show, materials that allude to an ever-evolving present as opposed to a lost past allow for a more enabling model of transience.

As a preface to this discussion, I would briefly alert the reader to the class and racial dimensions of Wharton’s portraits of ephemeral female subjectivity more generally. The escapist ideal of lightweight, transitory mobility of body and mind, recurrent in her work, is often only manifested in concrete terms within very narrow class confines and is enacted by white women. Travelling light and without binding material ties, though frequently construed as a sort of divine and spiritual quest for those in search of the flying ship that will take them ‘Beyond!’ (1990: 122), to invoke Lily Bart’s grey letter seal in The House of Mirth, is pointedly presented, on the purely practical level of bodily ease of movement, as a privilege only the very rich can afford: the select few who never have to shift their own heavy trunks. It must, moreover, be understood as a facet of white privilege.

In the elite circles Wharton spotlights, travelling light amounts to keeping up an unencumbered appearance and thus becomes a fashionable and necessary trompe l’oeil. Kate Clephane’s budgetary justification, early in The Mother’s Recompense (1925), for retaining a maid over and above staying in an expensive hotel, brings this necessity to the fore:

[…] it looked better for a lone woman who, after having been thirty-nine for a number of years, had suddenly become forty-four, to have a respectable-looking servant in the background; to be able, for instance, when one arrived in new places, to say to supercilious hotel-clerks: “My maid is following with the luggage” (1996: 6).

The detachment of a female character from her luggage, the displacement of visible bulk to preserve an air of respectability but also class-conscious femininity, becomes a marker of her position on a well-defined social scale; by the same token, her involvement with the composition and carriage of her luggage can be seen to correspond to a decline in social prospects (one must assume that the very lowest point on this hypothetical scale would see the character take on the composition and carriage of another woman’s bags). Concomitantly, the authentic act of travelling light, without maid or encumbering luggage, generates suspicion of looseness from the point of view of morality. The Reef, for example, turns around the question of how the young Sophy Viner, notably linked to lost luggage from her first appearance, should be judged for her part in a fleeting Parisian affair; it is in the attempt to relocate her lost trunk that the affair begins. In Wharton’s fiction, imagery of and around women’s luggage demands sensitivity to the social codes and significations embedded in the practice of its manoeuvre. My own interest in her work lies not in her attempt to subvert those codes and significations – though there is, at times, evidence of such an attempt, particularly in The Reef – but in revealing the trompe l’oeil for what it really is. Wharton’s fiction exposes the gilt-edged frame encompassing the freedom of the upper-class woman in fin de siècle New York through portraits of women no longer able or willing to keep up the moneyed pretence of free movement.

Wharton’s preoccupation with these individual narratives of ephemeral female experience, whether ephemerality is performed to achieve a particular effect or imposed by external circumstance, is problematically pitted, on a broader aesthetic level, against an outward critical and formal preference for a literary architecture envisioned as masculine. Wharton took an active interest in architectural history, having published two non-fiction books on the subjects of interior design and Italian architecture respectively at an early stage in her career.¹ Her conception of an art of decoration that moved away from a ‘superficial application of ornament totally independent of structure’ towards a form of ornamentation that takes into account ‘architectural features which are part of the organism of every house’ might be read as an attempt to legitimate decorative detail, traditionally deemed and even dismissed as feminine, by infusing it with a quality of architectural permanence (Wharton and Codman Jr., 1898: xix).²

This pursuit of a masculine form of architectural legitimacy extended to her literary critical commentary. Indeed, her work presupposes a literary architectural precedence: ‘I conceive my subjects like a man – that is, rather more architectonically and dramatically than most women’, she remarked in a letter to Robert Grant on 19 November 1907, continuing: ‘–& then execute them like a woman; or rather, I sacrifice, to my desire for construction and breadth, the small incidental effects that women have always excelled in, the episodical characterisation, I mean’ (Joslin, 1999: 62). Later, in 1934, Wharton goes so far as to use luggage as an analogue for a modern form of ‘over-packed’ narrative which manifests excessive zealousness in its attention to episodic detail: ‘The mid-nineteenth century group selected; the new novelists profess to pour everything out of their bag’ (‘Tendencies’, 1996: 172). She extends this criticism and accompanying analogy in a further essay, noting that what was being roundly celebrated as a ‘new form of novel’ was ‘really only a literary hold-all’ (‘Permanent’, 1996: 176). The cumulative implication of these pejorative statements is that the episodic is devoid of structure, form and discernment.³

Nevertheless, despite her professed preference for controlled architectonic design, ‘small, incidental effects’ recur throughout Wharton’s work, often as an aspect of her portrayal of the gendered experience of ephemeral materiality. The ephemeral, as I will argue, lends itself to episodic forms of portraiture and description in these texts, to the extent that we might align what she saw as a feminine mode of episodical characterisation with the deviant trajectories of her transient female characters, who, with their ephemeral possessions in tow, display a modern resistance to complete architectonic containment. This reading posits Wharton’s work as part of what Wasserman has described as a ‘longer lineage of women’s writing on ephemera’ while equally exposing the ‘vexed status that the writing of women has long had as ephemeral’ (2020: 33; emphasis in original). I will return to some of these issues in my conclusion but suffice it to say for now that Wharton’s thematic negotiations between a seemingly stable mode of domesticity and a transitory mode of ephemerality resonate, in intriguing ways, with her critical reflections.

Carrie Meeber’s Imitation Skin

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is long held to have had a formative influence on Wharton. It is a work cited by Maureen Howard (1995: 142) as one of two key novels Wharton had at the forefront of her mind in the composition of The House of Mirth (the other was Jane Austen’s Emma) while J. Michael Duvall has called Carrie ‘Lily’s literary cousin’ (2007: 161; see also Price, 1980). If The House of Mirth was informed by this earlier novel, then our approach to the ephemeral contents of Lily’s luggage might itself be informed by a contemplation of Carrie’s. The opening description of this character with all her trappings gives a microcosmic insight into the concerns of the narrative to follow:

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, which was checked in the baggage car, a cheap imitation alligator skin satchel holding some minor details of the toilet, a small lunch in a paper box and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren St, and 4 dollars in money. It was August, 1889 (Dreiser, 1986: 3).

Carrie is emphatically associated with her luggage, literal and metaphorical, throughout. The fact that the fabric of her satchel is a ‘cheap imitation’ evokes Wynne’s comments on women’s more portable possessions as substitutive, simulated manifestations of ownership. The ephemera contained within and around Carrie’s luggage – ‘small’, ‘cheap’, ‘minor’, scrapped together – register her inconsequentiality and her negligibility with regard to property, means and social status. It is the first thing the reader is made to notice about her character, a crucial initiation into what Wasserman calls, in a reading of the same passage, the ‘challenges of a transient object world’ (2020: 4–5).

Nevertheless, it is this perceived ephemerality, emerging from her luggage, that initially makes Carrie attractive to the men she encounters and subsequently enters into dependent relationships with: first, travelling salesman Charles Drouet and, later, married man George Hurstwood. In advance of his initial encounter with Carrie, Hurstwood (misguidedly) anticipates a ‘new baggage of fine clothes and pretty features’, tasked with providing a ‘lightsome’ diversion before disappearing ‘forever’ (Dreiser, 1986: 122). Such descriptive vocabulary corresponds with the definition of ephemeral objects as ‘[t]hings that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time’ (Oxford Reference, 2024). Hurstwood, to put this another way, has no intention of becoming involved in a long-term attachment in advance of his first meeting with Carrie; he envisages and seeks a short-term, throwaway encounter. Yet Carrie overturns such expectations, proving both more substantial and more durable as the novel progresses. Through her characterisation, Dreiser imbues the challenges of the novel’s transient object world referenced by Wasserman: ‘Because ephemera vanish in principle, and yet so often remain with us, they dramatize the dynamics between the temporary and the permanent, between extinction and longevity, and thus between the valueless and the valuable’ (2020: 3).

Not insignificantly, Carrie’s luggage comes to be poised, paradoxically, between lightweight ephemerality and burdensome durability on a conceptual level. While registering negligibility, for instance, on her first appearance in the text, her accoutrements later reinforce the sense of her entrapment within the prescribed role of immoral or common ‘baggage’, a term widely used to denote a disreputable woman (Oxford English Dictionary, 2023). After taking up with Hurstwood, who lures her away from Chicago by train and even buys her a trunk, Carrie senses that she is ‘being unjustly dealt with and made baggage of’ (Dreiser, 1986: 282). The literal and metaphorical become interchangeable here. ‘Made baggage of’ in this objective way, Carrie is allotted the figurative role of ‘baggage’ of disrepute, an inversion of the conventional allotment of the socially acceptable role of ‘housewife’ through the offer of a marital home. (Carrie and Hurstwood do later marry but it is a sham marriage, and they use false names.) Ephemerality and burden are conceived thus, through the shifting significations surrounding Carrie’s luggage in the text, as flip sides of an enforced form of subjection peculiar to women of Carrie’s background at this socio-historical juncture, the former indicating social insignificance and the latter encumbrance. This mode of two-sided subjection amounts to being under-valued and over-valued at the same time, both inconsequential and an imposition.

As the narrative evolves, however, it is Hurstwood, rather than Carrie, who proves to be the baggage in the relationship, transfigured into a ‘perfect load to contemplate’ later in the novel (Dreiser, 1986: 398). As his reputation, self-confidence and financial security collapse, he becomes increasingly dependent on Carrie, forcing her eventually to step up to bear financial responsibility for the two. It seems that Carrie is, indeed, fated to ‘carry’ in this novel, a fate inscribed in the opening paragraph in the accumulation of all manner of paraphernalia about her person. Yet she determines, with decisiveness albeit some misgiving, if not to escape, at least to modify, that fate. In her eventual abandonment of Hurstwood, she abandons the ‘perfect load’ he represents and, in doing so, she equally reinvents the ‘baggage’ as a woman of independent means. Leaving the furniture in their shared flat, Carrie takes her very few portable belongings with her in the ‘trunk he had bought for her in Montreal’ (1986: 436) and the absence of this trunk, ‘gone from its accustomed place’ (1986: 439), is noted by Hurstwood in returning to the empty flat. Carrie appropriates the trunk as a symbol of newly-wrought self-sufficiency as opposed to the immoral and encumbering reliance for which it originally stood, recovering something of the ephemeral quality of that opening description of her character but without the implication of degradation and diminished value.

Carrie finds a degree of material success while Hurstwood sinks in Sister Carrie because she puts the skills she has to the best use in her circumstances in learning to ‘carry herself’ (1986: 401) to the best effect, a faculty integral to the theatrical career she pursues. That she pursues a theatrical career is important. The theatre had long been popularly connected with ‘loose women’, a connection signalling not just immorality, but financial independence (Auster, 1984; Gardner and Rutherford, 1992). Howard comments that Carrie’s freedom is ‘won by disguise and concealment’ and further observes that she ‘finds herself in being other than she is’ (1995: 151). I would add that Carrie’s baggage becomes her business in this way, her means of conveying the materials of her art of disguise, indeed even the expression of that art; this reading returns us, once more, to that original conception of her luggage in terms of ephemerality in that acting involves the temporary adoption of ephemeral identities. This shape-shifting capacity is also invoked in her last name, Meeber, which nods to the amorphous attributes of the ‘amoeba’ organism (McNamara, 1992: 224). As Rachel Bowlby notes, her achievement is ‘premised upon her own conscientious reproduction of the dress and manners of women she sees about her’ (1985: 62).

Her theatrical star begins to rise only when she has succeeded in aptly combining the qualities of imitative display with an understanding of audience desire, to theatrically embrace the figure indulgently anticipated by Hurstwood, earlier on, of a pretty ‘new baggage’ with whom he may do as he pleases. We are told of her performance as a little Quakeress which wins her notice in New York: ‘The portly gentlemen in the front rows began to feel that she was a delicious little morsel. It was the kind of frown they would have loved to force away with kisses. All the gentlemen yearned towards her. She was capital’ (Dreiser, 1986: 447). Carrie is capital, indeed, but with this critical difference: she is her own ‘capital’.⁴ What the gentlemen encounter is a new stage baggage with pretty features and an air of ephemerality, promising short-term, throwaway pleasure. At the same time, this is a baggage with a deceptively thick ‘imitation’ skin. In the end, Carrie’s survival and success must partly be attributed to her ability to ‘carry’ people away in fantasy through sustaining an illusion of casual availability when, in reality, she refuses to be carried away herself and declines to carry any load but her own.

Lily Bart’s Static Trunk

The carriage of collected ephemera similarly enters Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Glimpses of the Moon, albeit with some vital qualifications, posing a dilemma which has a significant bearing on the narrative outcome for each female protagonist. With her thickly developed imitation skin, the provincial Carrie is deliberately set apart from the ‘beautiful, insolent, supercilious creatures’ (Dreiser, 1986: 325) she longingly perceives parading along 34^th street from out of their regular ‘hot-houses’; it is in this respect that she can, in turn, be differentiated from Lily Bart and Susy Lansing in Wharton’s later works, characters who form a part – if a far from guaranteed part – of that elitist hot-housed culture. Lily and Susy are both posited as women with bags, women who lean towards more ephemeral positionalities and identities; but they play these roles with considerable reluctance, from the outset, in Lily’s case, and progressively, in Susy’s. The House of Mirth, in particular, portrays Lily as a woman cast out of the house – paradigmatic locus of established domesticity and longevity – and continually on the look-out for a more permanent way back in. She is not a woman who walks out of her own accord (though this is a contending urge felt by her character).

The metaphor of the ‘load’ forms one important thread in the intricately woven figurative web which attends the characterisation of Lily from an early juncture in The House of Mirth. (Other figurative strands attending her characterisation turn, for instance, around waste/disposal and nature/artifice.) Its use discloses a contradictory quality in her character and brings to light, by extension, some of the unresolved paradoxes in the text as a whole. The following four instances of the employment of this metaphor give a sense of the extensiveness of its application but also of its semantic plasticity:

1. She returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks up a heavy load and toils on after a brief rest (Wharton, 1990: 25).

2. The certainty that she could marry Percy Gryce when she pleased had lifted a heavy load from her mind and her money troubles were too recent for their removal not to leave a sense of relief which a less discerning intelligence might have taken for happiness (Wharton, 1990: 41).

3. Again she felt the lightening of her load, and with it the release of repressed activities (Wharton, 1990: 68).

4. Her whole future might hinge on her way of answering [Mr. Rosedale]: she had to stop and consider that, in the stress of her other anxieties, as a breathless fugitive may have to pause at the cross-roads and try to decide coolly which turn to take. […] the chill of [Selden’s] delay settled heavily on her fagged spirit (Wharton, 1990: 141).

The first two images refer to the early prospect of a marriage to the rich but lamentably dull young Percy Gryce, a marital union which would solve Lily’s financial troubles. The image recurs again, in the third instance, in response to the financial aid seemingly freely offered by the husband of a friend, Gus Trenor, the true cost of which is only later revealed. Finally, in the fourth, it appears in response to an unwanted proposal of marriage from financial magnate and social parvenu, Mr Rosedale, whose visit to Lily coincides rather unsettlingly with the failure of Lawrence Selden, the real object of Lily’s affections, to appear as expected.

As a juxtaposition of these quotations reveals, Lily’s load signifies financial anxiety (quotations 2 and 3) on the one hand, and the burden of a stagnant financial security (quotation 1) on the other. The thought of marriage to Percy (and later on, the thought of Gus Trenor’s spuriously offered aid) weighs upon but equally relieves Lily. If the freedom to move is constrained by material considerations, it is also intimated that such constraints can only be cast off by relinquishing the freedom to move altogether. Lily seemingly cannot travel light without money attained through compromising, indeed abandoning, her own moral code. The respectable alternative is a financial security which would fix her in place and to a man. Thus, Lily is burdened by moral as well financial anxieties. It becomes apparent that travelling light as a woman – the embrace of an ephemeral form of experience that is detached from more enduring material responsibilities as well as the vestiges of propriety – would be socially construed as travelling without morals, a conundrum Wharton would come back to in The Reef. This forms Lily’s predicament at the ‘cross-roads’ confronted in the fourth quotation, poised as she is throughout the novel ‘between domestic asylums that underscore the impossibility of marriage without male dominance’ (Loving, 1999: 105). Her inability to ‘decide coolly’ between the two turns ultimately fixes her in place without any financial security at all. As Gavin Jones astutely observes in a comparative analysis of the novels of Wharton and Dreiser, it is Lily’s subjection to oppositional forces pertaining to her precarity that demobilises her: ‘If poverty features in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie as a device of consistent descent where Hurstwood is concerned, and of consistent ascent where Carrie is concerned (in the sense that the fear of poverty drives Carrie upward), then The House of Mirth is remarkable for its compounding of these forces into a single character’ (2008: 97–8).

The paralysing conflict that ensues from Lily’s experience of precarity informs The House of Mirth from start to finish. Lily possesses a ‘streak of sylvan freedom’ (Wharton, 1990: 12) which cannot be reconciled with a contesting desire for establishment, continuity and security through more durable forms of possession as epitomised in the ‘concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories’ (248). As Linda S. Watts observes in an essay which interrogates this conflict in terms of the spatial and property rights of women of Lily’s milieu, ‘a good deal of [her] energy goes toward repressing both her desire for independence and her knowledge of that goal’s elusiveness’ (2007: 194), contributing to an eventual lack of agency ‘[w]ithout a domestic venue’ (2007: 195). Her attraction to and repulsion from the idea of a concrete domestic structure engenders a sense of detention, localised in the image of the static trunk of the ‘female sojourner’ (Watts, 2007: 196) with nowhere left to go, packed with a selective store of visceral recollections and disappointed aspirations.

This image, counterpoint to the ‘old house’, occurs at the end of the novel, when Lily, in her dingy boarding-house surroundings, goes over her remaining possessions:

Last of all, she drew forth from the bottom of her trunk a heap of white drapery which fell shapelessly across her arm. It was the Reynolds dress she had worn in the Bry tableaux. It had been impossible for her to give it away, but she had never seen it since that night, and the long flexible folds, as she shook them out, gave forth an odour of violets which came to her like a breath from the flower-edged fountain where she had stood with Lawrence Selden and disowned her fate. She put back the dresses one by one, laying away with each some gleam of light, some note of laughter, some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure. She was still in a state of highly-wrought impressionability, and every hint of the past sent a lingering tremor along her nerves (Wharton, 1990: 247; emphasis in original).

Lily’s carefully preserved dresses conform to Wasserman’s understanding of ephemeral objects in that they are ‘keyed to specific occasions that they outlast’ (2020: 6). As Muñoz puts it, ephemera is a ‘kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself’; as such, he defines it not in terms of its dependence on ‘epistemological foundations’ but in terms of its pursuit of ‘traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things’ (1996: 10). Likewise, Lily’s trunk is a repository of memories fragrant, quite literally, with the sense/scent of the possibility of an earlier time. It is an archive of ephemeral sensations and evocations that emerge from salvaged materials – gleams of light, notes of laughter, stray wafts of past pleasure – and this is not least because its contents point to a brief and glimmering epoch of social success and acceptance that cannot now be recovered. I draw particular attention to the idea of a disownment of fate above. The verb ‘to disown’ might be read in a number of different ways in the context of Lily’s recollection of the ‘exquisite’ (Wharton, 1990: 109) moment in which Selden’s love for her is vocalised and seen, fleetingly, to be reciprocated. To disown one’s fate is to refuse to acknowledge it, to deny it. But, taking account of the recurring proprietary motif throughout the text, to ‘dis-own’ here is also to cede possession of that fate, to raise (if only for an instant) the ‘roof of the soul’ (Wharton, 1990: 122), and to open oneself up to incalculability beyond an authorised proprietorial framework.⁵ This accords with William E. Moddelmog’s reading of the ‘illegible element at the core of Lily’s self’ (1998: 339) as a function of her ultimate and subversive elusion of the ‘legal, domestic and literary parameters of “personality”’ (1998: 340).

This most vital memory that Lily preserves in her trunk thus involves, appropriately enough, a form of self-dispossession as well as a momentary denial of the ‘heavy load’ she has carried throughout the book. Above all, it is a memory that refers to a passing moment that captures the essence of the ephemeral at its purest, a moment defying conceptions of permanence and touching on beauty, truth, mystery and possibility. Now, at the end of the novel, that very memory of fragile, fleeting beauty and reciprocation becomes the weightiest element of her load, transforming tokens of a former joie de vivre into a garish spectacle of ongoing alienation. In a certain way, the above passage anticipates the figurative terms of Newland Archer’s sudden forced contemplation of the ‘packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime’ (Wharton, 2003: 214), when faced with the prospect of meeting old and unforgotten flame, Countess Ellen Olenska, after a gap of twenty-six years, in The Age of Innocence (1920). What is packed up for departure in The House of Mirth is eventually packed away in a still-standing trunk, the visual expression of a still-born escape and, at the same time, an unending homelessness which is inscribed in Lily’s narrative from its recounted beginnings.

Indeed, chief amongst Lily’s earliest memories of a chaotic and transient youth is the recollection of ‘precipitate trips to Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of interminable unpacking’ (Wharton, 1990: 25), a hyperbolic vision that foreshadows the nightmarish aspect of her concluding houseless fixity. Her perusal of the contents of that final static trunk explicitly produces the ‘feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them’ (Wharton, 1990: 248). This image contrastingly frames ephemerality in terms of insufficiency and what Jones calls a ‘curious annihilation of selfhood’ in a discussion of the same passage (2008: 99); it represents a negative incarnation of the kind of transcendent immateriality that Lily repeatedly craves. The trunk thus embodies an important set of contradictions: Lily is both weighed down and completely unmoored by an idealised vision of ephemerality preserved through treasured objects that have no real bearing on the horrifying material reality of her ongoing transient condition.

Both metaphorical and actual loads are laid down and merge in the image of Lily’s trunk. However, Lily (though metaphorically over-laden throughout) is never, in fact, shown to carry her own (actual) luggage in the novel. I nodded earlier to the sociological dimension of Wharton’s representation of luggage and ephemerality. Certainly, when we first encounter her through Selden, Lily’s luggage remains concealed to the degree that her footing in the upper social echelons is more assured. In other words, Lily is far from being in a position where she is required to carry her own bag. Selden markedly sets her apart from the crowd in this respect:

He led her through the throng of returning holiday makers, past sallow-faced girls in preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly specialised she was (Wharton, 1990: 6).

Through not having to struggle with her own bundles and thus maintaining an unburdened appearance, Lily is distinguished, both in class, and also in racial terms, from these sallow-faced, over-laden women as a sort of ‘specialised’ species. However, this distinction contributes, in large measure, to her later collapse. Claire Preston interprets her ‘specialised’ quality through an evolutionary framework, with a focus on the image of the ‘hot-house’, earlier invoked in Sister Carrie, as Lily’s necessary environment, an image which implies the development of refined features which cannot survive in the ‘explicitly Darwinian ecosystem of The House of Mirth’ (2000: 50). When Lily gradually loses her social footing and is forced into relation with the ‘average section of womanhood’,⁶ it is her specially cultivated delicacy which accounts for her inability to measure up to the task of carrying her own bundles in their midst.

That Lily never visibly manoeuvres any trunks or bags in The House of Mirth only reveals that it is a task which is beyond her. Her lack of resilience makes her unfit to inhabit an indubitably material and competitive world, an unfitness which Preston relates directly to luggage:

In what is perhaps the most telling incident in the novel, Lily recklessly gives to Gerty’s charity the money intended to pay for a very elaborate new dressing case, merely because a self-congratulatory eleemosynary mood is on her for delaying the order when (coincidentally) she runs into Gerty. (Lily would require lessons in domestic account-keeping if she were ever to find a place of her own). The luxurious valise with its many drawers and compartments is as complicated architecturally as a house, and Lily would virtually live out of it, her money, checkbook, library (a single volume of Omar), ornaments, and toilet articles all disposed in their appropriate places. […] [F]or Lily the case would in some literal sense be ‘home’. Instead it is casually converted into a place for working girls to keep them off the streets; Lily gives away her dwelling place en passant (2000: 70; emphasis in original).

In other words, if Lily had recognised the expediency of embracing a dressing-case as dwelling-place in miniature, a process of adaptation to reduced circumstances and a movement towards proprietorial self-sufficiency through the form of substitutive home (to re-echo Wynne), her end might well have been different. Instead, she clings to a trunk that encapsulates a self-defeating paradox with implications that extend beyond Lily’s own individual circumstances. Lightweight immateriality is revealed as an impossible fantasy in the current system of possessive individualism but so is a form of independent female proprietorship equal to Selden’s, as Lily remarks when she visits his flat: ‘“How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman”’ (Wharton, 1990: 8). If, as Watts argues, Lily ‘wishes to control her destiny but fails in this hope as long as she fails to establish domestic control’ (2007: 194), then the procurement of this ‘dressing-case of the most complicated elegance’ (Wharton, 1990: 87) would have been tantamount, on a symbolic level, to taking ownership of her fate, to assuming self-possession on a small scale without fully submitting to the requirements of that larger proprietorial system. It would have entailed channelling, above all, the power of an ephemeral materiality shaped by present-oriented and concrete pragmatism over and above a backward-looking idealism. The elaborate dressing-case suggests one solution detrimentally overlooked. This is not least because the elaborate dressing-case implies an elaborate dressing-up case and, as a symbol, its sacrifice points to the loss of the means by which Lily can practise the trompe l’oeil so essential to maintaining even a modicum of social success.

In her inability to adjust in this way and to recognise in such an ephemeral materiality the possibility of taking control of her life, Lily is exposed as unfit for selective survival. This is in stark contrast to Dreiser’s Carrie. Caren J. Town identifies this difference in a reading of the two characters together: ‘Because Carrie has the ability or inclination to become what she beholds around her, she will rise in a society obsessed with the material. Because Lily fails to recognize that there is no self without the appropriate trappings, she fails to survive in this materialistic world’ (1994: 45). In other words, Carrie cultivates the art of ephemeral camouflage in direct proportion to Lily’s forfeiture of the same art (and it is ironically the memory of her former skill at this art that she keeps in her trunk through the dress she wore in her incarnation as Mrs Lloyd for the Bry tableaux.) If Carrie makes baggage her business, Lily makes it her loss.

Susy Lansing’s Managed Ephemerality

In creating another Lily-like character in the shape of Susy Lansing in The Glimpses of the Moon, Wharton takes pains to amend this deficiency. Susy was largely understood, at the time, to represent a return to the character of Lily in The House of Mirth. Wharton was, in fact, directly requested by her publishers to write another House of Mirth, according to Preston (2000: 160). Most conspicuously, in her depiction of the relationship between the characters of Susy and Nick Lansing in the latter novel, we find a re-imagining of the ‘what might have been’ between Lily and Lawrence Selden (in that Susy and Nick come together while Lily and Selden are doomed to remain apart). Indeed, the parallels are deliberately evoked throughout The Glimpses of the Moon. Susy, in one instance, toys with the possibility, in passing a milliner’s window, of earning an independent living by trimming hats, in line with the downtrodden Lily before her (Wharton, 1922: 270). Even earlier, Susy and her long-time English admirer, Charlie Strefford, attend an exhibition of Joshua Reynolds portraits in Paris, invoking Lily’s moment of glorious incarnation as ‘Mrs Lloyd’ in The House of Mirth (Wharton, 1990: 106). Given that the ‘principal collections of England had yielded up their best examples of the great portrait painter’s work’ (Wharton, 1922: 225) for the Paris exhibition in the latter novel, the implication is that Susy comes face to face with the image of her literary predecessor at a remove.

Like Lily, Susy is beleaguered by financial trouble but, crucially, does not baulk to the same degree at bending and making concessions where and when required, in order to maintain her place in high society. We are told that she has always lived among ‘cosmopolitan people’ (Wharton, 1922: 46) and, in this, she is emphatically house-less from origin; she is deliberately set apart even from fellow cosmopolites such as, for example, Strefford, who has his home in the same world but another in the form of a ‘great dull country-house’ which gives him a ‘firmer outline and a steadier footing than the other marionettes in the dance’ (Wharton, 1922: 47). Susy’s is, Wharton stipulates, a ‘drifting disorganised life, a life more planless, more inexplicable than any of the other ephemeral beings blown upon the same winds of pleasure’ (1922: 143). Aligned with the marionettes over and above the proprietors, Susy is associated, like Carrie and Lily before her, with ephemerality, impersonation, and sensual enjoyment; a marionette comprises, after all, a fragile and insubstantial replication of the real human form. This is not dissimilar to the substitutive relationship of luggage to house, discussed in previous sections, and Susy is, by extension, also repeatedly characterised in terms of the things she carries.

Nevertheless, even though she lacks the kind of proprietorial footing that steadies some of her friends and acquaintances, Susy, if she does not quite make baggage her business like Carrie, decidedly refuses to make it, like Lily, her loss. Unlike her literary forbear, Susy marries Selden-equivalent Nick Lansing (as financially insecure as she is herself), with the intention neither of submitting to suffocating domesticity nor to resigning herself to an impecunious life of discomfort, but on the premise that the pair will parasitically take advantage of the honeymoon holiday home offers of their wealthy friends for as long as they justifiably can. They live as ephemeral guests, never outstaying their welcome in any given home. It is a marriage based rather precariously on episodic sojourns as opposed to the architectonic security of fixed property, to re-invoke Wharton’s own terms, and requires, as such, judicious strategy.

The care with which Susy oversees the packing of her portmanteau is taken to be deeply expressive of her adaptive (bordering on opportunistic) proficiency by her husband Nick soon after their marriage:

Upstairs, on the way to his dressing room, he found her in a cloud of finery which her skilful hands were forcibly compressing into a last portmanteau. He had never seen anyone pack as cleverly as Susy: the way she coaxed reluctant things into a trunk was a symbol of the way she fitted discordant facts into her life. ‘When I’m rich’, she often said, ‘the thing I shall hate most will be to see an idiot maid at my trunks’ (Wharton, 1922: 29).

If Lily’s trunk is an archival repository of ephemeral sensations and evocations that hark back to a happier time, Susy’s portmanteau presents a more chequered archive, the discordant coexisting alongside the sentimental, and always subject to change depending on surrounding circumstance. Yet it is her very capacity to allow for dissonance and change – to embrace ephemerality in its more quotidian, concrete, evolving form – that enables her to largely maintain her precarious positionality within her social circle. This capacity, along with a willingness to handle the packing of her own luggage, conducted with what is conceived as a practiced virtuosity, separates her strikingly from Lily, who foregoes such expertise to her ultimate disadvantage. Susy reminds us that transience need not be ‘the site of neglect and inaction’, as it is with Lily, ‘but something that can be cultivated’ (Wasserman, 2020: 180). Her skill at packing is equated, in the novel, with her skill at ‘managing’, a trait which leads to the demise of her relations with Nick when he comes to realise the kinds of awkward concession the art of managing entails, not least turning a blind eye to the inappropriate conduct of certain benefactors.⁷ The word ‘managing’ itself retains a taboo-like quality once these relations are finally restored at the very end of the novel.

Susy manages her status as an episodic sojourner through unashamedly and adroitly managing her ephemeral materials on the move in a way that Lily simply cannot. One might say that she accepts an ephemerality in practice that Lily can only accept in spirit. Indeed, Susy, unlike Lily, is able to acclimatise herself in reduced circumstances; this is largely through making the necessary moral compromises (‘squalid compromises’ (Wharton, 1990: 23) Lily cannot bring herself to make in the same way), to fit the ‘discordant facts’ into her packed bag. Though Lily, too, stores certain discordant facts in her own trunk in the form of Bertha Dorset’s illicit love letters to Selden, it is only for a brief period, and she eventually burns these documents for the sake of preserving both Selden’s reputation and her own moral rectitude. It is in the retention of the compromising element that Susy departs from Lily. This retentive quality is brought to the fore by Wharton when Susy keeps a gift bestowed upon her in exchange for facilitating an extramarital affair on the part of a hostess, Ellie Vanderlyn, while Nick, upon discovery of his own unwitting complicity in facilitating this affair, returns the same:

Susy’s quick blood surged up. Nick had sent back the pin – the fatal pin! And she, Susy, had kept the bracelet – locked it up out of sight, shrunk away from the little packet whenever her hand touched it in packing or unpacking – but never thought of returning it, no, not once! Which of the two, she wondered, had been right? Was it not an indirect slight to her that Nick should fling back the gift to poor uncomprehending Ellie? Or was it not another proof of his finer moral sensitiveness?…And how could one tell, in their bewildering world? (Wharton, 1922: 211).

This packed bag is thus equally a repository of memories, but these are memories which do not point to moments of exquisite immateriality, as in Lily’s trunk, but measure Susy’s self-possessed, if self-demeaning, survival instinct in a materially-obsessed and ‘bewildering’ environment. Lily’s memories of unencumbered moments of passing beauty cumulatively and paradoxically weigh her down. By contrast, the very solidity of the compromising ‘little packet’ in Susy’s luggage enables her to maintain some level of mobility and agency, in spite of the ethical cost. Susy’s is thus a more hard-edged ephemerality, allowing for a transient, impermanent way of life that acknowledges material necessity while skirting the pitfalls of a more idealistic desire for an absolute, uncompromising and uncompromised freedom.

The above passage raises the question of whether Susy’s capacity for accommodating discordant facts is to be admired or disparaged. It is a question which consistently comes between Susy and Nick. The passage itself harks back to a key moment earlier in the novel when Nick, on departure from one of the villas offered up for their honeymoon, goes to great lengths to remove several boxes of cigars from a locked suitcase, cigars packed up by Susy in a liberal extension of the rights of the guest within the framework of domestic hospitality. The question is never fully resolved. Furthermore, if Wharton saw this novel as an experiment in envisaging a marriage based on relative freedom of movement rather than shared domesticity, then her findings are likewise inconclusive. Though marriage does not contain or fix Susy in the way that her literary predecessor might have feared, it offers a version of liberty that inhibits complete honesty within the relationship itself, without coming close to alleviating the stresses of precarity. Though Nick and Susy are eventually reconciled and her ‘weary load [of] accumulated hypocrisies’ (Wharton, 1922: 270) is transformed into a ‘great load of bliss’ (Wharton, 1922: 360) that they bear as a couple – witness, here, the reinvocation of that key leitmotif from The House of Mirth – the discordant facts within this new load remain, even if these facts are obscured in the throes of happy reunion. This concealed disharmony is mirrored in the ‘troubled glory’ of the glimpsed moon in the final lines (Wharton, 1922: 364). Whatever the case, in writing another House of Mirth, Wharton also wrote a new Lily, one evolved into a more robust and necessarily pliable form – Susy’s maiden name is ‘Branch’ after all (1922: 6) – and the survival of this literary offshoot has everything to do with her added aptitude for accepting and ‘managing’ her own transient condition.

Conclusion

The condition of transience is largely forced upon the female protagonists discussed in this essay. It is not something they actively seek out or desire. Their continually spotlighted bags become material manifestations of impermanence; these bags are not posited as emancipatory but rather as indices to domestic exclusion, vulnerability and, at times, burden. Indeed, in all the texts, negative connotations of baggage are foregrounded; the taint of a rootless moral laxity in opposition to the values of an upright domestic mode is hard to shake off. In Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, baggage means a depraved form of female dependency; in Wharton’s The House of Mirth, it signals self-insufficiency, dispossession (however ambiguous) and lack of social success; in The Glimpses of the Moon, it speaks of a questionable parasitism. Yet it is the capacity either to entirely transform or to adjust these symbolic charges which divides these protagonists on the level of raw endurance. Carrie turns her baggage into the symbolic foundation of her self-reliance and dramatic art. Susy makes it the symbol of her managerial competence in constrained circumstances even if this is hardly upheld as an admirable attribute; her luggage points to her continued status as a guest, rather than an independent woman, but this is a guest who is adept at maintaining a level of autonomy within this dependent role. The ambiguous concluding reunion with her husband Nick offers no certainty of escape from this scenario. Lily alone seems incapable of perceiving in her collected accoutrements anything other than her own misfortunate fate, confirming her marginalisation.

To come back to broader aesthetic questions, in claiming that Lily overlooks the emancipatory potential of her transient status to her own detriment, I am not proposing that Wharton touts the possibility of a more ephemeral vision for fiction, suited to the expression of the ‘episodical’, as an alternative to an ‘architectonic’ mode, to reiterate the terminology cited at the beginning of this essay. The accumulated portable possessions of her characters might align with Braddock’s idea of the collection as an authored work, as I suggested in the essay’s introduction, but they are far from achieving the ‘instrumental agency of a provisional institution’, which he saw as integral to the conception of the modernist collection (2013: 27). At best, Lily’s sacrificed dressing-case amounts to no more than a disregarded survival kit in figurative terms: a symbol for self-management on a thematic level but hardly a viable formal metaphor on the level of novel design. If Wharton initially considered A Moment’s Ornament as a title for Lily’s narrative, a working title foregrounding the ephemeral, she did eventually opt to emphasise domesticity, however ironically (Tyler, 2019). Furthermore, in Wharton’s public critical pronouncements, luggage imagery is used more than once to characterise a modernist formlessness, purposelessness and a detachment from the past she found to be aesthetically reprehensible: ‘No bag has been found big enough to hold the universe’, she chides in 1934 (‘Tendencies’, 1996: 172). Her critical writing maintains, in opposition to ‘most of the critics’, that literary advancement must continue to reside in the idea of a ‘four-square and deeply founded monument which the novel ought to be’ (Wharton, 1966: 75), even if this is a monument which, with all its ‘inherited passions and loyalties’ (Wharton, 1990: 248), requires renewal from the inside in order to accommodate rather than to punish episodic deviation.

Not incidentally, this idea of internal renewal informed her conception of household décor in an analogous way. As Helena Chance points out, Wharton was conscious, not least through her own interventions, that tastes in interior design were being ‘shaped by reforming movements that became linked to women’s bids for independence’ (2012: 199); in other words, she was aware that forms of interiority and domesticity need not be, by default, reactionary and oppressive for women. Wharton identifies, thus, as a ‘reformer’ as opposed to an ‘innovator’ (Chance, 2012: 203) in her approach to the decoration of houses as much as to novel writing. In this she resembles contemporary writers like E.M. Forster whose work, as Michael Levenson notes, affords an insight into ‘what the development of the novel might have been if at the turn of our century it had endured an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, change’ (1991: 78). ‘I believe the initial mistake of most of the younger novelists, especially in England and America’, Wharton wrote, again in 1934, ‘has been the decision that the old forms were incapable of producing new ones’ (‘Tendencies’, 1996: 170).

Yet, like Forster too, her response to Modernism is more nuanced than these antagonistic critical expressions would imply (Wegener, 1999; Peel, 2005; Haytock, 2008, 2012), an ambiguity borne out alike in her shifting approach to tropes of permanence and ephemerality. Overt professions of literary architectural loyalty are at odds, firstly with her own extremely unsettled and exiled existence (Wharton exhibited a kind of transience in her own life to rival any of the early deracinated modernists) and, secondly, with a formal frustration palpable at various points in her fiction, a frustration pointedly related to gendered constraints. ‘Why must a girl pay so dearly for the least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?’ (Wharton, 1990: 15), Lily asks early in The House of Mirth after she has been caught in the spontaneous, episodic act of visiting Lawrence Selden in his flat alone, an act initiating her subsequent misfortunes. Such remarks self-reflexively betray an inherent dissatisfaction with structures of artifice, whether architectonic or societal, but Wharton is, by the same token, far from convinced by a contrasting feminine compulsion towards the episodic and the ephemeral in a more emphatically modernist vein.⁸ It would be more accurate to say that, on the whole, the peculiarly feminine strain of transient experience, which is represented throughout her work, formed something of significatory sticking point. She cannot quite make up her mind as to what the embrace of ephemeral materiality might mean and, across her fictional writing, we find contradictory representations and a certain hesitancy in finally judging a more ephemeral mode of female subjectivity for better or worse (this is particularly true of Sophy Viner in The Reef). Thus if Lily fails to find a way out of her predicament, unlike Carrie Meeber before her, this might be said to reflect Wharton’s own wholesale uncertainty as to the value of, on the one hand, ephemeral experience and, on the other, of episodic style and ephemeral aesthetics.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.