Jennifer Egan in NY Times says favorite heroine is Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, who is “flawed but self aware,” but Lily’s lack of self awareness is one main theme.

Jennifer Egan says: “My favorite heroine is Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” She’s a tragic figure: flawed but self aware, living at a time when a woman’s surest ticket to wealth and comfort was physical beauty. In her last act, Lily transcends her mistakes, and I’ve never managed to read it without sobbing.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/books/review/jennifer-egan-by-the-book.html?mcubz=0

But one of the novel’s main themes is that Lily is not self aware, due to her having multiple, dissociated selves, working at cross-purposes, as discussed in a past post:

May 12, 2015

Lily Bart’s multiple dissociated selves in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth prevent her marrying, and end in suicide, because they are at cross-purposes.

“Miss Bart…had a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another” (1, p. 101).

“She might have married more than once—the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence—but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it” (1, p. 123).

“That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic” (1, p. 148). 

The explanation is that she has multiple selves who are at cross-purposes with each other. Little is known about these selves, and it is difficult to know which are the same, but referred to by different names, and which are distinct, but there may be more, perhaps many more, than two of them, variously referred to as “captive,” “free-spirit,” “frightened self,” “insistent voice,” “abhorrent being,” “Furies,” speaking in an “altered voice,” “anguished self,” “a hundred different points of consciousness…this legion of insurgent nerves…sentinels” (see below).

“There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free-spirit quivered for flight…Was it love, she wondered…” (1, p. 52).

“It was as if the eager current of her being had been checked by a sudden obstacle which drove it back upon itself. She looked at him helplessly, like a hurt or frightened child: this real self of hers, which he had the faculty of drawing out of the depths, was so little accustomed to go alone!” (1, p. 75).

“But all the while another self was sharpening her to vigilance, whispering the terrified warning that every word and gesture must be measured” (1, p. 114).

“…the frightened self in her was dragging the other down…Whence the strength came to her she knew not; but an insistent voice warned her that she must leave the house openly…She seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves in her, the one she had always known, and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained…Yes, the Furies might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the dark corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their wings was in her brain…” (1, pp. 116-117).

“Then [Lily Bart] lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered voice… ‘There is some one I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you—we are sure to see each other again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room’ ” (1, p. 240).

“Sleep was what she wanted…The little bottle was at her bedside…but as soon as she had lain down every nerve started once more into separate wakefulness…her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered…She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was possible…a hundred different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could still this legion of insurgent nerves?…She raised herself in bed and swallowed the contents of the glass; then blew out the candle and lay down…Tonight the drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts” (1, pp. 250-251).

1. Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth [1905]. A Norton Critical Edition, Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. New York, WW Norton & Company, 1990.