TRIANGLULAR DESIRE IN EDITH WHARTION'S HOUSE OF MIRTH
Beginning with Renee Girard in his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel,
theorists have discussed desire using the spatial metaphor of the triangle. According
to Girard, you can visualize desire as a line drawn between a subject and his object of
desire. Sometimes a simple straight line can be drawn between subject and object, but
more often a line is there but not one line alone. There is a third party present, who
Girard terms "a mediator of desire" and there are lines radiating from the mediator
toward both he subject and the desired object, giving this form of mediated
relationship the characteristic of a triangle. According to Girard, the subject chooses
his object of desire because that object was already desired by a man1 he admired and
"the impulse toward the object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator". (Girard
10) The subject reverses the logical and chronological order of desires in order to
hide the fact that the true trajectory of the subject's desire "is aimed at the mediators
being". (Girard 53) When applying this model to literature it is important to keep in
mind that Girard placed admiration for the mediator and a desire to imitate him as the
motivation for the subject's choice of the mediator's object of desire as his own. The
first instance of this mediated desire described by Girard is that of Don Quixote in
Cervantes' novel. According to Girard, Don Quixote has "surrendered to Amadis the
individual's fundamental prerogative: he no longer chooses the objects of his own
desire- Amadis must choose for him" (Girard 1) In the novel Amadis is a fictitious
person and the Chivalric ideal represented by Amadis the mediator of Don Quixote's
desire. Girard's is a purely structural model and does not overtly take stratifications
such as gender, sex, and race into account. In Deceit, Desire and the Novel Girard
1
Typical for the canon of European literature of his time, Girard only considered relationships where
the subject and mediator were male. Even in the study of Cervantes' novel Don Quixote where
Amadis, the mediator of Don Quixote's desire was a fictional character, he was male. For simplicity
sake, when discussing Girard's model I will refer to the mediator as a man.
2
only applies his model to relationships where the subject and the mediator were two
men, but as long as the admiration and emulation of the subject for the mediator are
kept constant, potentially the model could be applied to alternative relationships.
Because of this Girard's structural model is helpful when theorizing a wide range of
triangulations of desire.
In her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire,
Eve Sedgwick reworks Girard's study of erotic triangles. Sedgwick makes explicit the
assumption that what is mediated by the presence of the woman in the triangle is
men's desire for each other. Sedgwick produced a model that places male sexual
desire and gender at its heart. This addition of a binary instead of making her model
more useful, actually limits its usefulness.
Like Girard, Sedgwick proposes that in the erotic triangle the erotic rivalry is
the bond that links the two rivals and it is as intense and potent as the bond that links
either of the rivals to the love object. "The bond between the rivals is even a stronger
determinant of their actions than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and
the beloved." (Sedgwick 21) However, here is where the similarity ends. For
Sedgwick, the motivation for the presence of the woman in the role of common object
of desire is not the subject's admiration for the mediator and his wish to imitate him,
but erotic desire between men. Sedgwick took the ethical position of factoring
sexuality and gender into the triangular model, making it less structural and more
culturally based.
According to Sedgwick, for men the homosocial2 continuum has been severely
disrupted, forcing men to identify themselves on a binary of homosocial or
2 Homosocial is a term used primarily to describe the nonsexual bonding of men with men and women
with women. Homosociality manifests itself in many forms and institutions, from friendships, social
circles, single-sex clubs, athletics and the military. The term homosocial is particularly associated with
the thought of Eve Sedgwick, and her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
3
homosexual. This homosocial/homosexual binary made bonds between men suspect.
Homophobia was built into the patriarchal institutions to regulate relationships
between men and expressions of male affection started to be closely monitored. Since
the existence of the hegemony and the patriarchy depend upon these very same bonds
between men that now were suspect, it was necessary to find a way to mediate these
bonds. The role of the woman in this model is simply as a conjunction between men.
In other words, because of the homophobia present in the homosocial patriarchy men
must route their intimacy through women. "We can go further than that, to say that in
any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial
(including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting
patriarchal power." (Sedgwick 25)
In addition to Girard, Sedgwick's work is based on Claude Levi-Strauss and
Gayle Rubin's work on the exchange of women. For Sedgwick, the presence of a
woman allows men to exchange power and to confirm each other's value, supporting
the patriarchy. In his book The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude Levi
Strauss theorizes that kinship is a way of generating a social and political structure
through manipulations of marriage and descent. For Levi Strauss the exchange which
constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman but between two
groups of men, and the woman figures in as an object of exchange, not as a partner in
the exchange. The English language gives interesting insight into this exchange of
women, the father is said to be giving away the bride. Levi Strauss states that the
exchange of women, "has in itself a social value. It provides the means of bonding
men together." (Levi Strauss 480) Sedgwick sees the male-dominated social order as
Desire. She acknowledges that the term predates her in occasional usage, with a generic meaning:
"'Homosocial' is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social
bonds between persons of the same sex"
4
being based on homosocial desire. Following the feminist theoreticians Gayle Rubin
and Luce Irigaray3, she factors in the exchange of women.
In her book Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's
Fiction, Patricia Smith points out that in Sedgwick's model, "Male desire is
sublimated and controlled in the name of maintaining power relations between men.
A breakdown in this system- that is, the threatened enactment of male homosexualitysets the stage for homosexual panic, the irrational and often violent response of one
man to the real or imagined sexual attractions of another. " (Smith 6) What is at stake
for a man in Sedgwick's triangle is his status in the male social order and if he were to
enact a sexual preference for another man he would be forfeiting his position as a
subject in the exchange of women and in doing so forfeit his position as subject.
Sedgwick makes an assumption that the continuum of male homosocial/homosexual
desire is radically disrupted whereas the female continuum is relatively uninterrupted.
She believes that there is an unbroken continuum between lesbianism and other forms
of women's attention to women. "the apparent simplicity-the unity-of the continuum
between women loving women and women promoting the interests of women
extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic, and political realms would not
be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males."
(Sedgwick 3) This basic assumption of Sedgwick's theory will be considered later in
the paper.
Sedgwick, while acknowledging Girard's work, is very critical about what she
sees as its limitations. She faults Girard on two fronts, his failures to differentiate
between the sexual/non-sexual (sexuality) and male/female (gender). Firstly, she
faults him for not taking homosexual desire into account when formulating the
3
In Commodities among Themselves", Irigary states that "women exist only as an occasion for
mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between man and his fellow man." (193)
5
topology of the triangle. "It is one of the strengths of his [Girard's] formulation not to
depend on how homosexuality as an entity was perceived or experienced-indeed, on
what was or was not considered sexual-at any given historical moment. As a matter
of fact, the symmetry of his formulation always depends on suppressing the
subjective, historically determined account of which feelings are or are not part of the
body of sexuality." (Sedgwick 22) In my opinion, what Sedgewick is criticizing in
Girard's model is in fact not a drawback but an asset. The structural nature of his
model allows us to escape the binaries of sex and gender.
Sedgwick criticizes the fact that Girard's theory does not take into account the
radical disruption of the male homosocial/homosexual continuum, and the forced
heterosexuality and homophobia produced. She quotes Gayle Rubin who writes "the
suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the
oppression of homosexuals, is…a product of the same system whose rules and
relations oppress women." Sedgwick's theory duplicates what she shows is done in
society, a binary is formed between homosexual/heterosexual making a radical cut in
the homosexual/heterosexual continuum.
Her second criticism of Girard's model, concerning gender is, in my opinion
unfounded. Sedgwick says that "Girard's reading presents itself as one whose
symmetry is undisturbed by such differences as gender, although the triangles that
most shape his view tend, in the European tradition, to involve bonds of "rivalry"
between males "over" a woman, in his view any relation of rivalry is structured by
the same play of emulation and identification." She claims that according to Girard's
model, the gender of any of the participants could be changed without affecting the
erotic triangle since he does not implicitly consider gender. "The structure of the
triangle would be relatively unaffected by the power difference that would be
6
introduced by a change in the gender of one of the participants". (Sedgwick 23)
Since this is the case, Girard's model could be seen as an extremely queer model
allowing us to theorize a plethora of triangles disregarding gender completely, making
it a more radical model than Sedgwick's own. Since Girard is does not concern
himself with social systems and only on structure, it is free from constructions of
gender.
This is not to say that Girard's model can be utilized successfully to study all
triangular relationships, we must keep in mind that one of the main prerequisites of
Girard's model is that the subject must admire and want to imitate the mediator of his
desire, thus precluding the possibility of the mediator being anyone but another of
equal or higher status. In this point, I think that Sedgwick and Girard's models have
much more in common that Sedgwick realizes. The perquisite of admiration for the
mediator foregrounds the impossibility of some subversive forms of triangles, such as
a female mediator or a mediator of a race other than white.
While Sedgwick claims she takes up the triangular paradigm not as an
ahistorical form that "perceives no discontinuity in the homosocial continuum", (24)
from which gender, class and power are missing, there is a sense that the significance
of the triangle of desire remains the same as that of Girard; always the bond between
white men. Whereas Girard, working on the European literary tradition fixes gender
implicitly in the triangle of desire, Sedgwick makes it explicit, limiting it to two men
and a woman.
In this paper I would like to consider a number of literary triangles of desire
and why Sedgwick's model can not account for them. What happens if the constants
of race, gender and class are destabilized? Since homosocial bonding and the
exchange of women are essential parts of the Sedgwickian model, will it work if we
7
disrupt the triangle by changing its configuration factoring in sex, race and class? I
would also like to reexamine another one of Sedgwick's assumptions, that of a
relatively undisturbed continuum of heterosexual/homosexual in women.
In her book Surpassing The Love of Men, Lillian Faderman states that till the
end of the century, "the sexual potential of love between decent, healthy women was
still unacknowledged by many seemingly sophisticated authors; sound women were
asexual. It was doubtful enough that they would concern themselves with any form of
sexual satisfaction." (Faderman 156) As in Faderman's book, it has been an axiom
that there is no homosexual panic concerning lesbian relationships. It has been a
convention that there is an unbroken continuum between lesbianism and other forms
of women's attention to women. It has been assumed that whereas for men
homophobia is built into the patriarchal institutions and expressions of male affection
closely monitored, women's bonding has been thought to receive far less scrutiny and
far more acceptance. Sedgwick did not consider a relationship of desire between two
women having to be mediated through a man since in her view there is no break in the
homosocial/homosexual continuum forcing a binary choice. In Lesbian Panic:
Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction, Patricia Smith gives a convincing
argument that questions this supposition. She shows numerous early and mid 20th
century novels in which lesbian panic is written into the narrative.
Consider this, if for men what is at stake in homosexuality is removing oneself
from the exchange of women, how much more radical is it when a woman, an object
and not a subject, chooses to remove herself, how much more destabilizing to the
patriarchy such an ethical position is. Wouldn't the patriarchy have a vested interest
in controlling the currency of exchange in the exchange of women, the women and
their sexuality? And how about from the point of view of the women's motivation for
8
veiling her same sex desire, I would even suggest that the stakes for women were
much higher than for men. For women who take themselves out of the exchange of
women put at risk nothing less than economic survival and the perception of society
of their perceived worth as a "commodity". In Irigaray's terminology, to lack
exchange value is tantamount to meaninglessness.
In the narratives studied by Smith, a courtship plot is worked into the novel to
cover the lesbian panic of the characters, and arguably of the writer. 4 This indicates
to me that Sedgwick was remiss in leaving out of her model the relationship of desire
between women simply because of the arguably false assumption that since the
heterosexual/homosexual continuum is assumed not broken in relationships between
women, a male object of desire would not be needed to mask the true trajectory of
female desire.
In addition, Sedgwick's model as is, with its inclusion of the theory of
exchange of women, does not allow us to consider a relationship between women
since women are only objects, "women cannot construct a parallel system of exchange
of men beyond the occasional erotic triangle, other than in narratives that do not
aspire to verisimilitude." (Smith 6) I would propose when including sexuality in a
model of triangulation, it should be recognized that in all relationships of desire, both
between men and women, the binary of homosexual/heterosexual is a socially
constructed binary which would make triangulation of desire equally necessary for
camouflage same sex desire. This attempt at camouflage of female same sex desire
4
Because of the limited scope of this paper I can not go into the specific examples of lesbian panic of
characters (and writers) examined in Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's
Fiction. One example is her discussion of Virginia Woolf, especially the relationship between Rachel
Vinrance and Helen Ambrose in The Voyage Out. Perhaps as interesting, if not more interesting, than
her interpretation of the relationship of the characters is that Smith notes that in a holograph version
dated 1912 Helen's desire for Rachel is written as unambiguous while in the later published version the
distinction between heterosexual and homosexual desire is absent. This, according to Smith, testifies to
lesbian panic experienced by Woolf herself, who chose to make lesbianism less overt in her novel.
9
camouflage is demonstrated in the many examples of courtship narratives in novels
written about by Smith, such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway,
Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook
and Elizabeth Bower's The Little Girls where the presence of the man is there because
of lesbian panic.
Let us consider one such triangle of desire. I believe that in The House of
Mirth Gerty Farish not only loved, but also desired Lily Bart. Gerty says, "I don't like
to go to her because I am afraid of forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted. Once
when we were children, I had rushed up after a long separation and thrown my arms
about her, she said: 'Please don't kiss me unless I ask you to, Gerty'; and she did ask
me, a minute later, but since then I've always waited to be asked." (The House of
Mirth 286) After the attempted rape by Gus Trenor, Lily comes to the home of Gerty.
Gerty, as the focalizer of this scene, sees Lily standing at her door as a "shining
vision". (171) This is quite interesting since right before Lily's arrival at her door,
Gerty had been contemplating how she hated Lily for destroying for Gerty any chance
of love with Selden. How then does one reconcile Gerty's hate/love for Lily? I
believe that a modified version of Sedgwick's triangle, one which allows for a female
same sex relationships, can give us an explanation for this. There is a love/hate
relationship between the subject and the rival in order to mediate the possibility of
same sex desire. In the case of The House of Mirth Lily is not in love with Gerty,
hence her actions show clearly that Gerty is of no consequence to her. However, this
can certainly not be said about Gerty. When Lily arrives at her home, Gerty's strength
of emotion surely can not simply be explained away by the fact that Gerty makes a
habit of taking care of others. In fact, Gerty is both in love with and sexually attracted
to Lily. "The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the
10
outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bedfellow. Knowing how
Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative
impulses toward her friend. But tonight every fibre in her body shrank from Lily's
nearness; it was torture to listen to her breathing and feel the sheet stir with it. As Lily
turned and settled to complete rest, a strand of her hair swept Gerty's cheek with its
fragrance. Everything about her was warm and soft and scented". (176)
In my reading of this text is that Gerty's competition with Lily for the love of
Selden is in fact a way of expressing her love for Lily herself and bonding with her in
a socially accepted manner, through the love triangle. Sedgwick's model would not
be useful in thinking about this triangle because if as Sedgwick proposes there is no
lesbian panic located in Gerty then she would not need to triangulate her love for Lily
through Selden. Proof of this triangle is interestingly illuminated when Gerty
contemplates Selden's "growing kindness to herself" the night after the party at the
Wellington Brys'. While thinking about how happy it made her that Selden was
paying attention to her, Gerty says that her happiness was compounded by "the
discovery that he extended his liking to Lily Bart". (157) Without the missing link of
Gerty's love for Lily it would be difficult to understand the fact that after this happy
exchange with Selden, Gerty wanted to share her happiness with Lily, the woman
supposed to be her rival for love. "Now that she was enjoying a little private feast of
her own, it would have seemed incredibly selfish not to lay a plate for a friend; and
there was no one with whom she would rather have shared her enjoyment than Miss
Bart". (157) Reading this passage through the lens of Sedgwick's love triangle we can
understand that while contemplating a possible sign of affection from Selden, Gerty
quickly turns her thoughts to Lily herself, the true object of her affection.
11
On numerous occasions, Gerty and Selden appear to be competing for a type
of ownership of Lily in the form of special knowledge of the true Lily. They both
think that they are privileged in having seen and thus possessing knowledge of the
real Lily Bart. After the tableaux vivants, Gerty turns to Selden and says, "Wasn't she
too beautiful, Lawrence? Don't you like her best in that simple dress? It makes her
look like the real Lily-the Lily I know". Selden quickly corrects her, "The Lily we
know". (142) It is pointed out to the reader that at this moment Gerty has been
overtaken by emotion, that Selden "was roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers" of
Gerty who could not contain her excitement at the vision of Lily in the tableaux. This
triangle is once again played out at the end of the book when both Selden and Gerty
are present after Lily's death. While Gerty had been there before Selden, she
relinquishes her place by Lily's side to Selden, for that "is what she would have
wished." (346) Gerty's desire for Lily must be channeled through Selden in order to
submit to the heterosexuality insisted upon by society.
Let us now consider why it is that Lily Bart does not and could not possibly
reciprocate Gerty Farish's desire. To do this we must go back to a part of Girard's
theory that Sedgwick mistakenly abandoned, which is the necessity for admiration
and emulation of the mediator by the subject. Sedgwick's model has built into it no
way of conceptualizing triangles whose two angles of the base are not occupied by
men who are part of the hegemony. We wound need to modify the triangle of desire
to allow for same sex female desire and then if we place Gerty in the position of
subject, Lily in the position of mediator and Selden as the object that Gerty desires,
the model works. Gerty clearly admires Lily, at least her own perception of Lily.
However, it would be impossible to reverse the triangle making Lily the subject and
Gerty the modifier because in Lily's estimation Gerty is not admirable because of her
12
lower class. Lily could not possibly desire Gerty because Gerty occupies a position
Lily would never aspire to. In either case, Girard's model, which leaves out sexuality,
would be useful to theorize this triangle. According to Girard, the form of desire is
not relevant; all forms of desire be it of a sexual nature or not, can fit into the model.
The very fact that Girard's model does not factor in sexuality or gender, the very thing
Sedgwick criticizes, makes is far more flexible
Another triangle of desire present in The House of Mirth which I would like
to consider is Simon Rosedale and Lawrence Selden's desire for Lily Barth. Clearly,
there is no sexual desire present between the two men; therefore Sedgwick's theory of
the triangle is unable to account it. However, Girard's model may be useful.
Undeniably Rosedale strives for a place in society, a place occupied by men like
Selden. In this case Lily is an object of desire similar to the one described by Girard
in Don Quixote. Lily is an object of desire for men of the class Rosedale aspires to.
He adopts their codes of desire much like Don Quixote desired what he believed to be
ideals of Amadis. He would like to possess the same possession men like Selden and
Trenor would like to possess. Once again the triangulation can not be reversed
because the trajectory between Selden and Rosedale is even more severely disrupted
than that between Lily and Gerty which is based on class, this is the absolute
disruption caused by race. According to Sander Gilman the general consensus of the
ethnological literature of the late 19th century was that Jews were black or at least
swarthy. Around the time that The House of Mirth was being written racial
ideologies were growing in importance as a way of understanding history and
designing public policy.
13
Wharton's ideas of race were most probably influenced from early reading of
Hippolyte Taine5 and William Lecky6, who she called, along with Darwin and
Spencer, "the formative influences of my life". (Letter to Sara Norton 3/16/08)
Wharton and her society believed that all people belonged to a particular race and that
this racial inheritance accounted for not only physical attributes but intellectual, moral
and spiritual characteristics as well. For Wharton, all people are products of their
racial inheritance. Rosedale is the socially unacceptable rich Jew, who, according to
the narrator, had "that mixture of artistic sensibility and business astuteness which
characterizes his race" and "his races accuracy in the appraisal of values." (House of
Mirth 15) Rosedale's Jewishness is seen as an identity and totally unrelated to any
actual religious practice. Wharton was not interested in exploring Jewishness, but
makes the assumption that her readers share with her, and the other characters7 in her
book, negative connotations associated with Jewishness.8 Wharton foregrounds the
tensions between old money New York society and the nouveau riche invaders in her
depiction of the triangle of Lily, Rosedale and Selden. Rosedale is excluded from
"good" society because he is a Jew. Society hates the acquisitive business practices
they associate with Jewish people. Rosedale is seen to embody the invasive qualities
that old New York society most feared. The old guard of New York was
experiencing previously unknown social and financial insecurity; they had to work
harder to make their money and to keep their exclusive aristocratic status.
Advantages began to be based on goods bought rather than on birthright, disrupting
5
Taine in his Introduction to History of English Literature says that "what we call the race are the
innate and hereditary dispositions which, as a rule, are united with the marked differences in the
temperaments and structures of the body.
6
William Lecky wrote much about the Jews and embraces attitudes about race and stereotypes about
Jews. He characterizes Jews as "shrewd and thrifty with a rare power of judging, influencing and
managing men." (Israel Among the Nations)
7
Lily is said to have "intuitive repugnance for Rosedale" which we assume must refer to his
Jewishness. (19)
8
"Wharton lived at a time and led her life in such a way that racial difference was an inescapable part
of life." (Ammons, Elizabeth: Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race)
14
the social hierarchy. In a letter Wharton says, "Social conditions as they are just now
in our new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited
obligations." (Letters 99) Race became the essentialist answer to the cultural
vulnerability of class.
In her book Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Jennie Kassanoff says
that "The logic of race in The House of Mirth transcends issues of skin, encoding
instead a complex semiotics of class, genealogy, ethnicity and nation." "If race could
expansively embrace the changing dimensions of class, family, ethnicity and nation, it
often did so precisely to transform these fluctuating categories into an indivisible
essence – a static vision of the organic." (Kassaoff 41-42) The character of Simon
Rosedale embodies all of this.
Lily Bart is Lily white and her white body is an emblem of her race.
According to Dale Baur in her book Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics, "Lily's
dazzling overdetermined whiteness emphasizes the shiny, semetic alterity of Simon
Rosedale". The character of Rosedale tries to acquire Lily for his collection of goods
in order to advance in society. "It was [Lily's] very manner of holding herself aloof
that appealed to his collector's passion for the rare and unattainable" (The House of
Mirth 113) It would have been unthinkable for Lily to marry Rosedale, so in the end
she must die. Elizabeth Ammons says, "The House Of Mirth is the story of the flower
of Anglo Saxon womanhood not ending up married to the invading Jew". (Ammons
80) The working title of The House Of Mirth, "The Year of the Rose" may reveal for
us the central anxiety of the book, Rosedale's ascendency. Since the exchange of
women in Levi Strauss' model upon which Sedgwick based hers depends on a barter
system, where goods are exchanged for payment in kind, Rosedale could not be
permitted to take part. In this model a women was exchanged for another woman, a
15
man gives away a woman from his family knowing that he will eventually get another
in exchange. Rosedale can not have a place in the homosocial exchange of women
because he has no commodity to exchange since his race precludes a woman of his
family being a commodity in white society. Her model also fails in the relationship
because is based on homosocial desire between men, which would be impossible
between Selden and Rosedale because of the race barrier. Just like Lily could not
desire Gerty, Selden could not desire Rosedale. He would not emulate him.
Dale Baur argues that for Wharton, racial and class allegiances overpowered
her gender ones. We can see where Sedgwick's model fails; it considers only sexuality
and gender, but totally leaves out class and race. In addition, when considering
sexuality and gender they are seen as clearly defined binaries. While the basis for
power in The House Of Mirth is patriarchal since it is based on economic power and
men make the money, money is not the central issue, race and class are and her model
gives us no tools for looking at these issues. If we would like to utilize a culturally
based model we have to be sure to include all of the parameters, I believe that class
and race must be added to produce another triangle, the trinity of race, class and
gender.
Works Cited
16
Ammons, Elizabeth "Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race". The Cambridge
Companion To Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press: 1995
Baur, Dale. "Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics" (1994). Quoted in Edith
Wharton And The Politics Of Race
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love Of Men. New York: Triangle
Classics: 1981
Girard, Rene. Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Baltimore:
John Hopkins Press: 1965
Goldman-Price, Irene. "the Perfect Jew and The House of Mirth"
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: A Casebook. Ed. Carol Singley
Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2003
Irigary, Luce. "Commodities Among Themselves" in This Sex Which is
Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press:
1985
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship.
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode: 1969
Rubin, Gayle "the Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex
(1975) Literary Theory: An Anthology ed. Julie Rivkin and Michal
Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 1998
Kassanoff, Jennie. Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: 2004
Gilman, Sander L. The Jew's Body. New York : Routledge: 1991
Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire. New York: Columbia University Press: 1985
Smith, Patricia. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's
Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press: 1997
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Signet Classics: 2000
Works Consulted
17
Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. James Tuttleton, Kristen
Lauer and Margaret Murray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:
1992
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: A Casebook. Ed. Carol Singley
Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2003
Fetterly, Judith. The Resisting Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press: 1977
New Essays on The House of Mirth. Ed. Deborah Esch. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: 2001