CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND NOTES

CHAPTER 9

Summary

Mrs. Peniston follows the old social precept that people of fashion return to New York in October. She opens the blinds of her windows promptly in that month. For two weeks she supervises the cleaning of her house. Lily Bart usually avoids this season of cleaning, but she is now at home since she didn’t get the usual round of invitations this season. As Lily goes upstairs, she passes a char-woman (cleaning woman) who gawks at her. It is the same woman who was at the Benedict that day she left Lawrence Selden’s apartment. Mrs. Peniston usually likes Lily better than her other young protégé, Grace Stepney, who is more practical, but in the time of cleaning, Grace is the better helper. Lily thinks that some day if she doesn’t get married, she’ll have to go from spending all her energy amusing friends like Judy Trenor to amusing people like Aunt Peniston.

Someone rings at the door and Lily is told a woman named Mrs. Haffen is there to see her. When she goes to the door, she finds the same char-woman who had so annoyed her before. She shows Mrs. Haffen into the drawing room and Mrs. Haffen goes into a long and roundabout discussion of her husbandÂ’s having just lost a job at the Benedict and their poor situation at present, close to being evicted from their home. She opens a packet of letters and shows them to Lily. She says the gentlemen who live at the Benedict usually burn their letters or tear them to shreds, but sometimes they become careless. Lawrence Selden had done so, and she had taken up the letters he had only torn in half once. They are letters from Mrs. Dorset and they are compromising. Lily realizes that Mrs. Haffen thinks she is the one who wrote the letters. After first thinking of throwing Mrs. Haffen out, she decides to buy them as a way to protect Lawrence SeldenÂ’s reputation.

Her aunt arrives home and begins o tell her all that she has heard of the wedding that Lily attended that afternoon. She had heard all the details from Molly Van Alstyne who said that Mrs. Dorset was the best dressed woman there. She moves on to tell about the new engagement between Percy and Miss Van Osburgh which Mrs. Dorset is said to have entirely arranged. Lily takes her leave of her aunt and goes upstairs. She thinks of burning the letters right away and then thinks of all the ridicule that is being heaped on her for losing the marriage with Percy. She decides to keep the letters. She seals the packet with a wax seal and puts them in a box in her wardrobe. She realizes that if it werenÂ’t for Gus Trenor, she would not have been able to buy them.

Notes

Lily is now suffering from the effects she had predicted earlier to Lawrence Selden of becoming old news to her friends. She is no longer invited to stay in country houses for the entire social season and so has to return to her auntÂ’s house which she finds aesthetically stifling and morally cramped.

Edith Wharton draws a truly frightful portrait of the life of a woman like Mrs. Peniston, who follows the same pattern of house cleaning year after year as if religiously, who kept her cotillion favors for her entire married life until her husband died, after which she thought it unseemly to have anything colorful in the house, who refuses the expense of energy to go to a wedding, but who spends hours discussing the details with those interested enough to report them. The description of the interior decorating of Mrs. PenistonÂ’s house is something like a character portraiture as well the helmeted Minerva that sits atop the clock, the crayon portrait of her late husband, the one artistic excess being the painting of Niagara, and, best of all, the dying Gladiator that stands in the drawing room.

Perhaps in reaction to her straightened economic and social situation,

Lily Bart takes the meanness of those who make fun of her for losing out on marrying Percy Gryce more seriously than she usually would. It seems as if the packet of letters will be another way Lily Bart will get herself into trouble.

Table of Contents | Downloadable/Printable Version