It’s hard to garner sympathy for party girls. The most frivolous of pursuits (partying) combined with the most frivolous cross-section of society (girls) is a difficult sell. From Zola’s irresistible Nana to Holly Golightly, to Parker Posey’s character in the 1995 film by that name, party girls often have attracted scathing feminist critique. Partying—exercising beauty, social graces, that ineffable ability to become the center of a room—is a kind of work, but it’s hard to pin down, too ephemeral to be construed as respectable labor.
Early on in The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton’s 1905 bestseller, Lily Bart tries half-flirtatiously, half-seriously, to muster sympathy for herself. Girls like her, she points out (although Lily is almost thirty, she always calls herself a girl), were brought up for only one thing: to marry and marry well. Achieving this requires dressing well, looking pretty, being socially skilled but still demure. Lily Bart, in the tradition of a Jane Austen heroine, is a lady with no money, a member of the ruined upper classes. Unlike an Austen heroine, there is no redemption in store for her. She will not miraculously fall in love with a very wealthy man who will sweep her out of her precarious existence. Instead, as the subject of Wharton’s scathing morality tale, she will sink into obscurity and die alone. Only in death does she really become sympathetic. “It was impossible,” thinks Selden, her friend and sometimes love interest, “even with her lovely eyes imploring him, to take a sentimental view of her case.”
Part of the problem is that Lily is a hanger-on, a parasite of high society. She thinks of herself and her maid as in fundamentally similar positions: the maid at Lily’s beck and call, Lily herself at the behest of her wealthy friends who put her up in their Hamptons’ houses. Her class is associated with an ugly kind of striving; “grifting,” we might call it now. Her singular goal is to be successfully absorbed into the unconcerned elite, to become so rich that she can dress however she wants, have fresh flowers every day, and lose large amounts of money at bridge without worrying. Her encroaching debts, her need for financial stability, is more sympathetic, but she has a bad attitude. She was not born to work or to scrimp or to live a quiet, frugal life. She will either make it big or burn out partying.
Her peculiar combination of helplessness and scheming feels familiar even in our contemporary world where marriage is ostensibly less important. Reading Emma Cline’s The Guest this summer along with everyone else, I found its parallels to The House of Mirth unavoidable. Like Lily, Cline’s protagonist is a hanger-on, dependent on the good graces of wealthy people to survive. Unlike Lily, she appears to be an outsider to the social class that surrounds her. Many reviewers have interpreted her to be some kind of sex worker, though she seemingly is dating her older boyfriend, Simon, without any direct exchange of money. Inarguably, she is something of a void. She worries about keeping her nails clean and her voice soft, about being unobtrusive. She lets the man she is living with at the start of the book dress her, doll-like, in the decorous uniform of bourgeois women. It makes her look older, more respectable. If she exerts any specific charm over him besides docility, what that might be is not clear from the close first-person narration. Her only skill seems to be fitting into a group, telling people what they want to hear, and mirroring their affects back to them. She is so deeply in character throughout the book that her narrative voice remains detached, never letting the reader glimpse her deeper interiority. The only time she exerts any more specific power is when, White Lotus-style, she hooks up with a teenage boy who believes earnestly in her essential goodness. She briefly has the upper hand, abuses her power, then shrinks back into her passivity.
It is never clear what Alex’s underlying relationship to wealth is. Some readers have speculated that she herself is wealthy, a bored girl playing a game. Curbed reported in July 2023 that everyone in the Hamptons was reading The Guest. The piece, which is basically a scene report, describes how wealthy Hamptons readers responded to the “searing accuracy” of the book—all the small details of how Cline’s characters speak and interact and eat, the rigid and intuitively understood class hierarchies to which they subscribe, their suspicion of outsiders. Unlike many reviewers, the readers interviewed in the Curbed piece aren’t very sympathetic to Alex; instead, they interpret her grift as gossip fodder. “No one I talked to identified with Alex or Simon,” writes the Curbed journalist, “but everyone recognized the character.”
Is literature that produces this type of recognition incapable of offering real class critique? There is something incongruent about stories ostensibly intended as scathing takedowns of wealth being written nearly exclusively by the wealthy, to be consumed by the wealthy. Like Edith Wharton, who belonged to the upper crust New York society about which she wrote, Emma Cline is intimately familiar with the class she dissects. I wondered, reading The Guest, if Cline made Alex such a thin character deliberately so as to discourage identification with her, if readers are meant to recognize themselves instead in the often casually unkind and self-absorbed people who surround her. These people are more narcissistic than truly cruel. Simon, Alex’s older boyfriend, comes off the worst: he throws her out of his house for a minor transgression. He might just be sick of her. We don’t get to know him, any more than we get to know Alex. He doesn’t care about her personhood, but their relationship is sketched along the outline of a trope. It feels so familiar and impersonal that it fails to shock.
Focusing on identification may seem like a shallow way to read. Certainly, identifying with a protagonist or another character in a story is not a prerequisite to enjoying it. It is, however, the mechanism on which such narratives ultimately trade. You might roll your eyes at the entitlement and thoughtlessness of the Hamptons families who leave their front doors unlocked and bristle at the sight of a newcomer, but the book really is creating a smokescreen, allowing readers to interpret its events voyeuristically and so comfortably to identify themselves on the right side. It grants, in other words, an illusory sense of self-righteousness.
This is a more complex problem, rooted in the thinness of our moral politics, in the economics and demographics of publishing and published writers, and in prevalent cultural expectations for easily digestible literature. But still, it is strange to consider that Wharton, a rich conservative living in a deeply and explicitly stratified world, more readily condemns the tendencies and rules of wealthy New York society than many contemporary liberal writers are willing to do. There are no good rich people in The House of Mirth. Wealth corrupts and putrefies, yields psychological and emotional sterility. But unlike many contemporary writers, Wharton is not at pains to distance herself from her environment. She has no illusions, you get the sense, about being the good kind of rich person. She is more interested in exploring her stunted class and its failings than in reflexive defensiveness.
Although The House of Mirth was a massive bestseller when it was published in 1905 and has continued to sell well ever since, it is hard to imagine that the story would end the same way were it written today. In the book’s final act, Wharton sharpens the prim solipsism of domestic fiction, a genre often criticized for being parochial and quiet, into something much darker. Lily Bart is so consumed by the system of wealth, so thoroughly commodified that she can see herself only through the eyes of others, so loyal to her set and to the trappings of money, despite her distaste for both, that she destroys her own life. When she dies from an overdose, maybe accidentally, it is a tragedy but one in which, Wharton suggests, Lily herself is, to an extent, complicit.
By contrast, The Guest offers irresolution. Alex’s narcissism and assumed helplessness do have destructive consequences, but their main victim is she. At the story’s end, a trail of chaos behind her, she goes to a garden party to try and win back Simon. The book stops there. The confrontation is left to our imagination, and so is Alex’s future: we can fill in the blanks about what happens after precisely because the story is so conventional. In a review dubbing The Guest the “anxious-girl book of the summer,” TIME declared that Cline “dares readers who eagerly consume literature about sexy messiness to reckon with a character who’s so singularly focused on surviving that she’s willing to destroy her life and the lives of those around her to do so.” But it isn’t clear if Alex really is singularly focused on surviving, mainly because Cline is so vague about her life circumstances. As I read it, Alex is not focused on sheer survival but on maintaining her precarious attachment to wealth. Like Lily Bart, she cannot imagine a different kind of life—one in which she’d have to get a job.
Wharton is more explicit about this problem. As she falls through the ranks of society, Lily becomes increasingly invisible to her fair-weather friends and increasingly aware of being visible to the working poor. Leaving Selden’s apartment, she has to squeeze past a charwoman scrubbing the stairs, who pauses her activity to stare at Lily. Lily first imagines herself appearing like an angel, dazzling the coarse woman, and then wonders, more uneasily, if the woman assumes she is a sex worker. Although Lily is constantly being watched and talked about, and exists as a kind of novelty amusement for her social set because she is young and beautiful and unmarried, the gaze of the domestic servant unsettles her. It threatens to upend her class position. It makes her vulnerable.
This dependence for status on the ephemeral and relentlessly scrutinized effects of beauty and docility is traditionally the provenance of women. In Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the heroine thinks of a former lover: “Because he has money he’s a kind of god. Because I have none I’m a kind of woman.” Lily Bart shrinks from the ugliness of the working-class women she encounters. She is horrified by the signs of exertion and malnutrition that deform their faces in her eyes, but also by the shabbiness and tackiness of their surroundings, by the appearance of poverty and its apparent futility. Beauty, for her, is synonymous with wealth and with purpose. When she is cast out of her environment and sinks into poverty and debt, she describes herself as thrown onto a giant rubbish heap, discarded. There is no life after wealth for her.
The critics also have struggled to reckon with Lily’s beauty. In his infamous 2012 essay on Edith Wharton, published in The New Yorker, (and also printed as the “Foreword” to the collected Penguin Classics edition of Wharton’s Three Novels of New York) Jonathan Franzen sees Lily as “the worst kind of party girl.” He finds her almost irredeemable—stupid, shallow, dull, arrogant about her looks. Her fatal flaw, to Franzen, is her inability to capitalize on her beauty to get ahead and marry well. Beauty in literature, he writes, is basically a moral failing deforming your character. But the reader is also averse to seeing it “wasted.” Since Wharton was often described as ugly by biographers, he imagines Lily’s story as a revenge fantasy about beautiful women. “The novel can be read as a sustained effort by Wharton to imagine beauty from the inside and achieve sympathy for it, or, conversely, as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.”
Franzen’s critique strangely echoes a 1905 New York Times review that took pains to stress that “the book does not pretend to represent New York society at large, buy [sic] merely one of its element, namely, that group or set to whom amusement and pleasure seeking are the main pursuits of life.” But this is a misreading of the novel. Lily’s fatal flaw is not that she cannot renounce her hard partying lifestyle in order to become someone’s virtuous wife, but rather that she cannot renounce her obsession with wealth. The darkest psychosocial aspect of wealth, in Wharton’s world, is how it enforces alienation from an inner life, prompting one to refuse love and connection in favor of chasing the elusive pleasures of money. The heart of fools, as the biblical passage goes, is in the house of mirth.
The crude morality that Franzen’s review exhibits, rife with anxiety about likeability, still seems endemic to contemporary media, if in a less patently sexist form. Popular, not to say populist, stories are generally expected to be more pleasurable to consume, to go down easier. In that sense, The Guest has a parallel narrative framing to The Menu, another muddled story about the class of service workers who cater solely to the luxurious desires of the very wealthy. Halfway through the film, it becomes clear that Anya Taylor-Joy’s character, Margot, is a sex worker paid to accompany her date on an extravagant fine dining excursion, and that her unanticipated presence throws a wrench in the event’s murderous design. She manages to escape by reminding the chef of his humble roots as a fast-food cook and thereby momentarily diffusing his stringent self-loathing. According to the didactic moral politics of The Menu, Margot is the only character who deserves to live because she is the only one who doesn’t belong in the luxe restaurant. Instead, her presence is as labor. She is on the job.
Both of these stories gesture at sex work to convey a particular kind of class relationship. Neither, though, seems very interested in fleshing out its actual dynamics. Like Alex, Margot is basically a blank. She initially refuses to eat the experimental food served or to play along—but then her companion viciously reminds her that he is paying for her time, humbling her into compliance. Both women are positioned as a cipher onto which wealthy men (and to some extent, other women) can project their fantasies, but they are ultimately too lifeless to be compelling loci of desire. Either could have been any variety of less wealthy woman without the narrative shifting at all, as Sarah Rose Etter pointed out in her essay on The Guest—a fact that suggests a strange and vaguely heteropessimist equivalence between financially uneven romantic relationships and sex work.
This makes more sense if you consider the overall portrayal of wealth in these stories. By effacing the visibility of labor—in this instance, sex work—they effectively transform the stakes of class relationships into interpersonal strife, built around carelessness and entitlement. This may explain the overwhelming popularity of The Guest or The White Lotus or Triangle of Sadness among wealthy people. Any one of us, faced with the comparative achievements and status symbols of the upper classes, can be overcome by a sense of envy and the unfairness of the world. There is always someone richer and more entitled who seems to have it all figured out. This lens distorts the dynamics of wealth, transforms us all into Lily Bart.
There is a weighty, depressive morality to these contemporary stories. They sag under the heft of it. Although each narrative is heavily preoccupied with demonstrating its own righteousness, the rich it portrays are more pathetic than evil. They do not scheme, they have no interests, they barely gossip. The convoluted rules of their social circles, which The House of Mirth explores in such forensic detail, are mostly gestured at for laughs or for general context. The writers are, you start to get the sense, out to prove their own disinterest in wealth.
In place of detail or interiority, they offer plot. The films and books referenced here are essentially genre fiction, conforming to the rules of psychological thrillers. Many of them involve murders (there is even a popular fan theory about The Guest, the least genre-driven of the lot, in which the protagonist dies at the end). In this sense, they more closely resemble the soapier kind of stories that use wealth as a voyeuristic vehicle for dramatic action. In Big Little Lies by Lianne Moriarty, picture-perfect wealth is a smokescreen to cover up abuse and murder. In Good Rich People by Eliza Jane Brazier, a Glass Onion-like mystery, a sadistic couple try utterly to destroy their tenants’ lives out of sheer boredom and end up inadvertently recruiting their final victim into their game. In the breezier beach read, Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum, a set of couples summer in Fire Island where they play endless rounds of tennis and cheat on each other. Inevitably, someone is murdered. Life goes on.
Writing for New York Magazine, Sam Adler-Bell describes how recent films about the super rich such as The Menu and Triangle of Sadness provoked more pity than real rage for him. He speculates that they have shifted the nexus of labor to a confrontation between service workers and their clients. This kind of affective labor, as Negri and Hardt tell us, relies less on the blunt conflict of traditional capitalist work relationships and instead rests on an illusion of intimacy. Service work such as food preparation, massages and beauty services, sex work, and child care, necessitate vulnerability. It is also more psychologically complex, Adler-Bell argues, mirroring the shape and relations of the nuclear family.
What the New York article does not explicitly touch upon is that service work is traditionally coded as feminine labor. And importantly, although it demands a more emotionally engaged and intimate skill set of workers, service work does not fundamentally transform labor relationships. In The Menu, the service workers are at the whim of their wealthy clients but also at the mercy of their tyrannical employer, the murderous chef, who belittles and abuses them. He identifies Margot as a fellow service worker and attempts some kind of unstable solidarity with her—but he also owns the restaurant and private island, making him closer in many ways to his wealthy clients than to Margot. The failure of the film is less that it attempts to humanize its characters and more that it fundamentally misconstrues the structure of service work. Emma Cline similarly structures The Guest along two blunt axes of class relationships: the confused intimacy of transactional relationships and the stark division between those who have money and those who do not—a paradigm that obscures the real exchange upon which the whole labor system rests.
By contrast, in Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados, two broke young women drift around New York grifting in similar ways to Alex. But unlike Alex, they are resourceful, charming, likable. They ingratiate themselves, have a pool of patrons to fall back on who will let them crash somewhere or give them a modeling gig or cover their martinis and oysters. They constantly have money-making schemes. They are cultivated, understand the ins and outs of New York society. Sometimes their hosts turn against them. Isa, the protagonist, is kicked out of a Hamptons house without even the thirty-three dollars for the bus. But overall, they flourish. “Some people think that in order to make an impression on a pretty girl,” muses Isa, “one has to be mean to her. People think girls who have certain magnetism have never known Real Struggle, so they take it upon themselves to give a little bruising and a hard time. They think we should always be learning Life Lessons.”
Granados has said in interviews that Happy Hour was inspired by a summer she herself spent in New York with a determined friend and very little money. That may be why, unlike Cline, she is sympathetic to her protagonist. Isa is in on the joke. Like Lily Bart, everything she does is self-aware, and when she drops her shield of self-awareness, it is often read as transgressive by those around her. These women are conscious of themselves as objects of attention and voyeurism and desire. In the most famous scene in The House of Mirth, Lily acts out a tableau vivant based on Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd,” but which is “simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.” To Selden, Lily’s inner beauty is finally revealed in the pose. Other men observing her comment on her revealing costume, on the outline of her body, her sex appeal. “Lily has here turned herself into a commodity, and poses as if she’s up for auction,” wrote Michael Gorra in The New York Review of Books in 2015. “The scene works to literalize the idea of the marriage market.”
Lily is, of course, a commodity, but her blunt awareness of that fact gives her a modicum of power. Her self-consciousness is not exactly a critique of her environment: she is too steeped in it to be explicitly critical. Instead, she must, in John Berger’s sense, “continually watch herself.” But her alienation never extends far enough to free her. She devotes all of her energy and limited resources to being beautiful but resists the expected outcome of that beauty: namely, to be possessed by a man. She is incapable of marrying for money and incapable of living without it. She suffers from night terrors. She describes looking at herself in the mirror some mornings and seeing herself disfigured and ugly—her worst fear. Her fixation on beauty is debilitating, it stunts her. No one in the novel is capable of seeing past it to her inner life: not even Lily herself.
This particular type of feminine alienation is almost ubiquitous in contemporary “eat the rich” stories. In The Guest and The Menu, the female protagonists ambivalently submit to the demands of the rich men at their sides. In Triangle of Sadness, this anxiety is partially displaced onto one of the male characters who works as a model, who undergoes an objectification that humiliates him and is later sexually exploited by one of his shipwrecked companions in exchange for food and favors. In The White Lotus, a series of young women, trophy wives, sex workers, and grifters are repeatedly able to access luxury via their beauty and social skills, but each also experiences psychic disassociation. One even participates in a burglary with her working-class lover as an act of revenge against her wealthy hosts before disowning her part in it and denouncing him. This archetype exists beyond stories about class conflict in the form of what Emmeline Clein, in a viral Buzzfeed piece, called the “disassociated woman.” It centers a woman who is (typically) white, middle-class, smart, beautiful, ironically depressed. Like the main character of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the disassociated woman doesn’t think much about a job. If she works, she experiences broad alienation without respite, without any flicker of solidarity.
Introduced into the genre of rich people novels, this archetype becomes a vehicle for describing the empty ennui of life under late capitalism without exploring class conflict in any meaningful way. By channeling the realities of labor and wealth inequality into a feminine psychological crisis, these stories avoid grappling with capitalist structures. Instead, their main arc is a psychodrama in which a young woman attempts to break out of her disassociation by exploring different kinds of social, personal, and romantic experiments. Unlike Lily Bart, they are never ground down by the system, do not understand themselves as cogs in it. Trapped in a thin, feel-good veneer of morality for the reader’s benefit, these characters also lack shine, appeal, fascination. Lily, at her social peak, is on top of the world, has the irresistible glamor of a meteor. Her fall is inevitable, but our eyes are drawn to things that glitter, easily distracted by the brightest light. It is hard to look away.
Miriam Gordis
Miriam Gordis is a writer and bookseller living in New York.