(the) American (Novel of)

Branded from the Start
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refrains from less tasteful depictions of inner turmoil, dramatic action,
and romantic disclosures. 9 But despite all her efforts, Wharton cannot
keep her novel in the same tastefully integrated space of manners as
Austen does. The novel constantly struggles with its form, its irony, its
realism, because too many, actually almost all, of Wharton’s characters
are not well mannered but rather “carniverous beasts” and “lower organisms.”
Furthermore, Wharton’s heroine Lily Bart doesn’t have the
assets Emma has; she has class without money and thus manners without
the social position attached to them. This complication of the
novel—so unlike Wharton’s own life since apparently she did seem to
have manners and money and social position 10 but did ultimately choose
to live in France—is emblematic of the American dilemma about manners
itself. America, Wharton implies, can only house noveaux riches, those
tasteless creatures that somehow challenge the ideological and ideal
connection between money, social position, manners, and morals on
which Austen’s novel rests. So the only person with true class in Wharton’s
novel has no money, and everyone who has money has no manners.
The result is devastating: Lily has to die among people who violate
manners, and thus herself, throughout the novel.
It is rather unclear, an unsolved mystery, why Lily has class, that
is, manners and taste, in the novel. But she does. And she has one thing
Wharton did not have (in this sense, Wharton’s writing is propelled by
a perceived lack in herself): personal beauty. Lily has more of that than
any other character in the novel. Indeed, as Austen conflates manners,
morals, money, and social position, Wharton conflates manners, taste,
and beauty. Perhaps in light of the lack of history, manners have become
aestheticized, and the effect is, literally, spectacular. It is all about seeing
and exhibiting; but it is not about exhibiting socially responsible, tasteful
behavior as in Austen but about displaying, more literally, a beautifully,
stunningly tasteful exterior. In Wharton’s novel, you wear your
manners on your sleeve, so to speak; or even better, your choice of
sleeve reveals your manners but so does the shape of the arm it covers.
Indeed, manners are expressed most perfectly by the way in which the
sleeve is chosen to tastefully reveal and cover the arm. Clothes, appearance,
taste, the way one walks and talks, those are the things that
determine manners. Thus as in Austen’s novel, in Wharton’s novel manners
are about exhibition: but who exhibits to whom, and who follows
whom, becomes a much more vexed issue when class and manners are