Women in Transit, Transient Women: Interpreting Ephemeral Materiality in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and The Glimpses of the Moon

Edith Wharton shows a sustained preoccupation with the material and gendered dimensions of transience in her fiction. Following an initial discussion of the formative influence of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), this essay focuses on the characters of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905) and Susy Lansing in The Glimpses of the Moon (1922). It argues that the packed cases of these female protagonists are posited as mobile archives of ephemeral experience, something I characterise as a type of non-domestic experience that foregrounds impermanent forms of attachment and is subject to social judgement and envy in turn. The various ephemeral objects that form part of the luggage of Lily and Susy stand in for more enduring forms of material investment. Yet their understanding of the implications of such objects differs greatly and has a bearing on narrative outcome for each character. As the essay argues, the respective fates of Lily and Susy depend on whether they conceptualise the condition of transience and accompanying material manifestations of ephemerality in terms of social marginalisation or dynamic opportunity.