Exhibit at the Mount
The thing I liked best about Edith Wharton's home, The Mount, was an exhibit called "Lily's Downfall." It is not part of the permanent display. It will run through October 2005.
The exhibit takes up the whole (unrestored) third floor of the house, where the bedrooms were. The wooden floors creak, and some of the ceilings slope with the roof. Windows look out over the Berkshires.
In each of six rooms a passage has been posted from the House of Mirth, which is perhaps my all-time favorite novel. Each passage is a critical turning point in the story of Lily Bart's long, sad fall. Lily's Downfall.
You can't go in the rooms. You stand behind a rope at each door. A few pieces of period furniture have been arranged to create a scene. A mannekin is Lily. I wish I could have taken pictures; it was not allowed.
In one tableau, she learns she has been disinherited. In another one she realizes she has taken money from the odious Gus Treynor. And so on.
It's clever, too, and poignant to illustrate the story this way, because in the book Lily posed in tableaux at parties, boldly showing off her beauty (and further undermining herself in the process).
What makes the exhibit so wonderful is the clothing, all of it provided by the Museum of the City of New York, out of its costume collection. Lily was, of course, much about her clothes. These are the clothes she might have worn.
Related: The Mount