Cigarettes, Tea, Cards, and Chloral: Addictive Habits and Consumer Culture in The House of Mirth

During the serial publication of The House of Mirth (1905), Edith Wharton received two letters regarding the novel’s reference to Orangeine, a headache cure that was offered Lily Bart by a fellow worker during her brief career in Madame Regina’s millinery shop. The first letter, from Albert B. Hale, suggested that Wharton had unwittingly engaged in an act of product placement: “there is an unintentional advertisement of a copyrighted or patented medicine which is working incalculable harm to our nostrum swallowing public. Could it not read a headache powder.” Hale warns Wharton that she might be manipulated by greedy merchandisers: “the agents or manufacturers of this stuff may make use of your innocent reference to their commodity and thereby swell the sum of their illy gotten wealth.”¹

The second letter corroborates Hale’s anxieties. Charles Bartlett, president of the Orangeine Chemical Co., thanked Wharton for her reference to his “pet prescription” and offered a complimentary year’s subscription in the “Orangeine Good Health and Good Spirits Club,” which would send her the medication at a discount in exchange for a testimonial. Bartlett included several pages of advertising with numerous statements from other members of the club and noted that “a suggestive allusion” to the medication by “a most prominent author, in the most prominent serial of a prominent monthly magazine, is a rare tribute to Orangeine, and of great value.”² Bartlett and Hale agree that Wharton’s novel advertised Bartlett’s product, perhaps in spite of itself; in Bartlett’s view, Wharton needed only lend her name to one of Orangeine’s ads to formalize the arrangement.

Wharton might well have viewed Bartlett’s request for ad copy with disdain; however, she kept the allusion to Orangeine when the novel was printed in book form and saved both pieces of correspondence. Although archival material can only hint at an author’s motivations, Wharton’s decision to preserve the letters points toward her concern about addictive behaviors and practices as American culture moved into the consumerist mode of the early-twentieth century. The burgeoning commodity culture of the period accompanied a growing anxiety around the concept of addiction, which, according to Timothy Hickman, was soon perceived as “a spiraling national problem.”³ Along with a number of other historians, Hickman documents a growing addiction crisis in the late-nineteenth century, spurred by the use of morphine in wartime and increasingly frequent diagnoses of neurasthenia. However, innovations in medical and commercial technology were also central: the invention of the hypodermic needle afforded an easy delivery system for intravenous drugs, just as James B. Duke’s patenting of the Bonsack Roller facilitated the mass production and consumption of cigarettes. By the late-nineteenth century, legal drugs like cigarettes, patent medicines, and alcohol were widely available, and illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine were often accessible in patent medicines in distilled form.⁴ When Bartlett asked Wharton for a testimonial, his inquiry does more than indicate how her persona could serve as advertising. It also suggests how the consumption of drugs was no longer seen as the provenance of either the demi-monde or the avant-garde, but rather the public who read bestselling novels and the authors who wrote them.

The House of Mirth links addiction to the rise of consumer capitalism. As much as seemingly innocuous consumer practices as smoking and tea-drinking by Wharton’s characters represent an endpoint of leisure-class indolence, they provide the stimulus necessary for working- and middle-class productivity. Similarly, behaviors like gambling drive the characters’ forays into the consumer economy and compensate for losses and disappointments in the marketplace. In Wharton’s fiction, addictive commodities and behaviors destabilize the autonomous self, making users dependent on objects they cannot control; habitual dependency drives individuals into the marketplace, as they continue to work, spend, and use in cyclical repetition. Wharton binds her elite and working-class characters together not simply through the shared experience of labor, as classic feminist analyses of The House of Mirth have claimed, but through the shared experience of...