Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter offers a poor orphaned Gerty, who also undergoes a Cinderella-like transformation. Not only do Lily's dresses express her inward self when she is wearing them, but they also tell the story of her past they encapsulate the entire person of Lily Bart. In Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, as Lily Bart lays her dresses reflectively across her bed, she notices, like Madame Merle, that "an association lurked in every fold: each fall of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record of her past" (295). Isabel's retort is perhaps an unexpected one in light of the tradition in nineteenth-century fiction of clothing serving as an outward sign of a character's internal "selfhood." Madame Merle herself subscribes to this traditional idea, admitting "I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear" (181). In this epigraph from Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer argues with Madame Merle about whether or not clothing expresses the wearer. My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don't express me.-Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (183)
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