ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with an old game of chance, gambling, and a fairly new one, stock market speculation, as they relate to the disavowed contingency of heterosexuality. Throughout the nineteenth century gambling had become subject to increasing moral opprobrium, although it persisted in myriad forms. Claiming that “chance itself may be the only law to which there is no exception,” Theodore Dreiser cites “the gamble of evolution” as evidence. In The House of Mirth Lily’s gambling represents the motility of desire, with its endless deferral of satisfaction and substitutive shuttling from one object to the next—a kind of ceaseless striving that postpones the certain disillusionment of getting what one thought one wanted. The compromised heterosexuality of The House of Mirth and The Pit offers insights that are perhaps most available to a queer reading whose fundamental assumptions include the contingency of heterosexuality and the ideological effort to deny that contingency.
