The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton doesn’t want readers to sympathise with Lily Bart

The House of Mirth is about Lily Bart, a New York socialite who wants to marry for money but hesitates to commit, unable to choose between money and love (for Lawrence Selden), and whilst wavering, makes some blunders. Ultimately, she’s ruined by a scandal.  
Any reader might consider the ethics of Lily’s choices and actions, and wonder “Would I have done the same?”.  
The interesting part is that, I’ve realised, Edith Wharton doesn’t want readers to sympathise with Lily Bart.  
From the beginning, it’s clear that, as with Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, her personality would cause her own downfall. She doesn’t have money, but has expensive tastes; she wants money, and knows that her only option is to marry a rich man, but can’t commit. Lily can neither reconcile with her love of comfort and luxury, nor reconcile with her own lack of money and need for a mercenary marriage. As Carry Fisher nicely puts it, “she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic” (B.2, ch.1).  
The contradictions, of course, give Lily Bart complexity and humanity—after all, it’s a critique of society that women’s options are so limited that the only way to be rich is to marry into money. 
But she also makes choices—bad choices. As I wrote before, Lily chooses to play bridge and get into debt, despite her aunt’s disapproval and her own dependence on her aunt, Mrs Peniston. She chooses to ask for money, or “tips”, from her friend’s husband Gus Trenor. She lets herself be seen with him, and gives the small-minded people around something to gossip about. The gossip involving Gus Trenor becomes a fatal element when she later becomes entangled in the Dorsets drama. 
There may be people who argue for her, citing individual freedom and all that, and think I’m harsh. However, Lily Bart is in a situation where her father was ruined and both her parents are dead, she is dependent on her aunt, who gives her an income and lets her buy dresses, jewellery, and go to dinners and parties, without controlling or watching her. See it from Mrs Peniston’s point of view—her anger is justifiable, her reasoning makes perfect sense, why should she give her niece money to play cards? Of course the aunt doesn’t know Lily asks for money in order to pay back Gus Trenor, but she takes money from him because of gambling debt and other luxuries. 
Throughout the novel, Edith Wharton makes it very hard to like and sympathise with Lily Bart, because she is shallow, frivolous, thoughtless, sometimes even ungrateful; she is a bad judge of character, and makes bad choices; and she looks down on everyone. The only person she seems to respect is Lawrence Selden—otherwise, she sees everyone as dingy, including her aunt, and is unkind to Gerty Ferish, the only person who is kind to her.  
Someone who sees herself as mentally superior and despises everyone is bad enough—in her case, when she’s not particularly better in any way (except the awareness that high society is hypocritical and rotten, including herself), it is insufferable. 
Look at this passage: 

“Lily's taste of beneficence had wakened in her a momentary appetite for well-doing. […] 
But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions from pain—that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on gladness, and young lips shaped for love—this discovery gave Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life. Lily's nature was incapable of such renewal: she could feel other demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid which did not press on an answering nerve. But for the moment she was drawn out of herself by the interest of her direct relation with a world so unlike her own. She had supplemented her first gift by personal assistance to one or two of Miss Farish's most appealing subjects, and the admiration and interest her presence excited among the tired workers at the club ministered in a new form to her insatiable desire to please.” (B.1, ch.14) 

(my emphasis) 
Lily Bart is privileged and selfish, that’s what Edith Wharton is saying—she does charity to feel good about herself, and feels drawn out of herself for a moment, only a moment. Such a reaction, I can’t help feeling, is common—most people, when brought into contact with people much poorer and less privileged than themselves, have strong feelings such as pity and anger, and gratitude for their own situation, just for a moment, then they get back to their normal lives. Wharton may not jump on the page like George Eliot would, but she puts it in a way to condemn Lily Bart as selfish and frivolous. 
It is partly her frivolity and partly her stupidity that Lily Bart is caught up in the Dorsets drama and scandal. 

“…she had been perfectly aware from the outset that her part in the affair was, as Carry Fisher brutally put it, to distract Dorset's attention from his wife. That was what she was "there for": it was the price she had chosen to pay for three months of luxury and freedom from care. Her habit of resolutely facing the facts, in her rare moments of introspection, did not now allow her to put any false gloss on the situation.” (B.2, ch.4)  

Lily is frivolous, impulsive, and reckless. She accepts the invitation, despite Mrs Peniston’s disapproval, despite her own dislike of Bertha Dorset, and despite the awareness that she is being used. Each of the reasons alone should be enough to prevent her from going, but she gets on the yacht anyway. She knows that Bertha Dorset is unfaithful to her husband, but she participates in the game and plays her role. She makes the choice.    
When “the disaster” occurs and the Dorsets are on the verge of separation, Wharton makes Lily more compassionate and therefore more likeable: 

“A chill of fear passed over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered treachery that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But compassion, in a moment, got the better of her instinctive recoil. What was this outpouring of senseless bitterness but the tracked creature's attempt to cloud the medium through which it was fleeing? It was on Lily's lips to exclaim: "You poor soul, don't double and turn—come straight back to me, and we'll find a way out!" But the words died under the impenetrable insolence of Bertha's smile. Lily sat silent, taking the brunt of it quietly, letting it spend itself on her to the last drop of its accumulated falseness; then, without a word, she rose and went down to her cabin.” (B.2, ch.2)  

But if this shows her kindness and compassion, it also shows her stupidity and misjudgement of character. Lawrence Selden, for example, knows that “Bertha would fight to the last round of powder: the rashness of her conduct was illogically combined with a cold determination to escape its consequences” (B.2, ch.3). Other people know Bertha’s dangerous. Only Lily seems to be unaware.   
Bertha’s reaction, when confronted by Lily, should imply the game she’s playing and the next step she would take. Sadly our poor protagonist doesn’t get it—she ignores Selden’s advice to leave the yacht and save herself. Worse, she later ignores his advice to come back to her aunt at once.  
I may feel sorry for Lily Bart, but I don’t sympathise with her—she makes the choices herself, and the disinheritance comes as no surprise. I suppose readers may have different reactions to the character of Lily Bart, and her choices—many readers would be more sympathetic and understanding than me. 
But I’m convinced that Edith Wharton doesn’t want readers to sympathise with her character. Why? Look at this passage: 

“It was the first time that she had faced her family since her return from Europe, two weeks earlier; but if she perceived any uncertainty in their welcome, it served only to add a tinge of irony to the usual composure of her bearing. The shock of dismay with which, on the dock, she had heard from Gerty Farish of Mrs. Peniston's sudden death, had been mitigated, almost at once, by the irrepressible thought that now, at last, she would be able to pay her debts. She had looked forward with considerable uneasiness to her first encounter with her aunt. Mrs. Peniston had vehemently opposed her niece's departure with the Dorsets, and had marked her continued disapproval by not writing during Lily's absence. The certainty that she had heard of the rupture with the Dorsets made the prospect of the meeting more formidable; and how should Lily have repressed a quick sense of relief at the thought that, instead of undergoing the anticipated ordeal, she had only to enter gracefully on a long-assured inheritance? It had been, in the consecrated phrase, "always understood" that Mrs. Peniston was to provide handsomely for her niece; and in the latter's mind the understanding had long since crystallized into fact.” (B.2, ch.4) 

It’s hard to like Lily Bart.