Abstract
This essay argues that a strong undercurrent runs throughout The House of Mirth, which subtly combines the themes of risk‐taking, gambling, and aesthetic play and thereby exposes the randomness and indeterminacy that the predominant value systems of Lily’s universe attempt to disguise or negate. The presence of risk is felt as a variable whose attributive value or meaning differs widely depending on varying and often contradictory contexts from the economic to the aesthetic, the material to the spiritual, and the individual to the communal.