art and architecture of the self: Designing the "I"-witness in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, The

College Literature, Fall 2000 by Totten, Gary

"If, then, design is inevitable, the best art must be that in which it is most organic, most inherent in the soul of the subject." (Wharton 1914, 229-30)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, writing of the ideological force of the gaze in The Visible and the Invisible, argues that "we could not dream of seeing [things] 'all naked' because the gaze itself envelops them [and] clothes them with its own flesh" (1968, 131). Merleau-Ponty's conception of how the gaze works describes the ideological utility of the eyewitness gaze within the discursive system of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary Realism.' Indeed, narratives which articulate individual subjectivities within an ideology privileging universal reality often reveal the assumptions of the Realist aesthetic. The Realists depend on the mechanisms of the gaze to construct a realistic depiction of life, "clothing" or "enveloping" reality with the "flesh" of the gaze. Working from the epistemological assumption that "to see is to know," Realism assumes a transparent relation between art and artist, between narrative and reality. However, when we consider Realist characters acting as what Jonathan Crary calls "observing subjects" (and what I term eyewitnesses), the supposedly transparent relation between narrative and reality is disrupted.

In The House of Mirth (1905), Edith Wharton explores the complicated relation between narrative and reality through Lily Bart's attempts at self-representation during the tableaux vivants. Early in The Order of Things, Michel Foucault illustrates the problematic nature of representation by discussing Velasquez's Las Meninas. Foucault considers the multiple gazes of the various figures in the painting, as well as the position of the actual painter and the painter depicted in the work itself, and suggests that the spectator's gaze is led to these figures in a spiral pattern which "presents us with the entire cycle of representation"; however, the spectator's recognition of this cycle lasts only for a moment, and then the representation "dissolves" again (1994, 11). Foucault suggests that ultimately the painting is an example of "representation undertak[ing] to represent itself... in all its elements" (16): the painting's structure manages to elide the subject, the foundation of representation, and "offer itself as representation in its pure form" (16).

Lily's portrayal of Reynolds' portrait, Mrs. Lloyd (1776), is also an instance of representation representing itself, but Lily's subjectivity remains intact in the process. Indeed, as Dale Bauer suggests, Lily manages to retain her own identity during the performance rather than becoming the figure in the portrait (1988, 96-97), and the spectators praise Lily's ability to express her own individuality on stage rather than her fidelity to the portrait. Throughout the narrative, Lily utilizes her gaze to create a self, encountering her reflection in mirrors, she monitors the condition of her face, and is horrified to see the effects that her experiences are having on her appearance. These "faint flaws" and "little lines near her mouth" appear early on in the novel (Wharton 1964, 31) and not only indicate that she is getting older (and thus less marriageable), but also forecast Lily's economic future. Lily's mother had predicted that though the family may have lost all its money, Lily would surely "get it all back" with her face (32). Thus, Lily "values" her looks for obvious reasons, and her physical appearance, an important marker of socio-economic status, also becomes an important component of her subjectivity. Lily utilizes her gaze to assess the visual impact of her appearance and then constructs her subjectivity based on what she sees. This process intensifies during the tableaux vivants, when issues of design and visual effect dominate Lily's self-creation. Thus, rather than having her subjectivity eclipsed in the tableau's structure, Lily uses the tableau to stage her subjectivity, and her experience as an eyewitness (indeed as an "I"-witness) during the scene exposes the tension between her individual acts of gazing and a Realist ideology committed to a "common vision" of reality In light of the many architectural and design matters occupying Wharton's attention during her writing of the novel, we might even term Lily's production of self in the tableau an "architecture of self," due to Lily's (and Wharton's) interest in aesthetic design and structural decoration, and the novel's place within a cultural context privileging vision's role in both the social construction of meaning and the construction of the modern subject.

The Ideological Utility of the Eyewitness Gaze

Wharton's discourse reflects epistemic conditions generated by developments in film, photography, and other visual technology. Jonathan Crary discusses the repositioning of the observer in the early nineteenth-century, "outside of the fixed relations of interior/exterior presupposed by the camera obscura and into an undemarcated terrain on which the distinction between internal sensation and external signs is irrevocably blurred"(1990, 24). This "'liberation' of vision" prompts a "falling away of the rigid structures that had shaped it and constituted its objects" (24). Crary tracks this new perception of vision through scientific interest in the retinal afterimage and post-camera obscura inventions such as the stereoscope, zoetrope, phenakistiscope, and other technological and cultural phenomena in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which focused public attention on new visual experiences. Crary believes that these developments produce a new kind of observer, different from the passive spectator (onlooker) of nineteenth century culture, and thus lead to the formation of the modern human subject. Relying on Foucault's method of situating subjects within frames of discursive possibility, Crary defines "observer" as "one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations" (6).The observer becomes "the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification" (5).