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

The period's visual entertainments exploit these changing perceptions of human subjectivity and identity. Spectacles such as the diorama and tableaux vivants capitalize on developments in photographic and cinematic machinery and processes, mirroring the effect and operation of these processes. Though Lily is not participating in a film version of Reynolds' portrait in the tableau, Wharton's tableaux vivants reflect the properties of both photography and film, and the novel's publication coincides with film's emergence in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, following decades of photographic advancements. Combining both drama and stasis,The nature of tableaux vivants is to arrest a particular art work in a dramatic reproduction. Indeed, though Lily is dramatically portraying Mrs. Lloyd, the theatricality of her performance is also characterized by a temporal extension during which the spectator's gaze may scrutinize her presentation of self. The tableaux vivants seems especially suited for displaying new structural formations of a subject. Martha Banta suggests that for artist's wanting to capture the "soul" of their subject, certain theatrical traditions (namely, the tableaux vivants and Noh drama) "serve the artist better than nature does," for while nature is in constant flux, in the tableau "it is stillness which expresses the self's core" (1987, 296).

The drama, "stillness," and heightened aestheticism of the tableau provide the ideal setting for Lily's investigation of self. However, because Lily also commodifies her appearance, the tableaux vivants move beyond the simple pleasures of seeing to reveal how the period's developing consumer gaze affects representation and self-creation. David Shi reminds us that changes in both physical and social structures, particularly in the city, increased opportunities for people "to see and be seen" during the nineteenth century: "The introduction of public transportation, parks, balconied apartments, congested tenements, public recreations, spectator sports, office towers, and plate-glass windows gave people an intimate glimpse of others and their possessions" (1995, 85-86). This combination of consumerism and voyeurism in nineteenth-century urban culture is well illustrated by the lengthy apartmenthunting scenes in William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), for example, where, similar to those participating in the popular "slumming parties" of the late nineteenth century,2 the characters Basil and Isabel March characterize the spectacle of Bowery life, poverty, and immigrants as repulsive, yet picturesque, their experience a combination of fascination and horror. The way in which they define themselves in relation to these unsettling sights is ultimately an effect of their status as consumers, and these scenes from Howells's novel exemplify how spectacles of urbanization, socio-economic status, and otherness sustain the period's developing consumer gaze.

The literary Realists grapple with these various issues of representation and the gaze in terms of fictional art, and narrative theory at the turn of the century reflects an interest in the ideological utility of the eyewitness gaze. Howells's Criticism and Fiction (1891) and the prefaces and essays of Henry James (particularly "The Art of Fiction" [1884]) consider the relation between artist, vision, and text. Edith Wharton comments on narrative "seeing" in The Writing of Fiction (1925) and various essays such as "The Criticism of Fiction" (1914) and "Visibility in Fiction" (1929) where she privileges a connection between the art and the artist's consciousness. The eyewitness gaze in American Realism provides a narrative device by which the bond between artist and art, reality and narrative, can be invisibly maintained, masking the writer's ideological participation in the narrative.