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

Lily's performance contains at least two levels of reproduction, which further illuminate the differences between the text and the performance of Lily. First, her depiction of Reynolds's portrait faithfully reproduces the original, imitating photographic reproduction in its statis, its fidelity to the original, and in its "life-size" impact which produces a "close-up" effect.8 However, a second and more complex level of reproduction occurs because Lily is also trying to reproduce an image of herself that is not connected to the actual painting at all. This reproduction is a dramatic rendering of her self intended to counteract the disturbing image that she sees when she looks into mirrors. On this level of reproduction, she is not interested in verisimilitude with Reynolds's painting, but wants to construct an illusion of subjectivity, a supra-real subjectivity (existing in the supra-real space of the tableau) through her visual encounters with her own image and her participation in the tableau. Lois Tyson suggests that the ratified life Lily desires would be the ideal "frame" to display her beauty (1994, 21). Lily envisions this life while gazing at the jewels displayed at the Van Osburgh wedding; the jewels symbolize the "life she longed to lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form a harmonious setting to her own jewel-like rareness" (Wharton 1964, 95). Lacking such a frame, however, Lily substitutes the setting of cultural refinement and beauty within her tableau, fabricating a visual and narrative frame within which to publicly exhibit her beauty. Seeing her in her scanty, yet aesthetically correct, finery, the Trenors and Dorsets speculate on Lily's intentions to commodify herself, while, according to Tyson, Selden aestheticizes Lily (28-29). Regardless of her position as aesthetic object or commodity, Tyson concludes, Lily, as object, becomes a fetish (29).

Lily's status as fetish derives mainly from her position as an exhibited object, a further effect of artistic reproduction, which, as Benjamin suggests, generates an intensified artistic gaze. Lily, as reproduced image and exhibited objet d'art, receives this intensified gaze. However, the unique nature of tableaux vivants also lends Lily's reproduction the qualities of film, which Benjamin distinguishes from painting: the painter, like the magician, retains a distance from reality in his work, while the cameraman "penetrates deeply into its web" (1968, 235). Benjamin further suggests that filmed behavior offers itself more easily to analysis because it can be isolated more readily: the close-up expands space, while slow motion extends movement and time.The static nature of the tableau creates a "freeze-frame" effect that seems to combine the dramatic, photographic, and filmic; during this frame, the spectator's gaze may scrutinize Lily's production in a manner similar to the penetrating gaze of the surgeon (according to Benjamin) or pathologist (according to Foucault). Benjamin believes this rearrangement of time or space "reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject" (238).9