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

What new structural formations of Lily does this "still frame" reveal? Indeed, while Benjamin emphasizes how mechanical reproduction affects the spectator's experience with the work of art, we must consider Lily as not only art object but also gazing subject, and thus, as Crary suggests, the site of certain practices of subjectivity tied to specific historical processes of vision within the tableau. The novel's narrator informs us that "Tableaux vivants depend for their effect not only on the happy disposal of lights and the delusive interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision." To the responsive individual, such entertainments offer "magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination" (Wharton 1964, 140). Selden, we learn, possesses such a responsive mind. When the curtain parts to reveal what was "simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart" (141), rather than Reynolds' depiction of Mrs. Lloyd, Selden believes that here before him is "the real Lily Bart" (142). Cynthia Griffin Wolff contends that Lily "might best be characterized as a heroine in search of an appropriate scenario" (1994, 77), and for Selden, this particular tableau seems to represent Lily's perfect scenario, for within the tableau frame, "divested of the trivialities of her little world," she represents, "for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part" (Wharton 1964, 142). During this moment, Selden catches a glimpse of Lily that seems to coincide with his notion of a "republic of the spirit,"10 and his reaction to Lily's tableau indicates that his conception of this republic may involve both a moral and aesthetic vision.

The moral implications of Selden's vision of Lily become most apparent when Ned Van Alstyne leans toward Selden to exclaim: "Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but gad, there isn't a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!" (142).The comment rouses Selden from his aesthetic reverie, indignant that Lily is fated to live in an inferior world and be judged by standards far below her level. Thus presented with an opinion from a member of the gaping crowd which, according to Wolff and Amy Kaplan, Lily has learned to rely on to maintain an identity (Wolff 1995, 124; Kaplan 1988, 102), Selden is jarred out of his aesthetic contemplation of Lily to feel, "[i]n the long moment before the curtain fell ... the whole tragedy of her life" (Wharton 1964, 142). He recognizes that because Lily seems to require an interpretive frame that is inherently impossible for her to occupy, she is forced to exist in a society that forever misreads her. Despite this lapse into apparent moral indignation, however, Selden ultimately relies on his aesthetic sense and specular processes to appraise Lily. The "tragedy of her life" that is impressed upon him before the curtain falls is more a consequence of his visual sense than his moral standards. Tyson suggests that the heightened aesthetic awareness of both Selden and Lily contributes to the perpetual distance between them that is never bridged. According to Tyson, Selden's insistent aestheticization and fetishization of Lily insures that her desirability (in his eyes) is maintained only while that distance is intact, while Lily's desire to make herself into an objet d'art represents her distaste for the "psychosexual demands of an intimate relationship." As a rare aesthetic commodity, she can be "admired from afar" and "seen but not touched" (Ton 1994,24).