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

Throughout the performance, Lily holds the visual image of her representation and its effect on her audience in her mental gaze, vicariously gazing at her own image through her suppositions about the audience's gaze. Lily is particularly concerned about Selden's gaze, and after the performance it becomes clear that Lily viewed the tableau through her notions of what Selden's perception of the performance would be. When they meet later in the ballroom, Lily and Selden exchange a reciprocal gaze that reverberates with the implications of the tableau performance:

Lily was ... standing alone when he [Selden] reached her; and finding the expected look in her eye, he had the satisfaction of supposing he had kindled it. The look did indeed deepen as it rested on him, for even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily felt the quicker beat of life that his nearness always produced. She read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she cared to be beautiful. (Wharton 1964, 144; emphasis added)

Lily's specular experience before, during, and after the tableaux vivants reveals that, as Foucault suggests,"one cannot simply look at oneself in a mirror"; she must "look into another eye" within herself, one that is "in the shape of the eye of the other" (1984, 367), namely Selden.11 Lily Bart uses the gaze and her notions of an "aesthetics of self" to intercept and deflect Selden's gaze during the constructing and staging of her subjectivity. This interception occurs when Lily's perception of Selden's vision of her mediates between the gaze he actually directs at her and the gaze that she directs at herself. This perception deflects her (physically) off-stage gaze out into the audience during the tableau, and she seeks evidence of this certain perception in Selden's eye when she and Selden exchange an actual physical gaze after the performance. In Selden's gaze, Lily sees herself reflected in the pupil-mirror of the other and her status as subject (who also gazes) is revealed.

The Mise en Abyme and Realist Ideology

In the reciprocal specular engagement between observer and art work triggered by Lily's performance, the "cycle of representation" which Foucault refers to manifests itself in the events surrounding Lily's subjectivity (1994). What makes Lily's act of representation most significant, however, is the fact that her reproduction of Reynolds's portrait goes beyond a mere reproduction of the art work; she visually reformulates the narrative of her self within the frame of the tableau. Thus framed and framing, Lily appropriates all the theatrical and specular means at her disposal to create an aesthetics of self which speaks to Selden's finely tuned aesthetic sensibilities during the tableau s temporal extension, and salvages the fading subjectivity that the mirrors reflect throughout the novel. Of course, Lily's aesthetic triumph during the tableau is only temporary. The novel's ending implies that neither the eyewitness gaze nor the aesthetics of self produced through her careful design is powerful enough to avoid her eventual fetishization. However, reading Lily as merely aesthetic fetish (without subjectivity) and viewing her death as the unavoidable consequence of that fetishization, does not account for her status as an eyewitness to her own subjectivity. Even if it operates only temporarily, Lily's function as an eyewitness is important for our understanding of her subjectivity in the narrative. Though Lily's death at the novel's ending suggests her failure of subjectivity, the tableaux vivants scene complicates this conclusion.