The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton - Gary Totten (essay date fall 2000)
Gary Totten (essay date fall 2000)
SOURCE: Totten, Gary. “The Art and Architecture of the Self: Designing the ‘I’-Witness in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.” College Literature 27, no. 3 (fall 2000): 71-87.
[In the following essay, Totten suggests that Lily's one genuine moment of subjectivity happens when she constructs herself as the aesthetic figure of Mrs. Lloyd.]
“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...
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