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Some perversity to reading choice: desire to read of a heroine's fall from a state of grace. Theme reading. Then realizing identification and empathy is akin to schizophrenia (that passage in I Love Dick where the patriarchal cultural critic diagnoses the emotive narrator who has become so obsessed with him that she begins to consider him, as well as herself, as a fictional character.)
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Noting interconnectivity of opening passages of kindred books: that first chapter where the heroine is watched upon by an opening male narrator, then a switch to her own point of view. The first chapter of Madame Bovary, a condensed history of a dunderdoc's short life occurring primarily to experience the only passion of his existence, that of Emma, his object of desire. Then Kate Chopin lifting this idea for The Awakening, to enforce the theme that Edna Pontellier is viewed by her capitalist husband as a possession—as he notes the sunburn on her body as she arises from the sea. Then six years later, The House of Mirth, with a parallel theme of the woman as consumer object, always surveilled (by all the gossip girls and boys of New York City). Another sort of schizophrenia—Elaine Showalter writing in The Female Malady of the feminine condition of the young girl divided onto herself, always aware of being looked at, quoting from John Berger's "Ways of Seeing," that passage of a girl aware of crossing the room or weeping at the death of her father. This feminine condition (if we want to call it that) causes the young woman to perpetually be in existential crisis, in a sort of bad faith, an enhanced version of Sartre's waiter who is aware that he is playing the part of the waiter. Lily Bart is not allowed to become a flaneuse—to walk around the streets of the city unspotted, to disappear into crowds. She is spied instantly upon coming out of bachelor lodgings of a friend in the first chapter, which she knows will seed her downfall. One must not slip up.
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"Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?" Lily Bart is a philosopher of her own trapped and thwarted subjectivity. The dialectic in the novel: between freedom and happiness. In chapter one, the image of freedom is Selden's female cousin, unattractive and living alone with grim furnishings. Dialectic of the hag versus the kept woman. Also in The Awakening: spinster Mademoiselle Reisz, with the shrivelled violet in her lapel, versus the angelic perpetually pregnant Adele Ratignolle. Edna Pontellier chooses neither. The only choice between the only two undesirable options in society is death.
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Realizing the opening scene, with the socialite Lily Bart in Grand Central Station, being voyeured upon by a shaggy chapter one narrator, is direct influence for opening scene of first episode of the TV show Gossip Girl. Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald are the two central literary influences of the television show, which has now fallen into a sort of rot. Serena Van der Woodson is the tragic socialite who is always aware, who is constructed in public. Fitzgerald's Daisy (with Lonely Boy Dan Humphrey playing the writer needing a mysterious yet somehow empty muse). Fitzgerald's Zelda character named after Henry James' Daisy Miller, a novella read in rapture by wives of famous writers of the early twentieth century. Another work about a socialite's tragic fall and decline—yet we never get any entrance into her subjectivity. *
This constant identification and empathy with the female character is a Bovarizing, I know. Vivienne Eliot who took on the name of Henry James' Daisy Miller, once she was herself ostracized from Bloomsbury society. *
The burdens of a woman who lives in public - she constructs her identity from the outside. A madness in that.
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Edith Wharton takes as her muse beautiful women - she sees the tragedy in the beautiful woman who is not allowed any freedom. Freedom is perhaps the freedom from the gaze. Also freedom from the material conditons of needing to get married. Lily's sapphire bracelet a handcuff. When I met with the writer Lauren Elkin at the British Library in July, we talked about the flaneuse, as she's writing a study of it and I mention it somewhat in Heroines. We talk about Virginia Woolf, who is allowed to become a walker when she's older, then she's able to haunt the streets, a freedom in that, although the idea of that depresses me, somehow. Yet still Clarissa Dalloway is only allowed out because she has domestic errands to run. The flowers, etc.
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It is difficult for me not to read this novel without thinking of Jonathan Franzen's essay in The New Yorker, about, I think, Edith Wharton's lack of beauty making her somehow likable. I have no idea if that's what the essay is about. I glanced at it briefly in the Southpoint mall Barnes & Noble, and felt a feeling of rage. I guess I should go and read it. This morning a writer for The New Yorker chastised me over Twitter that I didn't read the full review that Pauline Kael wrote of Barbara Loden's Wanda (also published in The New Yorker), for my blog post. Sometimes I wish there were more visceral emoticons.
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The girl as capital - as investment - as consumer - as consumed. Lily Bart as expensive object. Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project. The dawn of the department store. Department store windows. Mannequins. Also: discussion of prostitution, people hawking wares on the street. The cost and labor behind elaborate grooming. "If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as herself...Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can't keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership." One gets married to be kept.
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Link between opportunistic Jewish property owner/social climber and opportunistic socialite. She is the goods. Anti-Semitism.
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Turn-of-the-century uppercrust Manhattan society, with the gleeful greedy rate with which news travels, trap doors, competitiveness, cruelties, hierarchies, expulsions, etc. is a bit like the New York media culture as represented on the Internet.
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Such sly swift wit: "She had the art of giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally sure of being able to embarrass the self-confident."
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Lily Bart is an artist of the social—like Fitzgerald's flapper. Except her role is to aggrandize not to put down. Gentle tricky manueverings as opposed to improvisational wit and chaos. She must adapt and change for each appropriate interaction. She is the commodity that is aware of itself - a commodity that pitches itself for the exchange, which is marriage. Some sort of con artist chameleon, dressing the part, in order to snag the prize, or be the prize that is snagged.The hunted that positions herself for the hunter, becoming in effect the hunter.
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On publicity and composing an identity from the outside: or to twist it: on writing: "Anxious as he was to avoid personal notice, he took, in the printed mention of his name, a pleasure so exquisite and excessive that it seemed a compensation for his shrinking from publicity."
