“Beyond Her Self”

Quotation

1.          “Lily’s mind is furnished with the corresponding adjustment of the mental vision which is synonymous, as the text suggest, with being responsive. The kind of ‘response’ Lily makes, however, is to the stranger within. This is to say that her sense moves toward the other of sense, and even beyond, into the otherwise than sense in which the soul of being takes its priority. This movement is pertinent to the tableaux vivants, because these performances are all about a relation of the self to another, over the gulf of a certain death and unbridgeable space, and yet the relation is mutually revelatory. The everyday subjectivity of the person ‘dies’ into a figure from a canvas, bringing it to life. At the same time, and through the dying of the subjectivity of the self, the figure from the picture brings out ‘the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony’ (I, 12, 106). Such harmony, I would translate, is generated by the soul of the self, caught for a moment of dead time, able to flicker within existence only (if not able to come to be) by way of the confluence of the one losing her self in the other as response” (p. 116).

2.          “In the final scene, Lily lies at the threshold, not just of consciousness and unconsciousness, but of being and beyond. As a scene of fundamental ontological trouble, the figures we are given trace the possibility of being read otherwise. The image rendered is a queer manifestation of appearance with non-presence, of Lily reaching out to hold a child that is not hers and not there. Maternity, here, is less traditional than proverbial, as a caring for that which is wholly in need, a reaching out in the embrace to carry an other that cannot exist on its own. The fecundity of this embrace exceeds the thematic of an actual child and reaches beyond to the stranger in her being that persecutes the self-centered and commodified identity of feminity.” (p. 127)