“The Discreet Charm of the Leisure Class”

Quotation

1.          “This sequence (the Monte Carlo trip) is, from one perspective, a reflexive meditation on Wharton’s painstaking analysis of Lily’s despondency and stasis; visual accompaniment to passages from the novel that almost clinically describe ‘the sparkle [that] had died out of her,’ when the ‘taste of life was stale on her lips . . . an inner desolation deeper than the loneliness about her.’ The dissolution of a coherent sense of self that these camera movements underscore might also be contrasted with the type of focalization featured in another great epic of upper-class venality, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. . . . Ironically enough, Davies’s stylistic flourishes imbue Wharton’s late-Victorian narrative devices with a modernist, near-Proustian gloss. As in Proust, objects becomes talismans of memory—even if this process cannot bestow upon Lily, herself a venerated object, the sense that time has been regained and vanquished.” (p 91-92)  

2.          “The evocation of Watteau provides a glimpse (even a slightly utopian glimpse) of Lily’s desire to escape from class-bound repression. Within a culture where women are reduced to their ‘exchange value,’ however, this desire can only be envisioned as a tableau vivant that that provides onlookers with an opportunity to gawk and smirk” (p 91).