Loebel, Thomas. "Beyond Her Self." New Essays on The House of Mirth. Ed. Deborah Esch. American Novel. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2001. 107-32.  

Both within and beyond its narration, what the text performs is the processs of dis-covering the complex relations of identity, being and beyond, of dis-covering the being of the self and the being-for of being. The enduring agony of this performance is that dis-covering the self is an impossibility within being. In order to address the soul of “who I am,” one moves beyond being, articulating otherwise. Lily Bart does dis-cover herself, but removing the cover occurs as a movement beyond being, beyond cognition and consciousness, beyond language. What The House of Mirth gives us is an articulation of the self as passage, as response to the alterity of the soul, taking it beyond being. ( P110)

Human commodities possess the possibility of selfhood in the interstices between their objective existence as commodities in circulation and their being as subjects—between, one might say, two ontological discourses, as object (of) and subject (to). Dis-covering the self is a process that takes place between these two. The trace of the human in being persecutes the commodified object of identity, and response to the trace of the human (or what I am calling the soul) is the very process of dis-covering the full ontological self, a coming into being of the self.

There is an ethics of self-discovery, then, in that as persecuted by being, identity and self-identicality are called into question so radically by this other as to enable their deconstruction. The other (in) being of the self faces identity, persecuting its cognitive construction as a reason for being. In the mute language of trauma, the human faces the commodity demanding response. This process is no simple one. It always runs the risk of a certain failure, whereby the other (in) being is conceptualized as just another part of my self, some alternative “me,” and thus imperialistically brought within identity’s boundaries. Lily wrestles with this possibility after the jarring event on the Sabrina. “She felt that she had at last arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced into the service of the state” (II, 1,150). As the text suggests, reconstructing identity imperialistically is a project of understanding, of making sense of being, of generating new reasons for being, all articulated within a rhetoric of capture and force. Lily achieves a certain republic of the spirit as a system of self-government, ironizing Selden’s version. Rather than approaching the stranger self of being, letting it be, her understanding pulls the stranger self into a uniform system, attempting to maintain at all costs its self-identi(cali)ty.

When Lily’s commodified identity would have had her submit to rape. ( P 112)

The space and time in which Lily seeks to find herself is traced in the fundamental scene of the novel, that of the tableaux vivants. ( P 115)

Lily’s mind is furnished with the corresponding adjustment of the mental vision, which is synonymous, as the text suggests, 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).4 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 confluence of the one losing her self in the other as response.5

What interests me is this moment of the passage into dead time that is prior to the conscious registration of what is being seen as intelligible. The moment that Selden and Gerty Farish see and know the real Lily Bart in the tableau may well be real, to employ Wharton’s term, but it is already too late to be true. In constructing the thematic of the real Lily Bart and then registering it as seen, the mind performs a cognitive operation that seems instantaneous and immediate. What we get is the moment, which is the trace-effect of an attempt to bridge the gulf, as well as an attempt to translate the truth of the other into the moment. What results is the construction of the real (in the) time of the one. However, “the truth correlative to being – in which the subject, a pure welcome reserved for the nudity of disclosed being, effaces itself before that which manifests itself, and in which effort, inventiveness, and genius are all just means, ways, and detours by which being is dis-covered, by which its phases come together and its structures are secured – remains, within the thought that issued from Greece, the foundation of every notion of truth.”6 The move to make the thematization of the truth of being manifest within intelligibility, to secure it within the structure of what we call the self, is a reaction to the “hesitation, a time, a certain risk, good or bad fortune” constitutive of the always only about to come to be of the truth of the human. Accepting alterity on its won terms and time is otherwise even than “letting it be,” for one does not even assume the power relation of “letting.” Perhaps fitting in Wharton’s context of economy and circulation is to approach this relation not as exchange but as gift, a giving over of the self in a certain expenditure without return, a circumvention of the self in a certain expenditure without return, a circumvention of the imperialism of intelligibility.8

Both Gerty and Selden function entirely within the stock market economy of this text at this moment, in the sense that neither faces pure risk and gives all.9 The question is whether one can do otherwise when the structure of intelligibility as it comes down through Western philosophy is capitalistically imperialist itself. How is it possible not to have the real overtake the true within intelligibility and its thematizations? The word “soul,” for instance, is a name standing in for the absolute alterity of the human that cannot but be lost in language. One can say that in seeing the real Lily Bart, Gerty and Selden have caught a glimpse of her soul, but this discourse itself is an attempt to trans-scribe what cannot be rendered in its own terms. The terms of cognition take it over. The soul, as we say, is not really existent but transscendent. It can’t be found. It figures the truth of being with a word that designates uncognizable immateriality. Yet what I find interesting in Wharton’s structure of the tableau vivant is the attempt, within the possibilities afforded by narrative description, to trace the sort of space one finds within a shadow, a space in which the nudity of being is itself being traced within objective intelligibility.

If tableaux vivants  are threshold structures dependent upon the blurring of the boundaries between art and life, and between what is seen and what is made intelligible, then the choice of Reynold’s portrait of Mrs. Lloyd particularly carries the threshold structure toward the thematics of nudity, alterity, and being-for-the-other.

One of the things The House of Mirth is telling us is that the most important moments of self-discovery occur when the subject finds itself outside of the economy of appropriation and exchange – not simply off the market, but beyond it, when and where the subject can’t think itself, because it is transfixed by an alterity within to which it must respond, yet toward which it cannot think. Lily Bart’s trajectory in the novel is one that moves from the commodity to the human, from the economic to the moral. This direction suggests a potential for thinking “humanistically” in a theologico-philosophical mode as a way of approaching the self in discovery of Wharton’s text. ( P 120)

In this 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 femininity. In this sense, the scene of embracing an other of being on the threshold of cognition and existing only in a queer manifestation moves further beyond Lily’s earlier scene of embracing an other figure of feminine identity during ontological crisis, the reaching out to Gerty Farish (I, 14,133). As companion pieces, these two scenes suggest a tension threshold between an ontic reaching out in need and a more prior giving over of the self to an other (in) being. As she moves into the queer space beyond what can be fully presented, and, therefore, beyond the self of feminine identity, Lily’s reaching out speaks more of an abundance over-flowing any particular construction of feminine identity, to the soul of being human itself. If the image of the child calls forth a fecundity of being, the non-present coming of the not hers from nowhere of this child also suggests that the other to whom the self of identity responds is the other (in) being, an embrace of self dis-covered, a figuring of a self other than itself to which one responds prior to any choice from cognition or decision as such. This act reaches out beyond being to the child of birth who is prior to being in the here and now. Any image of maternity that this scene might suggest is not a manifestation of Lily’s nature. “Rather than a nature, earlier than nature, immediacy is this vulnerability, this maternity, this pre-birth or pre-nature,”19 which John Llewelyn retranslates as the “pre-natal.”20 ( P 128)

 4. Given that Lily poses as Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Mrs. Lloyd, it is probably more than coincidental that Wharton’s rhetoric here emulates that of Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses on Art. Wharton claims for the eye of the viewer of a tableau what Reynolds claims for the eye of a painter –that it must move from the particular in order to construct the general truth of nature, so much so that “painting is not only not to be considered as an imitation, operating by deception, but that it is, and ought to be, in many points of view, and strictly speaking, no imitation at all of external nature.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 232. Citing Macbeth, Reynolds claims that “the mind is to be transported, as Shakespeare expresses it, beyond the ignorant present, [sic] to ages past” (235-6). Macbeth I.v. 57 “ beyond/This ignorant present. ( P 130)