失われた手 : The House of Mirthにおける読む行為、接触、感染(関東英文学研究)

抄録

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that the discourse of contagion informs the theme of communal exclusion in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905). Wharton's anthropological knowledge of precivilized society helped her to describe the rapidly industrialized yet morally conservative "Old New York" as a unit of immune system, from which organic objects are mechanically eliminated. As is clear from her 1903 essay "The Vice of Reading," Wharton compares the difference between Europe and America to that between life (the organic) and the machine (the inorganic). The House of Mirth reflects this dualistic relation; in particular, the famous scene of tableaux vivants situates a symbolic event in which European culture meets American soil. Lily Bart's performance embodies the European organicity, which the American audience fails to appreciate. As she becomes identified with a carrier of immoral dirtiness, Lily is gradually expelled from the community. While people sublimate her physical beauty through the ritualistic tableaux vivants, they assume that she is untouchable because of her spiritual immorality. Mrs. Peniston, for instance, feels that the room allocated to Lily gets contaminated as she learns Lily's habitual gambling and accumulated debts. Lily becomes a victim of such collective imagination about her "dirtiness." What is fundamental for this system of social immunity is the sense of touch. While Lily's physical beauty is emphasized throughout the novel, her body remains a site of taboo. Lily's existence is always framed by the communal practice of reading, and the sublimation of her beauty makes her being socially untouchable. I argue that the novel's foregrounding of tactile sense is related to the thematic importance of Lily's hand, which serves as an indicator of her fate in the novel.