2—
"Sublime Speculations"

Edmund Burke, Lily Bart, and the Ethics of Risk

Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations, for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.
(Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France )

Ah, how she'd always envied women with a natural wave! No difficulty for them in eloping with explorers. Of course they had to undergo the waving ordeal now and then too, but not nearly so often . . .
(Edith Wharton, "Permanent Wave")

The hatred of expenditure is the raison d'être of and the justification for the bourgeoisie; it is at the same time the principle of its horrifying hypocrisy.
(Georges Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure")

No excess is good.
(Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France )

As a young man writing A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , the book that was to establish him as a major force in eighteenth-century British intellectual and cultural affairs, Edmund Burke favored an aesthetics of the sublime. He held it to be "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling."^[1] The sublime, an experience bordering on tenor but productive of delight, "derives all its sublimity from the terror with which it is generally accompanied" (60), and although Burke's notion of terror may have nothing to do with what Edith Wharton describes as the "terrible god of chance," their conjunction suggests a profound link between sublimity, chance, and speculation, categories that haunted Burke from the beginning to the end of his career.^[2] But whereas Burke attempts to banish terror and everything that accompanies it from everyday life, Wharton insists upon precisely that which Burke feared: that ethics, politics, and aesthetics are inseparable, and that

human excellence resides in the capacity to engage the incalculable.^[3] The following pages begin by examining the connection between speculation and the sublime as it appears both positively in Burke's aesthetics and negatively in his politics and then consider the ways in which Lily Bart's relation to risk and speculation suggests another version of sublimity.

If Burke rose to fame by defining himself as the theorist (or speculator) who speculated on the sublime, it is important to examine the ways in which Burke's discussions of sublimity are linked to questions about speculation, and we might begin by considering the diverse and contradictory meanings of that word. On the one hand, speculation entails interest: according to the Oxford English Dictionary , to speculate is "to engage in the buying and selling of commodities or effects in order to profit by a rise or fall in their market value; to undertake, to take part or invest in, a business enterprise or transaction of a risky nature in the expectation of considerable gain." On the other hand, a second definition of speculation implies disinterest and detachment, for to speculate also means to "theorize upon," "to observe or view mentally; to consider, examine, or reflect upon with close attention; and to engage in thought or reflection, especially of a conjectural or theoretical nature." The word's double meaning suggests that risk taking and theorizing are somehow related, as if contemplation were never quite so free of interest (or speculation) as one might prefer to believe.

The Enquiry is a speculative work in every sense of the word. Even Burke's consideration of the extremes of size links speculation, in the sense of a multitude of associations, to the sublime: vastness or littleness are both sources of sublimity because "they afford a large and fruitful field of speculation" (66). In this sense speculation is consistent with, if not a synonym for, sublime experience; in perceiving the magnitude or finitude of space we become "amazed and confounded," unable to distinguish the "extreme of littleness from the vast itself" (66). Speculation and the sublime both entail an experience in which objects that ordinarily are separate from one another become confused or "confounded." The shape of a "rotund," for example, produces a particularly "sublime effect" for in it you can no where fix a boundary; turn which way you will, the same object still seems to continue, and the imagination has no rest" (68). But Burke invokes yet another meaning of speculation, for in writing the Enquiry he assumes a position of disinterest, as if the activity of theorizing demanded an observer who remains separate from that which he observes.

In this regard Lawrence Selden, who is fascinated by Lily Bart precisely because "it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation" (3), but who nonetheless manages to keep her at a distance, enacts Burke's relation to the subject matter of the Enquiry : both present themselves as disinterested spectators who contemplate, or theorize about, a field upon which they exert no influence, preferring merely to observe the spectacles someone else creates.

Burke begins the preface to the first edition by stating his reasons for writing the Enquiry : he has "observed that the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful were frequently confounded" and that "such a confusion of ideas must certainly render all our reasonings upon subjects of this kind extremely inaccurate and inconclusive" (1). Burke intends to eradicate "confusion," a quality that will later emerge as one of the features that accompany sublime experience; his hope is that a "diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts" may provide "an exact theory of our passions" and thereby allow him to discover the "fixed or consistent principles" (1) that govern them. Burke's passion for "exact theory" is matched by his wish to "know the exact boundaries of their [the passions'] several jurisdictions. . . . It is not enough to know them in general. . . we should pursue them through all their variety of operations, and pierce into the utmost, and what might appear inaccessible parts of our natures" (48, 49). Indeed, in the "Introduction on Taste," he reemphasizes his wish to abolish the "uncertainty and confusion" to which "the term taste, like all other figurative terms . . . is therefore liable" (12): they are the impediments that might prevent him from proving that taste, which appears "indeterminate" and open to infinite "diversity," is in fact subject to principles, "so common to all, so grounded and certain, as to supply the means of reasoning satisfactorily about them" (13). Burke's goal is to reveal the certain and invariable laws that govern the imagination, to demonstrate that taste has "fixed principles" and that the imagination is "affected according to some invariable and certain laws" (12).^[4]

Burke's desire to eradicate uncertainty and confusion is especially noteworthy because the Enquiry continually emphasizes their sublimity. Praising Milton's portrait of Death, for example, Burke writes that "in this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree" (55). In great poetry, "the mind is hurried out of itself by a crowd of great and confused images; which affect because they are crowded and

confused" (57); a few paragraphs later he observes that "in nature dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those which are more clear and determinate" (58). And when Burke remarks that "uncertainty is so terrible, that we often seek to be rid of it, at the hazard of a certain mischief" (76–77), he not only ascribes to it the very attribute of tenor he has already described as "the ruling principle of the sublime" but implies that he will hazard "a certain mischief" in order to get rid of it.

Commenting upon his "method of proceeding" (4) in the preface to the second edition, Burke employs a word that was, in the eighteenth century, a synonym for the sublime. When it is a question of dealing with matters of great complexity, Burke emphasizes that "we must make use of a cautious, I had almost said, a timorous method of proceeding" (4; my emphasis). As Adam Phillips points out in his introduction to the Enquiry , the word "timorous" "fits accurately into an eighteenth-century discussion of sublimity, meaning, as it did then, 'causing fear or dread: dreadful, terrible' (O.E.D. )" (xvii). Phillips's gloss suggests that there is something terrible (or sublime) about Burke's own "method of proceeding," and that caution may be a quality he lacks. Burke believes that he can eradicate uncertainty and confusion in life even as he finds them productive of delight in art, but doing so depends upon a distinction between art and nature, or "imitation" and "the real," that his definition of the sublime calls into question.

If Burke's wager in the Enquiry is that theory can put certainty in the place of ambiguity and replace diversity with fixed and universal "principles in nature" (17), why does he choose to privilege that dimension of aesthetic experience in which uncertainty rules, a domain always in excess of any boundary or limit? If "clearness . . . is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever" (56), Burke's discussion of the sublime serves to prove that "an exact theory of the passions" is a contradiction in terms. The sublime is never simply pleasure nor pain, but their confusion and combination—indeed, it is a pleasure "which cannot exist without a relation . . . to pain" (33); and delight is a "relative" rather than "positive" pleasure because it not only "accompanies," but also arises from, "the removal of pain or danger" (34). It is as if the Enquiry , which begins by deploring confusion, risk, and uncertainty, means to praise the very qualities it appears to despise. And although Burke maintains that "in an enquiry, it is almost everything to be once in a right road" (50), the

sublime, in which "all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible" (55) implies the probability of losing one's way.

The sublime demonstrates the capacity of one extreme to turn into the opposite. Its ruling principle resides in an incessant and infinite reversibility, a movement that destabilizes boundaries and undercuts the terms of any opposition. As W. J. T. Mitchell observes, Burke's sublime

goes beyond the 'combination' of opposites in a single object, and involves the transformation of one into the other in the extremes. . . . This union of extreme opposites Burke will identify as itself a principle of the sublime: when 'two ideas as opposite as can be imagined' are 'reconciled in the extremes of both,' they concur in producing the sublime.^[5]

Just as extreme light may be a source of the sublime because "by overcoming the organs of sight, [it] obliterates all objects, so as in its effects to resemble darkness" (74) so the sublime entails a merger or confusion of opposites in which light by its very excessiveness is transformed into darkness. The paradigmatic law of Burke's sublime, the principle of mutability or conversion by virtue of which one extreme turns into its opposite, imposes on its theorist the risk that disinterested speculation will also become that to which it is opposed. The diverse meanings at stake in the word "speculation" can never securely be divided, for the speculator is always part of the game she speculates about, or upon.^[6] If, as Burke observes, in both nature and in art "we must expect to find the qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other united in the same object" (114), we will see that the distinctions so dear to him mutate into one another according to the principle of transformation, or speculation, Burke underwrites as sublime. Burke's observations that "a true artist should put a generous deceit on the spectators" and that "no work of art can be great, but as it deceives" (70) lead us to speculate whether or not the theory of the sublime is not his own "generous deceit," for it produces the uncertainty and confusion he supposedly wishes to contain.

The early Burke can laud the sublime and the experiences of terror, confusion, and obscurity that accompany it because he believes he can keep them at a distance, confined within an aesthetic domain. But, as Donald Pease remarks, the sublime is "less a rhetorical or even an aesthetic category than a power to make trouble for categorizing procedures"; as

such, it lays waste to binary (and inevitably hierarchical) distinctions.^[7] The sublime cannot remain encased within an aesthetic domain because it is the force that undercuts the stability of boundaries, including those that divide masculine from feminine, politics from aesthetics.

I—

Why, in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), does Burke link speculation to the sublime, and what, in this context, might he mean by sublimity?^[8] In his East Indian and counterrevolutionary writings, Burke describes the political events of his day in terms that echo the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful he had described some thirty years before in the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful .^[9] As his critics frequently observed, Burke in his later political writings employs the aesthetic constructs and vocabulary that were the explicit themes of the Enquiry . (Foremost among the critics, Ronald Paulson notes, was Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Man , published in the same month as the Reflections , points out that the categories Burke invokes in the Reflections derive from those he defined in the Enquiry .)^[10] Among more recent critics, Neal Wood argues that Burke's concepts of the sublime and the beautiful "inform and shape several of his fundamental political ideas [and] are a unifying element of Burke's social and political outlook"; Steven Blakemore observes that Burke "reintroduces the sublime and the beautiful to explain, criticize, and control proliferating revolutionary forces at war with traditional meaning"; and Sara Suleri points out that "while Burke's treatise on the sublime predates his active involvement in the politics of the colonization of India, it constitutes a figurative repository that would later prove invaluable to the indefatigable eloquence of his parliamentary years."^[11] It is as if Burke's encounter with the terrifying phenomenon of the French Revolution (which was already anticipated by his response to the East India Company's activities in India and his attempts to impeach Warren Hastings, its governor general, during the 1780s) was to assimilate it to the categories of the sublime and the beautiful he had first discussed in 1757.^[12]

There is, however, a remarkable discontinuity between Burke's aesthetic and political positions. Indeed, Burke's politics appear to be the precise opposite of his aesthetics, for the very qualities he praises in the Enquiry he later condemns. As Mitchell observes, "When Burke con-

fronted a historical event [the French Revolution] that conformed to his concept of sublimity, he could find it only monstrous and disgusting. His notion of the sublime remained safely contained in the realm of aesthetics."^[13] We cannot account for the disparity between Burke's aesthetic and political preferences simply by emphasizing that for Burke terror can be a source of the sublime only because the affected subject is a spectator and not a participant in the terrifying event he observes. If "terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime" (54), it does not consist merely in the spectator's imaginary experience or observation of someone else's terror, for then it would not possess the mind-shattering effect of the sublime, which blurs the difference between observer and observed. Burke's definition of the sublime as a "great power" in which "the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it" (53) undercuts those distinctions between spectator and event upon which his theory also relies. This is not to dismiss the role spectatorship plays in the production of the sublime, but rather to underscore its profoundly ambiguous status. For the experience Burke describes as sublime depends not only upon maintaining a certain distance from terror, but also upon an identification or merger between observer and observed that precludes the distance that supposedly is essential to sublime experience. Indeed, the originality of Burke's sublime is that it calls into question our belief in the "merely aesthetic" and unsettles the notion of an autonomous domain of human experience that exists independent of political, ethical, and social concerns.

Whereas in the Enquiry the sublime refers to the experience of "delight," a peculiar mixture of pain and pleasure that occurs when what would otherwise be dangerous "does not press too close" (42), by the end of his career the qualities that earlier had indicated aesthetic superiority become the focus of attack.^[14] While the early Burke emphasizes that the experience of power, darkness, obscurity, astonishment, confusion, and terror not only are the source of the sublime but provide a standard of aesthetic excellence, in his counterrevolutionary writings the terror he had previously lauded as sublime instead evokes a vision of hell. In a speech delivered in Commons four years after the publication of the Reflections , Burke depicts "the condition of France" in terms that recall descriptions of the sublime in the Enquiry : "The condition of France at this moment was so frightful and horrible, that if a painter wished to portray a de-

scription of hell, he could not find so terrible a model, or a subject so pregnant with horror, and fit for his purpose."^[15] In the Enquiry, we have seen, Burke considers terror to be "the ruling principle of the sublime" (54). Here, however, it functions as a metaphor for anarchy and political chaos: the sheer, undirected energy that the early Burke regarded as sublime is now envisaged as a dangerous threat to the social and moral order, linked to the dissolution of the monarchy and the unleashing of sexual passion. Through a bizarre reversal of sexual roles, the subject has become "pregnant with horror."

In Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), his last work on the French Revolution, Burke continues to interpret the condition of France through recourse to the rhetoric of the sublime. As in the passage we have just remarked, Burke begins by ascribing to France the qualities of terror and vastness he had previously attributed to the sublime and ends by assigning a gender to "that hideous phantom" he has just described:

Out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist . . .^[16]

The revolutionary sublime, it would appear, is a "she."

II—

Burke's aesthetic categories are determined and shaped by prevailing assumptions about sexual difference; indeed, the success of his project depends upon eradicating the possibility that gender itself may be a form of speculation, a cultural role or performance and not a natural fact. I am not merely emphasizing that, as Terry Eagleton observes, "the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, then, is that between woman and man," but rather that patriarchal assumptions about the nature of sexual difference are at the source, and provide the thematic value, of Burke's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, which in turn provides a unifying structure for both his aesthetic and political ideas.^[17] Burke's project in the Enquiry hinges upon assumptions about gender that give rise

to the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime and offers the structuring principle that informs his subsequent political writings. It would, as Sara Suleri observes, "be too simple to read the Enquiry as a gendering of aesthetic categories, or to draw further attention to its masculinization of the sublime and the concomitant feminization of beauty." Presuppositions about an innate sexual difference supply the ground in which Burke's aesthetic and political categories take root and, especially in Burke's later political writings, become the rhetorical figure for their merger and confusion.^[18] If gender lays the foundation for the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, its instability also marks the necessity for their conflation.

In a footnote to "A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature" (1838), Thomas De Quincey observes that the idea of the sublime, "in contraposition to the Beautiful, grew up on the basis of sexual distinctions,—the Sublime corresponding to the male, and the Beautiful, its anti-pole, corresponding to the female."^[19] Burke's understanding of the modes of aesthetic experience derives from assumptions about the nature of sexual difference and the proper relations between the sexes, commonly held preconceptions about the innateness and universality of sexual difference, which become the indispensable condition for the aesthetic theory he puts forward. Burke is able to argue that "the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful stand on foundations so different that it is hard, I had almost said impossible, to think of reconciling them in the same subject" (103) only because he has found that "foundation" in the apparent naturalness of the difference between the sexes.

Burke's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful rests upon an understanding of sexual difference in which the "masculine" passions of self-preservation, which stem from ideas of terror, pain, and danger, are linked to the sublime, while the "feminine" emotions of sympathy, tenderness, affection, and imitation are the preserve of the beautiful. The sublime amalgamates such conventionally masculine qualities as power, size, ambition, awe, and majesty; the beautiful collects the equally conventional feminine traits of softness, smallness, weakness, docility, delicacy, and timidity. The former always includes intimations of power, majesty, and brute male force—a storm at sea, a raging bull, a ruler or sovereign, greatness of dimension—while the latter connotes smallness, delicacy, and serenity: "it is the flowery species," such as, perhaps, a lily, "so remarkable for its weakness and momentary duration, that gives us the

liveliest idea of beauty, and elegance" (105–6). Beauty, like femininity, is inseparable from a certain weakness. In part three of the Enquiry Burke observes that "the beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy, and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it" (106). He argues against the prevailing view that perfection is the cause of beauty:

[Beauty] almost always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection. Women are very sensible of this; for which reason, they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, and even sickness. In all this, they are guided by nature. (100)

And although we may love weakness, imperfection, and the beautiful, we feel awe in the presence of paternal authority and imperial majesty; thus "we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us" (103). Burke's aesthetic categories hinge upon a presumed opposition between the masculine and the feminine that, in turn, generates the distinction between tenor, power, sublimity and self-preservation on the one hand and pleasure, affection, beauty, and society on the other. The success of Burke's aesthetic project—the attempt to explain the universality of aesthetic judgment through his distinction between the sublime and the beautiful—therefore depends upon assumptions about sexual difference whose validity is never put in question.

While in Burke's later writings the confusion of the sexes becomes a metaphor for the revolutionary forces that would destroy traditional distinctions and hierarchies, and parallels his critique of speculation, in the Enquiry he is not yet haunted by this specter and can privilege risk and chance as central to the experience of the sublime. A particularly interesting passage links the "confusion of ideas" with the "abuse of words," as if confusion were itself a kind of abuse, and does so specifically in descriptions of sexual difference:

If beauty in our own species was annexed to use, men would be much more lovely than women; and strength and agility would be considered the only beauties. But to call strength by the name of beauty, to have but one denomination for the qualities of a Venus and Hercules, so totally different in almost all respects, is surely a strange confusion of ideas, or abuse of words. (96)

Already in the Enquiry there is a hint of impending confusion, and it is no accident that the feminine body figures the breakdown of the dis-

tinction between the sublime and the beautiful. In the following passage, the consequence of observing a beautiful woman, which ought to produce feelings of affection, sympathy, and a comforting sense of masculine superiority over weakness, instead gives rise to a dizzying mobility:

Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. (105)

Here the feminine body, supposedly the symbol of the beautiful, instead produces the effects of the sublime. Rather than securing boundaries and limits, its very "smoothness," "softness," and "variety" instill "unsteadiness": this body does not provide a site where distinctions can be fixed but rather represents the point at which they come apart, and the observer, seeking a resting place, "slides giddily." The absence of a fixed point of view or visual focus produces disorientation; unlike the male, the beautiful female body defeats our expectation of a center and instead becomes the occasion of a giddiness, or vertigo. Vertigo, of course, is a typically sublime feeling connected with the falling away of ground or center; it is what we feel when an abyss opens up before us. It is important to emphasize that feminine sexual difference, which provides the foundation for the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, here becomes the figure for that distinction's instability, eliciting a moment of textual dizziness in which the beautiful takes on the characteristics of the sublime.^[20]

III—

In the Reflections Burke identifies the French Jacobins with the "vigorous and active principle" (44) that exemplifies the masculine spirit of ambition and boldness and, if unchecked by the tempering aristocratic principle, threatens to invert the social order. In Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), Burke returns to this theme. After listing the features that make the Jacobins monstrous and dangerous, he asks what accounts for their success: "One thing, and one thing only—but that one thing is worth a thousand—they have energy ."^[21] By the time of the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), he believed that Britain was at war with a Jacobin conspiracy,

a vast multitude possessing what he envisions as a "dreadful energy."^[22] But what, we may ask, makes their energy so "dreadful"? Although J. G. A. Pocock suggests that "the 'dreadful energy' is that of the human intellect set free from all social relations, so that it is free to be constructive or destructive, and it frequently chooses the latter in sheer assertion of its own power," I argue that unchecked energy—one of the distinguishing features of Burke's sublime—is that of speculation itself, dreadful not only because of its metamorphic and transformative power, but because it implies a domain that, lying beyond our control, suggests the limits of human agency.^[23]

Like the "dreadful energy" Burke regards with a mixture of fascination and honor, speculation brings us face to face with the incalculable, and Burke detests speculation of all kinds.^[24] As early as the Vindication of Natural Society (1756), he emphasizes that abstract speculation endangered the status quo. Remarking upon the "extreme danger of letting the imagination loose upon some subjects," he underscores the riskiness of deducing practical policy from theoretical principle: metaphysical speculation, which presents the lure and charm of fiction, must not become confused with the brute reality of everyday politics.^[25] But he also believes that financial speculation is a threat to the traditional social order and especially to the inviolability of landed property. As Christopher Reid points out, "it is precisely the new capitalist formations of France (and, of course, of England) which pose a threat. . . . For Burke, this urban capitalism, apparently controlled by individual speculators, seems to herald a complete social fragmentation."^[26] In the Reflections , Burke's most vociferous attacks are directed at revolutionary finance. He condemns French legislators:

the very first who have founded a commonwealth upon gaming, and infused the spirit into it as its vital breath. The great object in these politics is to metamorphose France from a great kingdom into one great playtable; to turn its inhabitants into a nation of gamesters; to make speculation as extensive as life. (169)

For Burke, metaphysical and financial speculation are dangerous, if not revolutionary activities: theorists and economists alike employ it to bring about the end of monarchy, landed property, and the "age of chivalry" (66) Burke so reveres. In his "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America" (1777), for example, Burke holds "abstract speculation," the

realm of pure theory, responsible for the demise of civil freedom, a perilous threat to human liberty:

There are people who have split and anatomised the doctrine of free government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity . . . speculations are let loose as destructive to all authority, as the former are to all freedom. . . . Civil freedom, gentlemen, is not, as many have endeavored to persuade you, a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science. It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation.^[27]

Philosophical and economic opposition to the revolution is fused in the image of speculation and the speculator, the practices of revolutionary thinking and revolutionary finance. In each case speculation is dangerous because in producing an excess either of linguistic signs or of paper currency, it threatens the loss of value. Just as the verbal excess that is a by-product of abstract speculation interferes with the view that words invariably have clear, distinct, and stable relations to the ideas for which they stand, so financial speculation substitutes the symbolic, and therefore shifting, contingencies of paper money, debt, and credit for guarantees of economic value such as property or precious metals. In so doing, revolutionary finance, like revolutionary thinking, undermines the value and prestige of landed property and the monarchic political configuration that accompanies it. Metaphysical speculation has as its economic corollary financial speculation, which becomes synonymous with social anarchy and fragmentation.

Burke's fear that abstract speculation could, like financial speculation, exceed control and proliferate to infinity suggests a reason why, in the Reflections , he associates the sublime, which he revered, with speculation, which he loathed. Language and money are each crucial modes of exchange, and the speculator, in the act of producing excess verbiage and/or inflated currency, abuses both. By inducing proximity to excess, speculation enacts the very subject the Enquiry describes. But if the theory of the sublime is intended to "investigate the springs and trace the course of our passions" (5) and thereby to contain the excess it bespeaks, speculation not only invites proximity to excess but produces more of it. In so doing it foregrounds the subject's relation to the incalculable, to a domain that, beyond the range of conceptual or economic stability, cannot be controlled.^[28]

Soon we will look at the career of Lily Bart, who begins by attempting to personify the aesthetic of the beautiful Burke honored, and ends by risking her life in a version of the sublime she herself refashioned. In contrast, Burke's career revolved around the effort to keep sublimity at a distance. The British colonization of India and the French Revolution, events that he strenuously opposed, showed "the terrible god of chance" fully at work in the world, and Burke would spend the rest of his career attempting to reconcile the aesthetic values he had praised in the Enquiry with his own terror at what he perceived as the anarchy, cruelty, and tyranny unleashed by the major social and political events of his day. It is not, however, by chance that gender gives Burke his principal rhetorical strategy for keeping history at a distance: as we shall see, the moments when his distinction between the aesthetic and the political are most vulnerable are marked by recourse to metaphors of sexual difference, as if to invoke a solid ground that could ward off speculation, and with it the sublime.

IV—

In one of the best-known passages in the Reflections , Burke remarks upon (and fictionalizes) what he believed to be the greatest crime of the French Revolution: the near-rape of Marie Antoinette on the sixth of October, 1798.^[29] The Reflections reaches its affective and ideological climax in Burke's dramatic evocation of the Jacobin attack on the queen of France, whom he idealized as the personification of the beautiful. Viewing "the then dauphiness" at Versailles some "sixteen or seventeen years" earlier, he remarked that he had never seen a "more delightful vision . . . above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy" (66). For Burke, Marie Antoinette embodied "the glory of Europe . . . extinguished forever," the aristocratic and feminine values that were being destroyed by the "sophisters, economists, and calculators" (66) whose success he witnessed with horror.

Reporting upon her attack, Burke employs the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime as a structural allegory not only for the proper relations between the sexes, but for political order itself. The passage acquires rhetorical force through the contrast between an active, boundless, and masculine sexual energy and the harmonious social order upon

which it is unleashed. Burke relates that the queen was awakened from "a few hours of respite and troubled, melancholy repose" (62) by "a band of cruel ruffians and assassins" who, after killing her guard, rushed into her chamber "and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence the persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked" (62). The queen escapes the mob and reaches the king's chambers, but the two are "forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses" (62). Despoiling the queen and piercing her bed become an analogue for destroying the aristocracy: sexual violation is a surrogate for political defilement, and the revelation of the queen's nakedness is a metaphor for the destruction of the social order itself.

Although, as Isaac Kramnick points out, Burke clearly identifies the revolutionary principle "with intrusive masculinity and the aristocratic principle with violated femininity," equally striking is the confusion of sexual difference that, in Burke's evocation of the royal captives' forced march to Paris, becomes a paradigm for the chaos unleashed by the revolution.^[30] Although Burke's excessive rhetoric begins by emphasizing the mob's indeterminate composition—it is "a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations . . . a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame" (59–60)—the figure of feminine evil becomes the vehicle that allows him to give the incalculable a form and thereby to keep it within bounds. In the description that follows, female mutation becomes a metaphor for the perversion of the feminine ideal of beauty and virtue represented by the fallen queen:

Their heads [of the king's bodyguards] were stuck upon spears and led the procession, whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the Furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women. (63)

In this passage Burke is concerned to emphasize not only the sexual but also the peculiarly feminine nature of the violence, the better to stress the intensity of its departure from the natural social order. Noteworthy too is the fact that women and not men provide the concrete shape for "abominations" that otherwise would be "unutterable."^[31] Sexual inver-

sion, the confusion of genders, reflects social inversion; the distorted image of French women as "abused shapes" and "furies of hell" suggests a way of containing a perverted sublimity.^[32] Although "the vilest of women" are not precisely equivalent to Burke's sublime, they have become the medium through which the unutterable and nameless can be made speakable, and thereby kept at bay.

Encountering Lily Bart, whom she finds alone and exhausted on a park bench one frigid winter's night, Nettie Struthers recalls meeting her in language almost reminiscent of Burke's vision of the queen:

You don't remember me . . . but I'd know you anywhere, I've thought of you such a lot. I guess my folks all know your name by heart. I was one of the girls at Miss Farish's club—you helped me to go to the country that time I had lung-trouble. My name's Nettie Struthers. It was Nettie Crane then. (312)^[33]

Lily's beauty and grace has made so strong an impression that Nettie has named her infant daughter after an actress who, playing the part of Marie Antoinette, reminded her of Lily. Finding Lily too weak to walk to her boarding house, Nettie takes her home to rest in the warmth of her kitchen and to meet the baby named "Marry Anto'nette . . . after the French queen in that play at the Garden—I told George the actress reminded me of you, and that made me fancy the name" (314). Holding the little girl who is almost but not quite her namesake, Lily feels "as though the child entered into her and became a part of herself" (316). Later, falling into the drugged sleep from which she will not awake, she believes that she holds the sleeping child in her arms. What occurs when the woman who is meant to exemplify Burke's ideal of beauty instead prefers the sublime will be our concern in the pages that follow.

V—

At the end of The House of Mirth , Lily Bart wants only to sleep. She is exhausted by poverty, loneliness, and insomnia; sleep offers her the sole respite from a life that has become unlivable, but she has come to depend upon the sedative chloral in order to obtain it and is already taking the maximum dose. Warned by her pharmacist that "the action of the drug was incalculable," Lily prefers to increase the dose and incur what she

believes to be only "a slight risk" (322) rather than endure another sleepless night. She takes the risk and dies.

Lily's commitment to risk is the source of the ethical value she acquires in the course of the novel. When, for example, Rosedale proposes marriage on the condition that she use Bertha's letters to Selden to clear her name, Lily refuses in the name of a precept that links the possibility of freedom to the proximity of risk. Intrigued by the plan's certain outcome and "fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and measures" (259), she nonetheless perceives that "the essential baseness of the act lay in its freedom from risk" (260) and declines. An action whose outcome can be calculated in advance is ethically inferior to one whose results are unknown. If an act is free of risk, its agent is no longer free, and to affirm risk means to enter into active relation with the realm of the "capricious and incalculable" (311). If, however, some actions are "base," what conditions might render them sublime?

The House of Mirth takes its title from the nickname of a firm on the New York Stock Exchange and from Ecclesiastes 7:3–4: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." The novel suggests not only that the Exchange is the place where Lily, Trenor, and Rosedale (among others) win or lose, but that the world in which all these characters buy, sell, and place their bets is one of complete homogenization and commodification. Beauty too is a commodity where nothing remains outside the marketplace.^[34] The novel's first scene underscores the diverse ways in which economic conditions shape and determine aesthetic judgments and presents art itself as a form of speculation. We first observe Lily Bart—whose name attests to the complicity between art and barter—through the eyes of Lawrence Selden, whose initial observations about her are couched in economic terms. Seeing Lily amidst the afternoon crowd at Grand Central Station, he notices that she looks as if "she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her"; indeed, her contrast to "the dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood" makes him feel how "highly specialized" (5) she is. The novel begins by emphasizing that beauty, be it that of a woman or of a work of art, is neither natural nor innate, as Burke would have it, but is rather a commodity that cannot be separated from economic determinations.

Lily has been trained from birth to fashion herself as a collectible object. To her mother, her beauty is "the last asset in their fortunes" (34): she has taught her daughter to see it as a "weapon," an "asset," a "property," and a "charge" (34); and Lily, who recognizes that she "had been fashioned to adorn and delight" (301), has learned to treat it as a commodity available for purchase by the highest bidder. Even the name "Bart," which contains the injunction to be art rather than produce it, attests to the "purely decorative" nature of her "mission" (301), for Lily "could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume" (100). Brought up to be ornamental, she has also learned to embody Burke's ideal of femininity as delicate, dependent, and submissive. Burke, however, was unaware that beauty requires money every bit as much as a pretty face and pleasing figure. As Lily explains to Selden, "a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don't make success, but they are part of it" (12). The custodian as well as the proprietor of her beauty, Lily knows that it is "only the raw material of conquest" (34): she requires clothes and jewels that display her beauty to advantage, servants to care for them, and careful attention to her hair and skin. Like any commodity, the value of her beauty fluctuates and her business is to market herself in order to increase its worth.

Lily's ability to construct herself as a work of art, to personify and incarnate Burke's notion of the beautiful, raises questions about the nature of beauty he never entertained. As we come to recognize, in the opening scene Selden's speculations about the relation between Lily's outer loveliness and her inner worth are symptomatic of his deeper concerns about the status of aesthetic value: he wonders, for example, if the qualities that distinguish Lily "from the herd of her sex" are merely external or if they signify her superiority to the realm of "the dull and ugly" (5)? Is beauty the visual counterpart of truth and goodness, as Selden would like to believe, or is it profoundly amoral, the result of calculation? (He wonders if her hair is "ever so slightly brightened by art" [5], and when she cries during their walk together he tells himself that "even her weeping was an art" [72]; it is helpful to recall that for Burke, feminine weakness and the need for protection are associated with the beautiful.) Although "as a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart" (4), the force of her beauty interferes with his predilection for detachment and causes him to indulge in exactly these sorts of "speculations" (5). Here, as in Burke's Enquiry ,

the feminine body functions as a "deceitful maze" whose initial beauty strangely passes into something sublime. Lily has the capacity to turn spectators into speculators, to transform the pleasures of Selden's "purely impersonal enjoyment" (10) into speculative interest and desiring activity; indeed, Selden can "never see her without a faint movement of interest" (3). Because Lily's beauty is something she both has and makes, and because she is herself the commodity she speculates upon, it—or she—is always on the verge of producing the excess, speculation, and confusion that characterize Burke's sublime.

At the beginning of the novel Lily's artistry lies in her ability to make the calculated and artificial appear uncalculated and spontaneous, the accidental seem intentional, and the cultural, natural. She conceals the labor that has gone into her own production and thereby upholds Burke's reassuring view that beauty just "is," a tribute to an ideal realm that does not require material support. In this sense Lily enacts Burke's precept that a true artist should put a generous deceit on the spectators" (70), for she promotes his understanding of beauty as pure and uncontrived, a force that enhances social relations without being produced by them. In this regard it is important to emphasize the complicity between an industrialized (or capitalist) economy and Burke's notion of the beautiful, for the idealization of beauty is in fact an essential dimension of capitalist ideology: the marketplace requires a notion of beauty as extrinsic to and untrammeled by culture in order to augment itself Capitalism needs art, which must appear to be outside the marketplace so as to command a higher price.

Like Selden's famous "republic of the spirit," Burke's notion of the beautiful is grounded in and dependent upon the market it appears to resist. When, for example, Lily displays herself as a tableau vivant at a fashionable party, she personifies the ideal of feminine beauty as eternal, timeless, and beyond price, and thereby augments her value. Beauty is valued in exact proportion to its uniqueness, rarity, and apparent detachment from the realm of commerce; the art object's worth increases to the extent that the potential purchaser is persuaded that it transcends individual, and therefore fluctuating, social norms and customs. Wall Street requires Park Avenue as commerce requires art, and the woman as bel objet actually enables a market economy. The successful entrepreneur needs to own a beautiful woman just as he needs to increase his capital; beauty is capital, and the beautiful woman allows the wealthy man not only to display his wealth but also to disseminate his power beyond the marketplace.

Lily inhabits a maddeningly contradictory position with respect to her beauty. She is at once the commodity upon which she encourages others to speculate, the object of their interest and desire, and the creator of that object, simultaneously her own author, director, producer, and publicist. Lily's relation to herself replicates that of the speculator to the marketplace: she must market her beauty in the same way that a successful entrepreneur markets a product, and this entails determining the optimum conditions for display, fixing a price, and negotiating the terms of her own purchase. Her labor reveals the kinship between art and the marketplace, for both artist and speculator must manipulate appearances and learn to read the signs of others' desire not only in order to fashion a product that will satisfy, but also to increase demand for the product.

There is, as Lyotard points out, "something of the sublime in capitalist economy," for its goal is to produce excess and expand infinitely, to generate capital out of all proportion to individual energy or merit.^[35] In this sense, Terry Eagleton's description of "the restless, overweening movement of capitalism itself, its relentless dissolution of forms and commingling of identities," recalls Burke's emphasis upon the sublime's ability to confound specific and individual entities into one indeterminate and overwhelming force.^[36] (In a speech during the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, Burke himself said, "We dread the operation of money.")^[37] The marketplace terrifies: it recalls the "lack of moderation and intemperance" that Marx describes as money's "true standard."^[38] Immeasurable and beyond calculation, the force of its speculative energy and totalizing power transcends moral, political, or ethical precepts; like a tidal wave it engulfs whatever it encounters. Its power resides, as WaiChee Dimock points out, "in its ability to assimilate everything else into its domain"; in her view, the marketplace is as much "a controlling logic, a mode of human conduct and human assimilation," as an economic force, and Lily's position with respect to it is profoundly equivocal.^[39] On the one hand, as the entrepreneur who seeks to manipulate the market and speculate upon her beauty, she is its exemplar and accomplice; on the other, as a single woman without influential family, friends, or capital, she is its victim and pawn. The question at stake in our reading of The House of Mirth , then, is whether we may find in Lily's resistance to the marketplace that she also personifies an alternative to Burke's notion of the sublime?

In the pages that follow I argue that Lily's encounters with and changing relation to contingency and the "terrible god of chance" also imply

a counterpart to Burke's idealist account of the sublime. Like Burke's Enquiry , The House of Mirth raises fundamental issues about the nature of artistic activity and production in relation to political and economic concerns. Unlike the Enquiry , however, it suggests a radically different version of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, one that emphasizes the very notions of risk and speculation Burke would prefer to repress. Consider, for example, the following scene, in which Selden's admiring proclamation "You are an artist" (66) reflects his perception of Lily as a mistress of deceit, able to manipulate appearances in order to make accidents appear to be "the result of far-reaching intentions" (3).

Lily, who is visiting the Trenors' country estate, takes an afternoon's vacation from the task of wooing the rich but stupefyingly boring Percy Gryce to walk with Selden, who has arrived unexpectedly. Observing her is, he says, the purpose of his visit: Lily is "a wonderful spectacle" and he always likes "to see what you are doing" (66). Selden, who prefers to occupy the observer's position, seldom buys or sells; relatively removed from economic activity, he can play the detached critic. He compares her walk with him to an artist making use of her material: "You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today. It's a part of your cleverness to be able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously" (66). In Selden's view being "an artist" is equivalent to being an agent, connoting the ability to manipulate chance in order to further one's intentions and designs. Lily is an artist, then, because she avoids taking risks; Selden's view that Lily is "artist" as well as art object turns upon his awareness of her ability to make the accidental appear to be the expression of intent. Like the investor who takes calculated risks in order to maximize profit, the artist employs accident in order to minimize its effects; in both cases success lies in the possibility of mastering the unpredictable. The artist's business is to profit from the unexpected, not to indulge in speculation as an end in itself.

At the beginning of the novel the portrait of the artist as mistress of the calculated effect parallels Lily's profound inability to take uncalculated risks. Although the novel opens with a scene in which Lily, having met Selden accidentally, "takes the risk" (6) of visiting his bachelor apartment (and thereby acquires some helpful "points" about collecting Americana that will be useful in her pursuit of Gryce), she will not risk loving him. During their walk together Selden and Lily flirt with the idea of marriage by assuring one another of just how risky such an act would be. But, as

if afraid of that which she cannot control, Lily withdraws when Selden declares himself ready to "take the risk" (i). She is not yet committed to what, as the novel progresses, will become an ethics of risk.

To make the calculated appear spontaneous and the accidental seem intentional: at the beginning of the novel, this is Lily's "art." The project of speculating upon her own beauty is predicated upon avoiding any unnecessary risk; indeed, the mark of her artistry is her ability "to use the accident . . . as part of a very definite effect" (66). In this view art distinguishes itself from non-art because it leaves nothing to chance, and the artist differs from the non-artist insofar as she is able to give accident the appearance of necessity. But if in her dealings with Selden Lily makes accidents look intentional, she can also make the premeditated seem impulsive. When, for example, she appeals to Gus Trenor for financial aid, "it was part of the game to make him feel that her appeal had been an uncalculated impulse, provoked by the liking he inspired" (85), and she allows him to convince her that "if she would only trust him . . . her modest investments were to be mysteriously multiplied without risk to herself" (85). Whether Lily is flirting with Selden or manipulating Trenor, however, her artistic practices reveal the complicity between the aesthetic of the beautiful and the economy of the marketplace. The artist and the speculator share an aversion to risk, for each seeks to maximize the possibility of artistic perfection (or the equivalent goal of financial profit) by minimizing the presence of chance. Lily's artistry makes explicit precisely what Burke's Enquiry conceals: that the domain of the beautiful exerts its own peculiar form of tyranny.^[40] Nowhere is this more apparent than in the tableaux vivants scene, in which the attempt to resist the marketplace by invoking an alternative notion of the beautiful—one that would exist free from any form of speculation—serves only to reinforce and perpetuate it.^[41]

In the tableaux vivants , in which fashionable women display themselves as famous paintings at an extravagant party, Lily chooses to present herself in the classical guise of Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Mrs. Lloyd, painted in 1766. This moment is perhaps the climax of her career: Selden, Trenor, and Rosedale, among others in the audience, see Lily, who "has shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself" (134), revealed in pale draperies and flowing robes that accentuate rather than conceal the sensual lines of her body; she is captured in the act of writing

her husband's name in the bark of a tree. Lily had feared "at the last moment that she was risking too much in dispensing with the advantages of a more sumptuous setting" (136), but nonetheless has chosen to display her beauty without the "distracting accessories of dress or surroundings" (134). She thus feels triumphant when the spectators' murmur of approval attests "not to the brush-work of Reynolds's 'Mrs. Lloyd' but to the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart" (134). Reynolds's portrait brings to life Burke's notion of femininity as symbol of the beautiful par excellence, as does Lily's embodiment of it, and it is perhaps no accident that Burke and Reynolds were close friends."^[42] The curtain that parts "on a picture which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart" (134) shows not only that "the real" Lily Bart is the effect of a performance, but that that "self" is an aesthetic construct, an embodiment and imitation in which Lily appears as, and is identical to, the portrait she resembles.

Lily has taken a minor, but well calculated, risk. By "displaying her own beauty under a new aspect" she intends to present herself as a timeless work of art existing beyond the fluctuations of the marketplace, to show "that her loveliness was no more fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to fresh forms of grace" (131). And her successful evocation of an ideal realm finally touches "the vision-making" (133) faculty in Selden, who wants to believe that beauty has an essential value in and of itself and longs to see Lily's beauty allied with the "eternal harmony" (135) that his nature craves. As a tableau vivant Lily embodies this ideal, evoking a veritable "republic of the spirit" in which truth is beauty, and beauty, truth. Rather than mask the effects of chance, however, in portraying Reynolds's painting Lily actually appears to overcome it: here art attests to the absence of chance and Lily's genius lies in her ability to create an object, or self-representation, in which there are no accidents. Art testifies to the triumph of agency; god-like, the artist creates an ideal world in which every detail has meaning and nothing takes place by chance. In this notion of the aesthetic art does not so much imitate life as transcend it, and this aspect of Lily's artistry is supremely evident in her appearance as Mrs. Lloyd, for here outward beauty matches inner worth. Selden, her cousin Gerty, and even Lily are all convinced that they have seen "the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world" (135); Selden reflects upon "the noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, [which] revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty," and catches a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part" (134–35).

For Selden, Lily's beauty is proof of a deeper, hidden meaning. In a fluctuating world of speculation, art takes on the function of religion, holding out the promise of abiding value and eternal truth.

Far from contesting the rule of the marketplace, this conception of aesthetic value instead reinforces it. The belief that art partakes of an ideal realm that is eternal, pure, and beyond price replicates the principle that underlies and regulates a capitalist economy: that of maximizing control and minimizing risk. Portraying what appears to be beyond price serves to increase Lily's value; becoming unique only makes her more collectible. The same attributes that make Lily seem ideal to Selden, and therefore finally worthy of marriage, also make her more desirable to the rest of her potential collectors, or acquirers. But whereas Selden views "the real Lily Bart" in Platonic terms, as a vision in which beauty and goodness are one, others perceive her as the commodity she is presumed to be. Seeing her so provocatively displayed, Van Alstyne remarks that Lily is "a deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but gad, there isn't a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!" (135). And although Trenor finds her display in "damned bad taste" (138), the next day he lures her to his house, tells her the time has come to "pay up" (145), and almost rapes her. Embodying the priceless has served to increase her marketability, but Lily already owes much more than she can pay.

VI—

Lily's visit to Trenor marks the novel's turning point. Before the visit it is still possible to imagine that she might marry well; after it, realizing that she owes Trenor nine thousand dollars and has acquired the reputation of being a woman who trades sexual favors for money, her downward spiral begins. The visit, however, also marks a shift from Lily's desire to embody the beautiful and market herself as an aesthetic object to a new definition of worth that resists the logic of barter and exchange. If for Burke beauty is aligned with social cohesion and the rather dubious "pleasures" of society, while the sublime induces a commitment to individuality and self-preservation, Lily's visit to Trenor signals the transition between the novel's beginning, in which Lily pursues beauty and avoids risk, and its conclusion, in which she becomes sublime by affirming it. The House of Mirth thus demonstrates not only Lily's commitment to a mode of self-preservation that, paradoxically, requires the cost of her own

destruction; it suggests a version of the sublime that resists the economy of the marketplace and the aesthetic that accompanies it.^[43]

While at the beginning of the novel Lily glorifies Selden's "republic of the spirit," whose ideality consists in freedom from risk and "all the material accidents" (68), by the end she recognizes that freedom becomes possible only when one recognizes risk's necessity and refuses to avoid it. The changes in Lily's relation to risk are accompanied by correlative shifts in her relationship to money and to art. At the beginning she accumulates debts she refuses to acknowledge and understands art to be the successful manipulation of appearances; at the end she pays her debt to Trenor, refuses Rosedale's offer of a loan, and burns the letters that represent her last bit of capital. The ethical injunction to live well takes on an aesthetic dimension that has nothing to do with beauty and the beautiful, for to live finely or nobly involves style in the sense of creating the kind of person one aspires to become and the kind of life one seeks to lead. In this case, the person Lily aims at becoming is one who takes unnecessary risks while refusing to speculate, one who is incomprehensible to the omnipresent measures of the world of exchange.

In A Backward Glance , written thirty years after The House of Mirth , Wharton observes that the central problem in writing the novel was how to extract "typical human significance" from the story of "a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers." The answer, she explains, "was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals. The answer, in short, was my heroine, Lily Bart."^[44]

Although the "frivolous society" Wharton depicts does in fact destroy Lily Bart, she nonetheless resists its power to "debase people and ideals," and her capacity for resistance is inseparable from her ability to engage the incalculable. In so doing she creates a kind of worth that defies the prevailing norms of her society, instilling ethical value where previously there was none. If significance is found only in what society destroys, Lily's acts of self-extinction become symbolic acts of self-creation. In The House of Mirth loss rather than gain becomes the fertile site from which significance is produced, and in this sense Lily's death is not so much an escape from the marketplace, but a way of passing judgment upon it.

Rather than epitomize the logic of capitalist exchange, Lily invents forms of resistance to it.^[45] A capitalist economy depends upon accruing debts that remain unpaid, and is, as Dimock observes, a system that "has

non-payment as its secret motto": successful exchange entails maximizing gain while minimizing loss and functions by sustaining imbalances of power.^[46] In paying her debt to Trenor, however, Lily challenges the basis of exchange, which needs to maintain the very inequities she insists upon annulling. Here Lily asserts the power to define these terms, and the rate she determines—that of total payment—operates not to maintain exchange but rather to annul it. By reversing the implicit conventions of the marketplace and putting a different code of behavior in their place, Lily's behavior suggests an alternative mode of human interchange.

Paying her debt and refusing subsequent indebtedness defies the underlying structure of the marketplace. To reject, for example, Rosedale's proposed loan on the grounds that "a business arrangement between us would in any case be impossible, because I shall have no security to give when my debt to Gus Trenor has been paid" (299), is to insist that a loan can be free of obligation only if one has the means to repay it, that business and friendship cannot coexist. That her resistance to the market remains an integral part of the system's own internal strategies (Gus will reinvest the money she's repaid, and Rosedale has more profitable ways of investing it) in no way lessens the intensity of its effect, for Lily breaks the rules of the marketplace by the strictness of her adherence to them. Exorbitant dedication to the letter of the law makes evident its inequities. Taking its precepts at face value, her total obedience to the law becomes a parodic subversion of it.

Breaking society's rules by obeying them overscrupulously suggests the possibility of a different relation to the marketplace. The woman who at the beginning of the novel knows "very little of the value of money" (31) at the end has learned to create a kind of value that, while not transcending the logic of exchange, nevertheless presents an alternative to it. Unlike both the spectator and the investor, whose desire to avoid risk and ensure profit sustains the market, Lily wishes not to eradicate chance but to enhance it, and she finds in this desire an ethical precept: it is better to risk, to maximize accident, than to take advantage of a sure thing. Actively to seek risk implies the willingness to take one's chances, to employ agency neither to gain control nor to lose it, but to leave the outcome of an event up for grabs. To risk means to choose chance, that is, to choose an outcome one cannot predict or control. It implies a domain of constant fluctuation, a realm of "fluctuating ethical estimates" (259) that Lily's "tired mind" would prefer to, but does not, avoid. Here sublimity is shown to possess

an ethical as well as an aesthetic component, one born out of proximity to the realm of accident and "the terrible god of chance." Whereas Marx believed that a commodity's value is a function of the labor that has gone into producing it, the kind of value Lily creates results from how much she is willing to risk. Lily's resistance to the market, which takes the paradoxical form of asserting her will in order to lose rather than produce capital, also affirms another criterion for determining, or creating, worth: her goal is not to avoid expenditure, but to pursue it.

Whereas at the beginning of The House of Mirth Lily is a mistress of the art of controlling accidents, at the end her artistry consists in embracing them. She acquires value by assenting to chance, with all the uncertainty and confusion it entails. She thereby sustains an aesthetic and ethical value that, existing within the culture of consumption, functions to resist it. Such an aesthetic would no longer be understood as the discovery of a preexistent harmony or the embodiment of a timeless, transcendent order, but would rather consist in insisting upon and inventing form in one's life.

Lily's most incisive act of resistance can be found in the moment when, visiting Selden in order to bid him goodbye before she confronts Bertha Dorset with their correspondence, she unexpectedly throws these letters into the fire and thereby destroys her last chance of saving herself. Burning the letters is Lily's gift to Selden, a gift that is all the more profound for remaining unobserved. If the power of the marketplace resides in its ability to define the value and position of those who inhabit it, here Lily assumes that power in order to produce a different worth. Affirming the principle of expenditure that, according to Bataille, the bourgeoisie detests, Lily not only draws attention to the ideology of the marketplace but demonstrates an alternative to it: she and not it will become the arbiter of her value, a value determined not by how much she has but by how much she is willing to lose.^[47]

Lily affirms a form of "self-preservation" that both is akin to and deviates from that which Burke envisioned as the goal of the sublime, for it entails the desire to maintain "a moral attribute" (169) at any cost, even if doing so leaves her destitute, or dead. Fashioning a self whose value is established through its willingness to lose more than it can ever gain, she creates an alternative version of sublimity that, far from being synonymous with the marketplace, affirms the alterity it risks. At stake is a portrait of the artist who produces neither calculated effects nor beautiful objects, but rather enacts an aesthetic in which, in Jean-Paul Sartre's words, "art is a

ceremony of the gift , and the gift alone brings about the metamorphoses."^[48] What Lily resists is a notion of the aesthetic in which art is just another form of barter; what she creates is a kind of value that cannot be reduced to dollars and cents. If Lily's gift to Selden is to protect his reputation without his ever knowing it was in danger, her gift to us is to transform the Burkean sublime and enact a version of it in which ethics and aesthetics, risk and art, have become inseparable.