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Showing posts from May 4, 2010

the house of mirth and perfume

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I have been rereading the wonderful House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, and I am absolutely convinced that we are meant to read the lovely socialite protagonist as a study in the beauty and artifice of perfume.  Maybe I’m crazy…what else would you make of this: She paused before the mantelpiece, studying herself in the mirror while she adjusted her veil. The attitude revealed the long slope of her slender sides, which gave a kind of wild-wood grace to her outline – as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room; and Selden reflected that it was the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality. (1.1.119) Isn’t that what perfume is, something elemental which is trapped in a slender bottle of great beauty which still intimates some wild, untamed beyond? It is a way to capture and restrain magic—like containing a sylvan creature like a dryad in an upper-class New York drawing room. Ok, if you still think