An Enshrined And Entombed Beautiful Object In Consumer Society

In the late 19th-century New York."conspicuous consumption" has become a fashion for the wealthy to display their pecuniary strength and to attain or maintain a superior social status.Edith Wharton reveals such phenomena in her novel The House of Mirth,in which the protagonist Miss Lily Bart occupies a complicated position as both the consumer and the consumed under the regulation of consumerism.On the one hand,Lily is a smart consumer who relies on the materialistic milieu for social advantage and power.Through conscious connections with material objects and spaces,she constructs her persona as a leisure-class lady who consumes and performs a life of leisure in due form and degree as the society demands.Insisting on being her own image-maker.she imitates the portrait of "Mrs.Lloyd" in the tableau vivants,which proves to be a successful self-presentation that highlights her ornamental femininity,marks the moment of her enshrinement as a presentable beauty-an ideal wife for the rich men,and restores to her an illusory sense of power.On the other hand,this gender-differentiated consumer logic is essentially a commercialized ideology which assumes no emotional or moral concerns.In the marriage market where value exchange transactions take place.the value of the female body is at once created and deteriorated Lily's frank tableau exposes her body in the eyes of the voyeuristic spectators under the guise of appreciating art,during which she has been paradoxically commodified by the way she exerts an influence.However,unable to break the illusion of being in control,and troubled by incompatible emotional and moral considerations,Lily refuses to completely conduct marriage like a trade and is eventually discarded by the high society.Her diminishing value lands her in the working class,where she fails to support herself and is entombed as a disposable object.By revealing the manipulations of consumerism culture and the protagonist's participation and predicament in such a context,Wharton not only criticizes the consumer society,but also cautions her audience through Lily's destined downfall.