The Causes of Effect: Edith Wharton and the Economics of Ekphrasis

Abstract

Ekphrasis, from one point of view, is the aesthetician's topos par excellence. In it, one art contemplates another and in the process defines its own limits. In ekphrastic poems such as Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, a literary work compares its temporality to the still moment of the visual arts, yearns for an atemporal transcendence made impossible by its own medium, yet wins out over time through rhetorical sleight of hand (Steiner 1982: 41-42). But this purely aesthetic function of ekphrasis is just one of many that the topos serves. In this paper I would like to explore another: the role of ekphrasis in the novelistic clash between capitalist and aristocratic ideals. This conflict is expressed, in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth as elsewhere, through two opposed plot structures: on the one hand, the rags-to-riches story epitomized in the Horatio Alger books, and on the other, the chivalric romance, with its roots in fairy tale and myth. In the first, value arises from hard work, and causeand-effect relations are crucial. In the second, value is associated with the transcendent and eternal sphere, and the aim is to escape the world of causality into a purer realm. Ekphrasis, as the topos of the still, transcendent moment, opposes the contingency of plot flow and temporal progression in the novel and hence plays a signal role in the confrontation between contextual and acontextual value.