(the) American (Novel of)

142 Hildegard Hoeller
could grow up to be just like you? Of course I know she never
could, but mothers are always dreaming the craziest things for
their children. 15
In this subplot, Wharton clearly alludes to Austen’s sense of manners.
Lily exhibits the kind of compassion for the lower classes that Knightley
teaches Emma in the Box Hill episode. And Wharton shows the response
to such responsible manners: Nettie survives, builds a life, and
accepts a social order that, in all other regards, must appear unjust and
queer. Indeed, seeing Lily contains and stifles a potential revolutionary
insight (of thinking why things were so queerly fixed) and makes
Nettie accept an undemocratic, un-American world as a form of justice.
She furthermore compensates her own discontent by dreaming of an
impossible social rise (the American Dream); she acknowledges that
dreaming of her baby becoming like Lily is the “craziest thing.” In
Austen’s and Wharton’s terms, Lily has exhibited perfect manners and
perfect beauty, 16 but Wharton simultaneously shows that such performative
visual American manners lead to a celebrity culture posing
as justice rather than to a just society. 17
From Gerty’s account of Lily’s charitable actions, we move to the
actual tableaux vivants scene: an exhibition of the rich for the rich. The
entire spectacle speaks of a deep postcolonial neurosis, each American
woman trying with every art and artifice possible to fit herself into the
picture of a European master: Titian, Veronese, Kauffman, Vandyck,
Watteau. “A brilliant Miss Smedden from Brooklyn,” writes Wharton
with great irony, “showed to perfection the sumptuous curves of Titian’s
Daughter” while “no one . . . could have made a more typical Goya than
Carry Fisher.” It is not an accident that only Lily selects an eighteenthcentury
British painter (of manners): Reynolds. Impersonating Reynolds’s
“Mrs. Lloyd,” Lily is seen in her most tasteful and her most vulnerable
position: “She had [selected] a type so like her own that she could
embody the person presented without ceasing to be herself.” 18 Everyone
in the party recognizes the superiority of Lily’s choice and beauty.
The party is stunned by her performance, but no one is up to Lily’s
standards to respond. Instead the scene elicits unmannered desire that
nearly leads to Lily’s rape. While Emma fell below her standard in the
Box Hill episode, where she should have exemplified flawless manners,
Lily exceeds the standards of her exhibition to such a degree that