Adapted from the Original by Laurence Raw

Author:Laurence Raw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Textual Museums: The Practices of Collecting and Constructions of Value

The practice of collecting emerges as an important focus of both novels. Artifacts, paintings, and bric-a-brac stored in the interiors of The Age of Innocence reveal the relationship between connoisseurs and aesthetes. Wharton was immensely interested in nineteenth-century visual arts, especially in the Pre-Raphaelites. Even the title of the novel was inspired by Joshua Reynolds’ painting of the same name. Throughout the novel, Ellen Olenska is compared to many famous paintings: She embodies “a kind of restless, Pre-Raphaelite lady-in-waiting,” and “a nameless, languid lady in a Monet painting” with a parasol at another scene at Boston Common (Age 184). There are some other references to art works throughout the novel: Mr. Beaufort boldly displays Bouguereau’s famous nude painting, “Love Victorious,” in his drawing room. Mr. Letterblair’s house walls are adorned with the prints of famous paintings such as John Singleton Copley’s “The Death of Chatham.” There seems to be a different inspiration for the practice of art collecting, a prestigious obsession of the upper classes that sought to create imaginary interiors based on “the power of purchase” as the components of the interiors began to be “picked up” rather than “built up” (Agnew 140). The bibelot or object of beauty and rarity, became the metaphor of this new trend of art appreciation, in which art is shifted from museum to living room, and fragmented and reformatted in its minuscule form for display in the bourgeois interior spaces (Watson 23). Throughout The Age of Innocence our attention is drawn to the mass produced bronze and steel statuettes situated on the mantelpieces. The drawing rooms are stuffed full of expensive collectibles such as Saxe porcelain, gilt jardinières, Baltimore silverware, velvet puffs, Isabey miniatures. Just like a consumer, collectors remove objects from their original locations and relocate them in a different realm, in fulfillment of a fantasy that they will be transformed into creators (Stewart 158). In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin juxtaposes the real work of art, which is “unique” and “permanent,” with its “transitory,” mass-produced counterpart (221). The main difference, however, lies in the lack of what he calls “aura” in the reproduced art object: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space … that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art…. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (220–21). In the age of consumer collectors, a similar process occurs as objects are removed from their point of origin to museums, from museums to marketplace as reproduced commodities, and from the marketplace to bourgeois interiors. Valuable products lose their basic value as they are transformed into commodities.

Bentley asserts that the museum is a place for “hunting for the real” for Wharton, as it combines a range of customs and objects (56). “[As] Counterinstitutions to

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