The Impossibility of Triangulation of Desire in Edith Wharton's the House of Mirth

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TRIANGLULAR DESIRE IN EDITH WHARTION'S HOUSE OF MIRTH

Beginning with Renee Girard in his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel, theorists have discussed desire using the spatial metaphor of the triangle. According to Girard, you can visualize desire as a line drawn between a subject and his object of desire. Sometimes a simple straight line can be drawn betweensubject and object, but more often a line is there but not one line alone. There is a third party present, who Girard terms "a mediator of desire" and there are lines radiating from the mediatortoward both he subject and the desired object, giving this form of mediated relationship the characteristic of a triangle. According to Girard, the subject chooses his object of desire because that object was already desired by a man[1] he admired and "the impulse toward the object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator". (Girard 10) The subject reverses the logical and chronological order of desires in order to hide the fact that the true trajectory of the subject's desire "is aimed at the mediators being". (Girard 53) When applying this model to literature it is important to keep in mind that Girard placed admiration for the mediator and a desire to imitate him as the motivation for the subject's choice of the mediator's object of desire as his own. The first instance of this mediated desire described by Girard is that of Don Quixote in Cervantes' novel. According to Girard, Don Quixote has "surrendered to Amadis the individual's fundamental prerogative: he no longer chooses the objects of his own desire- Amadis must choose for him" (Girard 1) In the novel Amadisis a fictitious person and the Chivalric ideal represented by Amadis the mediator of Don Quixote's desire. Girard's is a purely structural model and does not overtly take stratifications such as gender, sex, and race into account. In Deceit, Desire and the Novel Girard only applies his model to relationships where the subject and the mediator were two men, but as long as the admiration and emulation of the subject for the mediator are kept constant, potentially the model could be applied to alternative relationships. Because of this Girard's structural model is helpful when theorizing a wide range of triangulations of desire.

In her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Sedgwick reworks Girard's study of erotic triangles. Sedgwick makes explicit the assumption that what is mediated by the presence of the woman in the triangle is men's desire for each other. Sedgwick produced a model that places male sexual desire and gender at its heart. This addition of a binary instead of making her model more useful, actually limits its usefulness.

Like Girard, Sedgwick proposes that in the erotic triangle the erotic rivalry is the bond that links the two rivals and it is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the love object. "The bond between the rivals is even a stronger determinant of their actions than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved." (Sedgwick 21) However, here is where the similarity ends. For Sedgwick, the motivation for the presence of the woman in the role of common object of desire is not the subject's admiration for the mediator and his wish to imitate him, but erotic desire between men. Sedgwick took the ethical position of factoring sexuality and gender into the triangular model, making it less structural and more culturally based.

According to Sedgwick, for men the homosocial[2] continuum has been severely disrupted, forcing men to identify themselves on a binary of homosocial or homosexual. This homosocial/homosexual binary made bonds between men suspect.Homophobia was built into the patriarchal institutions to regulate relationships between men and expressions of male affection started to be closely monitored. Since the existence of the hegemony and the patriarchy dependupon these very same bonds between men that now were suspect, it was necessary to find a way to mediate these bonds. The role of the woman in thismodel is simply as a conjunction between men. In other words, because of the homophobia present in the homosocial patriarchy men must route their intimacy through women. "We can go further than that, to say that in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power." (Sedgwick 25)

In addition to Girard, Sedgwick's work is based on Claude Levi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin's work on the exchange of women. For Sedgwick, the presence of a woman allows men to exchange power and to confirm each other's value, supporting the patriarchy. In his book The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude Levi Strauss theorizes that kinship is a way of generating a social and political structure through manipulations of marriage and descent. For Levi Strauss the exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman but between two groups of men, and the woman figures in as an object of exchange, not as a partner in the exchange. The English language gives interesting insight into this exchange of women, the father is said to be giving away the bride. Levi Strauss states that the exchange of women, "has in itself a social value. It provides the means of bonding men together." (Levi Strauss 480) Sedgwick sees the male-dominated social order as being based on homosocial desire. Following the feminist theoreticians Gayle Rubin and Luce Irigaray[3], she factors in the exchange of women.

In her book Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction, Patricia Smith points out that in Sedgwick's model, "Male desire is sublimated and controlled in the name of maintaining power relations between men. A breakdown in this system- that is, the threatened enactment of male homosexuality- sets the stage for homosexual panic, the irrational and often violent response of one man to the real or imagined sexual attractions of another. "(Smith 6) What is at stake for a man in Sedgwick's triangle is his status in the male social order and if he were to enact a sexual preference for another man he would be forfeiting his position as a subject in the exchange of women and in doing so forfeit his position as subject. Sedgwick makes an assumption that the continuum of male homosocial/homosexual desire is radically disrupted whereas the female continuum is relatively uninterrupted. She believes that there is an unbroken continuum between lesbianism and other forms of women's attention to women. "the apparent simplicity-the unity-of the continuum between women loving women and women promoting the interests of women extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic, and political realms would not be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males." (Sedgwick 3)This basic assumption of Sedgwick's theory will be considered later in the paper.

Sedgwick, while acknowledging Girard's work, is very critical about what she sees as its limitations. She faults Girard on two fronts, his failures to differentiate between the sexual/non-sexual (sexuality) and male/female (gender). Firstly, she faults him for not taking homosexual desire into account when formulating the topology of the triangle. "It is one of the strengths of his [Girard's] formulation not to depend on how homosexuality as an entity was perceived or experienced-indeed, on what was or was not considered sexual-at any given historical moment. As a matter of fact, the symmetry of his formulation always depends on suppressing the subjective, historically determined account of which feelings are or are not part of the body of sexuality." (Sedgwick 22) In my opinion, what Sedgewick is criticizing in Girard's model is in fact not a drawback but an asset. The structural nature of his model allows us to escape the binaries of sex and gender.

Sedgwick criticizesthe fact that Girard's theory does not take into account the radical disruption of the male homosocial/homosexual continuum, and the forced heterosexuality and homophobia produced. She quotes Gayle Rubin who writes "the suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppression of homosexuals, is…a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women." Sedgwick's theory duplicates what she shows is done in society, a binary is formed between homosexual/heterosexual making a radical cut in the homosexual/heterosexual continuum.

Her second criticismof Girard's model, concerning gender is, in my opinionunfounded. Sedgwick says that "Girard's reading presents itself as one whose symmetry is undisturbed by such differences as gender, although the triangles that most shape his view tend, in the European tradition, to involve bonds of "rivalry" between males "over" a woman, in his view any relation of rivalry is structured by the same play of emulation and identification." She claims that according to Girard's model, the gender of any of the participants could be changed without affecting the erotic triangle since he does not implicitly consider gender. "The structure of the triangle would be relatively unaffected by the power difference that would be introduced by a change in the gender of one of the participants". (Sedgwick 23) Sincethisisthe case, Girard's model could be seen as an extremely queer model allowing us to theorize a plethora of trianglesdisregarding gender completely, making it a more radical model than Sedgwick's own. Since Girard is does not concern himself with social systems and only on structure, it is free from constructions of gender.

This is not to say that Girard's model can be utilized successfully to study all triangular relationships, we must keep in mind that one of the main prerequisites of Girard's model is that the subject must admire and want to imitate the mediator of his desire, thus precluding the possibility of the mediator being anyone but another of equal or higher status. In this point, I think that Sedgwick and Girard's models have much more in common that Sedgwick realizes. The perquisite of admiration for the mediator foregrounds the impossibility of some subversive forms of triangles, such as a female mediator or a mediator of a race otherthan white.

While Sedgwick claims she takes up the triangular paradigm not as an ahistorical form that "perceives no discontinuity in the homosocial continuum", (24) from which gender, class and power are missing, there is a sense that the significance of the triangle of desire remains the same as that of Girard; always the bond between white men. Whereas Girard, working on the European literary tradition fixes gender implicitly in the triangle of desire, Sedgwick makes it explicit, limiting it to two men and a woman.

In this paper I would like to consider a number of literary triangles of desire and why Sedgwick's model can not account for them. What happens if the constants of race, gender and class are destabilized? Since homosocial bonding and the exchange of women are essential parts of the Sedgwickian model, will it work if we disrupt the triangle by changing its configuration factoring in sex, race and class? I would also like to reexamine another one of Sedgwick's assumptions, that of a relatively undisturbed continuum of heterosexual/homosexual in women.

In her book Surpassing The Love of Men, Lillian Faderman states that till the end of the century, "the sexual potential of love between decent, healthy women was still unacknowledged by many seemingly sophisticated authors; sound women were asexual. It was doubtful enough that they would concern themselves with any form of sexual satisfaction." (Faderman 156) As in Faderman's book, it has been an axiom that there is no homosexual panic concerning lesbian relationships. It hasbeen a convention that there is an unbroken continuum between lesbianism and other forms of women's attention to women. It has been assumed that whereas for men homophobia is built into the patriarchal institutions and expressions of male affection closely monitored, women's bonding has been thought to receive far less scrutiny and far more acceptance. Sedgwick did not consider a relationship of desire between two women having to be mediated through a man since in her view there is no break in the homosocial/homosexual continuum forcing a binary choice. In Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction, Patricia Smith gives a convincing argument that questions this supposition. She shows numerous early and mid 20th century novels in which lesbian panic is written into the narrative.

Consider this, if for men what is at stake in homosexuality is removing oneself from the exchange of women, how much more radical is it when a woman, an object and not a subject, chooses to remove herself, how much more destabilizing to the patriarchy such an ethical position is. Wouldn't the patriarchy have a vested interest in controlling the currency of exchange in the exchange of women, the women and their sexuality? And how about from the point of view of the women's motivation for veiling her same sex desire, I would even suggest that the stakes for women were much higher than for men. For women who take themselves out of the exchange of women put at risk nothing less than economic survival and the perception of society of their perceived worth as a "commodity". In Irigaray's terminology, to lack exchange value is tantamount to meaninglessness.

In the narratives studied by Smith, a courtship plot is worked into the novel to cover the lesbian panic of the characters, and arguably of the writer. [4] This indicates to me that Sedgwick was remiss in leaving out of her model the relationship of desire between women simply because of the arguably false assumption that since the heterosexual/homosexual continuum is assumed not broken in relationships between women, a male object of desire would not be needed to mask the true trajectory of female desire.

In addition, Sedgwick's model as is, with its inclusion of the theory of exchange of women, does not allow us to consider a relationship between women since women areonly objects, "women cannot construct a parallel system of exchange of men beyond the occasional erotic triangle, other than in narratives that do not aspire to verisimilitude." (Smith 6) I would propose when including sexuality in a model of triangulation, itshouldbe recognized that in all relationships of desire, both between men and women, the binary of homosexual/heterosexual isa socially constructed binary which would make triangulation of desire equally necessary for camouflage same sex desire. This attempt at camouflage of female same sex desire camouflage is demonstrated in the many examples of courtship narratives in novels written about by Smith, such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Elizabeth Bower's The Little Girls where the presence of the man is there because of lesbian panic.

Let us consider one such triangle of desire. I believe that in The House of Mirth Gerty Farish not only loved,but also desired Lily Bart. Gerty says, "I don't like to go to her because I am afraid of forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted. Once when we were children, I had rushed up after a long separation and thrown my arms about her, she said: 'Please don't kiss me unless I ask you to, Gerty'; and she did ask me, a minute later, but since then I've always waited to be asked." (The House of Mirth 286) After the attempted rape by Gus Trenor, Lily comes to the home of Gerty. Gerty, as the focalizer of this scene, sees Lily standing at her door as a "shining vision". (171) This is quite interesting since right before Lily's arrival at her door, Gerty had been contemplating how she hated Lily for destroying for Gerty any chance of love with Selden. How then does one reconcile Gerty's hate/love for Lily? I believe that a modified version of Sedgwick's triangle, one which allows for a female same sex relationships, can give us an explanation for this. There is a love/hate relationship between the subject and the rival in order to mediate the possibility of same sex desire. In the case of The House of Mirth Lily is not in love with Gerty, hence her actions show clearly that Gerty is of no consequence to her. However, this can certainly not be said about Gerty. When Lily arrives at her home, Gerty's strength of emotion surely can not simply be explained away by the fact that Gerty makes a habit of taking care of others. In fact, Gerty is both in love with and sexually attracted to Lily. "The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bedfellow. Knowing how Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend. But tonight every fibre in her body shrank from Lily's nearness; it was torture to listen to her breathing and feel the sheet stir with it. As Lily turned and settled to complete rest, a strand of her hair swept Gerty's cheek with its fragrance. Everything about her was warm and soft and scented". (176)