ABSTRACT
Edith Wharton’s novel traces the young woman’s descent from a privileged pedestal in society’s upper echelon to her lonely death by overdose in a boardinghouse. By employing multiple references to sight and seeing, Wharton implicates the reader as participating in the culture that destroys Lily Bart but nurtures Undine Spragg. In Undine Spragg, Wharton created a ruthless anti-heroine more suited to bear the title ‘celebutante’ than any twenty-first-century ‘it girl’. Wharton creates multiple ways of seeing and a multiplicity of visions, which complicate a single conclusion. Thus Wharton encourages readers to confront the discrepancy between character traits they might claim to value and those that capture their imagination and hold their interest. By observing the interactions of the social elite in Wharton’s novel, the reader participates in an exchange not unlike the transferral of pleasure via pornography.
