ABSTRACT
Works of fiction—stories—do cultural work, whether they are told in language common and accessible to everyone, openly attempting to influence the course of history, or are “by definition a form of discourse that has no designs on the world [i.e., “literature”]… does not attempt to change things, but merely to represent them, and does so in a specifically literary language whose claim to value lies in its uniqueness.” 1 I am interested in the conflation of these “languages”—in Edith Wharton’s telling a story in the form of a simple “emblem” and then telling it again as “literature” in her early novel The House of Mirth; and in that novel centrally positioning a scene—the tableaux vivants—from popular culture while leaving her readers to ponder the representations of “high art” the players enact. In short, I am interested in the kind of cultural work that Wharton’s The House of Mirth does.
