Abstract
Roland Barthes’ work, and especially S/Z: An Essay, challenges the whole premise of what we conventionally call Realism. Realism as a literary mode disguises the conditions of its production. Appearing to accurately reflect the world of external reality, a realist text reads like a seamless and thus apparently ‘natural’ whole. We note as readers, as Barthes points out, ‘only the smooth surface, imperceptibly soldered by the movement of sentences, the flowing discourse of narration, the “naaturalness” of ordinary language’.2 Attention is diverted in realist literature away from the instabilities of language and reference. Language, rather, gives here a seemingly transparent representation of a solid world. All stress is placed on referent: word becomes a ‘translucent window … neutral and colourless’3 onto world.
We know now that the text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author — God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
(Roland Barthes)1
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Notes
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1984 [1977]) p. 146.
Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974 [1970]) p. 13. All references to be given after quotations in text from henceforth.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983 ) p. 136.
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1976 [1881]) p. x. All references to be given after quotations from henceforth.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Toronto, New York, London: Bantam, 1976 [1966]) p. 137.
Richard Cavendish (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Unexplained: Magic, Occultism and Parapsychology ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974 ) p. 167.
Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (Glasgow: Fontana, 1983) p. 87. Barthes initially distinguishes between the ‘readerly’ and the ‘writerly’ in S/Z, pp. 3–11. Terence Hawkes explicates in Structuralism and Semiotics ( London: Methuen, 1977 ) pp. 113–5.
Elaine Millard, ‘Feminism II: Reading as a Woman: D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr’, in D. Tallack (ed.), Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts ( London: Batsford, 1987 ) p. 136.
Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Literature ( Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982 ) p. 125.
Ann Jefferson and David Robey (eds), Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction ( London: Batsford, 1982 ) p. 103.
Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction ( London: Hutchinson, 1983 ) p. 200.
Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics ( London: Methuen, 1983 ) pp. 123–5.
Marcus Cunliffe, The Literature of the United States (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1964 [1954]) p. 228.
Jay Williams, The World of Titian ( New York: Time-Life Books, 1968 ) pp. 70–1.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Mentor, 1953 [1899]) p. 72.
Mrs Mary Wood-Allen, M.D., What a Young Woman Ought to Know ( Philadelphia: Vir Publishing Co., 1898 ) p. 224.
See Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986 ) pp. 349.
See Cynthia Griffin Wolff, ‘Introduction’, to Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987 [1905]) pp. vii-viii. All references to be given after quotations in text from henceforth.
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity ( London: Verso, 1983 ) pp. 18–19.
Elaine Showalter, ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’, The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory ( London: Virago, 1986 ) p. 134.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 ) pp. 114–5.
Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1976 ) p. 134.
Annette Kolodny, ‘Some Notes on Defining a “Feminist Literary Criticism”’, in Cheryl L. Brown and Karen Olson (eds), Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose ( Metuchen, NJ.: Scarecrow Press, 1978 ) p. 42.
Henry James, The American Scene ( London: Chapman and Hall, 1907 ) pp. 211–12.
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985) p. 130. Moi is here explicating Irigaray.
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© 1990 Peter Messent
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Messent, P. (1990). The Portrait of a Lady and The House of Mirth: A Barthesian Reading. In: New Readings of the American Novel. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21117-3_6
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