The Public Life: The Discourse of Privacy in the Age of Celebrity

STACEY MARGOLIS The Public Life: The Discourse of Privacy in the Age of Celebrity I. THE WORLD OF PUBLICITY 'hen Helen dale, the famous lady novelist of Edith Wharton 's "Copy," meets her ex-lover—the well-known poet Paul Ventnor—after years of separation, she greets him with the news ofher own death. "1 died years ago,"1 says Dale, attempting to explain her sense that the public image she has acquired has taken on a life of its own, a life that seems to have become more real to her than her own flesh and blood existence. "What you see before you is a figment of the reporter's brain—a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs with ink in its veins" ( 1 1 1 ). The rising popularity of her public persona only reinforces the fact that "[t]he last shred of [her] identity is gone" (112). As the dialogue makes clear, however, Dale's public identity is "monstrous" not just because it is patently false, a "figment" of someone else's "brain," but rather because it can be sold repeatedly, like any other commodity. Her identity, in other words, has become "public property" ( 1 1 1 ). And, if Dale has clearly profited from her ability to sell her identity—"most people," according to Ventnor, "would be glad to part with theirs on such terms" (112)—she has also lost the ability to see herself as anything but alienable property: "A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion" (112). In "Copy," it appears , the market that can provide the individual with an identity that is larger than life can also rob the individual of a kind of personhood, making the most intimate experiences virtually indistinguishable from the mechanisms of contract and exchange. If Dale has indeed "died," Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 Stacey Margolis by becoming a celebrity, this death merely heralds her rebirth as a commodity. In a concerted effort to escape the perils of such a system of commodification , Dale and Ventnor plan to salvage their privacy by refusing to publish their old love letters. Likening their private correspondence to the private garden where they had once been able to lose themselves to the outside world—a garden that has been lost to them since its transformation into a public park—the two writers decide to "burn the key" (121) to their garden by throwing the whole collection of letters into the fire. In the logic of the dialogue, it seems, one can keep something private only by refusing to keep it at all; in order to lock out the world one must not hold the key but destroy it. And yet, the destructive fire that Dale and Ventnor dream of does not promise to rid them of their property so much as to purify and transform their very relation to property. Asserting an inalienable claim to the burned letters , Dale and Ventnor attempt to establish a kind of ownership that would be impervious to market forces; they dream of becoming, in effect , "landed proprietors" (120). It is this figure of the landed proprietor (whose identity depends on the inviolability of his relation to land) that holds out for these two celebrities the possibility of liberation from a world in which identity, like property, is always alienable. As Wharton's story makes clear, however, their attempt to resist the infiltration of the market has come too late; the landed proprietor, rather than heralding a totally new form ofownership, already seems to have become a figure of nostalgia. The letters that the two celebrities burn cannot be kept from the market because, as a kind of intellectual "capital" (120), they have already been sold. Just as Ventnor speaks of burning the letters as "spending one's capital" and Dale as "wasting" it, the letters themselves seem to assert their own unique capacity to produce a kind of surplus value in the form of Ventnor's poetry and Dale's prose (120). Seeing her letters once again, Dale realizes that her recent creative work has been "simply plagiarized, word for word...