Every Contact Leaves a Trace: Wharton's Critique of the Forensic Imagination in The House of Mirth

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines how the forensic "scene" was invented by a new science, which revealed that objects contain records of past activities and developed an array of technologies and protocols for harvesting these records. It also explores how Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth took up this forensic imagination, which is, above all else, attuned to the communicative capacity of objects. This capacity is enacted in the final chapter of the novel, where Selden's attitude toward Lily's body and his systematic survey and interrogation of the objects in her room suggest that the literary influence of forensic science was felt far beyond the genre of detective fiction. Wharton represents objects as providing more voluble, candid, and persuasive testimony than humans, even as she underscores the disturbing lessons about the elusiveness of evidence and forensic detachment that emerged from the most famous trial in the history of France. In revisiting this history, we see into the origins of our own object-oriented juridical culture, which has replaced people with physical evidence as the most reliable witnesses to an event.