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Zizek's interpretation of Lacan's work as ideology critique enhances my reading of The Age of Innocence. While the objet petit a becomes the forbidden, motivating impetus, the failure of language maintains the performative effect of society as "the Thing."
In Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, characters struggle with their particular realities as they adhere to the ideology of the society that forms and circumscribes them. Wharton explores the subtleties of language as language deceives and, inadvertently, mirrors her characters' inner lives. Old New York becomes a sort of Lacanian fantasyland governed by a rigid, underlying symbolic code, a "superegoic voice" that both controls and is sustained by its members. To examine this symbolic code, I turn to Slavoj Zizek's version of Lacan in his book Looking Awry, in which he transforms psychoanalysis into a critique of ideology, or the "superegoic voice," as central to the ideologic imperative and as essential to our understanding of the real. Such an interpretation of Lacan, with its political and cultural inflections, enhances a Lacanian reading of The Age of Innocence.
Language as a tool for deception is often noted in critical discourse surrounding The Age of Innocence. A Lacanian discussion of the novel illuminates the imperative of the superegoic voice to perpetuate this deception. Lacan explains that, since the effect of speech on the subject constitutes the unconscious, "the unconscious is structured like a language" (149). Zizek's socio-political emphasis reveals both the fantasy construction of the unconscious and the control of symbolic law on members of society (Looking viii). Zizek explores subtleties of language as a tool for deception and a mirror of our own troubled psyche. Additionally, he explores fantasy spaces and the real as Lacan defines them, that is, the surplus of fantasy space that fills the "black hole," or the unfulfilled desire that intrudes on and shapes reality.
In Wharton's novel, the objet petit a, that is, the unattainable "object-cause" of desire toward which a character is driven, becomes the forbidden yet motivating impetus. The dialectic of deception, "a dialectic in which those who really err are the unduped" (Zizek, Looking ix), along with the breakdown of communication, join to make a final resolution impossible in a society that realizes its own truth through...