In Edith Wharton’s The Eyes, Andrew Culwin surrounds himself with beauty in its bound, earthly forms. Once the phantom eyes manifest at the foot of his bed, however, he is forced to contend with what’s on the other side of that beauty. His ghost rips through the membrane that separates the aesthetic external reality from the disgusting outside and devours Culwin. The world becomes paper thin, and he becomes only a “night blooming flower” (Wharton, para. 10). The ghost in this story isn’t the typical emaciated thing clattering chains up in the attic. The eyes are sultry and organic yet dead and disembodied. They uncannily mimic Culwin’s character completely (derisive and devouring), though he is completely blind to it. Once forced under their insufferable glare, he can no longer find anything worthwhile in Alice or Gilbert. As such, his former companions fall through the tear that the eyes have left in Culwin’s reality and they are cast aside, completely devoured.
Because Culwin’s apparition makes him so “exceedingly uncomfortable,” it should hold no place in his aesthetic world. He tries to debunk their existence by comparing them to the ghosts in other tales. While the ghosts in his friends’ tales are colorful and displayed in an “exhibit,” his is “no show ghost” (Wharton, para. 2, 21). The ghosts from typical gothic tales haunt the attic and cry out in the night, bemoaning their existence. The eyes glare at Culwin silently from the foot of his bed, totally ubiquitous. Ironically, the first place that he sees them is in his aunt’s “gothic villa” in which he spends his time in the “gothic library” (Wharton, para. 23, 24). The disgusting eyes stand out blatantly as a stark contrast to Culwin’s stereotypical ghost by appearing in such a place. And, though he tries to pass them off as either “an optical or a digestive delusion”, he dreads their reappearance every night (Wharton, para. 21). The eyes’ disgusting nature makes their reality unacceptable to Culwin. If they appeared as the archetypal clattering ghoul he could categorize them and find some use for them, much as he does for everything else in his world. As they are, they do nothing but glare derisively and suck the use-value out of everything Culwin desires. He is as blind to this as he is to his own tendencies to devour those around him.
The eyes consume every part of Culwin, but perhaps most tragically, they devour his mind. By the time he tells his tale by the fire, his mind has become an empty husk, an “academic grove from which all the leaves have fallen” (Wharton, para. 6). The narrator describes it as being “cold and draughty,” a place in which a few selected friends could stretch out and enjoy the spaciousness (Wharton, para. 6). His friends appear to flock around for two reasons; this being one of them. Culwins friends are also only faithful to him because his love of eating has ensured the exquisiteness of the food served at his house. By devouring his mind and leaving nothing more than dry desolation, the eyes ironically give young minds an opportunity to “robuster bloom” (Wharton, para. 7). Phil Frenham especially is able to use Culwin’s “mental dryness” to painlessly leave the realm of familial mediocrity (Wharton, para. 7).
The unbound eyes manifest in Culwin’s room as the aesthetic in its unbound form. Now, Culwin doesn’t surround himself with beauty so he can appreciate it and observe it from a distance. He wants it totally bound and easily categorized so he can devour it. He consumes his companions. He “likes ’em juicy” and is known for “tast[ing] the lyric qualities in youth” (Wharton, para. 7). His only doctrine is gastronomy both in a purely physical sense and in a metaphorical sense. The disgusting has no place in this world, even though it is merely an extension of the aesthetic. The eyes questionable physicality does nothing to whet the appetite, so they appear to have no beauty and no use-value at all. Because he can get nothing out of them, they continue to eat Culwin greedily with their incessant stare. They do to Culwin the very thing that he has made a habit of doing to others his whole life. Though he continues to devour his lovers and companions, the eyes shear through Culwin, leaving nothing left.
The eyes are a literal reflection of Culwin’s desire to consume everything around him. “Pulpy folds of flesh” surround the “watery bulbs” and are ready to be sucked dry in a sultry fashion (Wharton, para 31, 62). But, Culwin claims to be unable to see this representation of his nature. He likewise refuses to see the way their “thick red-lined lids” closely resemble “the red blink of [his] eyes” (Wharton, para. 31, 5). Even so, he cannot refute the eyes palpable “double life” and the disconcerting fact that in seeing them he is “seeing two” (Wharton, para. 21, 22). To Culwin the eyes are too out of place. They tear through the gossamer membrane of Culwin’s fragile sense of the world, leaving a hole behind and nothing more. His whole world begins to slip through this tear, piece by devastated piece. But, instead of recognizing the ghost at the foot of his bed as a materialization of his own lurid nature, he sees them as totally unnatural and repulsive. Even so, the similarities between Culwin’s own nature and that of this apparition are uncanny. The resemblances should be recognized and are not. They are home but not-home at the same time. The eyes are Culwin’s own, unbound to any “mottled bark” to hold them in context, but he doesn’t accept or appreciate their gratuitous revelations (Wharton, para. 5). No resolution is ever made, and the Grotesque appears in its entirety. The devourer becomes the devoured.
The haunting eyes work in the very confines of everything that Culwin finds beautiful. They shake his life’s paradigm completely not in spite of this fact but because of it. Culwin’s binging on the aesthetic invokes the ghost; they mimic the aesthetic and usurp the bound with the unbound. Every time Culwin tries to conjure up calming images of his lovers’ eyes, the unbound eyes are there, consuming whatever beauty the former orbs held. When he tries to cleanse their effect with images of Alice’s eyes-“[un]remarkable” albeit “wholesome as fresh water”-they transform into the unbound eyes (Wharton, para. 36). Culwin wakes to find the others glowering at him from across the room when he lulls himself to sleep thinking of Gilbert’s “blissful eyes” (Wharton, para. 59). They “[burn] such a hole in [his] consciousness,” leaving a gaping wound through which his lovers’ beauty fades away (Wharton, para. 42). Prior to seeing the eyes, Alice supplies admiration, and Gilbert supplies beauty in its truest form: physical charm. It all becomes nothing to Culwin; indeed, they become nothing to Culwin and are cast aside like so much refuse. To this extent, it is not just Culwin’s world that slips through the hole that the eyes leave. The “unreal” eyes dig into his lovers’ useful qualities and sap them of all worth. Once he observes the eyes staring at him, the aesthetic in its unbound form takes the place of bound beauty, and Alice and Gilbert get discarded as ventures of recklessness and foolishness, respectively. Their hateful glare robs Culwin of his right to feed off of the aesthetic and leave him with nothing.
The eyes affect Culwin increasingly over time such to the point that they consume the use-value of everyone, not just his lovers. By the time he tells his tale, all men have become “superfluous,” and women are worth nothing more to him than their ability to cook (Wharton, para. 5). Indeed, on the unfortunate occasions when his “friends” come over to his abode, he plays the “detached observer” in the goings-on (Wharton, para. 3). His questionable conviviality appears only at night and only in a limited sense. People house no more value for him. The eyes devour him so much that there’s quite literally nothing left in him that can feed off of his comrades.
Edith Wharton’s “The Eyes” perfectly embodies two aspects of the Grotesque: the Uncanny and the Disgusting. The similarities between Culwin and his apparition are unquestionable. They appear as something that should register as familiar to him and doesn’t. They both are red; they both devour those around them, yet he doesn’t see this and remains blinded. Even so, it is truly unsettling to observe the story’s protagonist and such a repulsive phantom mimic each other so completely. If Culwin saw himself reflected in the eyes, his life may have been different. The eyes are disgusting in that they are so out of place, both in Culwin’s mind and in nature. They hold Culwin so aghast and cause his gorge to rise because they are so repulsive (Wharton, para. 32). They hold no place in his world, but they emerge in front of him nonetheless. They are disgusting to the reader because they appear so antithetical to anything that we would expect a ghost appear. They are not emaciated nor do they hover about the attic moaning and groaning. They do not clatter chain, and they do not communicate in any open way. They are fecund, totally organic. It’s both appalling and compelling to read about such a ghost. The Grotesque achieves its goal. Boundaries shake and one squirms uncomfortably in his or her chair but not without an amused smile.
This story questions whether the boundaries between subject and object. Throughout the beginning of his life, Culwin happily devours those he finds use-value in, totally unaware that he is doing so. But, can such a man exist on the devourer becomes the devoured? Once the eyes use his faculty so completely against him, one must wonder if Culwin continues to exist at all. Has he become nothing more than a ghost himself, floating about in his now void world while young scholars come to bask in the desolate wasteland of his mind? True enough, Culwin continues to devour, albeit by the end of the tale it is nothing more than his culinary delights. He likewise continues to surround himself by interesting youths, and enjoys their juiciness, but his ability to sap them is gone. The eyes have come and consumed his world and his mind, leaving a fine area for said youths to spread their wings. So, can the subject continue to exist once it has become the object? Or, is there nothing left of dear Culwin but a hollowed out shell? It is quite ambiguous.
Works Cited Wharton, Edith. “The Eyes,” 1910. http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/3255/>.
