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of the private, bourgeois self) to a disintegrative and global image (Rosemary films in Rome and Hollywood, and screenings of her work seem available almost anywhere). Rosemary is publicity, and the changing pattern of desire which she instigates makes a comparison with Nicole obligatory. The two women, one ‘hard’ (dense) and the other transparent, stand at different moments in the history of desire. Veblen’s terms still apply to Nicole, or at least to Mrs Diver, but Rosemary requires a new vocabulary. When Nicole’s dress and manners provoke others to ‘invidious comparison’ or emulation, she can afford to ignore it because her ‘ducal’ wealth, though regulative of others, protects her from being regulated back. Rosemary, as publicity, stimulates envy but is inextricably tied to the gaze of those who envy her. Under Dick’s tuition Nicole achieved self-possession, she grew ‘hard’, ‘whole’, ‘complete’ and anachronistic. Rosemary’s self is a number of styles which exist to be alienated from her; like fashion, she is created to earn envy so that her style(s) may be purchased by others.
    Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, clarifies my distinction between density and transparency, through the distinction he draws between ‘person’ and ‘personality’. While an actor in a theatre may regulate gesture in response to audience reaction, building a ‘complete’ performance over the span of the play, film actors are subjected to camera shifts and editorial decisions which fragment their role. The film industry responds to this shrivelling of the actor’s ‘person’ with an artificial build up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio: ‘The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spellof the personality”, the phoney spell of a commodity’ (Benjamin 233). I have my doubts about ‘unique aura[s]’: the Jamesian possessive individual
is
denser than Benjamin’s cinematic personality, but both should be set within that anthology of selves which constitutes a history of the identities that culture has recommended. Rosemary is a ‘star’ in Benjamin’s terms. The disintegrative requirements of cinematic capital are as immediate to her as the solidities of accumulated wealth are natural to Mrs Diver.
    Rosemary’s greatest compliment to Dick is the offer of a screen test, even as ‘the most sincere thing’ she says to him is ‘we’re such
actors
—you and I’ (118; italics in source). Her ‘love’ is gestural and involves careful self-direction, a dance of camera angles culminating in the ultimate movie still. Scene: Paris, a hotel. Enter two lovers, who are to walk up five flights of stairs. ‘At the first landing they stopped and kissed.’ Each landing is the site of variously careful kisses, until the final ‘good-by with their hands stretching to touch along the diagonal of the banister and then the fingers slipping apart’ (87). Freeze frame. The example is unfortunate in so far as it implies a degree of manipulation by Rosemary. What I am trying to suggest is rather different: that at spontaneous, intuitive, instinctive levels the system of production within which she works modifies her desire. Take her response to the director, Brady, in Monte Carlo: the director ‘looked her over completely’: he desires her, and in ‘so far as her virginal emotions went’, she ‘contemplate[s] surrender’; ‘It was a click … Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him—like an actor kissed in a picture’ (33). Brady desires the image of her that he might produce; she, in his looks as in a mirror, admires the image of herself remade: