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My husband is determined that we don't give away all the rituals. --Kitty McEaddy, mother of five Charleston debutantes I don't know what people would do without deb season. --Margaret Lee McEaddy, one of the five [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The grand staircase fronting the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston leads to large, wooden, locked double doors and instructions to ring the bell for service. The summons brings a face between the doors and, in a moment that recalls the Wizard's brushing off Dorothy through a similar aperture, the question "May I help you?" faintly discourages a reply. Inside, other assistants hustle to retrieve documents from the unseen depths where archives are stored. I pay my five-dollar non-member's fee and ask to see any documents pertaining to the St. Cecilia Society, a Charleston musical society established in 1762, which became, sometime in the nineteenth century, perhaps the most exclusive and mysterious of all debutante societies in America. My wait is brief. A smiling assistant, having warmed to my curiosity, has unearthed a scrapbook belonging to a Miss Mary de Merrell of 129 Tradd Street, Charleston. As I respectfully leaf through the fragile pages that chronicle Miss de Merrell's coming out on 23 December 1943, I find a newspaper photo of her and her cohort of seventeen debs, dated 9 January 1944, posed elegantly for the occasion. Mary de Merrell has penciled an arrow above herself, atop which she has written "me." At last, I have burrowed through layers of secrecy to the private record of one war-time St. Cecilia debutante--an excavation that, just moments before and over long months, I'd thought was impossible. Mary Pinckney de Merrell Brady obviously prepared this scrapbook for archival purposes, having inscribed her married name and address in the front, dated June 1999, and having added notes throughout in the same hand, with the same pen. A newspaper photo of eleven mothers--nearly all hatted and in fox furs--records their meeting in early November 1943 about the upcoming festivities. Yet the reportage is everywhere inflected with personal touches. Lined notebook pages with contact phone numbers for the other debutantes and for such helpful people as "caterers" also list "presents given me," including flowers ("mums") and jewelry ("chain topax [sic] necklace"). Mostly, there are traces of parties, parties, parties! Hand-written and printed invitations line the rag pages, each bearing Mary's note that it was "answered." Every newspaper clipping dutifully reports who attended the punch bowl at whose residence. Mary kept a list of days and nights already reserved for parties, a list of what she wore to each party, and a list of her dates, as well as their heights ("I was 5' 7" barefoot!" she inserts). Next to one of those dates, Lt. Ned Brady, she has added, parenthetically, "whom I married!" Here, before me, are both infectious girlish excitement over a brimming social life and twilight nostalgia for days gone by. It is the single glimpse into the inner world of St. Cecilia that, as an outsider, I have been able to catch. Like a number of women who didn't themselves debut, I'm intrigued by women who have. Growing up in Ohio, I was never aware of debutante societies, although I partook in sororities, which thrived in my high school and at my university. Later, as a graduate student in the Ivy League, I encountered some of the same elitist separatism that characterizes contemporary debutante society. Today, still no stranger to exclusivity, I teach at a highly selective private college given to occasional bouts of self-ascribed superiority. In the case of schools, selectivity can be defended at least partly on the basis of merit. But what leads contemporary women to draw firm social boundaries, protected by the rites of a sorority or the rituals of coming out, for the sole apparent reason of inviting some people in and excluding others? …

I. In Room 34, at the far reaches of Washington, DC'S National Gallery of Art, hangs Bartolome Esteban Murillo's painting Two Women at a Window, dating from the mid-seventeenth century (fig. 1). As spectators in the room come and go, this painting attracts the notice of observers more frequently, sooner, and for a longer time than do the other eight paintings in the small space. The reason is clear: the two women at the window look directly at viewers, engaging their eyes. The younger woman, a beauty, rests her cheek on her hand, her off-shoulder gown revealing soft, milky flesh. She appears welcoming. The older woman, by contrast, is swathed in her generous mantilla, which she holds up over her face, just below her eyes. The two figures, the one leaning forward virtually into the spectator's space and the other, standing behind her so as to draw the spectator into the painting's space, illustrate much about how parallel instances of women at windows work in early modern English drama. In both cases, women framed by windows involve their audience in moral dilemmas, moral questions, or moral concerns. Just who Murillo's women are underscores this point. Are they chaperone and charge, procuress and prostitute? How innocent or enticing is that girl's smile? Does the older woman's pose arouse or discourage interest? Is her shawl a means of flirtation or a socially polite cover for her smile? All such interpretations have been advanced; none has been thoroughly substantiated. (1) The framing device of the window raises additional questions. What occurs on the other side of the window, which the viewer sees only as black background? Are the women confined within the building or free to come and go? If they are confined, how do they feel? Is their apparent contentment put on for their audience's benefit? How much choice do they enjoy? [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Murillo's painting is but one of many in the period centered on the image of one or two women at a window. Surely the most influential in its day was Rembrandt's Young Girl Leaning on a Window-Sill or, alternatively, Girl at a Window, dated 1645 and housed now in London's Dulwich Gallery (fig.2). Poised in the liminal space between indoors and outdoors, private and public, Rembrandt's girl captivates her audience in a manner that art historian Gorel Cavalli-Bjorkman says derives from earlier Renaissance portraiture: The face-to-face exchange makes each participant simultaneously the beholder and the beheld. The sitters adopt self-conscious poses that are oriented toward being seen. The experience of viewing appears to be mutual and shared, and consequently the surface of the image confuses, rather than upholds, the division between inside and outside the frame, and complicates the parallel distinction between I and thou. (emphasis mine) (2) Neither decidedly innocent nor sexual, the girl, according to art historian Ann Sumner, has been identified variously as "a relative of Rembrandt, a servant and even a prostitute" (3) However obscure her identity, it matters. As the title of Cavalli-Bjorkman's article on the painting indicates, she is in "A Dialogue with the Beholder": who she is determines, in a sense, who her beholder is. The less certain her character seems, the less certain becomes the viewer's relationship to her and, by extension, the viewer's own character. Rembrandt painted other women at windows--for example, The Kitchen Maid (1651)--and inspired many other artists, both in his lifetime and long after, to do so. (4) Another girl at a window, dated 1654 and rendered by an unidentified follower of Rembrandt, changes slightly the dynamic between subject and spectator because the young woman is looking askance, rather than directly at the audience (fig. 3). (5) Still, as in the earlier Girl at a Window, questions abound here as to her thoughts, motives, and power. What is she contemplating or looking at? …