Edith Wharton on Film

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88Edith 88888 8888888 88Wharton 88888 88 8 8 8 8 8 onFilm PARLE Y ANN BO SWE LL

Edith Wharton onFilm

Boswell Frontmatter.indd 1

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Edith Wharton onFilm E6GA: N6CC7D HL: AA

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale


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Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 07

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boswell, Parley Ann. Edith Wharton on film / Parley Ann Boswell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2757-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-2757-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937—Film and video adaptations. 3. Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937—Knowledge—Art. 4. American fiction—Film and video adaptations. 5. Visual perception in literature. I. Title. PS3545.H16Z625 2007 791.43'75—dc22 2006102592 Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞


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To my mother, Parley Dabney Boswell And to the memory of my father, Arlie O. Boswell Jr. (–)


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Contents List of Illustration Preface xi

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Introduction: A Glittering Place 1 PART ONE. Reading Wharton on Film 1. Charm Incorporated: The Short Fiction 19 2. The Mechanical Terror: The Novels 41 The Reef (1912) Twilight Sleep (1927) The Children (1928) PART TWO. Watching Wharton on Film 3. Going Hollywood: The Thirties 77 The Marriage Playground (1930) The Age of Innocence (1934) The Old Maid (1939) 4. Wharton in Bloom: The Nineties 109 The Children (1990) Ethan Frome (1993) The Age of Innocence (1993) The House of Mirth (2000) Conclusion: Another Country

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Filmography 175 Notes 181 Works Cited 201 Index 213


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Illustrations Following page Edith Wharton Mary Pickford Fredric March, Mary Brian, and the children in The Marriage Playground John Boles and Irene Dunne in The Age of Innocence Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in The Old Maid The old maids Patricia Arquette and Liam Neeson in Ethan Frome Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis in The Age of Innocence Wharton’s silent conspirators in The Age of Innocence Gillian Anderson (Lily), Dan Aykroyd, and Anthony LaPaglia in The House of Mirth Lily as decoration in the House of Mirth

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Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there? —Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

Preface

I

became interested in Edith Wharton’s relationship to popular film several years ago while I was researching another film project, and I came across a movie review in a 1930 issue of The New Movie Magazine, of a Hollywood production entitled The Marriage Playground. “Another study of divorce, based on Edith Wharton’s ‘The Children.’ Sympathetic story and beautiful acting by Mary Brian” (9). Although I had read most of Wharton’s fiction, and taught several of her works in my courses, I had never given much thought to her relationship with Hollywood. When four Wharton films were released in the 1990s, I became more interested in Wharton and the movies. I learned that she had made a good deal of money by selling several of her most celebrated works to Hollywood during her lifetime. When I began to study the vast body of Wharton scholarship, I found that there was very little mention of Wharton and film. Reading Wharton’s own letters and essays helped me to understand why there has been so little critical attention devoted to the subject. Edith Wharton disliked cinema. She wrote so herself, and the formidable body of Wharton scholarship—large enough to constitute an Edith Wharton industry—has confirmed that she found movies unsatisfying and their popularity alarming. Her biographers, relying on her letters and personal papers, all document that Wharton wrote about seeing one movie in 1914 in a storefront theater in Spain. “Edith Wharton herself appears never to have entered a movie theater,” wrote R. W. B. Lewis in his 1975 biography, Edith Wharton (7). Almost twenty years later, Shari Benstock offered more detail about Wharton’s film experience in No Gifts from Chance (1994). Wharton and her friend Walter Berry “went to a cinema at Bilbao, where they saw a travelogue entitled How to Visit a City at a Gallop, in which xi


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panting travelers marched across the screen. . . . this was the first ‘movie’ she ever saw. (It was not her last.)” (296). My study of Wharton’s fiction convinces me that Benstock was correct—Wharton’s 1914 movie experience was only her first. She probably did not like movies, and she most certainly disliked what they represented, but her fiction reveals that she knew a great deal about how movies worked, and about the dazzling ascent of popular Hollywood culture during the final three decades of her life. As I began studying Wharton and film, I realized that my most daunting challenge would be organizing the material. I studied several models, especially those that, like my own work, demanded integration of historical, biographical, literary, and cinematic materials. Of special interest to me were books about one author who had been translated to film, among them two fine collections of essays: Henry James Goes to the Movies (Griffin), and Jane Austen in Hollywood (Troost and Greenfield). I tried to organize the material in the context of theoretical concepts, and I tried to pair discussions of Wharton’s texts with the corresponding movies, but none of my early approaches seemed appropriate or effective. After much trial and error, I realized that I needed to tell a story—Wharton’s story. Edith Wharton on Film represents a loosely chronological narrative in which Wharton’s writings constitute the matrix of a story about Wharton and film, from her earliest cinema references through the 2000 adaptation of The House of Mirth. In part one, “Reading Wharton on Film,” I explore the ways that Wharton wove cinema references into the fabric of her short stories (chapter 1) and into her movie-age novels (chapter 2). Although Wharton was often writing short fiction and novels at the same time, I have chosen to discuss the genres separately for two reasons. First, Wharton’s earliest references to the cinema appeared in short stories she published during World War I, and her references to film in these works provide us with a standard by which to gauge her gradual understanding of how the medium worked. These earliest allusions to film suggest that Wharton came to recognize the narrative strategies and visual metaphors provided by a motion picture camera. Considering her short fiction in isolation allows us to chart her gradual awareness of the power of narrative film and, as I discovered, also suggests that soon after Wharton learned to read movies, she decided that she had seen enough, and she stopped watching them. I also separated the two genres because I realized that Wharton, who probably always understood that writing short stories and novels were


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Preface xiii

very different exercises, began to write the two for distinctly different audiences during the 1920s and 1930s, for reasons that had everything to do with movies and other popular mass culture. For example, during the lean 1930s, when she was anxious about money, Wharton struggled to write short stories that conformed to the standards of popular American magazines that she did not like but which paid enormous sums. Among the strategies she tried as she struggled to write stories for a mass audience was a superficial lip service to Hollywood. However, in one of her final cinema stories, her parodies of famous movie stars barely concealed her anxieties, when she created a character through whom she subtly warned that compromising oneself to the new standards of popular American culture made one complicit in a crime against traditional American culture. In chapter 2, I discuss Wharton’s cinema-age novels in the context of her frustrating experiences with short stories in popular magazines. Wharton crafted her novels carefully and for a loyal readership that went back decades, and in these movie-age works she articulated most clearly her resentments toward popular mass culture through her Hollywood caricatures and blatantly racial stereotypes. Frustrated and embittered by her experiences with popular American magazines and mass culture, Wharton located the source of American cultural decline and decay within the Hollywood film industry, first in Twilight Sleep and finally in one of her darkest and most disturbing novels, The Children. In part two of this study, “Watching Wharton on Film,” I explore the seven extant feature films adapted from Wharton’s fiction. Chapter 3, where I discuss the early (lost) silent adaptations and the three Wharton films of the 1930s, concludes—and roughly coincides—with Wharton’s decline in reputation and her death in 1937. In chapter 4, I explore the four Wharton films of the 1990s, and I begin a discussion that continues into the concluding chapter: why, after a fifty-year gap, Wharton’s works were revived through the lens of a movie camera in the 1990s. In my conclusion, “Another Country,” I look back through all seven of the extant Wharton adaptations to examine how cinematic translations of her work not only shed light on her anxieties about cinema during her lifetime but also confirm that her fiction indeed defies the formulaic conformity that she recognized and mistrusted so deeply. Wharton’s story on film becomes a new beginning in another country for her fiction, which anticipates and embodies one of the most independent and rebellious of all American genres: American noir.


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Wharton scholars have written little about film, and film scholars have written little about Wharton. When I began this project, I assumed that I would have a difficult time integrating the two. I was wrong. I am especially humbled by the remarkable scholarly work on Wharton and have learned much from the books and articles I have read, especially works by Dale Bauer, Helen Killoran, Elizabeth Ammons, Shari Benstock, and most especially, Scott Marshall. I am equally indebted to the film scholars whose works have encouraged my own: David Bordwell, Richard Sklar, David Cook, Brigitte Peucker, and Miriam Hansen, among many others. I have learned a great deal about Hollywood and adaptation from the works of J. Hoberman, Kamilla Elliott, Steve Neale, and Timothy Corrigan. Because of all of the work by these scholars, I can now write Edith Wharton’s name into sentences with those of Mary Pickford, Irving Thalberg, the Little Rascals, Erich von Stroheim, Rudolf Valentino, and Quentin Tarantino. Southern Illinois University Press has been patient and encouraging about my project, and I am especially fortunate for the thoughtful advice from Karl Kageff and Kristine Priddy. I am grateful to Eastern Illinois University for a sabbatical leave and to the great staff at Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University. For help with illustrations, I thank the Photofest staff in New York City and the Lilly Library, Indiana University. I also thank the following individuals, who have all helped me in their own ways: Mary Jane Boswell and Perri Holod; my tall Boswells: Tom, M. J., Beth, Adam, and Brad; Ginny DiBianco; Jean Toothman; J. J. Gittes; Marjorie Hanft; Scott Hutson; Bruce Nesbitt; and Ryan Reber. I am especially grateful to two fine film scholars who are, to my great fortune, also my friends: Christopher Weedman, who took time from his own work to help me find and document many of the films here, and Robert Carringer, who listened while I talked through this project more than once. Finally, I thank Kennedy K. Hutson and Boswell A. Hutson, who now know more about Edith Wharton than they ever needed to know. Their patience, good humor, and generosity enrich me on a daily basis.


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Edith Wharton onFilm


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. . . I fear I must put my veto on the cinema plan. —Edith Wharton to Rutger B. Jewett (1928)

Introduction: A Glittering Place

I n 1928, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was invited to participate in

a short documentary celebrating the accomplishments of several illustrious American women called Woman Marches On, to be produced by the Will Hayes Motion Picture Association. Through a letter to her American publisher, she declined the invitation, explaining that she thought it would tire her too much. Then she added, “I must confess that I should not be greatly flattered at being associated with some of the ladies named in the list who are to figure in this same series” (Lewis and Lewis 515–16). This note might be of passing interest to a Wharton scholar. To a film scholar interested in Wharton, the note is especially interesting. The “ladies named in the list” were a rather distinguished lot, including Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sculptor and patron of the arts; Florence Sabin, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University; and Kathleen Norris, writer of popular novels. From what we know of her biography and her published correspondence, Wharton most likely knew who these women were and probably would not object to being grouped with them. But the last name on the list would have given her more than enough reason to decline: Mary Pickford, reigning queen of Hollywood, California, and international movie star. Only if she had lived on the moon would Edith Wharton not know something about Mary Pickford in 1928. As it was, Wharton lived in France, where Pickford’s movies were shown regularly. Wharton probably knew more than she wanted to know about America’s Sweetheart, because

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Pickford was one of the most famous celebrities in the world at the time, and not just because of her movies. She ghostwrote a syndicated weekly newspaper column, her face was plastered on countless consumer goods, and her name showed up regularly in newspaper and magazine articles in both the United States and Europe.1 With her fellow United Artists—Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith—Pickford had helped transform the novelty of moving pictures into the filmmaking industry in the years following World War I.2 By 1928, the Hollywood dream machine represented the most lucrative corporate entity in the United States and was well on its way to being America’s most valuable export to Europe and beyond. American movies and movie stars commanded respect and attention from Wall Street to Main Street and around the globe, thanks to the popularity of stars like Pickford. As Samantha Barbas points out in her study of Hollywood celebrity, Movie Crazy, by the early 1930s, “Time magazine began featuring film actors on its covers, and even the New York Times regularly reported on Hollywood” (57). Movies were now legitimate by so many standards that “film stars had become national if not international celebrities” (57). Wharton, however, would not have been convinced that sharing the screen with a celebrated film actor would have been such a great honor in 1928, and she continued to regard the cinema with trepidation for the rest of her life. Nine years after she declined the invitation to be part of Woman Marches On, Wharton explained why she disliked movies. The cinema was one of “the two world-wide enemies of the imagination,” she wrote in the 1937 preface to Ghosts (the other was radio). “To a generation for whom everything . . . used to nourish the imagination,” she lamented, “the creative faculty . . . is rapidly withering” (8–9). Wharton sensed a sea change in the sensibilities of her reading public that she associated with the popularity of movies, and that saddened and alarmed her. Writing about the movies made Wharton cranky and forlorn: “All this is very depressing to the ghost-story purveyor and his publisher” (9). For Wharton, storytelling and reading were essential creative activities. Movies suggested passivity, atrophy, and manipulation.3 Also in the preface to Ghosts, Wharton tells an old joke: “Do you believe in ghosts?” “No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them” (7). To understand Wharton’s relationship to Hollywood, we can recast this joke: “Do you believe in movies?” “No, I don’t believe in movies, but I’m afraid of them.” Hollywood and the likes of Mary Pickford alarmed her, even as she was drawn to them. For just as stories about movie stars


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had begun insinuating themselves into mainstream American newspapers, Pickford and Hollywood had begun to haunt the pages of Wharton’s fiction, appearing most clearly for the first time in Summer in 1917. In Summer, we are introduced to Charity Royall and the season of her blossoming with this one-sentence paragraph: “A girl came out of lawyer Royall’s house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep” (91). Many scholars have noted Wharton’s precision in this sentence, among them Linda Morante, who points out that North Dormer “is the enclosed, restrictive place its name suggests” (241). “Summer recounts the aborted attempt of a young girl to set forth from the ‘country’ and journey to the ‘city’ of cultural plenty” (241). Charity’s longing to leave the “sunburnt village” in western Massachusetts for a larger metropolis comes true—at least for one day—when she travels to a larger town with her suitor Lucius Harney to celebrate Independence Day.4 Wharton’s depiction of the lovers’ Independence Day in Nettleton is one of the most evocative passages she ever wrote. She describes the center of town as Charity and Harney stand on the square: . . . as Harney and Charity turned into the main street, with its brick and granite business blocks crowding out the old low-storied shops, and its towering poles strung with innumerable wires that seemed to tremble and buzz in the heat, they saw the double line of flags and lanterns. . . . The noise and colour of this holiday vision seemed to transform Nettleton into a metropolis. (144)

Charity has never seen such spectacle, and she revels in the sumptuous delights before her eyes. Besides the variety of food—“strawberry-cake, cocoanut drops, trays of glistening molasses candy . . . dangling branches of bananas”—there are the shop windows where “through wide expanses of plate-glass,” there are “hints of hidden riches” (145). And indeed, the merchandise behind the glass only “hints” at being rich, because Wharton describes a series of cheap trinkets in ornamental metaphor: . . . waves of silk and ribbon broke over shores of imitation moss from which ravishing hats rose like tropical orchids . . . the pink throats of gramophones opened their giant convolutions in a soundless chorus . . . bicycles shining in neat ranks seemed to await the signal of an invisible starter . . . tiers of fancy-goods in leatherette and paste and celluloid dangled their insidious graces. (145)

One of the displays almost comes to life as a burlesque show: “in one vast bay that seemed to project them into exciting contact with the public, wax


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Introduction

ladies in daring dresses chatted elegantly or, with gestures intimate yet blameless, pointed to their pink corsets and transparent hosiery” (145). In a jewelry shop, Charity eyes a gaudy brooch, but Harney buys her a more discreet pin with a “small round stone, blue as a mountain lake, with little sparks of light all round it”(145). They dine at an outdoor café that calls “itself a French restaurant” where they drink champagne. Harney speaks French to the waitress, and Charity does “not think the wine as good as sarsaparilla” (146). Rhonda Skillern has pointed out that the difference between the aesthetic choices that Charity and Harney make during their day in Nettleton foregrounds their “class differences” (123). Charity has the tastes of a working girl, and Harney, the architect with ties to Springfield, Boston, and New York, has obvious “disdain for the ‘descending mob’ of rural and town folk attending the celebration” (123). Nowhere is their class difference more clearly defined than when Harney allows Charity to choose how they should bide their time until the fireworks begin. Charity chooses a working girl’s delight: to go to the “pictures.” Harney hesitates for a moment at her suggestion—we know enough about him to guess that he would not have chosen to sit in a hot crowded movie theater—but in they go.5 Charity might have been overwhelmed by what she saw in the shop windows, but she is almost undone by what she experiences in the movie theater. Harney takes her into the lobby, “a glittering place” where “everything . . . seemed to glitter” and Charity sees a movie poster of “yellow-haired beauties stabbing villains in evening dress.” Charity and Harney sit in “a velvet-curtained auditorium packed with spectators to the last limit of compression,” and the movie begins. For Charity, the spectacle on the screen and the hot spectators in the audience melt into one huge panorama: . . . everything was merged in her brain in swimming circles of heat and blinding alternations of light and darkness. All the world has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of palms and minarets, charging cavalry regiments, roaring lions, comic policemen and scowling murderers; and the crowd around her, the hundreds of hot sallow candy-munching faces, young, old, middle-aged, but all kindled with the same contagious excitement, became part of the spectacle, and danced on the screen with the rest. (147)

Charity and Harney share their first kiss shortly after their cinema experience, during another spectacle, the fireworks, and so their affair begins in earnest. Charity’s disorienting experience in the movie palace,


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where her “excitement” is “kindled,” anticipates the beginning of her sexual relationship with Harney. The image of an audience “dancing on the screen” suggests much more to us, however. When Charity imagines a “contagious excitement” that transforms an audience into “part of the spectacle,” she projects her own drama for us. In two important scenes in Summer, Wharton suggests the glittering façade and the crowded audience, to spotlight Charity’s private world. In the first of these scenes, Charity and Harney have just watched the last of the spectacular fireworks, and they have just kissed for the first time. As they disembark from the crowded boat that is carrying them back from the celebration, Charity, like the audience she imagined in the cinema, transforms from spectator to spectacle. Wharton describes the scene as if it were a performance. The lights come up: “The electric light at the end of the wharf flashed full on the descending passengers,” and the figure of legendary prostitute Julia Hawes appears. After Julia delivers her first lines to the laughter of the audience, “A snigger ran through the group,” a drunken Mr. Royall appears from behind Julia, and delivers his lines “with the tremulous majesty of drunkenness” (152–53). “You whore—you damn—bare-headed whore, you!” he cries, and the audience responds with “a scream of tipsy laughter” (153). Charity knows that she is now onstage. She sees “a vision of herself, hatless, disheveled, with a man’s arm about her” (153). She tries to stop the scene, but the audience only grows, and its interest intensifies: “Laughs and jeers were beginning to spring up from the circle of people beyond their group” (153). The drama ends only when a voice offstage announces that the boat is leaving, and the players disappear into the night. “The pressure of approaching and departing passengers forced the actors in the rapid scene apart” (153). Charity feels humiliated by the scene on the gangway, which she remembers the next day as a “disgraceful spectacle” that allowed people to gloat “over all the details of her humiliation” (155). She packs and leaves for the mountain but is stopped by Harney, who, after listening to her story, takes Charity into his arms: “Kiss me again—like last night” (160). The two become lovers. As the summer progresses and her attachment to Harney becomes more intense and then more tenuous, Charity’s memories of her day of independence and delight in Nettleton become a bittersweet touchstone by which she comforts herself. “Vague thoughts of Nettleton” come to her while she ponders her future as an unwed mother on the night that she tries to sleep among her mother’s poor relations on the mountain (198). After she has married Mr. Royall, she finds herself “alone in a bed-


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Introduction

room of the fashionable hotel where she and Harney had vainly sought a table on the Fourth of July” (205). And, just before she and Mr. Royall leave Nettleton to start their married life in North Dormer, she once again notices the shop displays “that had fired her imagination on the day when she and Harney had looked in at them together” (209). The most dramatic—and significant—of her Nettleton memories are those of the cinema, which Wharton references for the second time during the Old Home Week celebration scene. Charity sits onstage with other “fluttering girls” of the chorus, inside the Town Hall, which is “crowded and exceedingly hot” (168). As the speakers begin to orate in front of her, she becomes disoriented in a way that suggests her earlier reaction to the movie experience in Nettleton: “it was all a bewildering blur of eyes and colours” (168). She faints, but not before she associates her discomfort directly with her reaction to the moving pictures: “The heat had grown suffocating—she felt it descend on her in smothering waves, and the face in the crowded hall began to dance like the pictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton” (172). Charity’s fainting performance during the Old Home Week celebration transforms her once again from audience to performer. She has become “part of the spectacle” while the crowd dances around her. Wharton’s narrator reinforces the similarities of the gangway and Old Home Week scenes by describing Charity’s feelings in both with many of the same adjectives: “disoriented,” “humiliated,” “shaken.” Through these similar scenes, we understand that to move from passive spectator to active spectacle does not bode well for Charity—indeed, her description of the cinema as “chaos” is especially portentous. Wharton uses Charity’s cinema experience to herald the chaos in her life and to anticipate specifically the raptures (a word her narrator uses more than once during the lovers’ day in Nettleton) of love and the humiliations of unmarried pregnancy. What Wharton reinforces through similar adjectives is not Charity’s reaction to a movie on a screen but her reaction to being caught up in a spectacle where she is no longer in control. That Wharton associates Charity’s movie-going experience with humiliation and queasiness and that she privileges Charity’s disorientation, not the movie itself, becomes one of our first gauges to Wharton on film. To help us understand the relationship between Charity and spectacle, Wharton provides a remarkable contrasting scene in which Charity is also watching a moving picture, but this one she watches alone. As she watches, Wharton’s narrator describes the scene.


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In a scene before Charity and Harney have spent the day in Nettleton or become lovers, Charity suspects that Mr. Royall has interfered with her friendship with Harney, who has stopped taking his evening meals at the Royall house. When Mr. Royall confirms that Harney is no longer to be a regular dinner guest, Charity guesses that Mr. Royall “had suddenly begun to hate Lucius Harney, and guessed herself to be the cause of this change of feeling” (130). Angry and frustrated, Charity leaves the house at twilight and walks down the road to where she knows Harney will be, at Miss Hatchard’s house. When she sees a light in a window, she creeps closer and hides herself among the flowers on a trellis so that she can see in, unnoticed. She realizes that she is looking into Harney’s bedroom. Charity sees “two smooth sunburnt hands, one holding a pencil and the other a ruler,” and she knows that she watching Harney at his drawing board. “Her heart jumped and then stood still. He was there, a few feet away” (132). Charity, “tossing on seas of woe,” turns to leave but stops when she sees Harney throw his pencil aside. She continues to look into the room while he is staring into space, and the narrator tells us in especially evocative language that Charity is checking out Harney’s body: “He had taken off his coat and waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt; she saw the vigorous lines of his young throat, and the root of the muscles where they joined the chest” (132). Charity notices more: Harney is packing a suitcase. She decides that he “was preparing to leave, and that he had probably decided to go without seeing her . . . his change of plan was due to some surreptitious interference of Mr. Royall’s” (132). Charity watches silently as Harney moves about, until finally, “with the same expression of self-disgust, as if he hated himself and everything about him,” he kicks his suitcase out of the way and lies down on the bed, staring into the ceiling (133). Charity recognizes all too well the pain in his expression, and she is moved to tears: “grief at his grief gathered in her throat, and rose to her eyes and ran over” (133). Charity tries to decide whether to reveal herself to Harney. She imagines what will happen if she shows herself: “she was aware of the welcome his eyes and lips would give her” (133). But she stays immobile and decides what to do, and why: It was not the fear of any sanction, human or heavenly; she had never in life been afraid. It was simply that she had suddenly understood what would happen if she went in. It was the thing that did happen between young men and girls, and that North Dormer ignored in public and snickered over on the sly. . . . But these were not reasons that held her back. . . . Sometimes, when her youth flushed up


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Introduction

in her, she had imagined yielding like other girls . . . but she could not so cheapen herself to Harney. . . . If he wanted her he must seek her. (133–34)

After she makes her decision not to reveal herself, Charity continues to watch until she sees that Harney has fallen asleep, and then she walks home in the dark and goes to bed. In “Charity at the Window: Narrative Technique in Edith Wharton’s Summer,” Jean Frantz Blackall points out that Wharton “projects Charity’s state of mind as on a screen, defining the limits, the objects, and the range of her vision” (280). Charity “turns to mirrors for insight, or to the figurative mirrors of other characters’ faces . . . sometimes she looks at pictures on the wall, at moving pictures, into shop windows” (279–80). This Harney-in-his-bedroom scene serves as a good example of Charity’s ability to read in “other characters’ faces or to the reflections of her that their words evoke” (280). The narrator frames Charity’s best features for us in this scene: her genuine sympathy for other girls—particularly girls like Julia Hawes, who did not wait for men to come to them—her fortitude, and her clear self-knowledge (she does not delude herself about what would happen were she to go to Harney, for example). This scene represents much more than a good example of Wharton’s narrative technique, however. Among all of the scenes where Charity reflects on herself, this scene also represents the first time she watches a “moving picture,” a silent movie for which she provides the captions herself while she watches from the darkness. She has come in late, after the feature has already begun, but she can fill in the beginning. During the show, she is silently moved to tears. When the show concludes, she leaves with a new understanding of her own story. If Wharton projects Charity on a screen in Summer, then she screens a movie-within-a-movie for us here, where we watch as Charity acknowledges her love for Harney and where we begin to understand the depths of Charity’s character and the limitations of her world. This scene represents our best gauge to Charity’s dignity, where we see that Charity “is not the pale, clinging wraith of melodrama but rather the strongest moral force in the novel . . . a woman of integrity and insight” (Walker 317) If we consider the three performances that Charity watches in the course of the novel—Harney through the window, the movie in the cinema, the Old Home Week celebration—we discover that, although we learn a great deal about Charity’s story in all three performance scenes, only the first of these provides Charity herself with deep insight into her


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situation. Wharton suggests that only when Charity watches a moving picture by herself does she actually find value in the performance. Alone, she can control and evaluate what she sees and feels. When she watches as one of many spectators, she has no independence and no integrity—she is pinned into a crowd where she becomes just part of the blur. The experience of being part of a mass of spectators suffocates any semblance of value for her. In Summer, the glittering cinema represents just another gaudy storefront, a mass-produced, cheap novelty like the glittery jewelry, the fancy lingerie, and the delectable candies in the store windows that Charity craves from outside the glass.6 The movies themselves are trifling consumables and, in themselves, are inconsequential and fleeting. More significant to Wharton, however, is the uncomfortable sensation of being part of an audience: “the hundreds of hot sallow candy-munching faces . . . all kindled with the same contagious excitement.” Sitting passively in a movie theater requires a kind of conformity and regulation that Charity cannot tolerate—literally, sitting among a crowd in a theater makes her sick. When she remembers her movie experience, or when Wharton suggests it to us, we are reminded of the discomfort of the circumstances, not of the cinema itself. “All the world has to show” in the cinema—or among the people watching the fireworks, or any other spectacle—becomes an indecipherable blur. Genuine feelings, whether they be love, fear, or anger, happen only away from the façade and away from the crowds of consumers. Only when Charity chooses her own moving picture, of Harney in his bedroom, does she distinguish herself as a thoughtful, discriminating consumer, one who controls her own feelings and determines what to reject and what (or whom) to embrace. Charity’s genuine life, the one that unfolds before us with rapture, fear, love, and loneliness, transcends the glitter of any cinema spectacle. Sitting in a dark movie theater, even with the one she loves crowded next to her, will never substitute for being outside the theater alone with the one she loves. Charity herself, a blur among “sallow candy-munching faces” at the movies, distinguishes herself from the generic faces in the crowd and resists the rigid conformity demanded by a crowded spectacle only when she watches and discriminates privately. Wharton had referenced other forms of entertainment in her works prior to Summer, and she would continue to use public spectacle in her work. Lily Bart attends the opera with Gus Trenor and Simon Rosedale in The House of Mirth; George Darrow and Sophy Viner go to the theater in


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Introduction

Paris in The Reef; Undine Spragg uses her New York opera box as a social ladder in The Custom of the Country; the Archers and Wellands preen and gaze at Old New York from their opera boxes in The Age of Innocence. Wharton was familiar with opera and theater, of course. Having been raised among people who attended operas, plays, and other like entertainments, Wharton knew firsthand how it felt to be in an audience of a drama or an opera. Scholars have noted that when Wharton’s characters are spectators, she privileges them over whatever specific performances they are watching (although the performances are certainly significant to scholars of her works), and they, like Charity, become the actors in the spotlight.7 The point that Maureen Montgomery makes about opera in her study Displaying Women could apply to Charity at the movies as well: Wharton “uses the topos of the opera as a site for pleasure, spectacle, and the performance of class . . . the gaze directed at the stage is diverted to the women of the audience in boxes” (130–31). Although her use of the cinema experience in Summer is consistent with her use of other spectacles in these earlier works, Wharton also recognized differences, which she highlights in Charity’s experience. Unlike opera or theater performances, where Wharton’s characters sit in boxes that allow them to watch the spectacle on the stage and the spectacle of each other, Charity sits in a dark, crowded theater among a forward-facing audience with little freedom to gaze elsewhere. Charity’s private disorientation in a public place represents a facet of cinema that has fascinated film scholars. The “formal organization of spectatorship” in a movie theater, writes Miriam Hansen in “Early Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?” distinguished it from live theater (233). Movie theaters isolate viewers in the dark and guarantee “the complete absorption of the spectator, into the fictional world of the film . . . the space of the spectator became increasingly de-realized, reduced to specularity, privatized” (233). Charity’s movie experience, during which she is manipulated and held by the spectacle, has more in common with her window-shopping experience in Nettleton, where she gazes steadily into shop windows, almost in a trance, than it does with a live theater experience, during which she might have watched the people around her. For Charity, watching a movie is not much different from being enthralled by “hints of hidden riches” where “waves of silk and ribbon broke over shores of imitation moss” (Summer 145). Scholars have also written about the parallel between the cinema and window-shopping. The “shop window was displaced by the cinema screen,” writes film historian Anne Friedberg in “Cinema and


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the Postmodern Condition” (65). While sitting in a movie theater, the “spectator-shopper—trying on identities—engages in the pleasures of a temporally and spatially fluid subjectivity” (65) 8 The movies themselves are products, designed to attract consumers sitting in a darkened theater. “The cinema emerged as the perfect consumer product,” writes John Belton in American Cinema/American Culture (7). The cinema “not only gave audiences an experience to consume, but also functioned as a display window for other mass-produced goods” (7). When Wharton was criticized for writing outside her milieu in Summer, she took great pains to defend the accuracy of her work in “three articles and her autobiography,” where she “insisted on her firsthand knowledge of the region and the “accuracy of ‘atmosphere’ in her works” (White xx). Although she never mentioned specific traits that she had given to Charity, she could have pointed to Charity’s cinema experience as an accurate portrait of the tastes and longing of a young rural woman of the time. Charity represents Wharton’s first modern consumer of the cinematic product, one who is both confined and enflamed by the movies. Wharton limned a poor young woman of 1916 rural Massachusetts in authentic ways, especially in her yearning to be a consumer of the luxury goods she sees around her, including the movies. Her memoir A Backward Glance (1934) includes one of Wharton’s most quoted passages, where she explains what she had wanted to do with her two rural Massachusetts tales: “For years I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England . . . utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett” (293). Wharton was well aware of the landscape of poverty, desolation, and violence that characterized the poorest classes of the area. She had spent summers in the Berkshires when she was a child and had bought a home there in 1899, where she spent at least every summer until 1908. Sometimes spending half of each year in Lenox, she interacted regularly with the townspeople, whose own stories she found fascinating. R. W. B. Lewis recounts that Wharton told the visiting Henry James about “reports that had reached her about the dark unsuspected life—the sexual violence, even the incest—that went on behind the bleak walls of the farmhouses” (140). In Wharton’s New England, Barbara A. White explains that Wharton “participated in village activities, such as rearranging the Lenox Library and serving on the Village Improvement and the Flower Show committees” (x).


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Introduction

A memory of one of her neighbors, D. B. Updike, suggests how Wharton began to imagine Charity and her solitary days in the town library. One day, as Wharton and Updike drove past “a battered two-story house, unpainted,” Wharton told him, “‘It is about a place like that . . . that I mean to write a story. Only last week I went to the village meeting-house in Lenox and sat there for an hour alone, trying to think what such lives would be’” (x). Creating Charity Royall required Wharton to envision the everyday, private lives of the young women who lived in such towns, where “insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation” were “hidden away behind the paintless wooden house-fronts” (Glance 294). And those everyday lives, characterized by longings for what they saw in store windows and movie theaters, Wharton brought to life in Charity Royall. Charity yearns for fine things and handsome clothes, and although she has little income, she is an active consumer. Monika M. Elbert points out in “The Politics of Maternality in Summer” that “Royall has spoiled Charity . . . due to her many empty hours of leisure” (306). Citing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1898 Women and Economics, Elbert explains that “because [Charity] lacks education, she spends most of her time wanting to escape . . . or sewing and embroidering lacy frivolous items for herself. Charity becomes what Gilman would call a ‘priestess of the temple of consumption,’ a victim of male market created for women” (307). Gilman, notes Elbert, “warns that this relationship between men and women ‘sexualizes our industrial relation and commercializes our sex-relation’” (307). Wharton characterizes Charity as one of Gilman’s potential consumers from the very first: she stands on the doorstep of Mr. Royall’s house on an afternoon in June, watching as a young man in “city clothes” fishes his hat out of a puddle. She goes back in and looks “critically at her reflection and she wishes “for the thousandth time that she had blue eyes like Annabel Balch,” or at least a new hat (91). Charity is a bored but sharp-eyed young woman who worries about how she looks, who feels dissatisfied with her life—her first words in the novella are “How I hate everything!”—who wants nice clothes and something to do beyond the “household drudgery” that employs the other women of North Dormer. After her first encounter with Harney at the library, Charity thinks about him as she gets ready for bed. She feels dejected when she compares her “ignorance of life and literature” with “the vision of vague metropolises, shining super-Nettletons, where girls in better clothes . . . talked fluently of architecture to young men” (105). Then she remembers that


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Harney had found her attractive, and she gazes at herself in her mirror. In a passage that is both heartbreaking and wickedly funny, Wharton lets Charity imagine her wedding to Harney. She lowers her nightdress until it rests on her shoulders, and sees “herself a bride in low-necked satin, walking down an aisle with Lucius Harney. He would kiss her as they left the church” (106). Charity kisses her imaginary groom and puts her hands to her face “as if to imprison the kiss” (106). Charity projects her longings into a mirror (and, of course, suggests her own nuptials at the conclusion of her story), and Wharton projects the longings and habits of any number of girls in 1916 America through Charity. During the early decades of the twentieth century, American women of all classes were changing: they were taking jobs outside their homes and buying things with their wages. “American women began to invent new models of womanhood, forsaking Victorian gender conventions,” explains Ruth M. Alexander in her study of female delinquency, The “Girl Problem” (2). Young women “moved beyond the confines of their homes and assumed an increasingly conspicuous role in public life as consumers, wage earners . . . entertainers, and cinematic ‘sex symbols’” (2). Coming from urban and rural areas, “affluent and impoverished, black and white, immigrant and native-born . . . the ‘new women’ challenged masculine dominance” (2) Charity identifies herself as an independent “new woman” most especially by her freedom to spend her money on herself. One of her most interesting purchases is a bicycle: “With part of what was left of her savings she had hired a bicycle for a month, and every day after dinner . . . she hurried to the library, got out her bicycle, and flew down the Creston road” (165). In American Women in the Progressive Era, historians Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider describe the significance of the bicycle to young women at this time. They could be describing Charity Royall herself. “The popularity of the bicycle,” they write, “liberated [a young woman] from her corset, shortened her skirts or clad her in bloomers, and made her mobile, free to roam through the countryside” (16). As young women began to assume more independent public lives during these decades, they were still constrained in ways that Wharton suggests in Summer. “A persistent double standard, limited access to birth control, a discriminatory job market, homogenizing forces in mass culture” all worked against young women (Alexander 3). However, young American women were contributing to a more “liberal social and sexual order” that was reflected in an emerging popular culture, one that


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Introduction

“admired them for their ambition, spunk, and sexual attractiveness” (3). Among working women of all social classes, definitions of chastity were shifting in pronounced ways. Perhaps Wharton had made good use of the turn-of-the-century label attached to young women who “thought premarital sex acceptable when the man was a ‘steady’” (Schneider and Schneider 145). “Charity girls,” like Charity Royall, earned “a fraction of men’s wages” and “prided themselves on never taking money in exchange for their favors” (145). Premarital sex might be acceptable to a point, but it was also risky. For the unfortunate young single woman who became pregnant, life could be difficult, as Charity’s and Julia Hawes’s stories suggest in Summer. Americans of all social strata “scorned and avoided the woman who had a baby out of wedlock” (145). Charity Royall was not Wharton’s first heroine who defined herself within a consumer-driven construct where women who took risks or did not conform to dominant stereotypes were punished (Lily Bart gets this prize). However, Charity corresponds to the “new woman” profile of the pre–World War I era in unmistakable ways. Charity is a poor girl who aspires to middle-class luxuries. Not only does she crave the lovely products she sees in windows, ride a bicycle, and have premarital sex, but she is also Wharton’s first major character to sit in a movie theater. When Charity overloads with sensuous impressions in the movie palace, she engages in a leisure activity that her very real counterparts were both embracing and influencing. “By World War I,” writes Sharon Ullman in Sex Seen, the “movies . . . had made clear that women were deeply interested in expressions of erotic desire. . . . As the first films . . . enthralled a national audience, they presented images of women that rang true with many in the audience,” who “welcomed the films as affirmation and agreeable entertainment” (42). In her subsequent short fiction and novels, Wharton’s characters reveal that Wharton knew more than a little about these appealing images onscreen. Her details are accurate—she sometimes provides dead-on parodies—and they suggest that she knew not just how film worked visually but about film genre, the Hollywood star system, and the narrative appeal of the movies. Some of her characters wanted to look like movie stars, others wanted to be movie stars, and still others were movie stars. Wharton’s movie people were really not new to Wharton—as we will discover, they were heirs to earlier types whom she had already portrayed. Charity Royall, for example, reflects America’s “new woman” in many detailed ways, but the story Wharton tells about Charity is an old one.


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What makes Charity’s girl-in-trouble story so compelling is not the plot but Wharton’s storytelling itself. Giving Charity the characteristics of an American New Woman allows Wharton to suggest that there was little that was “new” about the “new woman.” Charity’s cinema experience has very little to do with the movies but everything to do with her transformation from leisure spectator/consumer to helpless spectacle/consumable. As such, Charity represents the first of Wharton’s young women who yearn for the glitter they see through windows or on screens. Wharton’s later characters would also be affected not by specific movies but by the experience of being movie consumers. When Wharton referenced motion pictures or movie people in her short fiction and novels of the 1920s and 1930s, the cinema she projected suggests that she had only mild interest in the movies themselves but was fascinated by the ways in which movie culture affected her characters. As we begin to consider some of the fiction she published in popular magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, and as we explore her cinema-age novels, we will begin to understand why Wharton didn’t believe in movies, but she was afraid of them. We will start by looking at how Wharton used movies in her fiction, which will help us understand why she had such mixed feelings about cinema. Her film-age characters—women, men, and children—will help us explore Wharton’s complicated relationship to the art of the motion picture. To begin, we must go back once again to Wharton’s first new woman, Charity Royall. As Charity tries to keep her composure in the glittering theater in Nettleton, she will introduce us to someone Edith Wharton never met: America’s most celebrated new woman, Mary Pickford.


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Part One G : 6 9 > C < L = 6 G I D C D C ; > AB

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Hollywood’s very far from New York—no? —Edith Wharton, Charm Incorporated (1934)

1 Charm Incorporated: The Short Fiction

E

dith Wharton wrote Summer in 1916, from her townhouse at 53 Rue de Varenne in wartime Paris. In a letter to her friend Gaillard Lapsley, she explained that she had set the tale in rural Massachusetts and had used details from one of their outings to Pittsfield together: I have written a book in the last six months—a shortish novel, which is coming out shortly in Maclure’s [sic]. It is known to its author & her familiars as the Hot Ethan, the scene being laid in the neighbourhood of Windsor Mountain, & the time being summer which is also the title of the book. There’s a Fourth of July at Pittsfield that few people but you & I are capable of appreciating! (Lewis and Lewis 385)

Charity’s Fourth of July outing with Harney represents one of Wharton’s most elaborately detailed sequences in any of her works and one of her most authentic portraits of pre–World War I America. Wharton never documented whether she and Lapsley actually went into a movie theater during their Fourth of July adventure, but she was no doubt familiar with the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield. In the prologue to Growing Up Fast, her 2003 study on teen mothers in 1990s Pittsfield, Joanna Lipper describes Pittsfield’s Colonial Theater: Pittsfield evolved throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one of several major pockets of industry. Imposing and strikingly urban, Pittsfield . . . was always a bit of an anomaly. . . . Framed by the majestic Berkshire Mountains, poverty in Pittsfield wore a prettier face than inner-city poverty but neverthe

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Reading Wharton on Film

less was immediately visible. . . . On North Street the once-spectacular Colonial Theatre remained the focus of a slow … restoration effort. After its construction in 1903, the theater was renowned throughout the country for its ornate interior and exceptional acoustics. (9, 20–21)1

Wharton knew Pittsfield well and perhaps learned about the movies there. Whether or not she had seen movies at the Colonial Theatre, by the time she wrote Summer, she knew how movies were advertised, how they were distinguished by genre, and much more. Among the movie posters Charity notices in the theater lobby is one of “yellow-haired beauties stabbing villains in evening dress,” which suggests not only a melodramatic version of her older-than-the-hills story but also any number of movie melodramas produced during the silent era. Wharton made other realistic correspondences to the most popular of silent movie formulas of the time: “palms and minarets” and “charging cavalry regiments” (action/adventure in the exotic Persian deserts), “roaring lions” (action/adventure in the exotic African jungle), and “comic policemen” (Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops).2 In a 1916 movie theater, Charity might well have been watching one of the pictures Mary Pickford made that year: The Foundling, Poor Little Peppina, The Eternal Grind, Hulda from Holland, or Less Than the Dust (Whitfield 421). Pickford’s biographer explains that by 1914, Pickford’s feature movies had established her as the fairest of Wharton’s “yellowhaired beauties.” Pickford’s onscreen presence appealed to people for many different reasons because she could be simultaneously innocent and sexually provocative: a picturesque urban guttersnipe, half savage, half angel, dressed in tatters, living from hand to mouth, untamable . . . Or . . . Gold Rush urchins decked out in flannel and feathers—all of them dead shots—or illegal immigrants and smalltown women encountering, then mastering, city life. . . . Pickford’s hair waved across her head, then streamed down her back in ringlets . . . [which] made her both childlike and erotic. (Whitfield 123, 128)

Film historians Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer also note that on-screen, Pickford projected a combination of “sexless childhood and buxom womanliness” (57). They describe Pickford’s movies in terms that reflect some of Wharton’s own interests in her fiction, especially incest and lechery. Wharton created attractive, sometimes boyish young women who become the focus of the inappropriate gaze of older men in Summer,

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The Reef, Twilight Sleep, and The Children, and Pickford “always had to play Little Mary, a girl on the verge of puberty. . . . Yet always hovering in the wings was a male admirer, frequently elderly . . . and the implication dangled that someday, beyond the final fade-out, perhaps . . .” [their ellipses] (57). Male viewers may have been turned on by Pickford’s suggestive persona, but women loved her for different reasons. Pickford’s movie characters were able to “embody—and negotiate—conflicting conceptions of womanhood” (Barbas 48). She embodied both the “chaste Victorian maiden” and the emancipated new woman in her films, where “she portrayed a young wife struggling for equality with her husband,” or, in 1916’s Eternal Grind, “a sewing machine operator fighting for the rights of working women,” or an independent modern woman who rebels “against her elders in order to pursue a career” (48). Pickford’s characters projected a new legitimacy that many different groups of working women recognized, from those who worked in factories to those who attended college, from immigrants to the middle class. Pickford appealed to many women because she “linked herself culturally to the independent working woman” (Peiss 162). Peiss quotes Pickford: “I think I admire most in the world the girls who earn their own living. . . . I am proud to be one of them” (162). During World War I, the movie industry, with Pickford in the lead, made deliberate efforts to appeal to a mass audience composed of working women from all classes. No longer the purview of urban immigrants and isolated rural girls like Charity Royall, the movies began to project middle-class values, environs, and habits and transformed “the cultural traditions of cheap theater and nickelodeons . . . into a new ethos of romantic companionship and mass consumption” (162). Middle-class women had buying power, and by 1920, Pickford and Hollywood were providing the wares. As early as 1914, consumers could find publicity photos of America’s Sweetheart in “movie magazines, . . . reproduced as postcards, and were slipped into cigarette and chocolate boxes” (Whitfield 132). Whitfield describes a 1914 photograph of Pickford that would have caught Charity Royall’s eye: she was “swathed, like a bride, in tulle or modestly turned out in cuffs and collar” (132). Among the products that Pickford began endorsing in 1916 were dresses from an emporium in New York run by “Mme. Kahn,” who placed the following ad in Variety: “The mere fact that Miss Mary Pickford, The Greatest Movie Idol in the World, has selected our establishment for her gowns should be proof positive that We

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Can Please You” (133). By the 1920s, Pickford was endorsing middle-class essentials in American magazines and newspapers: soaps, toothpaste, and Pompeian Beauty Products (132). In 1915, she was “hired by the McClure newspaper syndicate to write an advice column” that appealed to female consumers who wanted to improve the quality of their lives (Barbas 49). Ghostwritten by Frances Marion, a Hollywood screenwriter and Pickford’s close friend, the column “dispensed beauty tips, workplace advice, and Pickford’s secrets for happiness and success” (49). The relationship forged among movies, advertising, and magazines contributed to the economic boom in the United States during the 1920s in significant ways, a phenomenon that was certainly not lost on Wharton, who had been publishing her short fiction in American periodicals since before the turn of the century. However, the magazines that enjoyed the largest circulations in the 1920s were not the same ones with whom Wharton had done business before—the elite Scribner’s Magazine had been her mainstay for decades—but were mainstream women’s magazines. Scholar Maureen Honey describes these powerful magazines in “Feminist New Woman Fiction”: “three of the top five leaders in advertising revenue . . . were the Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, and the Pictorial Review, which were “most likely to amass circulations of one million or more” (89). These magazines, which had been “originally designed as fashion or household service magazines in the late nineteenth century shifted their emphasis” to include celebrity advertisements and more fiction—sometimes four or five different stories per issue (90).3 During the last two decades of her life, Wharton published short fiction in many different magazines, including almost every one of the most popular women’s magazines of the time.4 Wharton relied more and more on these popular American magazines as her relationship with Scribner’s, which was struggling financially during these years, deteriorated. By the early 1930s, she had suffered so many personal financial losses through the stock market crash and income taxes, that selling her stories to almost any magazine—even the ones she never before would have considered—became acceptable to her.5 She made a good deal of money by publishing her short fiction in these more popular American magazines, but she was constantly plagued with publishing woes. Although she had had much control over the terms and deadlines of her fiction before World War I, her long-distance negotiations with the women’s magazines in the 1920s and 1930s became increasingly difficult for her.

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The most serious struggle Wharton had with magazine publishing in the 1920s and 1930s, however, had to do with the short fiction itself. She had to learn how to write for magazines that were unfamiliar to her, and she had to write for publishers and audiences—especially in women’s magazines—that she could not always gauge. Honey describes the “formula stories” that women’s magazines published: “romances, with archetypal characters, conventional plots, and unrealistic endings” (“Feminist” 91). These stories were often churned out and “were hastily and poorly written. The hallmarks of mass-market fiction writers are speed, volume, and predictability, none of which aids in composing great literature” (91). However difficult it might have been for Wharton to publish her fiction in popular magazines, she did so consistently throughout these years. She was, as Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith point out in the introduction to Middlebrow Moderns, able to negotiate “with the two worlds of readers that consumed her books” (7). To “adapt her own work to a changing literary marketplace,” Botshon and Goldsmith explain, Wharton “deliberately appropriated the themes and strategies of popular fiction writers” (7). The short stories that Wharton might have noticed when she opened Ladies’ Home Journal or Woman’s Home Companion during the years after World War I were decidedly different from their predecessors and would have challenged Wharton’s efforts to conform. Where pre–World War I stories “largely concluded in romantic failure or serious compromise” for female characters, the postwar stories, whose narrators or main characters were almost exclusively female, included “the occasional ‘angel of the hearth’ or flapper who loses out to a more modest rival” but were more strongly characterized by “a positive resolution of the heroine’s conflict between autonomy and love. She was often able to have it all—financial success, creative work, and a supportive, intimate relationship” (Honey, “Feminist” 88). Many of these characters were working women, sometimes professionals or aspiring artists, who almost always identified themselves as middle-class Americans and whose stories had tidy resolutions. In her study of Wharton’s short fiction, Barbara A. White recognizes a significant shift in Wharton’s post–World War I stories that correspond to Botshon’s and Goldsmith’s observations about her magazine fiction. Wharton rarely wrote about “male and aristocratic characters and narrators” in these late stories but instead privileged characters who were “overwhelmingly female” and “lower-class types” (89). White points out

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that Wharton’s postwar characters ranged “from middle-class artists and professors” to characters who were rural Americans of the same class as Ethan Frome and Charity Royall (92). “But most evident,” writes White, were “the stronger presence of servants,” who were no longer “in the background as part of the furniture” (92). White studies the significant roles of servants in several of Wharton’s late stories, including “Autre Temps,” “After Holbein,” and “A Bottle of Perrier,” and she concludes that Wharton presents the servants in the late stories “more strongly and sympathetically” because during these years she was more inclined “to look beneath the surface of the class system” (98).6 Although White only implies reasons for Wharton’s late interest in women characters and the servant class, her observations about the late stories do reflect Honey’s formula and suggest ways in which Wharton tailored her stories to the standards of popular magazine fiction. Why she did so seems clear enough. Especially after 1929, when she suffered grave financial reversals, she needed all the income she could earn. She supported staffs for two homes in France, and several relatives. Her income shrank with each year. Biographer Shari Benstock describes the helpless financial situation Wharton found herself in during these years: Autumn 1934 marked the low point of her literary income, which had been reduced by 70 percent from a few years earlier. . . . now the French government could also tax . . . property held in other countries. Under the new law, her American holdings—most of them on the verge of foreclosure—were also taxable. The drastic reduction in her income meant that she had no money to pay her French property taxes, nor could she discuss her situation . . . without risking a full disclosure. (441)

While other popular women fiction writers were making names for themselves and ample livings through the marketplace of women’s magazines, Wharton struggled to conform. Many of these other writers, including Fanny Hurst, Edna Ferber, and Dorothy Canfield, “who rose to fame at [Wharton’s] side,” enjoyed prestige and consistent income during the 1920s and 1930s in the same way Wharton had before World War I (7). Many of these popular writers came from middle or working-class backgrounds and understood the issues and tastes of their readers. Other, less famous writers whose audiences were women of color, lesbians, diverse groups of immigrants, or otherwise marginalized groups of American women, wrote fiction that resonated with millions of readers because they addressed serious issues of the day that concerned a wide range of

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American women. They saw themselves as serious professionals, and they garnered the respect of their publishers, editors, and readers. In their short stories, these writers “explored early-twentieth-century national and local politics . . . negotiated roles in the mass media cultures of magazines and Hollywood; and articulated gendered concerns over the rising culture of consumption” (11). The issues these writers addressed, writes scholar Jennifer Scanlon in her study of Good Housekeeping Magazine, covered “a wide range of women’s concerns: love, sexuality, marriage, children, careers, homemaking” (139). Their fiction became “a stage upon which women’s lives” were “acted out, where their possibilities and limitations” were “played out in a more dramatic fashion than anywhere else in the magazine” (139). These writers were familiar with the story formulas of popular magazines and were comfortable with the publications. Often, they were able to negotiate the formulas in ways that allowed them to experiment with narrative, to articulate progressive ideas, or to question traditional stereotypes.7 Wharton had years of publishing experience and could probably have taught some of these writers how to negotiate the financial aspects, but she had to learn from them how to write for popular magazines in the last two decades of her life. Some of the characteristics she adapted—telling her stories through women narrators and characters, privileging lower classes—speak to her willingness to conform to a formula. However, her own work had anticipated women’s magazine fiction and had influenced the fiction of these younger writers in at least one significant way: she explored the ways in which women defined themselves and were defined by their roles as consumers. In some of her most powerful and influential works, she had created characters who wanted to be consumers (Charity Royall), were champion consumers (Undine Spragg), or were themselves consumed by the marketplace (Lily Bart). In the 1920s and 1930s, she updated her woman-as-consumer characters in ways that conformed to popular magazine standards. Wharton was herself a consumer (in some ways an extravagant one) who had embraced many of the twentieth-century conveniences and technological advancements that she would include in her late fiction. She owned expensive automobiles, traveled extensively, and consumed books throughout her life. She had all the modern conveniences of the time installed in her two homes. During the 1920s, she updated her personal appearance to reflect the standards of the times. She “marcel-waved and tinted her hair, wore cloche hats, straight-waisted dresses with midcalf hemlines”

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(Benstock 388). She read the latest books, used telephones, listened to the wireless, and knew the names of iconic movie stars of the age. In her postwar fiction, many of her characters, from wealthy women to servants, reflect these very consumer trends and others. Some are travelers who ride trains or take cruises. Some get “permanent waves.” Others belong to book clubs or bridge clubs, attend séances, or subscribe to self-improvement programs. Some, like Charity Royall, go to the cinema. Others want to be movie stars. Like other adjustments that she made to her late fiction, Wharton’s references to movie culture reveal how carefully she worked to conform to the mass market. When one of her narrators merely mentions the cinema or a character travels to California in hopes of becoming a movie star, they both reflect her understanding of the popularity and power of movie going. Beyond her understanding of popular movie going, however, her references to film—especially in the 1920s and 1930s—expose the sources of Wharton’s antagonism toward movie culture. During the years that Wharton was creating Charity Royall’s movie-palace experience, she also published two war stories in which her narrators use the visual metaphors of early silent narrative film: “Coming Home” (Scribner’s, 1915) and “The Marne,” (Saturday Evening Post, 1918). In “Coming Home,” Wharton’s narrator, an American in Paris, relates the tale of H. Macy Greer, a relief worker back from the front of the Great War. The narrator explains that Greer is an especially good storyteller, unlike some Relief Corps workers who, “when going beyond the bald statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes” (Collected Stories, 2: 26). Unlike these sentimental storytellers whose stories ring false, Greer “has the gift of making the thing told seem as true as if one had seen it” (26). Greer tells his story: at the front, he meets a French soldier, Jean de Réchamp, who is desperate for news of his family—elderly grandmother, parents, siblings, and his fiancée—because he has heard that his ancestral home, Réchamp, now lies behind enemy lines. Greer takes him home, and describes Réchamp’s reunion with his family’s servants with a sentimental trill: “Well—I leave you to brush in the rest. Old family servant, tears and hugs and so on. I know you affect to scorn the cinema, and this was it, tremolo and all” (43). The servant takes the two men into the main house, where Greer describes the Réchamp family reunion as another maudlin scene out of

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a movie: “there, in the hall, was another servant, screening a light—and then more doors opened on another cinema scene: fine old drawing room with family portraits, shaded lamp, domestic group about the fire” (43). Although “Coming Home” is one of Wharton’s least successful stories and suffers from “an unnecessary proliferation of narrators, an overcomplicated plot, and a confused ending,” it does include features that anticipate Wharton’s later short fiction: her emphasis on the servants and the fiancée who is of a lower class, a clever working girl whose questionable background makes her “solitary” and “independent” (White, Study 86).8 More significantly, this story reveals Wharton’s understanding of cinematic storytelling as sentimental and manipulative, complete with a sappy soundtrack, “tremolo and all,” and with weepy, romantic settings: “family portraits, shaded lamp, domestic group about the fire.” For all of its faults, “Coming Home” indicates that by 1915—during the same time that she was crafting Charity’s moviegoing experience—Wharton already understood one of the most powerful narrative strategies of popular film: the mise-en-scène. By World War I, “the feature film conquered the market . . . with its debt to the 18th and 19th century novel, its claim to both realism and universality” (Hansen, “Early Cinema” 229). One of the industry’s strategies to lure middle-class audiences was what film historian Ben Brewster calls “the extra twist of fictionality”: the use of set design (324). By 1915, the year that Wharton published “Coming Home,” the “locations and especially the sets” of popular cinema were “chosen, designed and furnished to convey luxury and fashion” (324). Unlike the sets of earlier nickelodeon movies, “typically sketchy functional ones,” the movies of the war years, especially those made by American filmmakers, began to employ more elaborate and expensive sets, so that, for instance, a character’s home looked like a real home, with real “family portraits,” real “shaded lamps,” and more. No longer characterized by the “naïve realism” of the earliest silents, movies projected and attracted, especially through stage sets, the “respectable, even rich middle class” (324). By projecting a generic middle class, movies also redefined how other classes looked and behaved as well. In the most striking transformation of nickelodeon cinema to narrative movies, writes Brewster, “the poor have become a picture-book poor, living a carefree life in little cottages with roses round the porch. . . . The American cinema . . . is becoming a dream factory” (324). Wharton, who had discarded the gauzy tint of romance from her lens, seems to have recognized the new dream factory. Popular cinema had betrayed any sense

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of realism and had put Wharton’s discarded rose-colored spectacles back on to sentimentalize war stories and diminish the plight of victims in a haze of nostalgia. In “Coming Home,” her first-ever reference to the cinema, Wharton’s Greer suggests this difference between the grainy documentary-like miseen-scène of the earliest narrative movies and the gleaming sentimentality of the dream factory. In The Marne, she referenced cinema in the same way. Her young American protagonist, Troy Belknap, is an adolescent boy whose wealthy parents had raised him in France. Now back in the United States, Troy, who had seen the horrors of the first battle of the Marne, mentions to his parents’ friends that he thinks America ought to join the war effort. The “kindly careless” adults laugh at him with a patronizing dismissal, “Oh well—at his age every fellow wants to go out and kill something,” which jars Troy. “To go out and kill something! They thought he regarded the war as a sport, just as they regarded it as a moving-picture show!” (275). Once again, Wharton acknowledges the power of cinema not in its ability to document the real world but in its capacity to interfere with and oppose the real world—to present “a world much more penetrated by phantasy” (Brewster 324).9 Also in “The Marne,” Wharton identifies popular cinema with the working classes in the same way she did in Summer, published only a year earlier. She associates movie theaters with small-town, middle-class America, and she suggests desire, disorientation, and seduction in the realm of the cinema palace. Late in “The Marne,” a more mature Troy has become an ambulance driver in France. He sees “a train-load of American soldiers on the way to the battle front,” and he describes how these Americans behave when they first arrive in Paris, how they are “vaguely roaming the streets, or sitting in front of cafés, or wooed by polyglot sirens in the obscure promiscuity of cinema-palaces” (290). Troy, who has the values and tastes of his upper class, does not understand these other American soldiers, rural boys who seem “bewildered, depressed and unresponsive. They wanted to kill Germans all right, they said; but this hanging around Paris wasn’t what they’d bargained for, and there was a good deal more doing back home at Podunk or Tombstone or Deposit” (290). The “good deal more doing” back home for these boys, Wharton implies, would include going to the movies, where they might encounter charity girls doing the same thing. Wharton’s association of the “polyglot sirens” of the cinema palace with seduction might seem familiar to film scholars. “It is not coinci-

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dence,” writes Miriam Hansen, “that literary intellectuals fascinated by the whiff of Otherness that emanated from the movies hardly ever failed to mention the presence of prostitutes in the audience” (“Early Cinema” 238). “The image of the prostitute was actually used as an epithet for the cinema as a whole” among literary elites like Wharton, who disparaged this “openly commercial” art form at the same time they invoked its “stark sensuality, exotic vitality” (238). For Wharton, boys from Podunk, girls from North Dormer—anyone who bought into the pretensions of the movies—were being exposed and seduced “into a consumer society of which mass culture was to become both agent and object” (231). Her earliest references to cinema indicate that for Wharton, the cinema was a female siren who consumed her consumers. In the years after World War I, Wharton’s fiction suggests that she perceived that this siren had the power to consume more than lonely boys, however. Her short stories from the 1920s and 1930s emphasize the power of cinema to reflect and manipulate the already-precarious position of women in the marketplace. It is no coincidence that during the same years that popular women’s magazines began to count their subscribers in the millions, the movie industry was catering to its largest demographic group: women. By one account, 60 percent of movie audiences were women in 1920, a number that rose to 83 percent by 1927 (Botshon and Goldsmith 19). “Women have always had an intimate relationship with the movies,” and not only because of the industry’s efforts to promote movies as products that offered “the key to women’s happiness” (Barbas 61). Women’s “enthusiasm for the cinema was not simply the product of careful advertising. Underlying their interest was often the drama of direct and passionate participation” (61). By the 1920s, American women, who had begun to assume public lives in ways that Wharton had already documented in Summer, had buying power and political power and were assuming public roles, especially those in the glare of Hollywood spotlights. Reformers, religious leaders, and politicians saw the popularity of movies among women audiences—and the celebrity status of Mary Pickford and other actresses—as a dangerous threat to the status quo. The “high percentage of women in cinema audiences was perceived as an alarming phenomenon” (Hansen, “Early Cinema” 241).10 The popularity of movies and women’s magazines threatened to “blur not only the boundaries maintaining hierarchic distinctions of class” but also threatened the lines “between public and private, between individuals with access to social representation by virtue of their economic position” and those (women) who had been traditionally silent and invisible

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(239). Wharton, who had enjoyed the privileges and status of an elite female writer in a man’s world—and had written about the dangers of that status—perceived the cinema as many male authors of the day did, as a gendered threat to this hierarchy.11 If popular cinema was a feminine siren, it might consume and obliterate the traditional male institutions that had supported Wharton as an elite writer. She used the flourishing popular American cinema of the 1920s and 1930s in her short fiction in ways that suggest her fears about its effects on women. Some of her stories included only slight references to the cinema but always in the context of women moviegoers. In “Atrophy,” first published in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1927, her protagonist, Mrs. Nora Frenway, is making a secret train ride to see her dying lover. She thinks about how, even in “a world where all the outer conventions were tottering,” the social standards that define her life are still severe, and she contrasts her private life to those public lives of women celebrities: “You took up the morning paper, and you read of girl bandits, movie-star divorces, ‘hold-ups’ at balls, murder and suicide . . . then you turned your eyes onto your own daily life, and found yourself as cribbed and cabined . . . as any white-muslin novel heroine of the ‘sixties’!” (436). Mrs. Christine Ansley, in “Joy in the House” (Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, 1932), has just broken off with her lover and is returning home to her family. As she sits on a steamer bound for New York, she likens her breakup to a movie scene. Her painful memories “seemed to grow unreal, remote, as if they had been part of a sensational film she had sat and gazed at” (632). In “All Souls,” Wharton’s final short story, published after her death in 1937, Mrs. Clayburn, a middle-aged widow in bed with a sprained ankle, limps downstairs to find out why the electricity is out and finds that she is alone in her dark house.12 She tries to find her maid Agnes, who “never set foot out of the house after dark, who despised the movies as much she did the wireless” but who, Mrs. Clayburn assumes, “had deserted the house on a snowy winter night, while her mistress lay upstairs, suffering and helpless!” (807). In one of her most famous late stories, “Pomegranate Seed,” first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1931, Charlotte Ashby, recently married to an older widower, becomes increasingly terrorized by a series of mysterious letters addressed to her husband in his late wife’s handwriting that keep showing up in her mailbox. She obsesses about the letters as she opens the door to her house: “Outside there,” she thought, “sky-scrapers, advertisements, telephones, wireless, aeroplanes, movies,

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motors, and all the rest of the twentieth century; and on the other side of the door something I can’t explain” (683). These, and others of her stories that do not mention cinema, point to her continuing efforts to conform to the standards of popular women’s magazines of the 1920s and 1930s by creating characters who have the tastes and habits of the middle class. Yet Wharton’s efforts never ensured that she would be published in women’s magazines, whose editors sometimes found her subject matter inappropriate or her stories not well crafted. When Woman’s Home Companion rejected one of her stories in 1934, Wharton was offended. She assumed that she had trouble conforming to their standards because she could not write “down” to a middlebrow audience. An oft-quoted passage from one of her letters reveals this sense of hierarchy and indicates that she saw herself on a higher level than other magazine writers. “The fact is I am afraid that I cannot write down to the present standard of the American picture magazines,” she wrote to Rutger Jewett, her editor and agent at Appleton in 1934. “I am in as much need of money as everybody else at this moment and if I could turn out a series of potboilers for magazine consumption I should be only to glad to do so; but I really have difficulty in imagining what they want” (Lewis and Lewis, Letters 572). Wharton was certainly not the only American author to sell her works to popular magazines and Hollywood at this time. Her “engagement . . . with the blurring of literary boundaries was hardly unique to her cultural moment,” write Botshon and Goldsmith (7). Sarah Churchwell points out that in the 1920s, “American writers . . . were negotiating two mutually exclusive ideologies: a European, aristocratic discourse of taste” and “an American middle-class, democratic egalitarianism” (138). Scholars often cite a group of male authors, particularly F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote about “the feminization of the 1920s literary marketplace,” along with William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, as canonical writers who sold themselves—and then distanced themselves—from popular literature and film (8). These same scholars often include and sometimes privilege the name of one female writer—Wharton—among their examples of writers who thought of themselves as elite but who traded themselves down to the level of the popular.13 In some ways, Wharton might have been pleased to be grouped with these male sellouts. As Kent Ljungquist points out in his introduction to Ethan Frome, “Wharton tended to measure her literary achievements against those of male writers” (xix). If Wharton considered herself to

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be a highbrow writer who measured her work against the works of male writers, then she would have felt that she was in good company among a group of American men who also tried their hand at writing down for the popular. Both professionally and personally, Wharton “preferred the company of men to that of women,” observes Marilyn French in the introduction to Old New York. She “liked to be queen in a room full of men” (xiii). Although she counted several women as her close friends, Wharton enjoyed this elite status among her male friends and within her profession, and she valued the patriarchal hierarchy that had distinguished her through the years.14 Her reputation among the male literary elite gave her extraordinary access to the world of men and afforded her the prestige to continue to publish into the 1930s. Yet as comfortable as Wharton might have felt among her prestigious male colleagues and friends, her fiction reveals that she did not always share their perspectives on popular culture. Perhaps because she had access to and experience with the privileges of a man’s world, Wharton understood better than her male colleagues the powerlessness of women. Fitzgerald “ascribed the commercial failure of The Great Gatsby to the power of female readers who, in his words, ‘control the fiction market at present’” (Botshon and Goldsmith 8). Wharton suggests that women did not control much of anything in the American marketplace, although they certainly encouraged it. Her women—Mrs. Frenway, Mrs. Ashby, Mrs. Ansley—measure their own worth against suggestions of what they have seen, or have not seen, on movie screens. Wharton’s projections of popular cinema in her short fiction reveal her displeasure about the degree to which American women allowed themselves to be defined, no matter how rich or poor they were, no matter if they were housewives, divorcées, or professional authors, by a masculine marketplace. Whether she was writing an exquisite novella about a rural New England girl or an awkward short story about a sad, middle-aged woman, Wharton addressed the dangers that modern American women faced in a world where they thought they were supposed to define themselves by what they owned, bought, wore, read, or watched in their leisure time. In her two earliest war stories, references to the spectacle of the movies suggest that she understood how movies worked and how sophisticated and appealing they could be. As she came to understand the cinema as a popular product, she suggested that this product had the power to diminish women’s individuality and integrity. When women buy into such fantasies as the movies, her fiction tells us, they lose their capacities

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to think for themselves; they blur their own identities, and they become consumables in an indifferent marketplace. Wharton warned that the marketplace of popular cinema and fiction prescribes how women should sit (still, quietly, among others in a dark theater), where to look (straight ahead at the screen), and on what to focus (on the goods displayed before them in a film). Her fiction portends a profile for women moviegoers that Scanlon describes in Inarticulate Longings, one that encouraged “inaction rather than action, conformity rather than individual expression, guided rather than self-generated change” (5). Wharton’s own engagement with “the masculinized professional ethos of business” had informed her fiction for decades by the time she wrote short stories for women’s magazines (Churchwell 138). As early as 1903, in her essay “The Vice of Reading,” Wharton had discussed the risks inherent in publishing one’s fiction. A writer who has “sold one’s wares in the open market” runs the risk of having sold “to the purchasers the right to think what they choose about one’s books” (Stange 37). In Personal Property, Margit Stange points out that in this early essay, Wharton “accedes to the market the power to define—and thus to debase—her work and her authorial identity” (37). The House of Mirth, writes Stange, “circulates the author herself as a celebrity who attains her fame and infamy by marketing celebrity” (53). Although Wharton had enjoyed great prestige and had been marketing her celebrity for many years, after World War I she was at the mercy of a newly energized mass market that might have catered to women but was still almost exclusively powered by men. A “professional woman writer still risked being perceived as unnatural or deviant for writing,” writes Churchwell, and “feminine labor . . . had always to brave association with the promiscuity and commerce of prostitution” (139). Wharton, whose own career began to thrive when she demonstrated the debasement of women in the marketplace in Lily Bart’s story in 1905, became her own best proof in the 1920s and 1930s of the compromises a woman still made in a world where male-powered institutions decided what women ought to be and ought to want. Wharton disparaged popular culture for reasons that went beyond any personal resentment of the popular mass market, however, as one of her late stories makes clear. In the same letter to Jewett in which she described her problems “writing down,” she mentioned that she decided to submit a story to a Hearst publication. “I have held out firmly till now against the wiles of Mr. Hearst,” she wrote. “I think you told me some

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time ago that in the case of the Cosmopolitan Hearst did not intervene personally. . . . I shall have to give them one of the stories you have in hand” (572). In 1934, at the most critical financial slump of her adult life, Charm Incorporated garnered five thousand dollars from Cosmopolitan.15 An unremarkable story in many ways, it presents Wharton’s most damning indictment of popular culture and reveals a clear source of Wharton’s antipathy toward popular magazines and cinema. In Charm Incorporated, she takes on the cinema siren through a male protagonist who learns to lower his standards to thrive. Through the examples of his in-laws, a group of attractive foreigners with questionable talents, tastes, and motives, he discovers that “charm” is a product that he can use to his own advantage. The consequences of his compromise, however, threaten to cause irreparable damage to the world in which he lives. Jim Targatt, a New York businessman, has married a charming, exotic refugee from Russia named Nadeja Kouradjine, who has bewitched him—when he tries to remember why he married Nadeja, he thinks that perhaps he “had been knocked on the head—sandbagged; a regular holdup” (Collected Stories, 2: 655). Nadeja has a string of equally enchanting, parasitic siblings, many of whom have come to live with the Targatts. As the story opens, Nadeja tells Targatt that her brother Boris “is going to marry a film-star. That Halma Hoboe, you know . . . She’s the greatest of them all” (653). To this news, Targatt asks, “Halma Hoboe? Well, why on earth shouldn’t he? Has she got her divorce from the last man all right?” (653). Targatt is relieved by the news: “Funny, to be related to a movie star. ‘My sister-in-law, Halma Hoboe.’ Well, as long as he couldn’t succeed on the screen himself.” He mutters to himself, “She’ll have to pay his bills now” (653). Targatt tries to figure out how he has become sole breadwinner to the “Kouradjine group” and he realizes that they have a natural “gift like a tenor voice.” What is their gift? “It was—what? Charm?” Targatt watches his in-laws closely and learns how to use his own version of charm to get what he wants: privacy for himself and his new wife. He sends one brother to Hollywood: “Little Boris had only had to borrow a hundred dollars of him for the trip to Hollywood, and behold little Boris was already affianced to the world’s leading movie-star!” (659). He finances a trip to Hollywood for a sister, “in the hope that Boris would put her in the way of becoming a screen star.” Targatt’s plan fails, however, when Boris announces that he is divorcing his rich movie star. Although Nadeja is sure that Boris “was going to marry another and even richer star,” Boris

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returns to the Targatt apartment, where he once again “shared the bathroom with Targatt and Nadeja” (662). Only after his divorce settlement of three million dollars arrives does Boris leave for Europe and Targatt finally have his wife to himself. Wharton characterizes the Kouradjines as a foreign tribe with questionable antecedents, habits, and motives, all slightly artistic, beautiful, and hypnotic, whose dreams revolve around another tribe of foreign, slightly talented, and hypnotic Americans: movie stars (Halma Hoboe is Wharton’s quite obvious lampoon of Greta Garbo). Jim Targatt, the generous and naïve WASP, becomes their good-natured American target. When Targatt learns by example how to play their game, he exchanges his own Anglo-American code of honor for the more risky practices of his émigré in-laws. As he learns to compromise himself, Targatt is rewarded with a new vigor. When he schemes to marry off his in-laws to wealthy New Yorkers, he feels “reckless,” and he likes the feeling (664). He realizes that using their techniques to get what he wants—privacy for himself and his wife, financial gain—gives him a sense of pride and power: “Other and more substantial returns he did draw from his alliance with the Kouradjines; and it was the prospect of these which had governed his conduct. . . . Targatt had never once swerved from his purpose. And slowly but surely he was beginning to reap his reward” (666). At the conclusion of the story, he finally has what he wanted all along: his money and his privacy. When he realizes that he and Nadeja are finally alone, he asks her, “what would you like best in the world to do?” (677). In the final sentence of the story, Nadeja looks at him “in her grave maternal way” and replies with a question: “Don’t you think that now at last we could afford to have a baby?” (677). In this final suggestion of Targatt’s and Nadeja’s offspring lies the seed of Wharton’s anxiety about the devastating effects of popular culture on her own traditional American culture and on her own reputation: Targatt’s mixed marriage will contaminate him and will perpetuate future contamination in his offspring. Charm Incorporated has received little scholarly attention beyond being described as “not funny enough to compensate for the shallowness in characterization and lack of import” (White, Study 83).16 Indeed, this is not a funny story, and Wharton was probably not laughing when she wrote it. Although Charm Incorporated may seem to be just another of Wharton’s failed attempts to write for a woman’s magazine, it represents one of Wharton’s most bitter indictments of her own participation in the world of American popular culture. Wharton is Jim Targatt. His transformation

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from a naïve, well-meaning husband with traditional values to street-wise player mirrors what Wharton saw as her own transformation from elite writer to popular magazine hack in 1934. In the same way Targatt learns how to see that adjusting his standards can be a rewarding investment, Wharton learned to invest in the strategies of the magazine short-story writer to increase her earnings. Like Targatt, Wharton had been charmed and lured into an enterprise that compromised her values. Targatt and Wharton have both committed crimes that will inflict great damage: they have contracted themselves to sleazy carneys, and the consequences—the issue—of their unions will not be pure. Like Jim Targatt, Wharton saw herself as the head of her household. She referred to herself with a term most often used to describe male heads of households: “Like everyone else in America,” she wrote in a letter to a publisher in 1934, “I find my income diminishing. . . . I am therefore obliged to view my literary work first of all from the point of view of the bread-winner” (Benstock, No Gifts 441). Through Jim Targatt, she projected what she saw as her descent from an elite masculine hierarchy into the lower stratum of popular middlebrow writers, a group she had anticipated in the same 1903 essay in which she discussed an author’s debasement. In “The Vice of Reading” she described a group of Americans who read because they thought reading to be “a moral obligation” (Uncollected 102). Because of their superficial motives, these “mechanical” readers were lowering the standards of both readers and writers, who were especially hurt by a market that catered to pedestrian tastes. The “gravest offense” of the “mechanical reader,” she wrote in 1903, was to encourage “the demand for mediocre writing” (104).17 As she struggled with the blur of highbrow and middlebrow (self-) designations in the 1920s, Wharton must have seen her own contributions to popular magazines as examples of what she had warned about in 1903. For a writer who felt she was writing below herself, she must have recognized that by “admitting the commercial into artistic consideration,” she could be “properly recognized as ‘middlebrow’” (Churchwell 160). By the 1930s, Wharton must have believed she betrayed herself and her readers by contributing to a mass market that had overwhelmed and transformed the American publishing industry. She was proud to publish her fiction—both short stories and serialized novels—with the prestigious Boston publishers who had been eclipsed by New York City publishing entities in the 1920s.18 While she had been on familiar terms with many of her earlier publishers, Wharton found herself adrift and “staggered”

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by the “insolence” of some of the new publishers she did not know (Benstock, No Gifts 439). After receiving an especially dismissive letter from an editor, Wharton became angry. “I have never before been treated like a beginner,” she wrote to Jewett in 1934, “and I do not like it” (439). To the New York publishing community, however, Wharton, like Jim Targatt among the Kouradjines, was a beginner, and her “foreign” competition included writers who wrote not just magazine stories but also novels of unprecedented diversity. The novels Wharton wrote during the 1920s and 1930s had to compete for a place on the bookshelf with a variety of books that had been publicized in magazines and marketed through any number of new enterprises—the Book-of-the-Month Club (established in 1926), “Great Books,” or the “Modern Library” series. Scholars who explore the book boom of the 1920s argue that “literature and advertisement combined forces to sell” books as products “to the aspiring middle classes” (Churchwell 139).19 Many of these books were nonfiction, like Making Life Worthwhile and Taking Stock of Ourselves, by Mary Pickford’s husband, Douglas Fairbanks, in which he dispensed advice to young men about incorporating charm into their lives (Barbas 51).20 Other works, like The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, or Etiquette by Emily Post, commodified culture for the middle classes (Churchwell 139). In the consumer culture of the 1920s, books themselves, writes Churchwell, “were becoming fetishized, brand names in a consumer society” (140). Edna Ferber, Fanny Hurst, and Dorothy Canfield were only three writers whose popular novels became brand names during these years. As such, these middlebrow authors “enjoyed a potent cultural authority” that made them national celebrities (Botshon and Goldsmith 8). For example, Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady and niece of Wharton’s beloved childhood friend Theodore Roosevelt, named Canfield “as the most influential woman in America” (7). Although Ferber, Hurst, and others were often marketed as generic “romance” writers and were dismissed by other writers (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Pound) who considered themselves highbrows, the novels of these middlebrows belied this trivialized label. The racial, ethnic, and geographic diversity among these authors contributed to their diversity of interests and defined their novels as multicultural explorations. They were popular in part because they mirrored a diverse reading public in many ways and they articulated the concerns of a wide spectrum of American women. They both embodied and wrote about “national and local politics”; they “negotiated roles in the exploding

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mass media cultures of magazines and Hollywood”; and they explored “gendered concerns over the rising culture of consumption” (11). Wharton’s younger colleagues, including Ferber, Hurst, Canfield, and especially Anita Loos, celebrated and exploited the possibilities of popular culture and mass marketing in their works.21 Perhaps because of their racial, ethnic, and economic diversity and because they were born into a generation for whom mass popular culture was an established institution, these writers immersed themselves in unself-conscious ways into the modern market, never disparaging the “consumerism of magazine, film, or best seller” (Churchwell 159). Like Loos, whose Gentlemen Prefer Blondes delighted some readers (including Wharton), many of these writers “willingly participated in self-advertisement” and deliberately identified their authorial personae with their narrative voices (159). They could invent themselves as artists. With little to lose, having never been considered—or never having considered themselves—highbrow or canonical, they could create their own public personae, and they could experiment with their art. Unlike her middlebrow colleagues, Wharton was not at home in the middlebrow culture. Other writers were celebrating their commercial and artistic endeavors through their works, thereby “refusing to bite the hand that fed” them (Churchwell 159). Wharton, however, continued to “disparage . . . the commercialism of the magazine, film, or best seller” and remained at an “ironic fastidious distance” from her characters (159). At the same time that she sensed that her status as an elite writer was wavering, while she was becoming more unsure of her publishers and more unsettled about her readers, her narrative voice in her longer works was becoming increasingly caustic. While she was “writing down” for women’s magazines for income, she was also writing novels in which her distant, sometimes icy narrative voice projected popular mass culture in its most nightmarish form: the cinema. Wharton located her antipathy and anxiety about the invasion of foreigners into mass culture—and her own complicity in this invasion—most clearly in her cinema-age novels. The more Wharton conformed to the standards of popular middlebrow magazines and the more money she made by selling her works to these magazines and to Hollywood, the more dark and scathing her portrayals of movie culture became in her novels.22 In the 1920s, she would maintain her merciless narrative distance, and she would invoke the word mechanical once again, this time not to describe a group of readers but to describe the “mechanical terror” of the cinema

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that threatened to consume all it touched. The characters in Wharton’s novels—men, women, and children—would struggle as perpetrators and victims who consumed voraciously and were voraciously consumed by the terror. Wharton “did not develop much as a short-story writer, and she consistently produced about the same ratio of good, bad, and indifferent stories” (White, Study xiii). Of the eighty-plus short stories and novellas Wharton wrote during her lifetime, perhaps a dozen are considered to be great stories, and most of these she wrote in the years before the advent of popular narrative film and the rise of magazine culture.23 Her short fiction in women’s magazines attests to her understanding of the power and sophistication of motion pictures but also reveals her resistance to and resentment of popular culture. Especially in Charm Incorporated, a supposedly humorous look at how an elite New Yorker learns to negotiate the popular, Wharton presented a nightmare: the mediocre and vulgar have invaded, have charmed us all, and have begun to reproduce. At the same time she endured the humiliation of “writing down” for what she saw as mediocre magazines and ill-mannered publishers, she placed the blame for her own dive into the middlebrow and for the diminishing value of “high art” on the foreign Kouradjines who peddled charm as a product. In her late novels, Wharton created blatantly ethnic stereotypes that poison other characters with dreams of the movies. She also created characters whose association with the movies has ensured that their children will struggle and suffer. In these dark visions, Wharton insisted that popular culture had triumphed over genuine artistic expression and integrity and that there would be no happy ending for a culture that worships mediocre celebrity. In Twilight Sleep (1927) and The Children (1928), traditional hierarchies of class and taste have been overridden by the lure of popular cinema culture, characterized by hedonistic, moviemad flappers, seedy foreign movie moguls, and vulgar, aging movie queens whose stories resemble that of Mary Pickford. Pickford, whose popularity helped transform charm into a corporate entity, was also struggling by the 1930s.24 In 1934, at forty-two years old, she was separated from her second husband and had recently retired from the screen (her final movie, Secrets, was released in 1933). Professionally, the 1920s were difficult years for Pickford, whose “girlish purity began to seem outdated” as other, younger actresses became popular as “icons of glamour and sexuality” (Barbas 55). She cut her signature locks in 1928 “in

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an attempt to reinvent her image,” but movie fans and critics reacted to her new bob with slightly hostile indifference (56). “Poor Mary is facing a new public,” wrote Photoplay editor James Quirk, “that no longer believes in ‘America’s Sweetheart’” (56). By the 1930s, columnists in movie magazines were describing Pickford as “a pathetic has-been” (Whitfield 302). Like Wharton, who set an example for a diverse group of women authors who “rose to fame at her side,” Pickford was now being rejected by an institution she helped create. By 1934, she barely recognized the American film industry, and she did not understand the desires of moviegoers. She chose to fade out of the pictures. Mary Pickford’s 1934 retirement from the screen would have come as no surprise to Wharton, who anticipated the modern, independent ingénue in several works, most clearly in the character of Sophy Viner in The Reef (1912), and portrayed an aging film actress whose movie-star status defined her as wealthy but obsolete in The Children. Wharton had always focused her attention most acutely on the relationship of women to cinema. From Charity Royall in the cinema palace to the polyglot sirens of the dark cinema and to Zinnia Lacrosse in The Children, Wharton consistently indicted her modern women as victims and perpetrators of the dehumanizing mechanical terror. When she projected women in her film-age novels, she bobbed their hair, loaded them down with pearls and makeup, and put cigarettes and cocktails in their hands so she could tell her film-age version of a story she had already told. In this version, a woman compromises her own identity and loses her freedom when she allows herself to be charmed and seduced by the invasive mechanical terror.

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She was the kind of girl in whom certain people would instantly have recognized the histrionic gift. —Edith Wharton, The Reef (1912)

2 The Mechanical Terror: The Novels

T

wo years after Wharton took Charity Royall and Lucius Harney to see a movie in Summer, she published The Age of Innocence, a novel that afforded her the luxury of escaping the twentieth century almost altogether.1 Only in the final chapter does fifty-seven-year-old Newland Archer confront the instability of the new century. When he thinks about all of the changes to his New York society, one change distinguishes itself from the rest: that his society took “joyfully for granted” his son’s engagement to one of “Beaufort’s bastards,” the lovely Fanny Beaufort.2 Archer compares Fanny Beaufort’s story with that of another outsider, Ellen Olenska. Fanny “had appeared in New York at eighteen,” and “had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won it thirty years earlier” (211). In a passage that suggests Lily Bart’s epiphany on the last night of her life that “the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance” (House 297), Archer realizes that Dallas Archer’s engagement to Fanny is his best gauge to a new, unstable world: “Nothing could more clearly give the measure of the distance that the world had traveled. People nowadays were too busy—busy with reforms and ‘movements,’ with fads and fetishes and frivolities—to bother much about their neighbors. And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?” (Age 211–212)

Fanny Beaufort is one of Wharton’s female outsiders, a character who figures prominently in many of her novels: Fanny’s own mother, Fanny

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Ring, mistress to Archer’s contemporary Julius Beaufort; Lily Bart’s questionable employer Mrs. Hatch in The House of Mirth, and Wharton’s most fully-realized portrait of a ruthless social climber, Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country.3 All of tainted, dubious, or unremarkable lineage, all poised to break into society by one means or another, these characters were Wharton’s unconventional women intruders, no more perfectly limned than in The House of Mirth, where Mrs. Hatch is described by Carry Fisher (who is also faintly marginal) through the narrator: Carry’s vague presentment of Mrs. Norma Hatch (whose reversion to her Christian name was explained as the result of her latest divorce), left her under the implication of coming “from the West,” . . . Lily found [Mrs. Hatch] seated in a blaze of electric light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she rose like Venus from her shell. (Mirth 257)

Lily notices how Mrs. Hatch’s “large-eyed prettiness had the fixity of something impaled and shown under glass . . . under her showiness, her ease, the aggression of her dress and voice, there persisted that ineradicable innocence which, in ladies of her nationality, so curiously coexists with startling extremes of experience” (257). Mrs. Hatch enjoys only brief exposure in The House of Mirth, but she anticipates subsequent characters, most especially ambitious Undine Spragg, whose climb becomes the centerpiece of The Custom of the Country. Also directly related to Mrs. Hatch is one of Wharton’s most interesting and complicated pre-cinema nobodies, Sophy Viner, in The Reef (1912), who, although she shares many characteristics with Undine, is a more sympathetic and compelling character.4 Sophy represents our best guide to the evolution of the cinema-age “new women” whom Wharton would create in the 1920s. She prefigures Wharton’s movie-age characters, those who would invade these novels from somewhere else, and infuse Society with more than a hint of cinema glamour.5 Sophy Viner seems to be the most unfortunate point of a love triangle in The Reef, caught between George Darrow, an American diplomat with whom she has a brief affair in Paris, and Darrow’s intended wife and old acquaintance, American widow Anna Leath. In the first chapter of the book, Darrow meets the twenty-four-year-old Sophy while they are traveling from London to Paris, he to await a message from his fiancée that will send him to Anna’s estate, Givré, and Sophy to look for work. Darrow seems preoccupied and annoyed with Anna’s reluctance to make

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contact with him, and he keeps trying to decide whether to venture toward Givré anyway, or to turn back for London. But when he pauses at the station to help an attractive young woman whose umbrella has been torn and who can’t find her luggage, Darrow stops obsessing about Anna and begins helping Sophy, whose circumstances and charms begin to intrigue him. His chance encounter with Sophy persuades him to travel on to Paris, and he leaves his worries about his fiancée behind as he follows the enchantress Sophy. Darrow finds Sophy fascinating, initially because she is very attractive, but also because he cannot seem to figure her out. He observes her closely, and tries to categorize her, in his own patronizing way: He had immediately classed her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind of sketchy delicacy in her face, as though she had been brightly but lightly washed in with water-colour, all confirmed the evidence of her high sweet voice and of her quick incessant gestures. She was clearly an American, but with the loose native quality strained through a closer woof of manners: the composite product of an enquiring and adaptable race. (Reef 14)

Darrow assumes that Sophy is just another generic American girl with an unimpressive “composite” pedigree. To his surprise, she knows him by name. She reminds him that she saw him at the home of a “Mrs. Murrett” in London, where Darrow used to visit a “Lady Ulrica Crispin.” Darrow remembers Sophy as “one of the shadowy sidling presences in the background of that awful house in Chelsea,” where, she explains, she worked as a secretary to Mrs. Murrett. She seems to know more about Darrow than he would like, and, to his discomfort, she begins to reminisce in an off-color way about the other people from Mrs. Murrett’s “salon.” She tells him that she was envious of Lady Ulrica because “she had almost all the things I’ve always wanted: clothes and fun and motors, and admiration and yachting and Paris . . .” (19). As Sophy confides her yearnings to Darrow, he is drawn to her, not so much because of what she is saying, but because of how she looks: “his sense of her words was lost in the surprise of her face. Under the flying clouds of her excitement it was no longer a shallow flowercup but a darkening gleaming mirror that might give back strange depths of feeling. The girl had stuff in her—he saw it . . .” (19). When he asks her what she will do in Paris, now that she has left Mrs. Murrett’s employ, she tells him that she wants “to study for the stage” (20). This startles Darrow, who has to rethink his assumptions about Sophy: “All his confused contradictory

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impressions assumed a new aspect at this announcement” (20). Sophy is more interesting than Darrow had imagined, and, as they make their way toward Paris, he learns her hard luck story. Sophy tells Darrow her story with only the slightest prodding. Orphaned at an early age, she had been tricked out of her inheritance by an unethical American trustee, abandoned by a friend who eloped with a “matinee idol,” and largely ignored by her older sister Laura, who was “married, unmarried, remarried, and pursuing . . . some vaguely ‘artistic’ ideal” (23). Sophy explains that her only friends, the Farlows, had secured her position with Mrs. Murrett, whom they described as “a woman of great intellectual eminence,” and would help her in Paris with her acting career. Darrow knows just how “intellectually eminent” Mrs. Murrett is because he frequented her salon to visit Lady Ulrica in England. Despite—or because of—Sophy’s naiveté, he is attracted to Sophy’s way of looking at the world: Darrow perceived that she classified people according to their greater or lesser “luck” in life . . . Things came one’s way or they didn’t; and meanwhile one could only look on, and make the most of small compensations, such as watching “the show” at Mrs. Murrett’s, and talking over the Lady Ulricas and other footlight figures. And at any moment, of course, a turn of the kaleidoscope might suddenly toss a bright spangle into the grey pattern of one’s days. This light-hearted philosophy was not without charm. . . . (25)

Sophy’s story has entranced Darrow completely by the time they reach Paris. He volunteers to see her to her lodgings (which, because her close friends the Farlows are nowhere to be found, turns out to be a hotel room next to his), and offers to take her to the theater the following evening. Within a few days, Darrow and Sophy become lovers, thereby setting up a complicated tragedy of Greek proportions. Wharton’s narrative privileges Darrow’s thoughts in this first part of the book, and alternates between his and Anna Leath’s thoughts for the remainder of The Reef. Never do we have any insight into Sophy’s inner life, which may explain why she seems to be the most interesting point of the triangle, fascinating not only to Darrow, but to scholars of The Reef. In this “novel about sexual obsession,” Rebecca Blevins Faery writes, Sophy Viner “is the embodiment of the dark terrain of female sexuality” who “clings to the framework of the novel and entwines herself around it like the vine from which she has her name” (80, 82). Faery points out that

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throughout the novel, Sophy is inarticulate and “cannot be fully known, fully rendered on the page” (91). “Is Sophy heroic or tawdry? Opportunistic or oppressed? Manipulative or merely indifferent? Independent? . . . Or simply self-centered and reckless?” (91). Sophy is best understood by looking at her through the lens she first offered to Darrow: as an actress.6 Darrow himself is intrigued by her ambition to “study for the stage,” probably because, as a cosmopolitan, experienced American at home in Europe, he has known his share of stage actresses. Given his ability to presume and categorize women, after learning about her ambitions and her family background (her “artistic” sister, for example), Darrow places Sophy into the category of actress/prostitute, somewhere between “Bohemian” artist and courtesan. Wharton reinforces this suggestion of prostitution by several means. The hotel rooms where Darrow and Sophy spend their ten-day affair suggest the seedy, indifferent ambience of a brothel, “the makeshift setting of innumerable transient collocations . . . having deliberately ‘made-up’ for its anonymous part, all in noncommittal drabs and browns, with a carpet and paper that nobody would remember . . .” (72). When Darrow confesses to Sophy that he has contrived to keep her to himself by not mailing a letter for her, he tries to explain with “an appeal to her pity” that sounds like a classic line from a lover to his mistress: “I was depressed and adrift . . . you made me forget my bothers . . .” (67–68). When he takes her to the theater (once to see a performance by a famous actress/prostitute named Cerdine, another to see a performance of Oedipe, a play that has much in common with the tragedy of The Reef ), Sophy wears a hooded cloak of pale pink, which shrouds her in the mysteries of a prostitute’s favorite boudoir color.7 And when Sophy tells him that she cannot stay in the hotel and attend the theater with him because she has no money, Darrow offers to pay her way with this smooth line: “Don’t you think one friend may accept a small service from another without looking too far ahead or weighing too many chances?” (69). Darrow is an opportunist and a wily operator. Throughout this part of the book, he thinks of Sophy as a poor, beautiful ingénue who pays him with sexual favors while he pays her with the chance to have those luxuries that she craves. That we are not privy to what Sophy thinks allows us to see her in a way that Darrow never does. Sophy is an actress, but not one of Darrow’s nineteenth-century actresses with a questionable private life. She is, in her own words, “awfully modern” (60). She is a new kind of actress, one whom Darrow can’t categorize because she has all of the attributes

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of a new animal: Sophy is a twentieth-century actress, an independent woman who lives by a different set of rules than Darrow’s women, and one who displays real talent for playing multiple roles in The Reef. Between the time Darrow first meets Sophy and the conclusion of the book, she plays many parts. In their initial journey together, to Darrow’s man of the world, she successfully plays a poor wronged orphan, a damsel in distress, a starry-eyed innocent with dreams of the stage, an adventuress, a kept woman, a lover, and a woman scorned. From the moment that Sophy calls Darrow by name and he doesn’t recognize her, we are aware that she has great power over him, and she manipulates him easily from that point on. Much of what she tells Darrow sounds like clichéd lines from melodramas. When Darrow asks her if she has “any influence” to help her in Paris, she replies pluckily, “None but my own. I’ve never had any other to count on” (20). When he offers to take her and her friends the Farlows to see Cerdine at the theater, she convinces him to take her alone by pleading to his sympathy, “but it may be my only chance” (32). During their ten days together, Sophy anticipates Darrow’s thoughts and moods perfectly because she is a great improvisational actress. She knows when to be vulnerable, and what not to ask him (although she tells him about herself, she never asks him to tell her the story of his life). She knows how to get close to him, how to manage adjoining hotel rooms and theater tickets, and she knows when to back away from him. When she senses that Darrow feels some remorse about their liaison, an “odd intuition seemed to make her conscious of his change of mood,” and she backs away (44). When they are at the theater, and Darrow is spotted by his fiancée’s stepson Owen, Sophy disappears “back into the shadow of their box” (50). For the increasingly troubled Darrow, who slowly realizes that eventually he will get his long-overdue letter from Anna and will have to leave their dingy love nest in Paris, Sophy plays the whore with the heart of gold. She attends to his every need—sexual, emotional, practical—and does so by playing various roles and wearing different expressions, including “a small white malevolent white mask in which the eyes burned black” (66). We have no reason to think that this is Sophy Viner’s first affair, as Darrow (if he were to think about it) might assume, because she seems to know too much about how she ought to act under the tricky circumstances. She plays the virginal ingénue so well that she might convince us that she is genuinely in love with Darrow, and that her heart might be broken when they part. However she feels about Darrow—and we can’t

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really know that, of course—she continues to improvise her way through subsequent chapters of the book with skill. When we see her again, she is playing two roles simultaneously: governess to Anna Leath’s young daughter, and loving fiancée to Anna’s stepson Owen. Wharton’s narrator never reveals how she comes to these roles, so we are free to imagine that she was able to act her way into Anna’s and Owen’s lives by becoming what they needed her to be, extemporaneously and with flair. Wharton’s twist in The Reef is that indeed, Sophy does fall in love with Darrow, but not until long after their affair has ended, and before she sees him again as Anna’s intended husband. Sophy masterfully delivers lines in this tragedy as if she were born for the role of “the other woman” who leaves the scene heartbroken, but with melodramatic honor. She breaks her engagement and leaves Givré, but not before she delivers a sad goodbye to Darrow in such lyrical language that she might as well be singing: “I’d been trying all the while to put everything I could between us; now I want to sweep everything away. I’d been trying to forget how you looked; now I want to remember you always. I’d been trying not to hear your voice; now I never want to hear any other” (251–52). Her goodbye to Anna is equally dramatic. She exits the scene, then turns back dramatically to deliver these final lines about her feelings for Darrow: “I wanted it—I chose it. He was good to me—no one ever was so good!” (274). Sophy Viner disappears from the narrative, leaving only Anna, who tries to find Sophy in Paris. In one of the darkest and most perversely funny scenes from any of Wharton’s novels, Anna finds Sophy’s “artistic” sister Laura instead, a big blonde ensconced in a seedy hotel, who receives Anna as she is lying in a “pink damask” bed with a little dog, while two smarmy young men sit in her suite. The scene allows us another perspective on Sophy. The story she had told Darrow about her past was the truth, which means that her constant role-playing is genuine. Never malicious nor spiteful, Sophy Viner is a new kind of woman, a straightforward working girl with talent who teaches herself as she negotiates her way among people of a higher, more evasive and duplicitous social class. The traditional, moneyed Anna and Darrow will never understand her. Although Sophy Viner has inherited characteristics from literary characters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she clearly belongs to the twentieth century, and represents the urban counterpart to Charity Royall’s rural new woman.8 Like Carrie Meeber in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Susan in David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox, Sophy is street-smart and capable. She makes her own success by auditioning her

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way into dramatic roles of her own choosing.9 She survives and thrives by inventing herself, often extemporaneously, and by morphing into anyone she needs to be. With little money and no connections, she is free to take risks and to compromise, and when she intuits that she might get hurt, she cuts her losses and moves on, broken-hearted or not. Where does Sophy go at the end of The Reef ? We can imagine that, like the fictional Carrie Meeber and Susan Lenox, or like the very real Evelyn Nesbitt, a working girl whose similar role in a 1906 love-triangle scandal in New York involving her husband and her lover was so celebrated that Wharton was certainly familiar with its details, Sophy Viner will reinvent herself as a celebrated and wealthy actress, whose past is our secret.10 If Sophy is a “woman adrift,” a “working-class woman” who “is at home in the fast-paced environment of the urban metropolis,” she may land on her feet, perhaps this time in New York, to audition for a role in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, like Evelyn Nesbitt, or, like Mary Pickford, to make a screen test for D.W. Griffith (Kassanoff 88).11 She fits the profile of Hollywood’s earliest screen stars perfectly—in fact, like Carrie Meeber and Susan Lenox, she heralds the cinema age of Pickford and her Hollywood heirs: Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, and, a bit further into the future, Greta Garbo/Halma Hoboe, all of whom had stories not unlike Sophy Viner’s.12 Wharton identified fissures in the façade of high society most adeptly by allowing her unconventional or marginal characters like Sophy to access the closed world of that society.13 Through Sophy, she suggested that a hearty, beautiful, new variety of weed was growing through the cracks. Sophy anticipates other Wharton characters who projected her vision of the age of the celebrated screen entertainer. In Twilight Sleep and The Children, Wharton looked back to the multitalented Sophy Viner to infuse her cinema-age women with life. Like Sophy, they represent a kind of freedom, modernity, and danger. Also like Sophy, they wreak havoc on the assumptions, traditions and values of Wharton’s other characters, by insinuating the carnival world of show business into the mix of high society. Yet in some ways, Sophy of 1912 seems to be a very distant relative of Wharton’s cinema-age women of the 1920s, who all reflect Wharton’s vision of the celebrity culture of Hollywood that was in its infancy when Sophy would have been playing her multiple roles in The Reef. No longer aspiring to the stage, Wharton’s movie-age characters are attracted instead to the glamorous, lucrative, and hypnotic world of the movies, where celebrity status promises them a chance to redefine themselves. However, these

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characters pay a high price for their financial independence and celebrity status. Cruel, selfish, and shallow, these women are, according to Wharton, ultimately pitiable. In Twilight Sleep, they are victims of an ominous system that Wharton clearly associates with a group of Hollywood movie moguls who use these women to further the interests of the film industry. In The Children, Wharton projects her dark vision of the consequences of movie madness by including an aging American movie star among her characters. In Zinnia Lacrosse, Wharton creates a movie star who has become one of Hollywood’s standardized products to be consumed and then cast aside. Even worse, the other women in the novel see Zinnia as the zenith of their own aspirations. As prisoners of an insidious system that manipulates their ambitions and dreams, and strips them of their individuality, these women endanger everyone around them—especially their children—as they fall into obsolescence. If Wharton allowed Sophy Viner to grow like a weed through the cracks of high society in The Reef, then she created a garden of beautiful weeds, fully rooted, in Twilight Sleep (1927). We are introduced to New Yorker Pauline Manford, matron of a wealthy family, who spends her busy days with philanthropy, self-improvement programs, and social engagements. Pauline’s motto is “There’s a time for everything,” and she fills her days with “faith-healers, art-dealers, social service workers and manicures” (10). Once we meet the rest of her family, we understand why Pauline wants to stay busy and avoid them: all of them are addicts. Pauline’s ex-husband, Arthur Wyant, is an alcoholic. Her present husband, Dexter Manford, is addicted to women, among them, his daughter-in-law. Arthur’s cousin Amalasuntha is addicted to the Manfords’ money. Pauline and Dexter’s daughter, Nona, is addicted to a married man. Pauline’s son by Wyant, Jim, is a workaholic. His wife of two years, Lita, tired of being married to staid Jim, craves pleasure and entertainment all of the time, and is attracted to the most potent drug of the age, Hollywood. And all of the main characters—Pauline, Dexter, and Nona—are addicted to Lita. Lita owes some of her allure to Sophy Viner. Like Sophy, Lita has a questionable background, and her marriage to banker Jim Wyant is not what his parents would have chosen for him. Lita has been raised by a vulgar and eccentric aunt, Kitty (out)Landish, who dresses like a Viking, and has encouraged Lita to be “artistic” (165). Also like Sophy, Lita attracts men easily, including her stepfather-in-law Dexter Manford, who, like

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George Darrow, spends a good deal of his time thinking about her: “Queer creature, Lita! . . . What sort of life did she really lead, he wondered? And what did she make of Jim, now the novelty was over? . . . But you never could tell with a woman . . .” (105–106). Lita, however, is more different from Sophy Viner than she is like her, and the contrast is remarkable. Sophy tells Darrow that she is “modern,” and she seems so, with her vague dreams of the stage and her waiflike charm. One of Sophy’s most endearing qualities is that she is a talented actress who never uses her gift to be malicious toward others. Lita also calls herself “modern” in 1927, and, like Sophy, she sees herself as a performer. Yet throughout Twilight Sleep, Lita acts out of narcissism, selfishness, and indifference. Sophy is a natural actor, but Lita is an act. Wharton positions Lita center stage in Twilight Sleep, allowing her to be the star around which all of the other deluded characters revolve. Lita is Wharton’s unconventional jazz baby, who drinks cocktails for breakfast, has no clocks in her house, smokes “amber scented cigarettes,” and whose “every moment” is “crammed with dancing, riding or games” (17).14 She seems indifferent to her six-month-old son, and hostile toward her husband. She complains to the Manfords that they are all boring and that she is bored, and when asked where else she might go, she replies, “Anywhere where I can dance and laugh and be hopelessly low-lived and irresponsible” (255). She sleeps all day, haunts nightclubs all night, and spends her time with “a bunch of freaks,” an entourage which includes a gay interior designer, Tommy Ardwin, and a Jewish Hollywood producer who goes by the ominous name of Serge Klawhammer, both of whom encourage her to abandon her New York life “to go into the movies” (76).15 Lita says very little in Twilight Sleep, and we are never privy to her thoughts, but there is no question that she commands attention. She is so overwhelming to watch that we sometimes get two pictures of her from two characters during the same scene. When Pauline gives a ball for her fatuous cousin Amalasuntha, Marchesa degli Duchi di Lucera, who has come from Italy to borrow money, we see two versions of Lita’s dancing. The Marchesa notices that Dexter is watching Lita dance, and remarks to him “You’re looking at Jim’s wife? . . . No wonder! Très en beauté, our Lita!—that dress, the very same colour as her hair, and those Indian emeralds . . . how clever of her!” (72). During the same dance, Nona describes how Lita draws all eyes to her as she dances with her freak friend, Tommy Ardwin:

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Lita Wyant and Tommy Ardwin. The decorator, tall and supple, had the conventional dancer’s silhouette; but he was no more than a silhouette, a shadow on the wall. All the light and music in the room had passed into the translucent creature in his arms. He seemed to Nona like some one who has gone into a spring wood and come back carrying a long branch of silver blossom . . . [Lita’s] sole affair was to shower radiance, his to attune his lines to hers. Her face was a small still flower on a swaying stalk; all her expression was in her body, in that long legato movement like a weaving of grasses under a breeze, a looping of little waves on the shore. (74–75)

Lita is the only character in Twilight Sleep whose looks are described in elaborate detail by every one of the main characters. They cannot take their eyes off of her. When they watch her—always moving or dancing or gliding—they always associate her with light (her name means “light”). Nona tries to place Lita’s allure: “It was simply that she was so beautiful. A vase? No—a lamp now: there was a glow from the interior. As if her red corpuscles had turned into millions of fairy lamps . . .” (283). Nona describes Lita’s charms with elaborate, sensual language: . . . Lita was made to be worshipped, not to worship; that was manifest in the calm gaze of her long narrow hut-coloured eyes, in the hieratic fixity of her lovely smile, in the very shape of her hands, so slim yet dimpled, hands which had never grown up, and which drooped from her wrists as if listlessly waiting to be kissed, or lay like rare shells or upcurved magnolia-petals on the cushions luxuriously piled about her indolent body. (16–17)

Nona also suggests that Lita’s charms work like a drug on the Manford family: A new scent—unrecognizable but exquisite. In its wake came Lita Wyant, halfdancing, half-drifting, fastening a necklace, humming a tune, her little round head, with the goldfish-coloured hair, the mother-of-pearl complexion and screwed-up auburn eyes, turning sideways like a bird’s on her long throat. (33)

Not only do they love to look at Lita, but also the other characters measure themselves by the standard of her beauty. Pauline, middle-aged and always keen for some new, expensive beauty regimen, decides to have a private chat with Lita, in hopes of luring her to stay in the family “with the offer of the cheque . . .” (192). When she sees Lita, however, Pauline is taken aback, and loses her train of thought for a moment to envy: “Lita slanted her head backward with a slight laugh. Mrs. Manford had never

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thought her pretty, but today the mere freshness of her parted lips, their rosy lining, the unspoilt curves of her cheek and long white throat, stung the older woman to reluctant admiration” (193). We also hear a great deal about Lita from her father-in-law, Dexter, who is both repelled and attracted to her. He remembers that she offended him when he first knew her, but that she slowly charmed him: Manford also disliked the girl at first, and deplored Jim’s choice. He thought Lita positively ugly, with her high cheekbones, her too small head, her glaring clothes and conceited lackadaisical airs . . . there were days when what he called her “beauty airs” exasperated him, others when he was chilled by her triviality. But she never bored him, never ceased to excite in him a sort of irritated interest. (106).

Eventually, Dexter succumbs to Lita’s charms, and indulges in a secret affair with her. Nona, the youngest and wisest of the Manfords, is the only one of them who finally breaks free of Lita’s allure. Initially Nona liked Lita’s sense of rebellion, her “unpunctuality, the irresponsibility, which made life with her such a thrillingly unsettled business after the clock-work routine of [Pauline’s] perfect establishment” (17). But after Nona senses that Lita has ensnared her own father, she begins to see Lita in a new light, one that seems more like an X-ray than a spotlight. Through Nona’s disillusionment with Lita and Dexter, we begin to see Lita as an exquisite but potent toxin, who works like poison on Dexter: “He had been absorbing a slow poison, the poison emanating from this dusky, self-conscious room, with all its pernicious implications” (109). After Nona searches Lita in the after-hours salon of Tommy Ardwin, she has new contempt for Lita, especially because of the company Lita keeps. Among Ardwin’s guests is one of the most hideous and stereotypical characters that Wharton ever created: a Hollywood producer named Serge Klawhammer. Wharton lampoons New York’s 1920s smart set with Ardwin’s salon party. All of the people Nona encounters are insipid, especially Ardwin himself, who pontificates to “his group of the enlightened” about art: “everything in art should be false. Everything in life should be art. Ergo, everything in life should be false: complexions, teeth, hair, wives . . . specially wives” (78). Not only is he stupid, but he also looks ridiculous: “He pivoted about on the company. When he was not dancing he looked, with his small snaky head and too square shoulders, like a cross between a Japanese waiter and a full-page advertisement for silk underwear” (78).16

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Nona describes Hollywood producer Klawhammer as a kind of creepy reptile: A short man with a deceptively blond head, thick lips under a stubby blond moustache, and eyes like needles behind tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, stood before the fire, bulging a glossy shirtfront and solitaire pearl toward the company. “Don’t this lady dance?” he enquired, in a voice like melted butter, a few drops of which seemed to trickle down his lips and be licked back at intervals behind a thickly ringed hand. (79)

Ardwin encourages Nona to “shed” her “togs” and “show Mr. Klawhammer here present” that she, too, has the stuff for Hollywood. Nona has no interest in the charade at Ardwin’s, and she declines, returning home to her own problems—her married lover lies to her and leaves her—and she becomes increasingly depressed. She suffers silently, however, because unlike Lita, a sponge for attention, Nona attracts little (her name can easily be respelled as “no one”). However, we depend on Nona’s clarity as she guides us most astutely and conscientiously through the rest of the disastrous story of the addicted Manfords. Especially after her encounter with Klawhammer, Nona sees Lita as inhuman. She watches Lita sleep: Thus exposed, with gaze extinct and loosened muscles, she seemed a mere bundle of contradictory whims tied together by a frail thread of beauty. The hand of the downward art hung open, palm up. In its little hollow lay the fat of three lives. What would she do with them? How could one conceive of her knowing, or planning, or imagining—conceive of her in any sort of durable human relations to any one or anything? (240)

When Lita wakes, she asks Nona to go dancing with her, but Nona declines, giving us her most damning criticism of Lita in the novel: [Dancing] was all life meant to Lita—would ever mean. Good floors to practise new dance-steps on, men—any men—to dance with and be flattered by, women—any women—to stare and envy one, dull people to startle, stupid people to shock—but never any one, Nona questioned, whom one wanted neither to startle nor shock, neither to be envied nor flattered by, but just to lose one’s self in for good and all? Lita lose herself—? Why, all she wanted was to keep on finding herself, immeasurably magnified, in every pair of eyes she met! (242)

Nona sees that Lita has all of the required traits of a leading lady in film, and her hunch that Lita might become a Hollywood star is supported

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by the comments of other characters, one of whom tells Nona that cinema is where Lita “belongs” (148). What better way than to go with the sleazy Klawhammer to Hollywood, where she can find “herself, immeasurably magnified,” than on a giant silver screen? Nona, a child of the cinema generation, knows Lita has the look and the manner for movies, that she has all of the traits of a magnified, bloodsucking vamp, not “a real human woman” (242). To Nona, Lita is an imposter, one who poisoned the Manfords with the venom of cinema madness. Near the end of the novel, we understand that indeed, all of the characters have heard Hollywood’s siren song, but that it is too late to resist. When their financially strapped cousin the Marchesa announces that her son Michelangelo has been sought by Klawhammer to star in a picture with Lita, Dexter imagines and then recoils at the thought of “Lita Wyant and Michelangelo as future film stars, ‘featured’ jointly on every hoarding from Maine to California” (166). He tells the Marchesa that Hollywood is nowhere for gentlemen. The Marchesa sets him straight: But, my friend, gentlemen can’t be choosers! Who are the real working-class today? Our old aristocracies, alas! And besides, is it ever degrading to create a work of art? I thought in America you made so much of creativeness—constructiveness—what do you call it? Is it less creative to turn a film than to manufacture bathtubs? Can there be a nobler mission than to teach history to the millions by means of beautiful pictures? (250)

The Manfords realize that they can “certainly not compete financially with Hollywood,” and that lavish sums of money awarded to pretty boys like Michelangelo or to jazz babies like Lita are more powerful than any of Pauline’s restive cures or Dexter’s bribes with old money. When Dexter tells Lita’s Aunt Kitty that Jim and Lita’s marriage is being threatened by Hollywood producers, he notes that the idea of “divorce, instead of frightening her, delighted her” (165). He realizes that she, like the Marchesa, is in debt, and that her “eyes were on Hollywood” (165). Kitty cannot understand Dexter’s horror of the movies: “Does the screen frighten you? How funny! . . . But surely you know the smartest people are going in for it?” (165). But the screen does frighten Dexter, not just because it will mean the end of his love affair with Lita, but because, as Nona puts it, the family is “not used yet to figuring on the posters” (266). Prophetic Nona is right when she adds, “Of course it’s only a question of time” (266). In her study of Wharton and classical allusions, Helen Killoran finds abundant evidence that Lita, her aunt Kitty, Ardwin, Klawhammer, the

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Marchesa, and her beautiful son Michelangelo represent a series of foreign Goths who might overrun the world of Twilight Sleep. They are “. . . dangerous Goths who threaten to invade, and perhaps destroy, American civilization” (110).17 Nona especially, with her comparisons of the cinema people to subhuman reptiles, and with her foreknowledge that, in time, the invaders will take hold in “this slippery sliding modern world” (49), would certainly agree. She understands that Goths like Lita and Michelangelo, “the newly arrived, with the film-glamour enhancing his noble Roman beauty,” will become new idols to be worshipped, and that, of course, it’s only a question of time before the old world is little more than a dream (310). At the conclusion of Twilight Sleep, Nona has become a crime victim, and lies alone in a hospital bed, recovering from a gunshot wound she has sustained at the hands of a drunken family member who meant to shoot Lita instead. Instead of waking the Manfords out of their various stupors, this accident scatters them, isolating them further in their own painless dream worlds, where they all rely on the drug of travel to induce more of the same: “ . . . when rich people’s nerves are out of gear the pleasant remedy of travel is the first prescribed” (306). Although Nona, the cleareyed “no one,” has taken a bullet for Lita, she suffers in isolation. She had predicted that she would be a victim early in the novel when she was thinking about her mother’s generation of “enlightened Americans” who “ignored sorrow and evil” by steeping themselves in the twilight sleep of faddish self-help programs, “as if they had never heard of anything but the Good and the Beautiful” (45). “Perhaps,” Nona had prophesized, “their children had to serve as vicarious sacrifices” (45). Nona knows her sacrifice will go unnoticed in a world of fakes, fantasy, and fads. She wisely and sadly acknowledges that there is no place for her in a world where people have no genuine feelings, “where nobody believes in anything” (315). Nona, who earlier had suggested that “somebody in every family had to remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering, and death had not yet been banished from the earth,” has become the one of the Manfords to bear the destruction with clear eyes (45). The others will continue to rely on whatever addictions they can, because, as Nona knows, they are too deluded to escape the invading Goths from Hollywood, who will continue to snare their victims with deadly doses of cinema madness. They have created new idols for worship: Tommy Ardwin, with his stupid, empty ideas on art; vulgar, lascivious Klawhammer; Michelangelo, “the future Valentino,” and Lita, the perfect

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and deadly movie star, whose beautiful face, like “a smooth heavy flower,” will forever “smile down on her worshippers” from a silver screen (281). Wharton had visited the United States only once in the 1920s before she wrote Twilight Sleep. Always meticulous with detail, she relied on her American correspondents to help her with the some of the details of American life in the 1920s, and she supplemented her knowledge with information from periodicals. Clearly, before she attempted to create the characters of Twilight Sleep, Wharton had done her homework on movie stars and Hollywood. In the text, she refers to the very real Rudolph Valentino, and she provides caricatures of Hollywood types, including the silly gay sycophant Tommy Ardwin and the ominous Jewish movie producer Serge Klawhammer. In addition to the parallel between fictional Michelangelo and real movie star Rudolph Valentino, she makes uncanny correspondences between Lita Wyant and several American movie stars of the era. The passages where Wharton describes how Lita moves and how she looks, suggest that someone—either one of Wharton’s friends, or perhaps Wharton herself—had learned about this jazz baby by watching any number of moving pictures, starring some of the world’s most famous starlets of the 1920s. Lita’s name not only means “light,” but also can be read as “lITa,” or in French as “l’Ita.” She certainly fits the profile of an “IT Girl,” a fabricated Hollywood studio term, embodied most effectively in Clara Bow. An IT girl had “sex appeal, sieved of its concomitants, love and affection, and offered neat” (Griffith and Mayer 149). Or, as screen actor Joseph Schildkraut told an interviewer in a 1920s issue of Photoplay Magazine, “‘IT’ is an AngloSaxon hypocrisy to cover up the honest phrase, sex magnetism” (Gelman 78). Wharton’s IT girl certainly fit the profile, from her gamine looks to her studied airs, to her constant need for stimulation and adoration. Lita, who in Twilight Sleep considers auditioning for the role of Cleopatra in Klawhammer’s film, also resembles the most famous vamp of the silent era, Theda Bara, who starred in a 1918 production of Cleopatra. Originally Theodosia Goodman of Ohio, Theda Bara was an extra on a movie set when she was discovered by a Hollywood producer. He reinvented her to be “an aggressive femme fatale who ruins men and tosses them aside,” and thus “gave the word ‘vampire’ and its derivatives ‘vamp’ and ‘baby vamp’ to the language . . .” (Griffith and Mayer 66). Again, given the chance, Wharton’s Lita could have upstaged Theda Bara. Wharton also suggests the two most glamorous female movie actors of the 1920s, Gloria Swanson and Pola Negri. Swanson, originally from

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Chicago, began her career as an extra in Mack Sennett comedies. By 1926, she had become most completely the genus Movie Star. Her camera-proof face, which can be photographed successfully from any angle, conforms to no known specifications of beauty, but the prognathous jaw, dished nose, and abnormally large eyes somehow blend into a bizarre loveliness which made her for years the idol and model of millions of women in the flapper era. (218)

Wharton also suggests Swanson in the Marchesa, an American who insists on being treated as royalty. During the 1920s, when Swanson married, she insisted that she be called the “Marquise de la Falaise de Coudray” (219). Pola Negri (who preferred to be called “Madame Negri”) might have suggested one of Wharton’s exotic and excessive Goths. Imported by Hollywood from Germany, where she had already established herself as a film actor, Negri initially had “an enormous following in the United States,” but gradually, probably due to bad handling, she lost influence. She was most famous in Hollywood, however, for having had an affair with Valentino, and for her melodramatic appearance at his funeral, where she swathed herself in black veils (219). The spectacle of Valentino’s Hollywood funeral in 1926 was splattered over the front pages of newspapers throughout the world. We can only imagine that this represented another example to Wharton of all in the modern age that she wanted to “try to forget,” as she had written to Minnie Jones in 1925 (Bauer, Edith 62).18 Wharton saw the United States of her memory as having been overrun by “moral monsters and criminals,” among them the ridiculous movie people she suggested in Klawhammer, Ardwin, and Lita (62). Wharton’s Manford family, fools all but one—Nona the no one—succumb without ever knowing that their world has been destroyed. That a nineteen-year-old girl, the only one of them immune to the cinema disease, should be the most poignant victim, speaks to Wharton’s understanding of the consequences of an artless American society consumed by dreams of false celebrity and easy wealth. In a world where everyone was in some sort of artificial stupor, all trying to stay young and desirable, they will not notice the devastating effects of their addictions on their children. Wharton’s final word on the disease of the cinema came in her very next novel, The Children (1928), where Wharton’s Lita/IT girl/vamp/siren has become middle aged, and, unfortunately, her children have suffered the consequences. Our guide through the tale of the Wheater children

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is forty-six-year-old American Martin Boyne. When we meet him, he is returning to Europe from South America to begin a new life with Rose Sellars, an American widow he has known since they were in their twenties.19 On the final leg of his journey, he befriends a group of seven children who belong, in one way or another, to an old friend of his from Harvard, Cliffe Wheater, now “one of the showiest of New York millionaires” and Wheater’s wife Joyce, “whom Boyne himself had danced and flirted with through a remote winter not long after Harvard” (12). The Wheater children, Boyne learns, are not all full siblings. Four of them: Judith, her twin brother and sister, Terry and Blanca, and the youngest child, two-year-old Chip, belong to Cliffe and Joyce Wheater, who during their first marriage had Judith, Terry and Blanca. They then divorced and were married to other spouses for a time, and then they remarried and had Chip. Two of the other children, “a sturdy brown boy” named Bun and “a very small brown girl” named Beechy, are “steps”—stepchildren of Joyce Wheater, whose second husband was a dissipated Italian count. Bun and Beechy are “foreigners . . . [their mother] was a lion-tamer” (29). Finally, five-year-old Zinnie, “the little red devil” with a “shock of orange hair” is a half-sister to the Wheaters, the issue of Cliffe’s brief marriage to “Zinnia Lacrosse, the film star” (27). After some confusion, the children’s stern governess, Miss Scopes, who on being told that Boyne knows their parents, confirms this fantastic story of the children to Boyne. She describes the Wheater family in terms of a tribe who lives in “a wilderness . . . picking up our tents every few weeks for another move . . . And the marriages just like tents—folded up and thrown away when you’ve done with them” (28). She explains that Judith convinced her parents to remarry, “and then Chip was born, and of course that has made everything all right again—for the present” (31). She adds, “Judith is almost sure it will last this time” (31). As he learns about fifteen-year-old Judith, Boyne becomes more and more interested in her, and he tries to categorize her in a way that others of Wharton’s unsatisfactory men—including Laurence Selden in House of Mirth, George Darrow in The Reef, and Dexter Manford in Twilight Sleep—would find familiar: “ . . . the more Boyne saw of her the more she perplexed him . . . He did not even know how old she was—somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, he conjectured . . .”(38). Also strategizing like Darrow and Manford, Boyne delays other commitments so that he can follow the alluring Judith and the children to Palermo, and then, with just a little encouragement, on to Venice, where

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he is reunited with the tribe’s parents, his old friends Cliffe and Joyce Wheater. He quickly realizes that his old friends are very different than they were in their youth. Cliffe is a loud, gregarious showoff who has come to Venice not to see his children, but to buy a yacht. Joyce, whom Boyne notes, speaks to her husband “with a slight steel edge in her silver voice,” wears too much makeup and jewelry. Boyne remembers her as “large, firm and rosy, with a core of artless sensibility,” but notes that she is now “extremely slim . . . with a little pout of disdain” and that “she seemed to have gone through some process of dematerialization . . . which had left a translucent and imponderable body about a hard little kernel of spirit” (51–52). The Wheaters invite Boyne to stay at their lavish hotel, but he declines, he says, because although “he loved Palace Hotels . . . he loathed the mere thought of the people who frequented them” (55). Boyne wants to stay at a smaller, more intimate hotel, conveniently, where Judith and the younger Wheater children are staying. As Boyne becomes increasingly obsessed with Judith, he thinks less about his fiancée, the patiently waiting Rose Sellars. He focuses more and more on Judith, whom he thinks of as a “playmate, mother and governess, all in one.” Judith stuns Boyne with her mixture of sophistication and naiveté. She calls her parents and their friends by their familiar first names (31). She knows how to mix cocktails and drink them (with him), smokes cigarettes (with him), and she understands her parents’ tenuous marriage in a very mature way. When Boyne suggests that she ought to go to school somewhere, Judith confronts his patronizing tone by telling him that she understands that her parents habitually betray each other with lovers. She challenges him, “quivering with anger” by describing herself: “I’m as old as your grandmother. I’m as old as the hills” (59). Judith tells Boyne that she knows her parents “do all sorts of crazy things . . . take up with horrid people . . . who drink and have rows . . .”(61). When she tells Boyne that she thinks her parents will split up again, he tries to comfort her: “I see no signs of anything going wrong. The only trouble with them is that they’re too rich” (60). As they continue to talk, Boyne, “hearing a shuffle on the gravel, looked around and saw the maid approaching with a card . . . bearing the name: Marchioness of Wrench” (61). If Boyne had not taken Judith seriously before, he will now, for standing before him, in all her movie-star regalia, is one of the “horrid people,” the mother of Zinnie, Zinnia Lacrosse, the Marchioness of Wrench. Zinnia Lacrosse, perhaps taking a cue from Gloria Swanson, insists that she be called by her new married title: “It’s the Marchioness of

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Wrench. Only I’m just called Lady Wrench, except on visiting-cards, and when they put me in the newspapers, or I talk to the servants” (62). She has come to Venice not to reunite with her daughter, but to show Zinnie to her new husband, whom she describes as “dead lazy”: “But I only want to show Wrenny that I can have a baby if I choose . . . he doesn’t believe I’ve ever had one . . . I can see he’s got to have an heir” (63). She pleads with Judith as only a rich American movie star can, in familiar American slang, and with a bribe of expensive jewelry: “Look here, Judy, ain’t I always dealt with you white? Let me see her right away, won’t you? I’ve got a lovely present for her here, and one for you too . . .” (63). Boyne has learned from Judith’s mother Joyce that Judith is so adept at mothering that “she tried to be a mother to Zinnia Lacrosse . . . Fancy a child of Judy’s age attempting to keep a movie star straight!”(53). Boyne watches Judith as she tries to negotiate the visit with Zinnie. What he sees is that the other children are drawn to Zinnia, waiting for presents, and Judith is silenced while the movie star does all of the talking. Zinnia reduces Judith to a spectator, while she rambles on with boasts about her “pearls flowing in cataracts” and her custom-made dress. When questioned about her pearls, Zinnia refers to herself as royalty: “movie queens don’t have to wear fake pearls . . . ’cos if the real ones get stolen they can always replace ’em” (70). As she throws gifts to the children, she tells them “When I give presents I don’t go to the ten-cent store for them,” and then she exits “in a dazzle of pearls and laughter” (70). Boyne notes that Judith’s “features, so tense and grownup looking during the film star’s visit, had melted into the small round face of a pouting child” (71). This is Zinnia Lacrosse’s biggest scene in The Children, where she actually plays only a minor supporting role in the saga of Boyne and the Wheater children. We learn nothing about her background, nor about the talents that made her so celebrated and wealthy. But we already know her. She is the projection of a type whom Wharton suggested in Sophy Viner, and had developed carefully in her writings during the 1920s. Zinnia Lacrosse is the movie queen who might have begun her career as someone’s secretary, clever enough to impersonate a governess, or as a hedonistic flapper who left her boring husband behind when she danced her way to Hollywood. Zinnia Lacrosse is Wharton’s mature movie star—vulgar, shallow, and self-absorbed—whose talents and ambitions, whatever they may have been, have catapulted her into high society’s stratosphere. She owes something to Gloria Swanson, something to vampire Theda Bara, and,

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poignantly enough, something to Mary Pickford, who, by 1927, was deciding whether to cut her locks so she could compete with the younger It girls. Zinnia has transcended the movie screen, and now belongs to the dissipated European aristocracy, where she resides with her silly, lazy husband, floating aimlessly around Europe on their yacht. As such, the movie star has become a harmless ornament. As Judith tells Boyne, “Zinnia doesn’t really matter, you know . . . She screams a lot; but she doesn’t mean anything by it” (71). As harmless as she might seem, Zinnia embodies a particular standard of beauty and charm to which other characters in The Children aspire. Zinnia reminds anyone who will listen to her that she could buy and sell all of them: she has the biggest pearls, the richest husband, many adoring fans, and the most freedom. The other adult women all try to look like her, including Joyce Wheater, whose pronounced thinness and bee-stung lips confuse Boyne when he first sees her, and Syb Lullmer, the Wheaters’ sad friend, a “small sleek creature,” “chock full of drugs,” whom Boyne finds “hideous” (133). When Boyne sees Syb for the first time, he notes her “craving eyes” and “piercing whine,” and he is horrified by “her large dark eyes . . . as empty as a medium’s” and her mouth, which “moved just enough to let out a flat knife-edge of voice” (135). Boyne first mistakes Syb for Judith when he sees her from a distance, probably because she dresses to the youthful-looking standards of a movie star. In fact, all of the women in the Wheater circle look and behave alike, a point that is lost on Boyne until someone else—his intended wife, Rose Sellars—points it out to him. Rose’s is the voice who suggests to Boyne that the luxurious world of the Wheaters represents a nightmare vision, a modern world of the impersonal, the superficial, and the automated. Rose, herself an artist of singular and nonconformist vision, becomes the character through whom we begin to understand the devastating effects of modern movie culture in The Children. After the spectacle and noise of the Wheater circle in Venice, Boyne feels relief when he finally joins Rose at her home high in the mountains.20 As the foil for Zinnia Lacrosse, Joyce Wheater, and Syb Lullmer, Rose represents the natural ripe loveliness of a middle-aged woman. She has admirable qualities and gifts—she is a talented painter, an avid reader, and “a tireless walker, proud of her light foot and firm muscles,” (80). She eschews most luxuries for a good hike in the mountains, loves to read silently by a fire, and yet can also be a lively and interesting conversationalist. She is thoughtful, even-tempered, patient, and sympathetic. She seems to

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be a dream come true for Boyne, which means, in Wharton’s world, that things will not work out between them. Boyne admires all of Rose’s admirable qualities, yet he remains attentive to the girl/mother Judith. He reminds himself “with a pang, of the contrast between [Rose’s] ordered and harmonious life . . . and the chaotic experiences of the poor little girl who for a moment had displaced [Roses’s] image” (81). Persuading/deluding himself that Rose needs “fun” and “a change,” Boyne takes her to dinner at the Wheaters’ hotel, a “‘Palace’ among the pines below [her] châlet, where he thought the crowd and gaiety of the big restaurant might amuse her” (95). As she watches the other diners, Rose reacts to the spectacle: “The girl in the peach-colour, over there by the column—lovely isn’t she? Only one has seen her a thousand times, in all the ‘Vogues’ and ‘Tatlers’ [sic]. Oh, Martin, won’t it be too awful if beauty ends by being standardised too?” (95). Boyne thinks beauty is already standardized, and he agrees with Rose that “I’m sure if I owned one of these new beauties I shouldn’t always be able to pick her out in a crowd” (96). As it happens, the peach-colored girl standing next to the column, whom Martin can’t yet admit that he would like “to own,” is Judith Wheater. As soon as he sees her, his conversation with Rose ends, and he is drawn into the sordid affairs of Judith and the Wheater children once again. Yet Rose’s words about standardized beauty haunt Boyne, and will lead him, further on, to a nightmarish understanding of the death of beauty and his place in the world. Boyne leaves Rose again shortly after this dinner scene, and their relationship begins to deteriorate as she perceives that he has been charmed irretrievably by Judith. He returns to the Wheater circle to try to help the children, and one evening, he finds himself seated at dinner “between Zinnia Lacrosse and Joyce Wheater” and across from the hideous Syb Lullmer. Boyne’s mind drifts amid the inane conversation at his table, and he is reminded of Rose’s misgivings about beauty in the modern world. He sees that he is sitting inside a nightmare: All about them, at other tables exactly like theirs, sat other men exactly like Lord Wrench and Wheater . . . other women exactly like Joyce and Zinnia and Mrs. Lullmer. Boyne remembered Mrs. Sellars’s wail at the approach of a standardized beauty: Here it was, in all its mechanical terror—endless and meaningless as the repetitions of a nightmare. (136)

He continues:

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Every one of the women in the vast crowded restaurant seemed to be of the same age, to be dressed by the same dress-makers, loved by the same lovers, adorned by the same jewelers, and massaged and manipulated by the same Beauty doctors . . . A double jazz-band drowned their conversation, but from the movement of their lips and the accompanying gestures, Boyne surmised that they were all saying exactly the same things as Joyce and Zinnia and Mrs. Lullmer. (136)

Boyne’s nightmare suggests a silent film, complete with a chorus line of powdered and costumed starlets, fake scenery, silent dialogue, and a disconnected and dissonant soundtrack. Wharton supports Boyne’s description of a dazzling, false movie set by using language suggestive of a cinema experience. As this scene closes, the diners all see “a triangle of stars” atop Wheater’s boat, the “Fancy Girl,” and the wind, “as darkness fell, carried the reflection toward the shore on a multitude of little waves” (136). The look-alike actors, Wharton adds, “following the line of least resistance, drifted down to the pier, where the ‘Fancy Girl’s’ launch lay mingling the glitter of its brasses with the glow of constellations in the ripples” (137). Boyne, like George Darrow and Dexter Manford before him, has a weakness for young women; cannot bear the thought of being old, and cannot be honest with himself or others.21 Also like Darrow and Manford, Boyne’s weaknesses contribute to the gloomy, unresolved conclusion of his story. By the end of the book, he has broken with Rose, been turned down by Judith, and has retreated back to the wilderness of South America, where he remains “a lonely man,” his attempts to help keep the seven Wheater children together a sad failure (299). Yet Boyne distinguishes himself from the earlier characters in one way: he acknowledges his loneliness, and it transforms him. Boyne begins as a rigorous suitor and knight, but by the end of his story, he has become an old man, watching a silent film in the dark. Rose Sellars’ suggestion that the new world they live in is an empty, standardized new world stays with Boyne. He learns from her that the modern world is a movie, full of actors who, if they are women, imitate and compete with Zinnia Lacrosse, (Lita Wyant, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow . . .). The men talk about the same things, and wear evening clothes exactly alike. The young, appealing, “peach-coloured” girls play virginal damsels in distress. He also learns that, as horrifying as this standardized world looks, it is the only world left. In the final scene of the novel, Boyne faces his sad truth: there is no place for him in this world. Three years

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have elapsed, and Boyne is taking a short holiday in Europe. He chances upon one of the Wheater children, the “red devil” Zinnia, precocious daughter of a movie star, who fills him in on their story. The family, like the Manford family at the end of Twilight Sleep, has scattered. The youngest child, Chip, has died; the two Italians are back in Italy; the twins are safely in boarding schools. Judith, Zinnie tells him, is staying in this hotel, and “she’s got a new dress for the dance tonight” (296). Boyne dines alone, and then lingers outside the hotel, looking for Judith. He gazes from the darkness into a window, which, given its description, might just as well be a movie screen. He sees the unfocused image of a group of dancers who all look alike, and he begins to understand that he cannot interact with the others, but can only participate as a viewer. He can only watch the screen before him: The terrace . . . was but faintly lit, and the spectacle within seemed therefore more brilliantly illuminated . . . At first he saw only a blur of light and colour; couples revolving slowly under the spreading chandeliers, others streaming in and out of the doorways, or grouped about the floor in splashes of brightness. The music rose and fell in palpitating rhythms . . . (297)

Boyne waits for Judith’s entrance onto the screen before him. He cannot distinguish her among the dancers, but he imagines that “she might be gazing out at him with unknown eyes” (297). He looks away for a moment “into the darkness” where the “pain of not seeing her” was so “unendurable” that he thought he might “be crying” (297). He “mechanically turned back,” just in time to see Judith’s face come into focus, “close to him on the other side of the pane, moving across the long reflection . . . She was facing Boyne now—she was joining a group near his window.” A close-up shot of her face reveals to Boyne that her eyes seemed “to have grown larger and more remote, but her mouth was round and red” (298). He tries to read her lips as she talks with a young man, but this is a silent movie, and Boyne has to imagine what she is saying. He realizes that “he would never know” and so he withdraws, and sits “there a long time in the dark” (299). Boyne, one of Wharton’s classic male voyeurs, is now the classic moviegoer, one who adores the star from his seat in the dark, and cries at the end of the film. His nightmare of the mechanical terror has become his reality: Judith is lost to him—she belongs to this artless, heartless age, full of beautiful automatons, and equally cruel to children and their elders. She is now part of the glittering spectacle, and he has become just another of her faceless fans. As her image moves swiftly by, and as he tries to keep her in

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focus, he realizes that the mechanical terror of the age has so much more power than he does, that he himself has succumbed to it. Boyne knows that he will always be on this side of the screen. He can only be consoled by rerunning his visions of Judith, which, according to his own predictions, will become an “endless and meaningless” series of “repetitions of a nightmare.” Perhaps Rose’s wise words will haunt Boyne as he wrestles with his nightmare of the mechanical terror of standardized life: to Judith and her generation, life “rushes past . . . in a whirl. Life’s a perpetual film . . . You can’t get up out of your seat in the audience and change the current of a film” (93). With Boyne’s reduction to a faceless moviegoer, Wharton’s invaders from Hollywood in Twilight Sleep have completed their occupation, and the world is now cinema-mad. By the time she published Twilight Sleep and The Children, Wharton would have understood Hollywood’s power most clearly because she had been negotiating lucrative movie deals with Hollywood for ten years by that point, since she had sold the film rights of The House of Mirth to the fledgling Metro studio in 1918. During the post-war years during which she was learning to conform her short fiction to the standards of a changing marketplace, she was also learning to deal with American film studios because she “realized that Hollywood could be an important source of income for her” (Benstock 361). The Age of Innocence, which had “sold 115,000 copies in America, Canada, and Great Britain in the first year,” became an especially lucrative sale to Hollywood when Wharton sold the rights to Warner Brothers for $9,000 in the early 1920s. By the midtwenties, earnings from that novel alone totaled $50,000, enough for her to restore her second home at Hyères (363). The Age of Innocence remained on the best-seller list in the United States until 1922, when it was eclipsed by a romance novel written by a beginner also named Edith: The Sheik, by Edith Maude Hull of Derbyshire, England.22 Like Wharton, Hull took advantage of the lucrative movie deal offered to her. The 1921 Paramount production of The Sheik energized the American film industry, and polarized the public, not because of E. M. Hull’s story, but because of the film’s star, Rudolph Valentino, an Italian immigrant who had been a “gardener, dish washer, and gigolo” until he began making movies in Hollywood (Griffith 140). Valentino’s profile as Latin lover, and the popularity of The Sheik were phenomena that Wharton acknowledged in her cinema-age fiction. The Sheik “was intended to be a minor film,” just another desert adventure film like the one Charity Royall might have seen in Nettleton

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five years earlier (140). Hull’s plot had all of the characteristics of an exotic romance: Lady Diane, orphaned daughter of an English poet, initially appears to be the epitome of the “New Woman” since she is a boyish creature who has renounced marriage . . . during a trip to the Saudi Arabian desert, she is kidnapped by an Arab tribal chieftain, handsome but cruel, who proceeds to rape her . . . He teaches her the meaning of submission, and as a consequence, she finds herself in love with him . . . She is captured by a rival tribe. The Sheik rescues her . . . Diane is told that her kidnapper/lover is not an Arab, but the son of an English lord and a Spanish aristocrat. (Studlar 297)

The Hollywood adaptation (true to the novel excepting the rape scene, which was censored) ensured Rudolph Valentino heartthrob status among women spectators. He became Hollywood’s first “screen persona created by women” (Sklar 104). At a time when New Women (including Charity Royall) were defining themselves as consumers and were enjoying new freedoms, Valentino’s popularity reflected women’s power to shape the public sphere. The Sheik, like others of Valentino’s s films, allowed a 1920s American woman, who “was usually not as emancipated as her image suggested,” the freedom to fantasize in a world where “her access to consumer culture often entailed an underpaid job, loneliness . . . housework and childrearing” (Hansen 648). Valentino’s screen persona focused “pleasure on a male protagonist of ambiguous . . . identity,” who “appealed to those who most strongly felt the effects—freedom as well as frustration—of . . . the precariousness of a social mobility based on consumerism” (648). Valentino appealed to women not just because his movies provided escape from an unstable or monotonous world, however. Valentino’s persona was unlike any other.23 His “appeal was that of a ‘stranger’” in an American film industry in which other male actors “did not display any distinct ethnic features,” but were deliberately groomed as generic white males (649). Valentino’s “racial otherness was masked by a discourse of exoticism—the Arab sheik, the Indian rajah, the Latin-American gaucho” that allowed the female moviegoer “to indulge in the fantasy at a safe distance” (Hansen 649). As distant as he might have been on the other side of the screen, to many white Americans, Valentino’s persona suggested miscegenation at a time when “sexual paranoia toward black men” and immigrants of color had “reached a new pitch” (649). He was a fantasy encouraged by white women in a white man’s world, and his stardom

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symbolized to many whites “the dreaded possibilities of woman-made masculinity” (Studlar 151).24 The Valentino phenomenon, like Harlem jazz, dancing, and the rise of ethnically diverse writers, threatened the values of the white status quo, and represented a “crisis of American cultural and social values” of the time (Hansen 635). Valentino became more popular because of, and in spite of, resistance to his persona. His name appeared in “antifeminist tracts, general interest magazines, and popular novels” of the 1920s, among them Wharton’s Twilight Sleep, where the Manfords’ cousin Michelangelo hopes to take The Loved One’s place (Studlar 151). Michelangelo, in fact, exhibits traits of Valentino that would make him a good candidate for the job, especially his ethnic heritage, which, like the Sheik’s Anglo/Spanish heritage, is mixed in mysterious ways—his mother, Amalasuntha, insists that “there’s always been a rumour of Borgia blood on the San Fedele side” (Twilight 249). Wharton suggested in Michelangelo (and later in Jim Targatt’s “long-lashed” brother-in-law Boris Kouradjine in Charm Incorporated), variations on a stereotype that Valentino came to symbolize: “sexualized and greedy masculinity . . . darkly foreign, an immigrant who was ready to make his way in the New World by living off women and their restless desires” (Studlar 151). Among his other distinctions, Rudolph Valentino is the only historical figure associated with the movies whom Wharton ever mentioned by name in her fiction. His role in Twilight Sleep, which Wharton was writing at the time of his sudden death in 1926, projects not only Wharton’s vision of a tainted and declining culture, but also attests to her understanding of Valentino’s profile and magnetism. He was everything that Wharton’s unsatisfactory men—George Darrow, Jim Wyant, Dexter Manford, Martin Boyne—were not: exotic, mysterious, ethnic, and sexual. Wharton referenced him in the same way that others of his critics did: as a threat to a younger generation of American women. Valentino, and Wharton’s Michelangelo, (and later, Boris Kouradjine) became repositories for much that Wharton feared. They “were men of suspicious foreign origin” who “were thought to be an insidious threat to the nation” because they might mix their exotic blood with that of whites, and produce the likes of the poor twins in The Children, and, in the future, children born to Jim Targatt and Nadeja Kouradjine (Studlar 152). For Wharton, a popular movie culture that reflected cultural diversity might also promote “the intermingling of customs, and the overthrow of traditions,” which “could bear no rich cultural fruit” (Benstock, No Gifts 388).

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As Nona predicted in Twilight Sleep, it was only a matter of time before the movies overtook the world. For Wharton, the most vulnerable victims of the onslaught were the very people whom Wharton understood most clearly because she was one of them: white women artists. Her movie characters reveal that which Wharton feared about her own profile as a writer during the 1920s: she had compromised her artistic and professional integrity by selling herself to the popular American media. At the same time she was admiring the work of younger writers, and publishing in the same magazines as they were, Wharton was also aware that this younger generation represented values that she did not share, especially their acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity and their willingness to embrace a diverse popular culture. When Wharton’s critically acclaimed Age of Innocence was eclipsed by a lurid desert melodrama about an English rose and her foreign lover, Wharton understood that her own prestige was threatened, and that the younger generation was destabilizing the traditional culture of which she had long been a part. For “Wharton, mass culture was generational,” writes Bauer (Edith 121). She disparaged it “not so much because of its class and gender affiliations, but because it signaled the end of her generation and the rise of another literary era” (121). Wharton recognized that what distinguished the new generation most from hers was the ease with which it embraced and celebrated popular culture. Her own references to popular culture in her fiction, and her broad parodies of movie people, reflect her anxieties about her own participation in—and isolation from—the cinema generation. Wharton’s distinguished career had begun when she exposed the hypocrisies of her own social class in The House of Mirth, where she “attacked the repressive constraints of American society” (12). In her fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, she exposed and explored another kind of repression, and she implicated herself in this crime as well. Her movie-age novels, in which she portrays American culture as “tolerant of everything, discriminating about nothing,” reveal her anxieties not just about the state of the civilization, but also about her complicity in the crime (12). Her contributions to women’s magazines and the sales of her novels to Hollywood now suggested her endorsement of the new standards of a younger generation of writers. If Wharton had seen herself as one of Lily Bart’s murderers in 1905, then she also saw herself as one of the people who helped destroy the Manford and Wheater women in the 1920s. During the final two decades of her career, Wharton became her own aging movie star.

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Wharton shares more than a few characteristics with her movie star, Zinnia Lacrosse, whose masses of pearls were the envy of other women. Wharton, with “pearls twined in her hair, furs draped around her shoulders,” had posed for years’ worth of publicity photos.25 She knew the consequences of allowing her books to be advertised and her persona to be circulated: that she had to yield her power as author to those who promoted and consumed her works.26 Wharton’s movie actors, like the author herself, have no power—they have been defined and packaged by others. She portrays her movie-mad women, aging stars, and foreign lovers as puppets whose strings are manipulated. And although she might have been “loathe to blame any scapegoat” for “the American chaos” that compromised her stature, she did lay blame for the sorry lives of her movie characters (146). The puppet masters who control Wharton’s movie people are the powerful Klawhammers of the film world, the Jewish film producers, in whose foreign presence and power Wharton locates the source of contamination. None of the other Jewish characters whom Wharton created, including Simon Rosedale in The House of Mirth, Mr. Fleischauer in The Custom of the Country, and Julius Beaufort in The Age of Innocence, came close to the acridity of Serge Klawhammer in Twilight Sleep, in which Arthur Wyant abuses him most clearly as a “Dirty Jew . . . the kind we used to horsewhip” (267). The closest to a twin for Klawhammer that Wharton ever created was the unnamed male whom Anna Leath encounters in Laura McTarvie-Birch’s hotel suite at the conclusion of The Reef: “another man, short, swarthy and humble” who watches Anna with keen interest as he sizes her up (349). This “furtively observant Jew” has a brief moment in the novel, and he never speaks (Kassanoff 109). Klawhammer, with his dyed blonde hair, his thick lips, and his garish jewelry, speaks several times in Twilight Sleep (“Don’t this lady dance?”) and his name comes up in many conversations (79). He has no redeeming qualities, but much power in the novel, where he casts a long shadow over the Manfords, who all dread his influence. With “eyes like needles behind tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses,” Klawhammer envisions how he can use people as he watches them dance, and he works to entice them to become his puppets (79). In The Children, whose movie star is now harmless and obsolete, Wharton offers the final word—ironically, a powerful silence—on the Hollywood moguls in her novels, not by including ugly caricatures of them, but by revealing the consequences of their power. The Klawhammers of Hollywood no longer need to travel to New York to solicit talent

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for the screen, because the Litas, Micheangelos, and Tommy Ardwins have been lured by a siren call to Hollywood, and have damaged themselves and their families with the blood of circus performers and foreigners. The moguls manipulate their empires silently from behind the scenes, and their puppets—men, women, children, writers—all duplicated and replicated, are consumed. Wharton, angry with ill-mannered magazine editors who disfigured her work and wanted to tell her how to write, angry that she had been lured by the sirens of the popular, deposited her sense of entrapment and betrayal into the movie business, and projected her rage with the publishing industry onto the Hollywood establishment. By portraying a diverse group of movie people who are entrapped and distorted by vulgar, foreign moneymen, Wharton reflected her own sense of betrayal by American publishing empires that tried to package and distort her work. In 1926, while Wharton was completing Twilight Sleep and starting work on The Children in France, German film director Fritz Lang was putting the final touches on Metropolis, a 153-minute epic that premiered in Berlin in January 1927, and opened in France later that year.27 Set in 2026, Metropolis tells the story of a future city in which the privileged and wealthy live in well-lit skyscrapers above ground, and the thousands of workers who sustain this modern paradise live a grueling existence with their children in cavelike darkness underground. In the first underground sequence of the movie, we watch hundreds of catatonic workers, all dressed alike, as they trudge in unison up a ramp into the mouthlike Moluch, the opening to Metropolis’s underground power source. Among the workers is a young woman, Maria, who takes care of the workers’ children. Early in the movie, she sneaks her charges above ground, where they watch young men and women dance and cavort in a garden. There are several clichéd subplots in Metropolis. While above ground with the children, Maria catches the eye of young Freder, son of the Master of Metropolis Joh Freder, who pursues her underground and learns of the degrading lives of the workers. To stem the tide of the workers’ revolt, and to force his son to return above ground, Freder enlists the help of an old friend, mad scientist Rotwag, who creates a robot-woman. Rotwag transforms her from a metal figure into a machine identical to Maria. This robot-Maria, with heavily made-up eyes and the dance moves of a vixen, cannot be controlled by Rotwag. She lures the workers with sex and drink, and works them into such a violent frenzy that they begin to

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destroy the machinery of both the lower and upper worlds of Metropolis. Near the end of the film, Freder finds the human Maria in the flooding underworld, and the two of them spend their time trying to evacuate the many innocent children of the workers from the flooding underworld. Robot-Maria, in the meantime, has been discovered, and is burned at the stake. We see her melt, and she transforms from a human to a machine. Metropolis was criticized at the time of its release and for many years afterward, for being “all eyes and no brain” (Mast 172). Seen as overly simplistic and predictable, critics agreed that it presented “sentimental clichés in response to the crisis of labor and management” (Sklar 127). Despite its lame plot, melodrama, and overacting, “the sweep of cinema history” has elevated Metropolis from over-indulgent curiosity to landmark status because of its visual elements. Sklar points out that movies have the power to: espouse a philosophy, an ideology, a political theory, but many of the greatest films are less likely to be paragons of narrative coherence than they are to be triumphs of spectacle and mise-en-scène. They communicate through the feelings evoked by their visual power rather than by logic. This is the case with Metropolis. Long after one has dismissed its narrative banalities, its powerful images remain: the fabulous city and horrendous machinery run by clocks and steam, for which the workers function as changeable parts. (127–128)

Film scholars see in Metropolis’s stunning cinematic composition, suggestions of the most plaguing problems of the era, played out most effectively through the visuals: unbridled capitalism, labor issues, science and technology, even generational and familial relationships. The role of women in society becomes a dazzling visual, where the “radical opposition of the two Marias has become the focus for analyzing the film’s complex interplay of sexuality and technology, gender and ideology” (129). We watch the fears of the early twentieth century unfold before us, including fears of mechanization, conformity, unbridled wealth and greed, and revolution of the unenlightened masses. People all look alike and are interchangeable; an innocent female transforms into a dangerous and destructive monster, and children huddle in a mountain of fear, the ultimate victims of their parents’ addictions and follies. In Wharton’s Twilight Sleep and The Children, people look alike, women’s images reflect desire, sex, and destruction, and children are victimized by their selfish parents’ addictions. Where Lang used visuals to overwhelm his audience with the fears of his time, Wharton suggested

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the same fears through her movie stereotypes. Like Lang, Wharton was sympathetic to her characters, “who are bewildered about and struggling to find niches in” the modern world (Bauer, Edith 6). Like Wharton, Lang was exploring the consequences of a world that was being manipulated by invisible, greedy forces, and that was moving quickly and indiscriminately on an assembly line toward upheaval.28 Metropolis and Wharton’s late novels also share similar legacies. Literary critics leveled many of the same charges at Twilight Sleep and The Children as film critics did toward Metropolis, that the plots were weak, the characters mere types, and the lessons too obvious.29 Wharton’s critics, who “have been invested in her focus on manners and morals and have tended to dismiss her late fiction as sloppy, cranky, or uninteresting,” have dismissed “her treatment of the narcissistic and dangerous habits of a newer generation” (9). Yet like Metropolis, Twilight Sleep, and The Children, despite their initial spotty critical reception, stand as valuable projections of the tastes and fears of an artist who was trying to make sense of the conflicted, complicated time between the two world wars, and was attempting to define herself in an unstable world. Fritz Lang, a German Jew, would become one of Wharton’s foreign invaders when he fled Germany in 1933 and reinvented himself as a Hollywood film director, where he directed many notable films, including the noir classics Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), The Woman in the Window (1944), The Big Heat (1953), and While the City Sleeps (1956). Although he enjoyed a long career in Hollywood, during his lifetime his critical reputation suffered among film purists, who accused him of selling out to American film industry standards, and becoming “an all-purpose Hollywood director” (Humphries 18). Although film scholars have challenged the dismissive “suggestion that Lang lost his artistic soul the moment he was sucked into industrial Hollywood,” he struggled during his lifetime to maintain his artistic integrity. The tensions and paranoias of his late dark films reflect his understanding of his tentative position in an unstable, slippery world (210). Like Wharton, whose sympathies lie with those who are entrapped, Lang distinguishes himself as an artist who “probes the ambiguous status of victims most profoundly” (Leitch 92). For all they had in common, we have no evidence that Lang and Wharton ever met. Wharton never documented a trip to the cinema to see Metropolis, and Lang never indicated that he knew anything about Edith Wharton. Wharton did not have to see Lang’s Metropolis to understand his vision, and Lang would have recognized Wharton’s mechanical terror.

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They shared the same nightmare at the same time because this vision of standardized human mechanization and victimization was everywhere in the 1920s and 1930s. The future was now, bubbling up through the cracks of an unstable, war-torn world. This was a deceptively beautiful celluloid future, where repetitive illusions and a façade of wealth were easily betrayed by a landscape of glamorous violence, armies of invading foreigners, and fleeting bright lights, all in continual motion. Wharton had clearly been inside movie theaters during the war years, and had recognized the storytelling strategies of popular movies as the same strategies she had rejected in her fiction. In her earliest references to film, she revealed her understanding of the dynamics of a movie theater, and of narrative film as a site of dreams and nightmares. In her short fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, and in Twilight Sleep, and The Children, Wharton dispensed with references to the spectacle of the cinema, and instead began to privilege the cultural icons, simple stereotypes, and superficial, generic aspects of cinema culture. Sometime after World War I, during the years when Mary Pickford’s movies were transforming motion pictures into the film industry, Wharton must have decided that she had seen enough. She stopped watching movies, but she did not stop thinking about them. She no longer needed to see movies to understand their impact. Movie culture was reflected and projected everywhere: in the air, in people’s dreams, on their backs, in their bank accounts, and in every other medium, including her own. As narrative film—as Hollywood—became dominant, Wharton turned away from the movies themselves, and began portraying movie culture as an increasingly ominous impediment to individual growth and independence. In the best of her fiction, whether she referenced cinema or not, Wharton grappled with the problems that individuals face when they cannot conform to a prescribed agenda. Her characters all yearn for freedom from restrictions, often restrictions that they themselves have helped perpetuate. One of Wharton’s most effective strategies was to reflect these characters against their own institutions. She “immersed herself in her times” in order to explore “how culture operated upon the individual” (Bauer, Edith 6). Wharton immersed herself “in cultural experience, even alien experience, paradoxically to avoid alienation” (7). As she immersed herself in an increasingly alien Hollywood culture, she liked it less and less. She saw movie culture, as she herself wrote, as an “enemy of the imagination” that inhibited people from creating their own identities and defining themselves.

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Film became a way for Wharton to explore her own rocky relationship with the mass popular culture to which she was contributing in the 1920s and 1930s. As such, she becomes the central figure in a story about the resiliency and triumph of her art. She used her imagination to transcend the world that threatened to categorize and entrap her, by writing her way into alternative worlds of her own making. Late in her life, she wrote to a friend, “I am always longing to tell about the life of the imaginary people who populate my dreams” (Benstock, No Gifts 432). She projected her longings onto her most compelling characters, all of whom, no matter what their entrapments, also sustained themselves by imagining alternative worlds in their dreams. Near the conclusion of the Age of Innocence, after Newland Archer has ruminated over his son’s choice of brides, Dallas reveals his mother’s deathbed conversation to Archer. May had “said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted” (214). Archer is silent. Only we and he know that May, beyond the grave, has had the power to co-opt and transform the most significant story of his life into a different story. Although he quietly tries to take his story back by setting Dallas straight (“She never asked me”), Archer is overwhelmed: “He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime” (214). Later, Archer realizes that he does “not regret Dallas’s indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guessed and pitied. . . . And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably” (214). He transcends his “packed regrets” when he realizes that May, the obstacle to his freedom, has actually freed him to keep his most private memories and cherished dreams intact. By trying to interpret his story, however inarticulately and inaccurately, she acknowledged and respected the depth and integrity of Archer’s inner life. Like Archer, Wharton might also be moved to know that, despite her resentments toward it, cinema art would free her. The movies would learn to articulate her yearnings and dreams, with sympathy and respect.

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Edith Wharton in pearls and furs, what her character Zinnia Lacrosse might have worn in The Children. 8djgiZhnAâanA^WgVgn!>cY^VcVJc^kZghîn!7addb^c\idc!>C#

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Mary Pickford in 1917, the year Wharton sent Charity to watch “yellow-haired beauties” at the cinema in Summer. EjWa^Xînhiâa XdjgiZhnd[E]did[Zhi>cX#

Boyne (Fredric March) and Judy (Mary Brian) with those rascally children in The Marriage Playground (1930). EjWa^XînhiâaXdjgiZhnd[E]did[Zhi>cX#


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Archer (John Boles) and Ellen (Irene Dunne) with their teacups in The Age of Innocence (1934). EjWa^Xînhiâa XdjgiZhnd[E]did[Zhi>cX#

A happy Charlotte (Bette Davis) with cousin Delia (Miriam Hopkins) in The Old Maid (1939). EjWa^Xînhiâa XdjgiZhnd[E]did[Zhi>cX#


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The old maids. EjWa^XînhiâaXdjgiZhnd[ E]did[Zhi>cX#

Mattie (Patricia Arquette) and Ethan (Liam Neeson) alone and together by firelight in Ethan Frome (1993). EjWa^XînhiâaXdjgiZhnd[E]did[Zhi>cX#


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A Scorsese tableau: Ellen (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Age of Innocence (1993). EjWa^XînhiâaXdjgiZhnd[ E]did[Zhi>cX#

Scorsese’s framing of Wharton’s silent conspirators: (sitting, left to right) Mrs. Welland (Geraldine Chaplin), May (Winona Ryder), and Mrs. van der Luyden (Alexis Smith). EjWa^XînhiâaXdjgiZhnd[E]did[Zhi>cX#


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Framed: Lily (Gillian Anderson) boxed in by Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd) and Simon Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia) in The House of Mirth (2000). EjWa^XînhiâaXdjgiZhnd[E]did[Zhi>cX#

Lily as decoration in the House of Mirth. EjWa^XînhiâaXdjgiZhnd[E]did[Zhi>cX#


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PartTwo L6I 8 = > C < L = 6 G I D C D C ; > AB

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You could always have told, every one agreed afterward, that Charlotte Lovell was meant to be an old maid. —Edith Wharton, The Old Maid (1924)

3 Going Hollywood: The Thirties

T he dominance of popular American movies must have disappointed

Wharton, who saw herself as one of the victims of the mechanical terror in the 1920s and 1930s. She had not always resented and feared the power of film, however. In 1918, she had commissioned a series of documentaries through the French armed forces on behalf of her many war charities. She made arrangements with the official filmmaker of “the Direction du Cinématographe de l’Armée” to “make films of the convalescent homes at Groslay and Arromanches and several of the Children of Flanders colonies,” which she arranged to be screened at various fund-raising functions in the United States (Price 150).1 Although Wharton seems to have acknowledged documentary film as a viable contrivance in the modern world—like automobiles, telephones, and indoor plumbing—after World War I, while other Americans might be spending more and more of their leisure time at the cinema watching stories on film, Wharton busied herself elsewhere. By the 1930s, she had managed to know almost nothing about the celebrity culture of Hollywood. “The party was pleasant,” she wrote to a friend in 1936, “. . . a wonderful dyed & spangled young lady . . . who did indifferent parodies of (to me) unknown actresses” (Lewis and Lewis 596). Whoever this young woman might have been, her imitations of Jean Harlow or Mae West would not have caused a ripple in Wharton’s composure. She spent her time doing what she had always done: traveling, writing, reading, and corresponding with her many friends, to whom she

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78 Watching Wharton on Film

often recommended books she had read and admired. In 1928, three days after she declined the invitation to appear in Woman Marches On, she wrote a letter to her friend Gaillard Lapsley, in which she recommended a book. “I commend most particularly a new book, ‘The American Band Wagon,’ by Charles Merz. It’s the best thing of the kind I’ve seen yet” (517). Then she added the following afterthought: “& by a German Yid, I suppose!” (517).2 Merz, a native of Sandusky, Ohio, and a Yale graduate, had been contributing articles to several American magazines, including Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Collier’s, since 1920. He wrote The Great American Band-Wagon after he had toured the Midwest by car, a trip he characterized as a drive through a landscape of “pop-stands, gas tanks, water cans, hot dogs, ukuleles, kewpie dolls and chocolate almond bars that has become the broad and pulsing artery of a nation” (iv). Despite her remarkably anti-Semitic slur, Wharton enjoyed and endorsed Merz’s lively assessment of American culture, where she would have found support for many of her own attitudes. In his chapter on Hollywood, “The Silver Screen,” Merz bemoaned the state of American celebrity worship, describing celebrities who might have been the feuding Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks: All of us know that the celebrities of the motion picture live in palaces, that it is indispensable to their health . . . to be surrounded by every comfort, and to their social position . . . to own either a hacienda . . . or a thirty-by-sixty swimming pool, but that under the surface of a necessary show of pomp they lead simple, democratic lives. What these people do in Hollywood . . . what they wear and what they eat . . . all this is news—and millions of people . . . watch with unabated interest for word of their love affairs, their latest pictures, and their family quarrels. (174)

Wharton would have agreed with Merz’s judgment on the quality of Hollywood cinema, that “the movies have romanticized life” and reduced narrative to “as simple terms as possible . . . to manageable units . . . subdivided, cataloged, and card-indexed” (175–76). She would have found confirmation for her own assessment of movies, that unlike good fiction, cinema provides “no tortuous psychological complication of character, no baffling mixture of evil and beneficence” (177). Wharton would have also recognized Merz’s attack on mass-consumer culture, where he describes the consequences of a mass market as “a scene which can be reproduced

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in any corner of the country: people doing the same thing in the same way . . . for the same purpose” (15). Finally, Wharton might have been especially interested in Merz’s chapter about her native Manhattan, in which he explains New York’s reputation among other Americans as “an alien island off the eastern coast of the United States” where the population is “rolling in wealth, bursting with pride, and scorning the Ten Commandments” (233). He calculates that “more than three-fourths of [New York’s] population is alien to that of the nation upon which it lives” (236). “How many old-fashioned Americans are there in New York?” he asks (236). He answers that “Foreign stock . . . furnishes 78.4 per cent of the city’s population. To this add the Negroes” (236). He then quotes an unnamed “American historian” who calculates that not even “10 per cent of New York’s population is American in the sense of possessing, in the form of a heritage, old American ideals, prejudices, and characteristics” (236). Merz does not blame Manhattan’s image problem on the 90 percent of the diverse population who labor in the city. In fact, he defends the immigrants and African Americans: “Their lives . . . are first of all a grim race to meet rent, union dues, and doctors’ bills” (237). “It is not the tenement-huddled alien population of New York,” he writes, but a different alien group, made up of bootleggers, Wall Street bankers, and advertising men from the American “hinterlands,” who have colored “the country’s thoughts” towards New York (238). Merz concludes that New York’s “most successful immigrants come not from Poland and Ukrainia but from points west and south. . . . A great many of those Wall Street bankers whom the Iowa farmers now denounce . . . are simply ex-Iowans” (239). In Merz’s reference to the success of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, he assumes that his American audience associates a group of Eastern European immigrants with wealth and success, and he tries to correct their false impression by explaining that these foreign immigrants do not have as much influence and power as the native born. Wharton would certainly have recognized the group that Merz describes here, because she had already stereotyped these Eastern Europeans in her fiction. By 1928, Merz’s wealthy Polish and Ukrainian immigrants were already so legendary that they had acquired a title: the movie moguls. The vague nature of his allusion to Hollywood producers, and his slight defense of their success, exemplifies the complicated nature of the “Jewish question” in American film culture of the age.

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“To be anti-Hollywood was, in a sense, to be anti-Semitic,” wrote American screenwriter Budd Schulberg (qtd. in Hoberman and Shandler 46). Schulberg, the son of an immigrant producer, articulates and embodies the knotty problem of ethnicity in Hollywood that Merz also reflects. Both were conflicted about “reading the annals of Hollywood as a Jewish story” (46). Schulberg, for example, associated anti-Semitism with Hollywood, but he also wrote “the quintessential Hollywood novel,” What Makes Sammy Run? (1940), a book that was itself “accused of self-directed anti-Semitism” (46). “For American Jews” like Schulberg and Merz before him, “Hollywood has figured as a complex touchstone, generating wideranging responses—sometimes even from the same individual” (46). For Jews and non-Jews, this longstanding “debate over the extent and significance of Jewish involvement” in cinema art “often focuses on those men whom Wharton parodied and Merz suggested, the moguls (45).3 For some time before the advent of film, the “Jewish Question” had been part of American and European discourse, in which “political leaders, writers, philosophers, and other intellectuals . . . had begun to debate the ‘proper’ place of Jews” (47). Wharton’s explorations of the “proper place” for Jews in The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence reflect some of the early-twentieth-century Jewish questions posed by others: “Could Jews successfully integrate into the mainstream? Could they become loyal citizens?” (47). Among those scholars who tried to answer these and other questions about the impact of immigration and assimilation, University of Wisconsin professor E. A. Ross distinguished himself as a proponent of “a rationally engineered plan for social growth” (Bauer, Edith 116). In 1914, Ross had published The Old World in the New, in which he catalogued characteristics of various ethnic groups of immigrants. In his chapter titled “The East European Hebrews,” Ross writes that the “Jew shines in literature, music and acting” (160). However, he also describes Jewish business entrepreneurs: “Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often ‘slippery.’ . . . these . . . immigrants lower standards wherever they enter” (150).4 Questions of assimilation into society or into Wharton’s Society became increasingly pronounced among non-Jews during the years that the film industry was ascending. Charles Merz subtly challenged the assumption that Jews were powerful by pointing to the power and influence of non-Jewish “Iowans” in New York City, implying that he knew who held the real power in the United States. He probably knew that, for instance, during the 1920s and 1930s, several of the earliest non-Jewish filmmakers,

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Thomas Edison, D. W. Griffith, and Thomas Ince, had already come to be “respectfully referred to as cinema ‘inventors’ or ‘pioneers,’” by vocal nativists, while Jewish film distributors and producers were called “moguls” (Hoberman and Shandler 49). Henry Ford, one of the venerated members of this club of American technology pioneers, became so obsessed with the moguls that he devoted several issues of the Dearborn Independent to diatribes against Jewish film producers. In a 1921 issue, Ford asked—and answered—the following question about the powerful film industry: “Who stands at the apex of this mountain of control? . . . The motion picture influence of the United States . . . is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind” (51). Ford’s well-documented anti-Semitism “had various sources,” among them his lifelong suspicion of all financial institutions and his dogged insistence that World War I “had been fomented by wealthy Jewish lenders” (Watts 382–83).5 His anti-Semitism accelerated as he reacted to the changing demographics and popular tastes of Americans during the 1920s, when he began devoting more and more of his time to collecting pieces of “Americana” in an attempt to recreate “an attractive portrait of traditional Anglo-Saxon Protestant village life that had little room for Jews” (383). During the years that cinema madness gripped America, Ford began targeting the movie industry specifically, sometimes launching into “tirades against Jews in the entertainment industry who were subverting sturdy American traditions with jazz and movies” (383). He never allowed that Jews produced anything—including movies—but insisted they had stolen their products. A Jewish producer, he told an interviewer in 1921, was a “mere huckster, a trader, who doesn’t want to produce, but to make something out of what somebody else produces” (382). Wharton, who was one year Ford’s senior, might have recoiled at the thought that she and Henry Ford had more in common than their age—she once referred despairingly to popular American culture as “Fordian culture” (Lewis and Lewis 547). However, she and Ford reacted to changes in American society during the 1920s and 1930s in similar ways. During the same years that Ford began collecting artifacts for his ideal Greenfield Village, Wharton glanced backward to earlier times in The Age of Innocence, the Old New York stories, and The Buccaneers. During the 1930s, both lost prestige and struggled financially, as they watched a new generation of Americans rise into prominence with Wharton and Ford as their examples. And although Wharton certainly did not share others of Ford’s sensibilities or tastes, they both became examples of Schulberg’s

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anti-Hollywood and anti-Semitic equation. Wharton’s anti-Semitism did not develop because of the successes of the Hollywood Jewish community, of course. Her writings reveal that throughout her life, she “agreed with the standard, white, racist generalizations and stereotypes of her day” (Ammons, “Edith Wharton” 68). From her characterization of Simon Rosedale, the richest man in all New York in The House of Mirth, to her caricature of Serge Klawhammer in Twilight Sleep and beyond, Wharton wove into the fabric of her fiction a thread of anti-Semitism that became increasingly vibrant. The rancor she expressed toward Jews in her private letters and in her fiction increased almost proportionally to the income she made from Hollywood studios in the 1920s. By the time one of her characters suggests that Jews ought “to be horse-whipped” in Twilight Sleep, Wharton’s anti-Semitism had become fully exposed by the bright lights of Hollywood, illuminating some of her most profound fears. In the same way Henry Ford’s rabid anti-Semitism masked “real fears” that seemed “to lie elsewhere,” so did Wharton’s anti-Semitism mask some of her anxieties during the last two decades of her life (Hoberman and Shandler 51). Always sensitive to the stories of outsiders, Wharton might have recognized the affinity between the stories of the excluded foreigners who successfully crafted their own world and a woman artist who was struggling to do the same: the story of Edith Wharton. Recognizing this correspondence between herself and the Jewish moguls would have challenged her traditional value system and would have demanded that she acknowledge her own stature as tentative. If she understood that when she portrayed the movie producers who bought her work as unscrupulous foreigners she was also redefining herself as fraudulent, this understanding made her angry and bitter. In the 1920s, Wharton angrily lashed out, sacrificing two white women who should have known better to the Hollywood moguls: she gave Lita to Serge Klawhammer and Zinnia Lacrosse to some other, nameless Hollywood producer. These sacrifices probably assuaged her somewhat. However, fearing that she understood the Hollywood moguls better than she let on in her fiction, Wharton was afraid that she had sacrificed another of her characters, this one closer to Wharton herself than any other. By the 1920s, she feared that she had given her blessing to the marriage of Lily Bart and Simon Rosedale. The real Hollywood executives whom Wharton seemed to revile in her letters and whom she attacked through Klawhammer were a remarkable

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group of film pioneers: William Fox (1879–1952) from Hungary; Samuel Goldwyn (1882–1974) from Poland; Carl Laemmle (1867–1939) from Germany; Jesse Lasky (1880–1958), second-generation Polish from San Francisco; Marcus Loew (1870–1927), also second-generation, whose parents were Austrian; Louis B. Mayer (1885–1957) from Russia; Harry Warner (1881–1958) and Jack Warner (1892–1978), whose father Benjamin immigrated from Poland; and Adolph Zukor (1873–1976) from Hungary (49). Their foreign heritage was only the most superficial of their similarities. Especially among the foreign-born of the moguls, they shared their utter and absolute rejection of their pasts and their equally absolute devotion to their new country. . . . something drove the young Hollywood Jews to a ferocious, even pathological embrace of America. . . . [They] embarked on an assimilation so ruthless and complete that they cut their lives to the pattern of American respectability as they interpreted it. (Gabler 4)

Wharton’s Klawhammer corresponds to the profile of Samuel Goldwyn in a 1925 issue of the New Yorker where Goldwyn was described as a man who “has a valet and dresses and looks like a gentleman, but to hear him speak is a shock. He shouts in a vocabulary of ten words” (Hoberman Vulgar 49). In language that sounds especially Whartonesque, the writer admits that “if Goldwyn was uneducated, insensitive, crude, loud, self-promoting, and innately comic, he was nonetheless a ‘dramatic figure—an inspired buccaneer,’” who had first achieved success in “mongrel New York” before moving to Hollywood (49). Especially for someone like Manhattan-born Wharton—who might have paused at Merz’s subtle suggestion of wealthy Eastern Europeans—the “mongrel” nature of New York City had a great deal to do with the success of the foreign movie moguls. Dorothy Parker, one of the darlings of New York during the 1920s who would eventually migrate to Hollywood, intended to title her (never-written) autobiography Mongrel, which might have been a reference “to her own mixed Jewish and Wasp heritage, but she could have been talking of racially and ethnically mixed ‘mongrel’ Manhattan” (Douglas 5). The complexion of New York had changed dramatically during the first part of the century. The moguls and many movie stars whose careers began in New York, those on whom Wharton would draw for her Serge Klawhammer, Boris Kouradjine, and Zinnia Lacrosse, had been able to launch successful careers in New York because it was “vast enough to welcome extreme ethnic and racial diversity” (5). In the 1920s, mongrel New York was cinema-age New York, where “there were no social barriers in a business as new and

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faintly disreputable as the movies” (5). New York City, with a history of ethnic and racial diversity, gave the moguls, who were “outside of that New England-Wall Street–Middle West money” represented by Wharton, Ford, and others, the chance to “create a new country” for themselves (5). When the film industry moved to California during World War I, the moguls transplanted their hybrid culture and established the film industry as the most diverse of businesses in the United States. The more lucrative their enterprise became and the more popular their products became, the more hostility they encountered. Like Wharton and Ford, many continued to regard “this foreign influence as a destabilizing, corrupting force that threatened the integrity of American culture” (Hoberman and Shandler 50). Although some of the most vocal critics of the film industry, like Ford, also condemned the movies on moral grounds, others, like Wharton, were dismayed by the blurring of racial, ethnic, and social boundaries. The origins of popular American culture of the 1920s could be traced to Hollywood via New York City, where blacks and whites made music together, Jews and WASPs made motion pictures together, and immigrants from Italy and Sweden became celebrated actors. American art was defining itself as diverse, plural, and collaborative, qualities whose value eluded Wharton. As the matrix of American artistic expression, mongrel New York of the 1920s represented something especially foreign to Wharton, who saw as little promise in the collaborative American arts—music, dance, and especially Hollywood cinema—as she did in popular American magazines. Yet in the same way—and for the same reason—that she contributed to popular magazines, Wharton learned to negotiate with Hollywood. The Hollywood moguls, to whom Wharton referred in a letter to Minnie Jones in 1934 as “the Western morons,” would provide her with steady income during the 1920s and the years of the Great Depression. These Western morons, whom Wharton blamed for contaminating her beloved New York and for the decline of quality in American culture, would ensure that she earned more money by selling her fiction to Hollywood than any other American writer of her time.6 Although she never noted her debt to Hollywood specifically, Wharton owed her financial security to a group of Eastern European businessmen who were also talented visionaries. The Hollywood moguls had backgrounds, skills, and interests that served them well in the film industry. Since most of them had “come primarily from fashion and retail,” in New York City, they “understood public taste and were masters at gauging market swings, at merchandising,

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at pirating away customers and beating the competition” (Gabler 5). They also understood more than a little about their audiences. As “immigrants themselves, they had a peculiar sensitivity to the dreams and aspirations of other immigrants and working-class families” (5). If Edison, Griffith, and Ince were film “pioneers,” then the moguls were “gifted impresarios, who combined financial acuity with an appreciation for talent and a sensitivity to audience sensibilities” (Hoberman and Shandler 49). Finally, as outsiders, “proscribed from entering the real corridors of gentility and status in America,” the Hollywood moguls were free to define themselves and their new industry, which became a haven for other marginalized groups of filmmakers, performers, and craftspeople (Gabler 5). Hollywood film art distinguished itself as cosmopolitan and international, with a perspective defined by collaboration. “Without immigrant businessmen and émigré artists, Hollywood might not have had the same universal appeal. . . . both the moguls’ drive to assimilate and their success at building an audience are rooted in a minority’s acute awareness of the conventions that govern the majority culture” (Hoberman and Shandler 275). The Hollywood moguls learned quickly to recognize “the image of prosperous Americans that brought people into their theaters” (Gabler 6). For the same reason Randolph Hearst was willing to pay many thousands of dollars to publish short stories by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author in his Cosmopolitan Magazine, the Hollywood moguls could project good taste and dignity through Wharton. In 1918, when Wharton’s Appleton editor, Rutger Jewett, suggested that he advertise her willingness to sell to Hollywood, she took the risk, which paid off. For three of Wharton’s best-known works adapted to the screen during the silent era, she earned at least twenty-two thousand dollars—probably much more than that—from the combined sales of the rights. All three of these early films are lost: The House of Mirth in 1918 (Metro), The Glimpses of the Moon in 1923 (Paramount), and The Age of Innocence in 1924 (Warner Bros). We know something about all of them and a great deal about the industry that produced them.7 The House of Mirth, a six-reeler that starred Katherine Harris Barrymore as Lily Bart, was probably one of the last films that Louis B. Mayer’s fledging Metro produced in New York before he moved his operation to California in 1919. Mayer’s competition had already settled on the West Coast: Goldwyn in Culver City; Universal, Fox, Famous Players–Lasky (Paramount by 1935) in Hollywood, and the United Artists (Pickford, Chaplin, Griffith, and Fairbanks) on Santa Monica Boulevard, were all churning out picture

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after picture by the 1920s. To do so successfully, they had brought their motley crews to California and had colonized. Griffith and Mayer describe 1920s Hollywood as a circus populated by a heterogeneous, rootless population . . . all in pictures, or wanted to be. They had come from everywhere, selling their specialties—writers, actors, painters, contortionists, cowboys, bankrupt aristocrats, bunco artists, promoters, “idea men”—and they hoped never to leave. . . . With six-figure salaries to back their whims, they staged the most spectacular display of libido on the loose since ancient Rome faded into the darkness. . . . Hollywood in the Twenties was garish, extravagant, ludicrous, acquisitive, ambitious, ruthless, beautiful. (231)

As Hollywood became popular, it also became notorious and newsworthy for its reputation as a wild place where scandal and sin were rampant. By the early 1920s, when the federal government threatened to regulate the industry, one of the studios’ strategies was to improve their image by offering more movies based on the works of respected authors. Producers looked to established writers like Wharton to help improve the image of Hollywood and add prestige to its films. Studios scouted for stories everywhere, including in highbrow publications and among established literary works. They began buying rights to novels before the books had been published, gambling on a writer’s reputation or popularity. Not only did they pay exorbitant fees for novels, but also they imported college professors of literature to oversee productions in Hollywood, and they commissioned prominent or promising fiction writers to adapt screenplays. The Glimpses of the Moon, a jazz-age novel by a Pulitzer-winning author, might have been recommended by one of their imported highbrows. That the film adaptation was released in 1923, only one year after Wharton’s book was published, reflects the new public-relations strategy of Hollywood during the postwar years. In 1923, Hollywood offered to the American public not just Glimpses of the Moon but also productions of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (Warner Bros.), and an adaptation of a novel by a young, pre–Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (Warner Bros). Edith Wharton, who corresponded with Sinclair Lewis and whose Age of Innocence had bested Lewis’s Main Street for the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, never noted anywhere that she knew of the coincidence of the screen adaptations made from their works during the same year. Nor did she ever acknowledge that young Fitzgerald, several years away from The Great Gatsby, had been lured to Hollywood and had written an

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adaptation of Glimpses of the Moon (ultimately rejected by the studio).8 Wharton could afford to remain coolly detached a full continent away from Hollywood. Fitzgerald could not, and his relationship with the Hollywood moguls, however rocky through the years, fueled his imagination. He was especially fascinated with the youngest and most singular of the executives, Irving Thalberg. A bright, articulate native-born New Yorker who began working as Mayer’s production assistant the same year as Glimpses of the Moon was released, Thalberg influenced the Hollywood motion-picture industry—and American film art—in ways that would continue to define American films for a century. He certainly did not meet the 1925 New Yorker profile of a movie mogul, but he did embody all of the qualities and talents of his older colleagues. He read voraciously, everything from the classics and Shakespeare to William James and D. H. Lawrence. He insisted that every aspect of a film be of the highest quality: the sets and costumes were be designed with care, the best writers and directors were to be on staff, and the most popular actors were to be on-screen as often as possible. Thalberg oversaw all the details of a film on a daily basis, sometimes maddening directors with his interference. He had an uncanny ability to spot screen presence in stage actors and chorus girls alike, and he made stars of Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Jean Harlow. He knew that most of the hundreds of movies produced in Hollywood were not good movies, and he wanted to improve the product. “The people have to take what we give them,” he once remarked. “It seems to me they deserve better” (Marx 35). The first film that Thalberg oversaw at Metro was Greed, a 1924 production based on Frank Norris’s McTeague, a book that both Thalberg and Edith Wharton admired. Thalberg already knew the director, because he had fired him from a picture at Universal: Austrian invader Erich von Stroheim, a writer, actor, and director with an ego as big as all outdoors. The two men clashed constantly during the production of Greed. Von Stroheim was determined to film a literal interpretation of the novel, and his final cut ran forty-two reels (about nine hours) long. After several bouts of editing, von Stroheim presented Thalberg with eighteen reels (about four hours), which he hoped could be shown as a two-part film. Thalberg gave the four-hour print to another editor with the order to cut it down to ten reels (two hours) and destroy the negatives. Now one-fourth of its original length, Greed became “a fragmentary masterpiece with vast gaps in continuity . . . but . . . a masterpiece nonetheless” (Cook 245).

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The story of Thalberg’s handling of Greed has become at least as legendary as von Stroheim’s film itself and suggests the paradigm that would define Hollywood film production from Thalberg’s time on.9 The precedent Thalberg set when he determined the appearance of von Stroheim’s film would become the norm in the American industry, and many years would pass before Hollywood filmmakers enjoyed the independence to make movies their own way. “By its excesses, von Stroheim’s experience—and his fate—mapped the terrain. . . . The businessmen were in charge (when had they not been?)” (Sklar 102). Thalberg and his colleagues in the production rooms and counting houses of Hollywood studios ensured their own success by instituting a formula for movies. “The director was responsible for finishing the film that had already been designed. . . . the formula picture, deadening to creativity and the imagination, was a means of making the studio product as standardized and . . . as stable as the product of any other factory” (Mast 146). Thalberg’s model also ensured that serious writers would continue to look on Hollywood with suspicion and contempt. Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other writers knew how movie studios were treating their works.10 Yet many of them, including Wharton and especially Fitzgerald, continued to take the money provided by Thalberg and other moguls to supplement their incomes. The Hollywood factory paid well, but especially after 1924, the year that Thalberg and Mayer renamed their studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, their Hollywood factory also began to mutilate the work of writers in unprecedented ways. They routinely bought a property with a famous author’s name attached and then put it through the machinery of a production assembly line of story writers, screenwriters, and scenario specialists. When the final film product came off the assembly line—sometimes with a new title—it was of a standardized size, shape, and texture. As such, to anyone who had either written or read the original work, the film was, more often than not, almost unrecognizable.11 This kind of production became standard practice throughout Hollywood studios during the 1920s. In 1924, while Irving Thalberg was snipping away at Greed in Culver City, others were working on a film version of The Age of Innocence at Warner Brothers. Although the film itself no longer exists, the scenario does, and it reveals the changes to Wharton’s text that the producers at Warner Brothers thought were a good idea: Elliot Dexter [actor] had his composure ruffled in The Age of Innocence, a psychological drama adapted by Olga Printzlau from the novel by Edith Wharton.

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A member of a somewhat straight-laced family, Dexter finds himself courting scandal when, after marrying blue-blooded Edith Roberts [actor], he meets, and falls madly in love with Beverly Bayne [actor], a Polish countess. The couple have a raging affair, and it is only when Miss Roberts gets to hear about it and quietly tells her rival that she is expecting a baby, that Miss Bayne does the correct thing and returns to Poland. (Hirshhorn 29)

Those members of a viewing audience who might have read Wharton’s book would no doubt have recognized faint elements of her work in this first Hollywood version of The Age of Innocence: suggestions of a love triangle, the delineation of social strata, and the intrusion of pregnancy into the love triangle. But this film was not especially intended for Wharton’s reading audience. The screenwriter Olga Printzlau, who wrote stories, scenarios, and screenplays throughout the 1920s (she would adapt Dumas’ Camille in 1926), specialized in one of Hollywood’s most popular genres, the “woman’s film,” and her scenario for The Age of Innocence follows the standard plot of many other women’s films of the time.12 Perhaps to Henry Ford’s chagrin, 1920s Hollywood was an especially well organized industry, patterned on the assembly-line model. Films were categorized for production according to genre and had been designed to fit into categories long before an audience saw them.13 “In studio production,” Sklar writes, “even before directors were assigned or performers were cast, films were planned and written in the framework of genres: what kind of film is it?” (107). The studios—with Irving Thalberg leading the way—assumed that audiences enjoyed these formulaic movies with their recognizable genre codes, codes that “play themselves out within structures that allow, but limit, variation” (107). The Age of Innocence went into the Hollywood factory as a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and was projected out as a melodramatic love triangle.14 What insights we might have gained from this lost adaptation of Wharton’s most famous novel would have been insights about Hollywood, not about Wharton’s work, and most likely there were few comparisons published at the time. The people who read Wharton’s novel were probably not yet the same people who bought tickets to see the motion-picture version in 1926. Wharton’s American readers would have found the film ridiculous. “‘Bad taste’ was the hallmark of the movies in the eyes of many,” Griffith and Mayer explain. “‘Symbolic’ scenes and flashbacks . . . impressed the hinterlands but moved the highbrows to laughter, as did subtitles, which Hollywood . . . decked out with moralizing and ‘art’ backgrounds”(210). When Wharton sold The Children to one of Irving

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Thalberg’s competitors, Paramount, for twenty-five thousand dollars in 1928, she probably knew that Hollywood would do things to her novel that she didn’t want to know about. She might have been amused to know that Paramount’s version of The Children would be a talking picture, and she might also have been relieved to know that the dream machine had been merciful to her and had given the movie a new title. The Children, as treated by Hollywood, was now The Marriage Playground, a new woman’s film for the new decade of the 1930s. We can only imagine how The Children was transformed into The Marriage Playground by the producers at Paramount. The film conforms perfectly to other melodramas and women’s movies of the early years of talking pictures. The director, Lothar Mendes, specialized in women’s melodramas at Paramount, all with telling titles: Ladies’ Man (1933), Personal Maid (1931), and Strangers in Love (1932) were his next three films. The script was written by J. Walter Ruben, a Paramount writer whose next two pictures would be Dance Hall (1929) and Lovin’ the Ladies (1930) and who would adapt many short stories into films with suggestive titles, including Behind Office Doors (1931) and Bachelor Apartment (1931). The adaptation and dialogue writer was Doris Anderson, who had a long screenwriting career in Hollywood and who adapted or wrote for movies with some of the most famous titles of the pre-Hayes code years: Fast and Loose (1930), Men Call It Love (1931), Wild Girl (1932), and Glamour (1934) are just four of many titles to Anderson’s credit (Internet Movie Database [IMDb]). At the time of its release, The Marriage Playground was considered a successful formula picture. The New Movie Magazine characterized it as one of “the best films” of the year, a “sympathetic story” with “beautiful acting by Mary Brian” (9). Wharton’s dark, complex story of Martin Boyne’s deluded obsessions and ultimate isolation, and Rose Sellars’s sense of harmony and understanding, was transformed into a seventyminute talking picture that projected Hollywood standards and tastes. Wharton scholar Linda Costanzo Cahir describes the new story with its new provocative title: “love and marriage are a playground on which happy endings are manufactured. The ending is blissful, Hollywood style” (“Wharton” 214). This 1930 film translation exemplifies the process of Hollywood transformation from complex novel to formula picture. To reshape Wharton’s work into a simple Hollywood love triangle, the screenwriters eliminated all of Wharton’s suggestions of incest or pedophilia by adjusting the ages of

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the main characters. Boyne becomes an energetic, athletic thirty-five-yearold (Wharton’s Boyne is squarely middle-aged at forty-six). Wharton’s troubled, naïve fourteen-year-old Judith, who is always called by the more modern “Judy” in the film, is almost eighteen years old in the Paramount production, which allows her to be mature enough to fall in love with and pursue Boyne legitimately.15 The other children, who have distinct personalities in Wharton’s The Children, become a chorus of talented rascals who provide the formulaic comic relief in the movie. Throughout, the camera privileges close-ups of the younger children while they are being mischievous and includes gratuitous scenes showing us their daily shenanigans. In an early scene, they play “divorce court,” are dressed in adult clothing and delivering adult lines. The scene suggests any number of similar sequences from the then-popular Hollywood series Our Gang (Hal Roach’s series of shorts starring a multiracial, multiethnic group of children who spoke with adult jargon while they caused mischief). In The Marriage Playground, this early divorce-court scene is only the first of several where the script has been adapted to give the diverse Wheater children the characteristics of a comedy troupe of little rascals.16 A subsequent scene includes another Our Gang moment when we see a shot of the six children lined up with their heads in a bathtub full of water, competing for a longest-breath-underwater championship. In a later sequence, Judy, now smitten with Boyne, takes vixen lessons from her half-sister Zinnie, who is explaining how her mother gets men to propose to her. She delivers a relatively long soliloquy in which she playacts her way through a melodramatic love scene between two adults, and then she teaches Judy how to walk like a vixen intent on snaring her man. With her broad urban accent, her poor grammar, and her bobbed hair, little Zinnie provides us with at set piece—she becomes the vaudeville showstopper in this film.17 With great accuracy, Wharton created the Wheaters, Zinnia Lacrosse, and their various friends and lovers to be shallow nouveau riche Hollywood types, and the screenwriters saw little need to revise these characters for The Marriage Playground. Selfish but harmless, the adult performers (Huntly Gordon and Lilyan Tashman as Cliffe and Joyce Wheater; Kay Francis as Zinnia Lacrosse) provide easy comic relief in the film. Wharton’s darkly funny scene in which all the parents are trying to make a decision about the children translates well into The Marriage Playground, where their four o’clock cocktail meeting becomes a colossal brouhaha. Boyne, who has high hopes that they can reach an accord, realizes that nothing

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will come of the meeting when he cannot keep all the women from fighting over their clothes (Zinnia and Joyce are wearing the same beach outfit) and the disaffected men just keep pouring martinis. For The Marriage Playground to conform to the Hollywood love triangle, Wharton’s clear-eyed earth mother Rose Sellars had to be rewritten as the unsympathetic third point of the triangle. Now a conniving shrew of melodramatic proportions, Rose (Seena Owen) delivers the predictable lines of a woman scorned. When she can take no more of Boyne’s attraction to Judy, she becomes strident and hostile toward Judy and the children, finally holding open the door and yelling at them, “Get out of here, you brats!”18 Near the end of the film, when Rose challenges Boyne’s affection by ordering him to leave with her immediately, Boyne refuses. With dramatic flair, Rose flings her engagement ring into the air and takes her dramatic leave. The screenwriters needed to rework the conclusion of Wharton’s Children significantly to accommodate the studio’s happy ending between Boyne and Judy. They chose to fade out by using a conventional Hollywood prop: the telephone.19 In the final scene of the film, Boyne and Judy, finally alone, move toward each other to kiss, when the telephone interrupts them. Playfully, Boyne lifts Judy from the floor, twirls her around, and then answers the phone. The two of them listen, heads close together, while Cliffe Wheater tells Boyne that not only have he and Joyce reconciled but they give their blessing to Boyne and Judy. In the final shot of the movie, the happy couple has moved out of the frame, showing us only the telephone receiver dropping and swinging back and forth, while we hear Cliffe’s voice, “hello? . . . hello?” Cahir (“Wharton”) points out that The Marriage Playground was produced during the tiny window between 1927 and 1934—between the first talking movies and the Federal Code of the Motion Picture Industry—that would screen film content and eliminate suggestions of sex or vice.20 This set of regulations, nicknamed the “Hayes Code” after its initial czar, Will Hayes, was first a gentleman’s agreement between Hayes’s office and the industry. After 1934, however, the Code became federal law. Films had to be submitted for “precensorship and . . . had to abide by the Code Administration’s rulings, on pain of a fine of $25,000” (Griffith and Mayer 297). Movies were to avoid depictions of brutality and excessive violence, sexual promiscuity of any kind, and unwholesome or profane language. Marriage was now holy and wholesome—married couples would always be shown in twin beds.21 The Marriage Playground, with “its unabashed . . . bid for audience

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popularity and commercial success,” had the kind of provocative title and blatant suggestions of sex, illicit or otherwise, “that would disappear from Hollywood pictures after the early 1930s” (Cahir, “Wharton” 214). Hollywood studios had little choice but to abide by the Production Code for many reasons, not the least of which was financial. The early 1930s were lean times for Hollywood studios, which had been used to an ever-flowing supply of revenue until the years of the Great Depression. After 1934, the Code would force studios to change the way they did business. “Prudent studio economy measures, the aid of government dollars, and a new moralistic path of righteousness nursed the film industry back to health” (Mast 273). Studios transformed themselves completely, from the business offices to the screening rooms. They began eliminating the peepshow element of their 1920s films, they stopped buying scripts that had to do with the excesses of the jazz age, and they began looking backward to classic literature for their screen adaptations. In time, Hollywood filmmakers would learn to negotiate the restrictions of the Hayes Code, but in the early 1930s they worked with the Code Office to dispense with “their fixation on contemporary life” toward “a sweeter day. Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Sir James Barrie were the spiritual . . . authors of the stories on which the screenplays of 1934, 1935, and 1936 were based” (Griffith and Mayer 299). No longer able or interested in transforming novels into one-dimensional puppet shows, screenwriters and directors began to make pictures with titles that a reading public would recognize. When RKO Radio announced that it would release a film titled The Age of Innocence in post-Code 1934, they were not referring to some silly trifle. They meant The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. The cast and crew of RKO’s Age of Innocence were stellar. The producer, Pandro Berman, had a reputation for professionalism and style. By 1934 he had produced several critically acclaimed films, including Katharine Hepburn’s first film, Morning Glory (1933). He assembled casts and crews who worked well together, and he was especially effective with costume dramas. During the 1930s he would produce some of the most stylish and beautiful movies of the decade: The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935) with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; Mary of Scotland (1936) and Stage Door (1937) with Katharine Hepburn; and the stunning Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) with Charles Laughton. Margaret Ayer Barnes had adapted Wharton’s novel for the stage in the 1920s. The Broadway production, starring Katharine Cornell as Ellen Olenska, had opened in 1928, ran for 207 performances in New York, and

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then went on the road through 1929 (Marshall, “Media” 293). Barnes’s dramatization was adapted to the screen by the talented partners Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, whose credits included adaptations of Little Women in 1933 and Imitation of Life earlier in 1934. Mason and Heerman would go on to have many more successes during their long careers, including screenplay credits for Stella Dallas (1937), Golden Boy (1939), and their second Little Women in 1949 (IMDb). The cast was also distinguished. Irene Dunne and John Boles, who had worked well together as star-crossed lovers in the successful adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s tearjerker Back Street in 1932, were cast as Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer. Among the supporting cast were several popular veterans of the stage, including Laura Hope Crewes as Mrs. Welland and Helen Westley as Granny Mingott. The other cast members included more stage actors: Julie Haydon as May Welland, Theresa Maxwell-Conover as Mrs. Archer, Edith Van Cleve as Janey Archer, Lionel Atwill as Julius Beaufort, and Herbert Yost as Mr. Welland. The film’s musical score was coordinated by Max Steiner, who had just completed work on King Kong. Best known as the composer of the score to 1939’s Gone with the Wind, Steiner would win Academy Awards for his scores for The Informer in 1935, Now Voyager in 1942, and Since You Went Away in 1944. For all of its impressive credentials, The Age of Innocence is an unremarkable film that best fits into the Hollywood subgenre of the “teacup drama.”22 During the clean, lean 1930s, studios tried to abide by the Hayes Code and, at the same time, save costs by “canning stage hits on celluloid, using the original players with little or no adaptation of the plays to movie terms” (Griffith and Mayer 256). In addition to The Age of Innocence, studios released Noel Coward’s Private Lives and a lavish production of Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934. All three films did fairly well at the box office, but, for all of their sophistication, none of them distinguished themselves or had lasting power. Like them, The Age of Innocence, wrote the New York Times critic, was “a painstaking but emotionally flaccid photoplay” (Cahir, “Wharton” 219). There really are too many teacups in The Age of Innocence. Like other drawing-room photoplays, “nothing ever happened . . . they left their characters where they found them, and . . . what passed for action . . . consisted exclusively of hand-kissing, cigarette-lighting, and an eternal pouring and serving of tea” (Griffith and Mayer 256). The screenplay resembles Barnes’s stage version almost exactly, except for one notable change: in the stage production, Newland Archer’s son is named “Newland Archer,

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Jr.” (in Wharton’s novel he is named Dallas). In the screen version, this character is once again named Dallas, but he is Archer’s grandson. As the only interesting departure from the stage play, this change affords this “teacup drama” to do something that only movies can do: incorporate a film montage into the narrative.23 By the 1930s, film editors throughout the world, including Hollywood, understood the technology of montage sequencing, and many American films of the period employed these sequences, with their swift, jarring images and their fades and superimpositions. In the Hollywood movie factory of the thirties, however, filmmakers used montage not to provoke or disturb audiences but to move them along through time by way of a series of images they already knew, so that they would arrive smoothly at the other end of the sequence. The Age of Innocence provides three good examples of Hollywood’s use of montage sequencing. The film opens with a dazzling montage of New York City in the 1920s: an image of the twinkling skyline at night, shots of black entertainers on a stage, a shot of a black saxophone player performing in a crowed nightclub, a shot of a cocktail being mixed and poured, shots of bootleggers firing machine guns, and finally a series of newspaper headlines with sensational news—“Bathing Beauty Tells All,” and “Armstrongs Tell All to Divorce Judge.” Unless viewers were sleeping, they understood by the end of the opening sequence that they were watching a story of the raging, roaring twenties. When the sequence dissolved into a close-up of Dallas Archer reading the sensational headlines and he and a white-haired, bearded man with a cane get into a car, the audience members knew they were in 1920s New York with Dallas Archer and his grandfather, Newland Archer. The opening montage sequence of The Age of Innocence allows for a brief suggestion of sex, alcohol, and sleaze that the Hayes Code would not have allowed in the narrative and frames the film as a story about generational difference. There are more superimposed montages of automobile tires fading into buggy wheels, and then buggy wheels becoming automobile tires, that frame Newland’s story as a flashback. We also see another long montage of changing scenery through a train window, as Newland travels to Florida from New York to see his fiancée, May Welland. In the final sequence of the film, we are back in 1920s New York, where we see the elderly Newland, having finished telling his story, as he sits alone on a bench in front of Ellen’s hotel. As he looks up at her window, the young Ellen Olenska is superimposed onto the screen, and we understand that Newland is remembering her as she was in his youth.

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If montage sequencing—however obvious—could show up in an otherwise mediocre teacup photoplay of the Age of Innocence in 1934, then montage sequencing was now in Hollywood to stay. Filmmakers, especially film editors, were challenging the boundaries of film technology (and the Hayes Code). Experimental cinematography and sophisticated editing and sound techniques began to transcend Hollywood’s preordained genres, showing up in a variety of movies—the good ones and the bad ones. Whatever The Age of Innocence does not tell us about Wharton’s novel, the film does suggest that Hollywood movies were becoming more complicated, with their own discourse and a faint but undeniable integrity. Despite regulations and overbearing producers, by 1934, the art and craft of filmmaking had matured into a serious artistic enterprise. Like Edith Wharton’s Sophy Viner, the movies were growing up like beautiful weeds through the cracks. In 1934 Hollywood studios released some especially interesting films that reflected an unprecedented degree of technical and artistic sophistication. Frank Capra directed It Happened One Night, W. S. Van Dyke directed an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s detective story The Thin Man, and Cecil B. DeMille offered Cleopatra. John Cromwell directed a screen version of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage that won acclaim from critics and showcased the talents of a young stage actress named Bette Davis in the role of Mildred. Five years later, by then a movie star, Davis would be a commanding presence in Hollywood, powerful enough to choose her own roles. In 1939 she chose the role of Charlotte Lovell in an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novella The Old Maid. Wharton had written The Old Maid in 1921. It had been rejected by Ladies’ Home Journal and Metropolitan Magazine because the subject matter—the story of an unwed mother—was “a bit too vigorous for” their reading audiences (Lewis 435). Perplexed by this reaction, Wharton wrote to her publisher, “Have the readers of the Metropolitan never read ‘The Scarlet Letter’ or ‘Adam Bede’ to mention only the two first classics that come to my mind? And how about my own ‘Summer’?” (Lewis and Lewis 443). The Old Maid might have been too much for readers of Ladies’ Home Journal in 1921, but it has always been considered by many Wharton scholars to be one of her best works, certainly among “the most powerful of her short fictions” (Wolff, Feast xx). As she did with The Age of Innocence, Wharton set The Old Maid in her mythological nineteenthcentury New York. And as she did in the best of her work, including Summer and Ethan Frome, she took a standard melodramatic plot and infused

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this “backward glance with an acrid sense of disappointment and loss” (xx). “Because of its sympathetic treatment of an unmarried mother, her failure to reveal her previous pregnancy to her fiancé, and the successful concealing of the daughter’s illegitimacy for two decades,” The Old Maid represents Wharton’s “best portrayal of an intense and prolonged struggle for dominance between two women, Charlotte Lovell and her cousin Delia Ralston” (McDowell, Edith Wharton xx). Wharton’s story of Charlotte (whose very name, Charlotte Lovell, suggests Charlotte Temple, the unwed mother and title character of the most popular sentimental novel in nineteenth-century America) owes a great deal to The Scarlet Letter, as Wharton recognized. Hawthorne had also used the form of the popular sentimental novel (Charlotte Temple, for example), which he had then subverted into something else. Wharton used the same model, the sentimental novel of a woman in trouble, and twisted it into a bleak story of relentless yearning. Also like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, Wharton’s Charlotte has already delivered her daughter, Tina, when the narrative opens, and we must only imagine the circumstances that led to her pregnancy. Like Hawthorne, Wharton marginalized any suggestion of romantic love in The Old Maid, forcing her characters and her readers to adjust to the grim realities of a world without Romance.24 The results are devastating. Wharton belied “the stylized surface” of old New York to reveal its “disturbing underside” (Benstock, No Gifts 444). In her story of how the two cousins negotiate an illegitimate child in an unforgiving world, Wharton transformed their dreams into the bleakness of Hawthorne’s prison door. “While she does not rule out happiness,” writes Funston in “Clocks and Mirrors, Dreams and Destinies,” Wharton “redefines it within the narrow constraints of society; ultimately, it is a happiness muted and greatly diminished” (156). Both Charlotte and Delia suffer throughout the novella because of their jealousy as they struggle for Tina’s love. Wharton gives us no measure of comfort at the story’s end but instead provides us with a sense of the high price that both women must pay, for whom “it was a terrible, a sacrilegious thing to interfere with another’s destiny, to lay the tenderest touch upon any human being’s right to love and suffer after his own fashion” (Old New York 132). Wharton’s novella was finally bought and published by Red Book in late 1921. Three years later, Wharton published The Old Maid, now with the subtitle The ’Fifties, as the second of four novellas that spanned the 1840s to the 1870s, handsomely packaged “in four volumes, boxed, with graceful illustrations” and titled Old New York (Lewis 459). In 1935,

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Zoë Akins adapted The Old Maid for Broadway, for which she won a controversial Pulitzer Prize.25 Hollywood, never shy about taking on a too-vigorous story or a controversy (they excelled, after all, in changing and defusing the works of authors), became interested in the rights to the play. Paramount first bought The Old Maid and sold the rights to Warner Brothers, who saw The Old Maid as an especially attractive property for their star, Bette Davis. The antecedents to Wharton’s story about an unwed mother lay not just in great classic literature, as Wharton had suggested, but in popular melodrama as well. Hollywood knew all about the unwed-mother story, which had served as a stock-plot device in cinematic melodramas since the early years of motion pictures, and studios had been offering movies about the trials of unmarried mothers for twenty years. In the 1930s, these “confession films” were especially popular. One of the best of the silentera confession movies, Stella Dallas (1925), based on the popular novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, was remade into a hit for Samuel Goldwyn in 1937. It represents only the most enduring of a host of movies about illegitimacy and single mothers that were filmed in the 1930s. With titles like Common Clay (1930), Born to Love (1932), and Bed of Roses (1933), these movies appealed to working girls and married women alike during the Depression years and made stars of Constance Bennett and Barbara Stanwyck, whose performances suggested that unwed mothers were heroes. “Once a figure of shame,” write Griffith and Mayer, “the unwed mother now asked for and presumably received the sympathy of her audiences” (279). The transparent and shallow film versions of The Children and The Age of Innocence of the early 1930s might have suggested that The Old Maid would suffer a similar fate in the hands of Hollywood filmmakers. However, The Old Maid was not just another sentimental story about an unwed mother, and the 1939 film was not just another predictable women’s melodrama. By 1939, American filmmaking had matured in remarkable ways, both technologically and artistically. What might have been just another formula weepie a decade earlier became instead a film with both style and substance, one in which Wharton’s vision was projected onto a screen in clear ways. The Old Maid became an early example of deft translation from text to screen, a rare feat during any decade. The cast and crew had worked together before. Casey Robinson had written the screenplay for another of Bette Davis’s 1939 films, Dark Victory, and he used both Wharton’s text and Akins’s stage play as his sources for The Old Maid. The British director Edmund Goulding was known as a

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“woman’s director,” having made successful pictures of Grand Hotel with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford in 1932 and That Certain Woman with Davis in 1937 (he would also direct Davis in The Great Lie, an interesting 1941 movie that resembles The Old Maid in many ways). Playing Delia to Davis’s Charlotte was Miriam Hopkins, who had worked onstage with Davis in New York and who would spar with her again in Old Acquaintance in 1943. The earnest George Brent, who had just finished filming Dark Victory with Davis, played Tina’s father Clement Spender, a character who was newly created by Robinson, since he is only mentioned in the novella and the dramatization.26 The adult Tina was played by Jane Bryan, who would also star in another Goulding film in 1939, We Are Not Alone. Perhaps the most interesting cast member was Donald Crisp (1880–1974) as the wise Dr. Lanskell. A distinguished British actor who had worked for D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Broken Blossoms (1919), Crisp starred with Davis in Jezebel in 1938 and would win an Academy Award for his role as a Welsh patriarch in How Green Was My Valley in 1941. Nineteen thirty-nine was a landmark year for American movies, among them Stagecoach; Wuthering Heights; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; The Women; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Ninotchka; and Destry Rides Again. As impressive as these movies were, they were only the runnersup to the two movies made by Hollywood that were destined to become iconographic: The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Presented in crisp, clear color, with special effects and epic proportions, these two films would come to define more about American movies—and American popular culture—than any others made in the United States during the twentieth century. In 1939, however, they could only claim to be spectacular movies. As such, they both provided Hollywood with new faces and new technologies and ensured that on the brink of world war, Hollywood could provide Americans with an escape over the rainbow and an epic backward glance. As another film of the class of thirty-nine, The Old Maid shares characteristics with both films. Like Gone with the Wind, it takes place during the American Civil War and its aftermath. Like The Wizard of Oz, it provides a glimpse of a new paradigm for an awkward, lonely girl who dreams about “some place where there isn’t any trouble.” Robinson, at the request of producer Hal B. Wallis, reset the film version of The Old Maid from 1850s New York to 1860s Philadelphia, most certainly to “take advantage of Gone with the Wind mania” (Wright 191). Robinson had to refigure the plot as well, to provide a Rhett Butler

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for Davis’s Charlotte/Scarlett. The film opens on Delia Lovell’s wedding day. She is fretting over a message she has received from a suitor she has rejected—Clem Spender—and she is trying to decide how to tell him that she is marrying someone else, Jim Ralston of the “Philadelphia Ralstons.” She shares her dilemma with her cousin Charlotte, who, dressed in her bridesmaid’s finery, decides to deliver the message herself to “poor Clem” at the train station. Charlotte meets Clem in the station crowded with Union soldiers, and delivers Delia’s message. In the next sequence, Clem shows up in Delia’s bedroom and confronts her just before she is to descend the stairs to be married. Just as Charlotte enters the room, Delia tells Clem that she gave up waiting for him to “make a success” of himself and can’t “bear to be lonely.” Throughout their heated exchange, the camera shows us cousin Charlotte in close ups as she listens to them argue. Clem stalks out, and the wedding march begins. The other bridesmaids begin to assemble to go downstairs, and we see cousin Charlotte run out of the house after Clem, trailing him in her bridesmaid’s dress. Delia begins to walk down the aisle, without her cousin Charlotte in attendance. In the scene that follows, we watch Clem escort Charlotte back through the same doorway from which she had run, only now it is late at night and the house is dark and quiet. He tells her that he plans to enlist in the Union army, and they share one chaste kiss in the darkened hallway. Our final shot in this scene is a close-up of Charlotte’s face over Clem’s shoulder as he holds her one last time. The next scene—the following morning—we are again at the train station, where first we see Delia pouring coffee for the Union soldiers who are waiting to board their trains. Delia spots Charlotte, who tells her that she is waiting to say goodbye to Clem. When Charlotte finds Clem, she brings him to Delia to whom he says goodbye while Charlotte watches in the background. Then, as Charlotte and Clem move toward their final goodbye in a classic Hollywood train-station scene, they share their second chaste kiss. The camera provides us with a shot of Delia in the background, watching Charlotte give a goodbye kiss to her own rejected true love. These sequences are the first of many scenes in the film that show us images of both women as they alternate between the background and the foreground. Because we have seen Charlotte and Clem returning in the dark from their one night together, we may already understand that they have become lovers and that they have conceived a child. By providing us with this goodbye scene in which the first love triangle of the story

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is clearly defined in visual terms, the camera also provides us with an apparatus for reading the struggle between Delia and Charlotte in their second love triangle—Delia, Charlotte, and the fruit of Charlotte’s and Clem’s night together: Tina. One of the strengths of this film, especially apparent in the early trainstation scene but also used in subsequent scenes, is the manipulation of our sympathies by the camera—the narrator of the story—to divide our loyalties between Delia and Charlotte. By giving them equal time on the screen and by allowing them to mirror each other, the camera leads us to understand that they share jealousy, fear, regret, and loneliness equally. More than once Wharton’s textual narrator allows us to see the reflection of Charlotte through Delia: “Delia understood now that Charlotte had guessed all this” (Old New York 132). In many scenes, the camera in The Old Maid allows us to experience the-mirror-in-the-mirror-in-the-mirror that Wharton gives us: we see that Delia understands that Charlotte has guessed what we already know. In a series of montage sequences, we experience the Civil War year by year, and a shot of Clem Spender’s gravestone tells us that he dies a heroic soldier’s death. When the montage ends, we are in 1866, and we see a close-up of a sign on a door: “Charlotte Lovell’s Nursery for War Orphans.” Now that Clem has been buried and Charlotte has hidden her own daughter from society within the walls of her nursery, we watch one final departure from Wharton’s text. In Wharton’s Old Maid, Charlotte confesses to Delia about Tina and Clem in their first conversation of the book, when Delia, married with two children, tries to understand Charlotte’s peculiar attachment to a foundling. We see our first display of Delia’s desperate needs in this scene. When Charlotte confesses the father’s name, Delia appropriates Charlotte’s story—and her daughter—by making it her story: “It was almost as if, for a moment, this other woman were telling her of her own secret past” (74). In the film, Delia makes this discovery herself, when she chances upon the little girl while visiting the nursery. (Delia visits the nursery in the novella but after Charlotte has identified Tina as her and Clem’s child.) In the scene where Delia meets the five-year-old Tina, she and Tina are alone in a room. Delia looks the little girl in the eyes and we watch her face in close up while she slowly begins to recognize her true love, Clem Spender, in Tina. We watch her as she puzzles through the girl’s name and figures out the riddle: “Tina. Tina. Clementina!” she whispers to herself and to us. She gives Tina the necklace she is wearing—a necklace Clem Spender


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had given to her at their last parting on her wedding day—and she pulls the little girl close to her. Since Charlotte is attending to other children in another room, we are Delia’s only audience, and now we share her secret, that she has appropriated Clem Spender’s daughter by holding her close and tying them both to Clem through the necklace. From this point, the film follows Wharton’s text quite carefully, including long passages of Wharton’s dialogue. In carefully composed scenes where the two women’s images are often alternated, the camera continues to show us that which Wharton’s narrator tells us. Delia and Charlotte spend their lives mirroring each other’s struggle for power, for Tina, and for ownership of Clem. Beyond the hoop skirts and the sentimental soundtrack (a slow “My Darling Clementine” plays every time one of them thinks of Clem), the movie provides us with a complicated, handsome story of two women who spend their lives carefully negotiating a shared secret. Both are imprisoned in a world where they are confined to strict roles, and both yearn for alternative ways of living or, as lonely adolescent Dorothy Gale of Kansas might tell them, a place where there isn’t any trouble. Wharton’s text of The Old Maid, writes Wharton scholar Cahir, “illustrates society’s crushing imposition of conformity and sacrifice, of the worst sort, on its members, who are beset by a vision of something more” (“Wharton” 217). The “something more” suggested in The Wizard of Oz is a world in which a girl has freedom to make her own choices, love whomever she pleases, and be loved for who she is. An unlikely pair, 1939’s Wizard of Oz and The Old Maid both anticipate one of the most interesting and sophisticated genres of American film, the women’s film of the 1940s. In many ways, Wharton’s text becomes especially powerful on the screen when viewed as a part of this genre. Many of the images and narrative strategies in Wharton’s Old Maid correspond in uncanny ways to the images that women’s films employed to signify confinement, yearning, and a glimpse of a new world. The genre of the “woman’s film” of the 1940s includes some of Hollywood’s most interesting movies from the decade, among them Now, Voyager (192), Tender Comrade (1943), The Great Lie, Since You Went Away (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and To Each His Own (1946). Among the distinguished scholarly works on these films, Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s includes some of the most significant and useful insights. Doane concludes her study by tracing “a consistency in certain recurrent themes as well as . . . the dependence on


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a limited number of spatial and temporal categories” in the woman’s film (179). She explains that a woman’s film shows a marked preference for a mistiming which facilitates the production of pathos . . . and an expansion of time which simulated the type of time most fully associated with women—the time of waiting and duration. . . . space is constricted in the woman’s film, usually to the space of the home. The opposition between inside and outside in relation to the house attains a significance which it rarely reaches in other genres. . . . there is a hypersignification of elements of the domestic—doors, windows, kitchens, bedrooms. The staircase functions multiply as the site of the woman’s specularization, her pathway from curiosity to terror, and as a symbolic prison. (179)

“In watching a woman’s film,” Doane concludes, “one actively senses the contraction of the world attributed to the woman, the reduction of meaning and its subordination to affect” (179). Doane might have been describing The Old Maid, which includes examples of all of her characteristics of a woman’s film. Time stands still for Charlotte, as she watches Delia and Clem end their courtship, and she is allowed to pursue Clem into a night of love. Then, with a montage sequence that moves time through the five years of the Civil War, we must imagine Charlotte’s pregnancy, Tina’s birth, and how the news of Clem’s death affected both Charlotte and Delia. There are also several scenes where Charlotte and Delia wait endlessly for Tina to arrive home, all scenes fraught with suspense, as Charlotte and Delia struggle to decide how, or whether, to tell Tina about her biological parents. In the spirit of Wharton’s scrupulous detail, the film translates Delia’s overstuffed, claustrophobic house beautifully. We have the same sense of suffocation in the film that we do in the text, where Wharton describes Delia’s sense of entrapment: “Now, as Delia glanced about her at the Leopold Robert lithographs, the family daguerreotypes, the rosewood and mahogany, she understood that she was looking at the walls of her own grave” (110). Doors open and close regularly. In the very first scene, while Delia ponders her wedding-day dilemma, Charlotte closes two doors to the bedroom, so that they can plot secretly. From that time on, doors are opened and closed in almost every scene: Charlotte closes the front door on Clem as he leaves her late at night, Delia closes her bedroom doors on Charlotte, and they both share scenes with Tina where, after enclosing her in her bed linens, they close her into her bedroom.


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Wharton’s novella also includes many doors closing—on almost every page of the text. Delia listens for Charlotte: “she heard Charlotte Lovell’s door open and her stiff petticoats rustle toward the landing. A light glanced under the door and vanished; Charlotte had passed Delia’s threshold on her way downstairs” (Old New York 110). Delia summons Charlotte to her bedroom for a talk about Tina: “Miss Lovell, closing the bedroom door with her dry deliberateness, advanced toward the chintz lounge between the windows” (118). And, in the last scene of the book, Delia comes into Tina’s bed on the night before her wedding: “Delia sat down beside her, and their clasped hands lay down upon the coverlet . . . But suddenly she thought of Charlotte, alone behind the shut door of her own room, watching, struggling, listening” (134). Wharton also includes many references to the stairway of the house. Delia watches as “Charlotte and Tina went upstairs together” on their way to bed. As they wait for Tina to return home from a ball, the “two cousins lit their bedroom candles and walked upstairs through the darkened house” (107). In the final scene, “Delia started up from her musing. There was a step on the stair—Charlotte coming down through the silent house. Delia rose with a vague impulse of escape” (133). In the movie, most of the action takes place in Delia’s overwrought house, where the three women who share the house most often discuss or hide their secrets. The large curved stairway that leads to their bedrooms, where most of the secrets lie, takes center stage in many sequences of the film. All four wedding scenes include shots of the wedding parties coming down the stairs, and many times we see Delia or Charlotte moving slowly up the darkened stairs, where they will try to sleep but will watch, struggle, and listen in anguished silence. Charlotte and Delia are inside closed rooms, with closed doors, through most of the film. In the final scene, however, they are outdoors, having just said goodbye to Tina as she leaves for her honeymoon. “From tomorrow on,” Delia tells Charlotte (in Wharton’s language), “until death comes for one of us, we’ll be sitting here alone together, beside the same lamp, in an empty house, with heaven knows what thoughts to keep us company.” They turn away from us and, arm in arm, walk slowly toward the door, which closes behind them. Although the scene mimics any number of Hollywood happy endings, the film has established enough imagery of entrapment within the house to make their going back indoors not a victorious ending but a diminishing one. Wharton’s bleak ending to the novella is softened, for sure, by sentimental music in this final


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shot. However, anyone reading this film as a woman’s film, one where the women are trying to escape lives of conformity and heartbreaking sacrifice, will understand that when Delia and Charlotte return inside, they are returning to the walls of their own prisons. Wharton privileges Delia’s thoughts in the novella, allowing us to hear her as she juggles her fear, jealousy, and sympathy for Charlotte and Tina. In the film, Charlotte becomes our best guide, not because of how she thinks but because of how she appears. Through Charlotte, we are given our only glimpse of another world—a place over the rainbow—where women are vibrant, free, and full of love. Charlotte seems happiest, healthiest, and most vibrant during the middle scenes of the film, those that begin with the shot of the sign “Lovell Nursery for War Orphans.” Without being told, we understand that somehow, Charlotte has negotiated a way to keep her daughter and lead a fulfilling life within a society that otherwise would have condemned them both. Somehow, she has figured out a way to build a new kind of family that thrives within the structure of her closed society. She looks competent and content. When Charlotte tries to incorporate her new family into society, however, she is thwarted. She cannot have a traditional marriage or family, and so she is forced to submit to society by breaking her engagement and relinquishing her daughter to Delia. At this point in the film, her appearance changes drastically. No longer fulfilled nor happy, Charlotte becomes what those around her—including her own daughter—call her: an old maid. Gaunt, severe, and steely, Charlotte’s façade hides the passion for life and the ingenuity that allowed her to have and keep her daughter. Back from her trip to Oz, Charlotte is now in the old black-and-white world where she is powerless, diminished, and often dismissed by all around her, including those she loves. Charlotte exemplifies another quality that Doane attributes to female characters in women’s films, “double mimesis.” As we watch female characters, we must remember that “textual pleasure is produced primarily through processes of recognition and misrecognition” (180). We see Charlotte first as the patriarchal projection of a lively, passionate young woman, sexually attractive and affectionate. Then we see the postnursery Charlotte as another patriarchal projection, an old maid. However, “credibility of these representations is sometimes undermined, in isolated images or scenes” where “something slips through” (180–81). What slips through in The Old Maid is Charlotte in her own alternative universe, where she is an unmarried mother who controls her own


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life. The images of the sexual Charlotte and the old maid Charlotte become mere reflections of a type that we know is artificial. “In the woman’s film, the process of remirroring reduces the mirror effect of the cinema, it demonstrates that these are poses, postures, tropes—in short, that we are being subjected to a discourse on femininity” (181). Charlotte mimics and mirrors back what her society sees in her, but we have glimpsed another Charlotte in this woman’s film, one who appears, however briefly, as she wants to be. Wharton uses mirrors several times in The Old Maid to show “selfscrutiny and alter egos,” and as “a kind of two-way mirror, reflecting both a horrific past and a past made rosy by girlish dreams” (Funston 151). Charlotte, the old maid, sees her reflection in Delia, also “an ‘old maid’ at heart because of her suppressed passion” and her willingness to conform (156). Both see themselves in Tina, which allows Wharton to “examine a woman’s need to go beyond motherhood to find selfhood” (157). Wharton’s damnation of a New York where “babies . . . were to make up for everything,” and where women’s lives were restricted, is projected through scenes of the babies themselves in the film. The brief glimpse of a happy, robust Charlotte taking care of her daughter and the orphans in her nursery, suggests a struggle with which Wharton had been grappling during her entire career and nearly forty years worth of fiction: there is no place in this world for women who do not conform to their prescribed lives. That a 1939 film could suggest this heartbreaking state and could provide a glimpse into Wharton’s imaginary different world testifies to both Wharton’s narrative skill and the reflective power of the movies. After the Greed debacle of 1923, Erich von Stroheim would direct only three more movies in Hollywood. By 1928, his reputation as a dictatorial, difficult, and expensive director made him a liability. During the 1930s and 1940s, he acted in several Hollywood productions but never again lived in the United States, having moved to Edith Wharton’s beloved Paris in the early 1930s. In 1949, he returned to Hollywood to act in Sunset Boulevard, one of Hollywood’s darkest and best movies about a doomed Hollywood screenwriter. He costarred with one of Wharton’s models for her movie-age sirens, Gloria Swanson, now the former Marquise de la Falaise de Coudray, who had come out of retirement to play an aging siren of the silent screen after Mary Pickford, now entirely secluded at Pickfair, had turned it down. Von Stroheim’s performance as Norma Desmond’s former husband was


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stellar and garnered for him a nomination for an Academy Award later that year. He returned to France in 1950, where he died in 1957. Von Stroheim’s nemesis, Irving Thalberg, a man who lived with a congenital heart condition and who worked sixty hours a week, died at thirty-seven in 1936. Between 1921 and 1937, he had been instrumental in transforming American motion pictures from novelties into a multimillion-dollar industry. His insistence that movies could be more than light entertainments, that they could be products of enduring value, became his legacy. In 1937, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established the Irving Thalberg Award, “given for consistently high quality of production” (Osborne 28). Hal B. Wallis, the producer who would oversee The Old Maid the following year, was awarded the first Thalberg Award in 1938. F. Scott Fitzgerald socialized with Thalberg during the 1920s and 1930s. He based several characters on “the boy wonder,” including the young producer Miles Calman in his short story about Hollywood, Crazy Sunday, and Monroe Stahr in his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. In 1925, Fitzgerald had visited Edith Wharton at her home outside Paris, where he had made a bad first impression by arriving drunk. During the 1930s, now struggling with debt and alcoholism, Fitzgerald continued to write screenplays for the studios at the same time that he disparaged Hollywood in his letters. He received credit for only one complete screenplay, Three Comrades, an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s story of three friends in post-World War I France, produced by Thalberg’s M-G-M Studio in 1938. Several of Fitzgerald’s own works would be adapted to the screen, including Tender Is the Night (1962), The Last Tycoon (1976), and his masterpiece of jazz-age America, The Great Gatsby (1949, 1974). Edith Wharton died in 1937, just before production began on Hollywood’s version of The Old Maid. She would have had no interest in the production, nor would she have cared how American audiences reacted to the movie. During the 1930s, while she was most happy for her cinema income, she would continue to disparage the popularity of motion pictures and would continue to blame their popularity on a group of Eastern European invaders who had conquered her beloved Manhattan. She assumed that the Americans who once had been nourished by her fiction were displaced by readers whose interests she did not understand. The “world is so changed,” she wrote in a letter in 1936, “and readers and reviewers belong to such a new breed, that I feel in despair at the lack of any interest


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or understanding of the inner life. . . . I can think of lots of things I want to write about, but who will read me?” (Bauer, Edith xi). In the late 1930s, Americans were reading, but they were not reading Wharton’s fiction. Her late letters reveal that she understood that she was out of fashion by then. The year before her death, she wrote an introduction to Owen and Donald Davis’s stage adaptation of her most famous novella, Ethan Frome. The Davises had dedicated their published adaptation to Wharton, who, sensing that the reputation of her fiction had diminished, seemed gratified to know that her works were still alive. “Here at least is a new lease on life for ‘Ethan,’” she wrote (Marshall, “Media” 293). We can only imagine how she would feel to know that Martin Boyne, Rose Sellars, Ethan Frome, Mattie Silver, Newland Archer, Ellen Olenska, and her earliest and most intriguing character, Lily Bart, would be brought back to life a half-century later. She might have glimpsed signs of rebirth in the 1939 production of The Old Maid. And she might have appreciated the next chapter of her story on film, when, after a fifty-year silence between 1939’s The Old Maid and 1990’s The Children, Wharton’s narratives would attract the attention of filmmakers. She might love the twist of this story: the same mechanical terror that had butchered her fiction during her lifetime would nurture it back into bloom.


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It’s more real to me here than if I went up . . . —Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

4 Wharton in Bloom: The Nineties

T he same year that Wharton vetoed the invitation to appear on-screen

with Mary Pickford, Virginia Woolf delivered two papers in London that she would later publish as A Room of One’s Own. In these essays, Woolf suggested that the novel, one of the youngest art forms, would become the site of experimentation by women. Most literary genres, she wrote, had been designed “by men out of their own needs for their own uses” (77). A woman writer would find that “all the older forms of literature were hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands” (77). The novel, Woolf continued, might be transformed by a woman writer someday: “No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle . . .” (77). Woolf and her contemporaries James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and others were tinkering with the English-language novel in a variety of different ways by 1928, and Woolf’s own fiction would become a most significant example of the English-language novel as a site of experimentation. But her suggestion that women might be the innovators was only somewhat prescient. As the twentieth century unfolded, the novel proved soft in the hands of many writers who came from traditionally marginalized groups: black, white, women, men, from England, India, or Nigeria. However different these new fiction writers were from each other, they all shared one characteristic: they had been born into the age of the cinema, which informed their


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experiments with fiction writing, directly or indirectly. Gertrude Stein noted the development: the cinema undoubtedly had a new way of understanding sight and sound in relation to emotion and time. . . . I myself never go to the cinema or hardly every practically never and the cinema has never read my work or hardly ever. The fact remains that there is the same impulse to solve the problem of time in relation to emotion and the relation of the scene to the emotion of the audience in the one case as in the other. (qtd. in Murray 68)

Cinema, an art form also “soft” in the hands of filmmakers in the twentieth century, did learn to “read” literature. From early efforts to adapt novels literally (McTeague to Greed) to mutilations during the Hollywoodization of cinema in the 1930s (The Children to The Marriage Playground), to innovative screenplays adapted from pulp fiction (The Godfather), film had matured into an art form with a room of its own by the 1990s. Like Stein’s work, Woolf’s own fiction, with its departure from traditional narrative form, defied film for most of the twentieth century. Film translations of her fiction would not be attempted until 1992, with the release of an innovative British production of Orlando, and then in 1998, with Mrs. Dalloway. Also in 1998, Michael Cunningham published The Hours, a novel that intertwined three stories—one of them involving the historical Virginia Woolf as she struggles to write Mrs. Dalloway. When the film version of The Hours was released in 2002, Virginia Woolf became a screen character. But she would have to share the screen with others of her contemporaries. By the 1980s and 1990s, a generation of diverse filmmakers and writers—men and women from anywhere in the cinema-mad world—released numerous narrative films that were clearly influenced by the masters of early twentieth-century experimental art and by a renaissance of women’s literature. Some of these movies offered homage to the pioneers dear to these literate filmmakers: a few days in the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were fictionalized in Waiting for the Moon (1987); T. S. Eliot struggled through his first marriage in Tom & Viv (1994); the story of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle was chronicled in Nora (2000), and Carrington told the story of Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey’s relationship. Chaplin gave us a seamless Hollywood version of Charlie Chaplin’s rise to fame; Henry & June (1990) told the triangular love story of Henry Miller, his wife June, and Anaïs Nin. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) offered a fictional account of Dorothy Parker and the writers of


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the Algonquin Round Table, and Il Postino (1994) told a tale about Pablo Neruda and his mailman.1 By the last decades of the twentieth century, profit might still be the primary motive for movie studios, but the process by which studios chose literary adaptations had changed. Unlike the movie moguls of the early years, contemporary producers and filmmakers were most likely credentialed and trained in their craft. They adapted complex narratives and experimental fiction—or biopics about earlier twentieth-century artists—because they admired the authors and had developed an affinity with these artists who had worked during the previous fin de siècle. Their backward glance resulted in a remarkable number of movies based on long-neglected or difficult texts. The adaptations from these decades included an impressive list of authors. Besides the two Woolf novels, there were several film adaptations of E. M. Forster novels, several of Henry James’s most difficult late novels, a beautifully realized version of James Joyce’s The Dead (1987), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1986), and Nabokov’s Lolita (1997).2 Also included on this list were works by Edith Wharton, whose name had not been linked to film since The Old Maid in 1939 and whose fiction had been eclipsed during the middle years of the twentieth century. Although much of her fiction had been republished during the surge of women’s scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, no one studied Wharton because her fiction represented the shock of the new. As Wharton scholars began exploring her long-neglected essays and her personal papers, they could confirm that, to the end of her life, she had written in traditional, conventional forms and had resisted, rejected, or dismissed experimentations with narrative in much the same way as she did cinema and radio.3 In her collection of essays The Writing of Fiction (1925), Wharton had revealed her anxieties toward the “modern novel,” and in two of her late novels, Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932), she had parodied the writings of Joyce and Woolf. Like the cinema, Wharton found modern literature to be faddish, manipulative, and distracting.4 Wharton’s fiction, however, has transcended her reactions to the modern world and continues to attract readers for many reasons: her acute understanding of the limited opportunities of American women and artists; her sardonic portrayal of an age of excess; her ability to discriminate between illusion and delusion; her juxtaposition of graceful, lucid prose with ruthless cruelty and emotional atrophy. For many of these same reasons, contemporary filmmakers have found her works timely and appealing. The


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four Wharton adaptations in the 1990s might have convinced Wharton herself that Virginia Woolf’s prophecy was true: a young art form is malleable enough to reflect the art of a woman in a room of her own. With a mere century of film art experimentation at their disposal, filmmakers have learned to reflect and project Wharton’s fiction back to us. The first two of the four Wharton adaptations of the 1990s, The Children (1990) and Ethan Frome (1993), are art films. Produced by an international film company, directed by British director Tony Palmer, and with an international cast, The Children represents a collaborative effort to tell the tale of Martin Boyne and the Wheater children. The screenplay follows Wharton’s novel closely. Unlike the 1930 Paramount adaptation, there is no title change and no tinkering with the ages of the characters. In this movie, Martin Boyne is Wharton’s forty-six-year-old Martin Boyne, Judith Wheater is a sad, confused fifteen-year-old, and there is no happy ending for either of them. We hear the children before we see them: their voices rise in the first few seconds of the film as we see the darkened profile of a woman who stands on the balcony of her chalet looking at snow-covered mountains. We hear her reading a letter to herself—“My dear Rose”—while the children’s voices subside. In the next shot we see a steamer moving across the water in the sunset, and we hear the same salutation, “My dear Rose,” from a man’s voice. From that point, Martin Boyne (Ben Kingsley) relates in voiceover his passage from Brazil and his chance encounter with “a group of noisy children,” while the children wreak havoc on the ship’s dining room. His amusing letter to Rose interrupted, we hear him thinking, “I never seem to have . . . adventures,” as he stands on deck alone. He looks around the corner, and we see what he sees: a beautiful girl with thick long hair blowing in the wind, watching him. As he looks at Judith Wheater (Siri Neal), the musical soundtrack, quiet until now, swells into the slightly dissonant and ominous chords of Ralph Vaughn Williams’s Job. Boyne’s letter to Rose continues as we watch him meeting Cliffe and Joyce Wheater (Joe Don Baker and Geraldine Chaplin) on the dock in Venice. He concludes his letter by telling Rose that he and all of the Wheaters enjoyed exploring Venice together. As he finishes, we see the group of them, a smiling Boyne in the center, posing for a photograph, and then we see the black-and-white photo, which Boyne is holding in his hand. Several times during the film, we will watch Boyne holding and looking at the photo.


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The following scenes in Venice help us to place the children, who are not as prominent nor as Our Gang cute and funny as they are in The Marriage Playground. They are a more solemn, sometimes whiny group, but we do see them frolicking at the beach while we hear their governess, Scope, explain to Boyne that their parents are neglectful. As she speaks, the camera closes in first on Boyne’s face, who watches the water intently, and then on the subject of his gaze, Judith, who is walking out of the water toward him. We see her sit down in the beach chair next to him, where she suggests that her parents are likely to stray from each other. When he admonishes her, she replies vigorously, “I understand more than you think!” In this same beach scene, we meet the “ghastly vulgar movie star” Zinnia Lacrosse (Britt Ekland), who arrives on the beach with an entourage of three suited servants carrying presents. She is Wharton’s vapid, inarticulate movie star, whose histrionics and painted face we experience in close-up shots. She hands out gifts to all the children except Judith, who, Zinnia says, is “too old for presents.” We see a shot of Judith’s back as she watches the circle of children gather around the movie star, and we see Boyne’s back as he rises out of his chair, stands next to Judith, and consoles her by putting his arm around her shoulder. In these early scenes where Boyne is with the Wheater children, he puts his arms around them, kisses them, tickles them, and laughs when they hug him. The choreography of the scenes of Boyne and the children is deliberate and consistent. Boyne, whose physical presence is slight and straight, becomes playful and emotive in scenes with the children. Watching Boyne with the Wheaters becomes especially significant and reveals how a camera and close editing can tell Boyne’s story more adeptly for us than words could. Because of the way in which these characters relate to each other physically, Wharton’s story comes alive and moves. This physical narration is especially clear when we finally meet Rose Sellars (Kim Novak) and we can gauge the nature of her relationship to Boyne through their body language. How the camera shows us the physical relationships of the characters throughout The Children becomes the foundation of our understanding of Boyne’s growing dilemma as the movie progresses. In Wharton’s novel, we hear Rose before we meet her, when we read two of her clever letters to Boyne early in the book. We only meet her in the eighth chapter, after Boyne has reluctantly left the Wheater family. In the film, we also hear Rose before we see her clearly—in the opening credit sequence, where we see her darkened profile—and we do not


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actually meet her for a long while. When Boyne finally leaves the Wheaters, twenty minutes into the film, he is clutching his tiny photograph of them as he sits on a train. We next watch him from above, as he climbs a steep hill. When we see what he sees in this sequence, we are looking up at a balcony, where a woman wearing all white is smiling down at Boyne with her hands outstretched. We cannot see her face well because of the bright interference of sunlight. As the camera comes closer, we see her more clearly, full-faced and smiling down, motionlessly holding out her hands. From Boyne’s and our perspective, Rose Sellars appears to be a beautiful statue. From the time when they first meet, Boyne and Rose are shown to us as tentative partners. Their initial conversations are awkward and slightly stilted, and they sit on opposite sides of a sitting room with a table between them. We see Rose give Boyne one chaste kiss on the cheek, and when he leans toward her, she pushes him away with a slight wave of her arm. As she explains to him that she is still in mourning for her dead husband, they move farther apart from each other. Her final line during this first encounter with Boyne is slightly accusatory: “You make me sound like a glacier.” A glacier, in fact, is the next vision we see, when this first indoor meeting transitions to an outdoor shot and the camera pans across the mountains and focuses on Boyne and Rose hiking down the mountain. As the two sit together picnicking, Boyne weaves a daisy through Rose’s fingers and kisses her. When he tries for a second kiss, Rose pushes him away and reminds him that they are not alone—there are a carriage driver and horses standing farther up the side of the mountain. Boyne pulls back with a look of frustration on his face. At this point in Wharton’s text, Boyne realizes that he has been deliberately withholding “his unsatisfied passion,” because he wants to maintain “the well-being of things” between them (79). He has been her friend for years, and he anticipates being her lover. The promise of a blossoming sexual relationship thrills Boyne, who had always found her resistance attractive. As they get to know each other again, Boyne looks forward to being Rose’s lover, especially now that there is no husband, no impediment to their relationship. He can wait: “Now there was no resistance—and his passion lay with folded wings. It was perfect” (80). When Boyne decides that his relationship with Rose “is perfect,” Wharton’s reader knows that the relationship must be problematic. In the film, we sense the same, but through body language and the sequencing


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of images. In all of the scenes in Rose’s chalet, the two lovers are far apart. Often, Rose is seated at a desk with her back to Boyne, and we can see both of their faces as they discuss the Wheater children or their tentative marriage plans. What is revealed to us in these scenes parallels Wharton’s narrative of Boyne’s growing obsession and Rose’s growing fear that the children will come between them. In the film, we see that the Wheater children have already come between them—literally at times and always pictorially—because the two of them never talk face to face but always away from each other. As viewers, we hear them admire and trust each other, but we see something different. They never touch each other, and they never engage each other’s eyes when they talk. They evade all intimacy on all levels, and we understand that before they do. In this movie translation of The Children, the characters consistently reflect Wharton’s characters and the dialogue sounds convincing. If these were the only criteria we would use to understand the narrative, The Children would not be a very interesting adaptation. However, on film, the camera, the lighting, and the music relate Wharton’s story in ways that allow us to understand her most subtle signs. Not only do we come to understand that Boyne is nourished by the Wheaters and starved by Rose, but the camera also allows us to recognize his sense of cool imprisonment in Rose’s chalet and his sense of warm enclosure when he is among the Wheaters. Almost all the indoor scenes of the chalet, Boyne’s hotel room, and the Wheaters’s pensione are shot with a Steadicam, a portable camera strapped to a brace on a camera operator’s shoulder. A Steadicam allows for long shots in small places and for close-ups that can look distorted and in parallax. In most of the scenes in Rose’s sitting room, the Steadicam is angled up toward the low ceiling and the room seems small, cramped, and dark, with only one bright shaft of sunlight coming in through a window. The shot echoes Wharton’s description of Boyne as he thinks about Rose’s “cool touch” late in the book: “as soon as they came together again she seemed hemmed in by little restrictions and inhibitions” (151). The restrictions and inhibitions come to us in the cool, confined darkness in which Rose and Boyne discuss their lives while they sit far apart, not looking at each other. If we are reading the images, we see that Boyne is trapped in a small igloo. The effect is similar in the scenes in Boyne’s small hotel room, where we see that even his bed is enclosed on three sides by dark wood. In the Wheaters’ pensione, more than once we watch Boyne and the children


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descend a flight of stairs in shots framed by a low ceiling. In these pensione scenes, however, the sun streams in through multiple windows and the paneled walls of the interior are lit by golden sconces. Boyne moves constantly, often interacting with the children by holding them, patting their heads, or being hugged by one or more of them. Also shot with a Steadicam, the effect of these scenes opposes those scenes at the chalet. We watch from above as Boyne is embraced and enclosed in golden warmth with the children, especially with Judith, who hugs and kisses him repeatedly within the cocoon of the pensione. The final sequence of shots in The Children, from the time Boyne watches Judith dancing through the closing credits, employs both careful editing and music to help us understand Boyne’s final isolation. The film’s sensitive retelling of Wharton’s spectacular final episode, in which Boyne gazes through a window into a ballroom, begins with a shot of Boyne, solitary and unsmiling, talking to himself in a mirror as he dons his evening clothes. We next see a long shot of him walking slowly toward the Palace, which appears as Wharton described it: “The great building, shining with lights, loomed above a tranquil sea; music drifted out of it, and on the long side toward the sea its wide terrace was thronged with ladies in bright dresses, and their partners” (296). We hear faint music, the lush and slightly portentous Waltz from The Masquerade Suite, by Aram Khachaturian. The music grows gradually louder as we move slowly through the rooms of dancing couples until we reach the final room. We see Joyce Wheater’s face in close-up, and then we move back outside, where we see Boyne approach the full-length window of the room. As Boyne looks in, we are gazing with him, and we all close in on Joyce’s face. In the next shot, the camera shows us Boyne’s pale, sad face as he peers in while couples swirl close to him. Next, we are back with Boyne while he looks for Judith. Just as he and we find her, the waltz rises into crescendos. Now with Boyne, we see a series of quick, disjointed close-ups of Judith’s face as she dances, each accompanied by a crash of cymbals. As Wharton describes her, with long hair tied up, “moulded to her head in close curves like the ripples of a brown stream,” her mouth “round and red,” she appears to be looking directly through the window at us. But she keeps moving, and in our final close-up of Judith, “her lids closed for a second . . . and her face suddenly became as sad as an autumn twilight” (299). The last shots of the sequence show us Boyne once more from inside the ballroom window, and then from outside, we watch him from behind as he watches the dancers. Almost in time with the waltz, Boyne turns


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his gaze away from the window. Wharton’s language at this point had suggested that the spectacle before Boyne looked like the “mechanical terror” of a movie on a screen, and in the film, he stiffens and stands without moving: “he mechanically turned back” (298). His face in profile, Boyne stands alone in the dark. In Wharton’s text and in the film, he has infiltrated the scene with his gaze and has become a part of the mechanical terror. Immediately, we are watching a steamer from above as it moves smoothly through water below a red sky. We hear Boyne’s final voiceover, in which he concludes his story: “I, Martin Boyne, engineer of middle years, came across various children along the way of my adventure, so long ago.” From this image of a steamer, we go immediately to a shot of another boat. We are moving alongside a yacht, and we can just make out the silhouettes of seven children standing on deck. The scene goes black, accompanied by strains of Benjamin Britten’s majestic Gloriana. The credits begin to roll. Halfway through the final credits, while Gloriana is still playing, we see one final sequence of shots. We are positioned at the bottom of the pensione staircase, and golden light streams through a window. In time with the music, almost as if they are dancing, the seven children all file downstairs, passing us one by one, almost as if they are parading through a curtain call. We see Boyne at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for them, with his arms outstretched. As they cluster around him, hugging and kissing him, he picks up the youngest, and they move, as one big group hug, out of the room and into the darkness. The screen goes black once again, with only the music to accompany the remaining credits. This final sequence has no direct parallel in the novel. It is a final interpretive moment that projects Boyne’s unspoken accumulation of longings and dreams. A solitary, lonely man in both the novel and the film, Boyne yearns for a human connection in ways that he cannot articulate. The movie does with sight and sound, and with stillness and motion, what Wharton does with language and ellipses. The Children begins with the rise of children’s voices and ends with images of their affection. Bracketed between these scenes are the sights and sounds of Martin Boyne’s struggle between the untouchable, immovable Rose and the blooming, warm Judith, between laughter and silence, between darkness and light. The final shot of him surrounded by affection, attention, and love suggests his dream vision and his memory in moving pictures, more lyrical and haunting than the black-and-white photo he carries with him.


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The Marriage Playground had been filmed entirely on a Hollywood movie set. The Children, which seems light years removed from the earlier adaptation, was filmed in Switzerland, Bavaria, Italy, and France, where it was released to art houses in 1990. In the United States, the film was never distributed to theaters but was released on video late in the same year. It received little attention from American audiences and film critics and has been relegated to footnote status in Wharton scholarship.5 Yet The Children represents a beautifully composed, thoughtful, and engaging film and a respectful and innovative rendering of one of Wharton’s most overlooked novels. The filmmakers had enjoyed a liberty not possible for those who sought to produce the next art film adapted from Wharton’s fiction. No one had read The Children. How a film might treat Wharton’s most famous work, Ethan Frome, was another matter. British director John Madden (who would direct Shakespeare in Love five years later) adapted Ethan Frome in a most traditional style, using standard shots and smooth sequencing. The film tells us Ethan’s story like a Massachusetts Puritan preacher might have delivered a cautionary sermon: in New England plain style, with little embellishment. In the most effective Puritan sermons of the seventeenth century, preachers drew simple comparisons based on the everyday lives of their listeners to “open” difficult Biblical passages, and they repeated these comparisons several times within each sermon.6 Puritan preachers relied on the power of simplicity—they rarely embellished their diction or developed complicated arguments. In his film of Wharton’s bleak Berkshire tale, Madden also relies on Puritan simplicity of narrative and unadorned comparisons. Of all of her fiction, Ethan Frome has attracted the most attention, even from Wharton herself, who contributed to the discussion in 1932 with a magazine article, “The Writing of Ethan Frome,” in which she described the novella as a “tragedy of isolation” (qtd. in Goodwyn 76). Scholars have explored every facet of this tragedy, especially the nature of the title character and the two women in his household.7 Is Ethan a tragic hero? His “final resolve and acceptance of his lot place him among the great anguished characters of tragic literature who have still found dignity and humanity in defeat” (Dodson 156). Or is he an emasculated weakling, so passive that “it is simply impossible to construe him as the victim of his isolated surroundings”? (Wolff, “Cold” 106). Is Mattie a poor innocent working girl who accidentally falls in love with her cousin’s husband? Or does she have a selfish agenda, in which she plays “a two-faced femme near-fatale, a scheming temptress”? (Scharnhorst


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271). Are we to be sympathetic to the long-suffering wife Zeena, or does she represent “the generalized, warped manifestation of New England Puritanism in its most unwholesome extremes” (Shuman 274)? Wharton’s rich, subtle text in Ethan Frome holds up to multiple readings, many of which contradict each other. Whatever perspectives they offer, the best essays on Ethan Frome share one assumption about the text: Ethan Frome is a study in opposites. Just the titles of some of these insightful essays introduce the oppositional context: “The Two Faces of Mattie Silver,” “Frozen Hell: Edith Wharton’s Tragic Offering,” and “Cold Ethan and ‘Hot Ethan.’” Wharton’s text provides us with endless pairs of opposites. Ethan is a strong young man and a maimed old man. He lives in a grim reality, but he thinks in dreams. His world is one of “despair and joy” (Ethan Frome 32). Zeena is a competent caregiver and a bitter invalid. She nags and complains as a young invalid, and she moves silently, “with opaque eyes which revealed nothing and reflected nothing” as an old caregiver (84). Mattie comes to the farm as an awkward, sickly girl and revives within a year to become a lively dancer with “laughing panting lips, the cloud of dark hair about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed point in a maze of flying lines” (25). In Wharton’s text, there are two of everyone and everything. The movie also provides us with doubles and with images in opposition. Because it is a story told in flashback, we see two of all of the characters, the present-day old characters and their younger counterparts. However, Madden also duplicates many of the significant scenes visually, which helps us to understand the grim irony of Wharton’s story. Wharton’s tale is told by an unnamed narrator, a stranger who has come to Starkfield to work, whose curiosity about Frome leads him to “put together this vision of his story” (Ethan Frome 22). In the film, the new preacher, Reverend Smith (Tate Donovan), becomes curious enough about Frome (Liam Neeson) that his landlady, Ruth Hale (Katharine Houghton), reluctantly tells him the sad story. We hear her voice-over while we watch a series of scenes and details that will be repeated or suggested again later in the movie. Wharton had provided or implied many of these duplications in her narrative—Ethan’s “despair and joy” is a good example of her dual descriptions—but the camera and the visual composition replace her language as our guide to Ethan’s story of simultaneous anguish and hope. These sets of twin scenes also help us to distinguish the ways in which the screenplay deviates from Wharton’s text.


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We learn the circumstances of the Fromes’s marriage well into the narrator’s story in Wharton’s text, but Ruth tells her story chronologically. As she tells us how Ethan and Zeena (Joan Allen) met, we watch Ethan’s mother’s funeral—a group of small black figures on a stark white landscape—from above. We next see a tired Zeena packing a trunk in her bedroom. The visual composition of the scene, with Zeena standing over the trunk while Ethan sits on the edge of her bed, is duplicated almost exactly near the end of the movie, when Zeena stands over Mattie’s trunk as she inspects its contents, while Mattie (Patricia Arquette) sits at the edge of the bed. In the earlier trunk scene, Ethan helps Zeena move her heavy trunk, a favor that Ethan does later for Mattie. When Zeena leaves for Bettsbridge to see the doctor, we see a long shot of Ethan helping her into the wagon, while Mattie stands far behind them, alone in the doorway of the house. Later, after Zeena has decided to send Mattie away, we see the same long shot when Ethan is helping Mattie into the wagon, and Zeena is watching from the door of the house. In Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan goes alone to Eady’s store to buy glue, but in the film, Ethan and Mattie make two trips together to Michael Eady’s store. The first time, they go to buy glue to repair Zeena’s pickle dish. Denis, whom we already know as Mattie’s dance partner and wouldbe suitor, waits on Ethan in the store while other curious patrons watch silently. In the second store scene, Denis sells a red hair comb to Ethan just before he is to drive Mattie to the train station, and again, several people watch silently. We watch two coasting accidents: the first occurs during the dance scene, while Ethan gazes from outside a window as Mattie dances inside. (This scene also suggests Martin Boyne of The Children, another of Wharton’s isolated voyeurs, who yearn for a dancing girl from behind the dark glass.) The second, shown to us in slow motion, is of Ethan and Mattie as they slide toward the elm tree. Mattie attempts suicide unsuccessfully twice in the movie, first by trying to drink poison after Zeena has discovered the broken pickle dish and has shrieked, “You’re a bad person, Mattie Silver!” and the second time by coasting into a tree with Ethan. There are also two dinner scenes—one when Zeena announces her impending trip and one on the evening she arrives home—where all three characters, along with the hired man, Jotham, sit in strained silence together at the table. And in the most striking deviation from Wharton’s story, we see two scenes that imply that Ethan and Mattie are about to make love.


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In Wharton’s novella, Ethan is clearly infatuated with Mattie, but they share only a few kisses, the last time just before they begin to coast toward the tree. In the movie, Ethan and Mattie spend not just one night together, but two—the first while Zeena is away and the second on the night of her return. In the novella, Ethan enters Mattie’s bedroom tentatively and only once, on the night of Zeena’s return, where he finds her sobbing. In the film, he opens her bedroom door with little hesitation on both nights. We see him lie down as he kisses Mattie, and then we see a shot of Zeena, in her bed, listening with open eyes. In her survey of Wharton films, Linda Costanzo Cahir characterizes this departure from Wharton’s text as “jarringly odd and radical” (222).8 She suggests that “the filmmakers are either too unpracticed or too distrusting of an audience’s capacity to follow depths of meaning to explore Frome’s aching intricacies,” and so they “give the audience what they think we should see and would enjoy: soft-hued lamplight, openmouthed kisses, and gentle sex” (222). Cahir also suggests that this is a misreading of Ethan, that he does not want a sexual encounter with Mattie: “Frome does not want the temporary physical satisfaction or the real-world intimacy that a sexual assignation with Mattie would provide. Matters are much more complex with him” (223). Yet Wharton’s rich language also suggests that one of the complexities with which he struggles is his desire for Mattie. During the scene where he and Mattie are sitting together after supper on their one night alone, Wharton suggests that he wants to touch Mattie so much that he aches. He may crave companionship, but he also yearns for more. Wharton’s descriptions of Ethan suggest his sexual excitement. After he consoles Mattie about the broken pickle dish, “his soul swelled with pride . . . he had never known such a thrilling sense of mastery” (49). While they talk about their plans to go coasting together, Ethan “luxuriated in the sense of protection and authority” Mattie gives him and he wants to “prolong and intensify the feeling” (50). He suggests a kissing scene to Mattie: “I saw a friend of yours getting kissed” (51). His voice has a “sudden heat” in it, and watching Mattie makes him feel that “a warm current flowed toward him. . . . he slid his hand palm-downward along the table till his finger-tips touched” her sewing, which he eventually kisses (52). Wharton’s Ethan wants to make all kinds of contact with Mattie, who represents the opposite of the woman he lives with: warm, sensuous, and flirtatious. Madden’s Ethan reinforces this reading that Ethan is starved


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for all kinds of love. Had Madden’s version of Ethan Frome ended differently from Wharton’s, Ethan and Mattie’s sexual encounter would have violated the integrity of Wharton’s story. However, both versions conclude with the same grim scene of Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena in their frozen hell together. Reading Wharton’s novella, we understand that Ethan is a dreamer whose love for Mattie might be fantasy but whose yearning and desperation are real. Whether Ethan and Mattie have been intimate makes no difference. Having sex with Mattie makes Ethan no less doomed in the movie than imagining sex with her does in the novella. In Ethan Frome, as in much of Wharton’s fiction, love and sex become oppositional: sex is easy, love is difficult, and to mistake one for the other, to confuse fantasy with reality, is destructive. Some characters, like George Darrow in The Reef and Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, have no trouble having sex but have a great deal of trouble understanding love. Others, like Ethan Frome and Martin Boyne, are solitary men who dream about love and warmth but do not understand themselves as sexual beings. Having sex does not upset Sophy Viner half as much as falling in love does. Dexter Manford’s wife, Pauline, tries to stay attractive for him in Twilight Sleep, yet he finds the siren call of his daughter-in-law, Lita Wyant, more appealing. And in The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer spends a lifetime dreaming himself into “another country” with the woman he loves, while he lives to be an old man in New York. The Children and Ethan Frome provide two small but respectable approaches to Wharton’s landscape of sexless love and loveless sex. By the 1990s, filmmakers worldwide had so many technical options and freedoms by which to exploit the language of cinema that they produced translations that sometimes bore little resemblance to the novels that inspired them.9 When production began on a new film version of The Age of Innocence in the early 1990s, the adaptation of Ethan Frome might have suggested an alarming precedent. If Ethan gets to sleep with Mattie, does Newland finally get to go to that hotel room with Ellen? Martin Scorsese would have to answer that question: “My feeling was, the book is very, very good, so why change it?” Jay Cocks, who wrote the screenplay with Scorsese, described the challenges they faced when they considered adapting a novel with “a pedigree”: Classics tend to calcify into respectability. After years of academic approval and adaptation to multi-part public television series, an excess of good breeding settles over them like a thick layer of dust. Just as Newland Archer is stifled,


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then strangled by the strictures of his society, so do adaptations of uppercase literature tend to come gift wrapped in a dramatic gentility that mutes the hard edges. . . . we might fashion a way of not only unwrapping the hard edges, but of sharpening them so that they stabbed the heart, not just fluttered past it (Scorsese vii).

With all of their experience as filmmakers, neither Cocks nor Scorsese had adapted a classic text before: “We could both learn something from adapting such a book—something, for example about precision of plotting—and, as we did that, lend something of our own” (vi). What they brought with them were their reverence and understanding of another classic art—film: “We wanted to bring the novel together with the spirit of the older movies we admired” (vi). Cocks described the movies as “a trail of celluloid breadcrumbs. . . . They are all part of The Age of Innocence, ghosts in the halls of the rambling house we’ve tenanted for a while” (128). Among the films they studied were Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), for its tone: “the chill, bemused irony of the narration—the lavish but careful use of the novelist’s language—turns the drama gradually from shrewd observation of 18th-century English mores into a complex, poignant portrait of vanity and ambition” (129). The lighting in Edgar G. Ulmer’s noir Detour (1945), where “the existential schmo hero” was “ruing his fate while the screen grew dark around him, until only his eyes were vivid in a single band of light,” inspired Scorsese to use a similar effect where Archer is “receiving a note that would affect him deeply, and turn the plot sharply” (129). They watched Jacques Tourneur’s Experiment Perilous (1944), studying “the ways in which [Tourneur] used setting to reinforce atmosphere, not just to establish it” (130). One of their most valuable sources was the trilogy of movies directed by Luchino Visconti, Senso (1954), The Leopard (1963), and The Innocent (1976), which Cocks described as a “supreme trilogy of political change and romantic dissolution in the 19th century” (131). The “lush last sequence” of waltzing couples in a vast ballroom in The Leopard attests to Visconti’s mastery of “period material . . . that had stylistic breadth and psychological panache. There was nothing safe, small or simply pretty” (131).10 Scorsese looked to these earlier movies to help him convey Wharton’s scrupulous sense of detail—from clothes to food, to furniture, and to art. He recognized that “the more detail you know, the better you know the


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people. . . . we have eight meals, and they are all different in order to make different dramatic points” (Thompson 188). The first two sequences of the film, the opera and the Beauforts’ ball, reveal to us that Scorsese’s Age of Innocence is also the Age of Opulence. In the opera sequence, we first see a close-up of the buttonhole gardenia on the lapel of Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis). Next, we pan up to an opera box in which May Welland (Winona Ryder) sits with her mother. While we listen to an aria from Faust, “the camera glides . . . then stops short as other images punch in: the conductor glimpsed through a haze of footlights, the auditorium viewed, from the stage, as a mass of silk and shirtfronts, then, from overhead, as an orderly parade” (Lane 28). We see extreme close-ups of elaborate beadwork on dresses, dangling earrings, a glittering broach, and polished shoes. We see Wharton’s opera boxes as “diorama-like boxes, classified and put on display,” from several viewpoints (Edwards 497). “There is an extraordinary moment,” writes Anthony Lane, when, as the music soars, the opera audience “begin to shudder; Scorsese is shaking his camera at them as though it were a fist” (28).11 Scorsese explained how he introduced Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) into the diorama by trying to “duplicate what you would see if you were actually looking through opera glasses and panning an audience. I wanted to give it more of an edge” (Thompson and Christie 186). He used stop-action photography and dissolves so that “you began to notice people, with the glitter of their jewelry, and then this incredible woman appears in a blue dress, and the blue is very different from what everyone else is wearing” (187). Scorsese continues to expose us to pictures of beautiful excess in the ballroom scene, where we walk slowly through three lavish rooms with Archer, lingering on the elaborate framed paintings and watching servants carrying baskets of food. When we arrive in the innermost ballroom, we see a stunning Sargent-like tableau of four maidens in white dresses. The camera closes in on one of the middle maidens, whom we recognize as May Welland (Winona Ryder). We then see Archer, from May’s point of view, as he kisses her hand. Just within these first two sequences of the film Scorsese exposes us to all of the details that suggest the excesses—and the potential conflicts—of this tribe of New Yorkers. He focuses on jewelry, clothing, food presentation, and other details because “details give you the impression of what Newland has to cut through in order to break away from that society. You keep adding and adding the imagery of detail . . . and you begin to realize how difficult it is for him to make a move” (189).


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Scorsese wanted his Age of Innocence to resist “traditional dramaturgy. . . . I wanted to get away from this three-act approach. . . . theatre is theatre and movies are movies; they should be separate. . . . I wanted to find a way of making something literary. . . and also filmic” (Thompson and Christie 185).12 To give an audience this sense of the literary, Scorsese decided to use a detached voice-over narrative: the narrator seems to be standing apart and observing events. But Edith Wharton writes the book from the point of view of Newland Archer, so that you don’t realize what the other people are doing until later on when he realizes it. . . . That was such a surprise to me, and satisfying . . . In the final dinner scene, rather than playing it out in normal dramaturgy, with Newland at the head of the table talking to Ellen and everyone smiling, I decided to use mainly voice-over, literally from the book. The gracefulness of the prose has a kind of scathing, ironic violence to it. (185)

Wharton scholars have also explored this narrator, who, with the gracefulness that Scorsese perceived, is the source of much of our discomfort in the book.13 Because she tells us Archer’s story, she denies us access to May and Ellen away from Archer—the women are represented to us only in scenes where they are with Archer—and so we find ourselves like Archer, prisoners “in the centre” of a “conspiracy.” We know, or could guess, who among the characters are other members of this conspiracy. However, one of them we cannot identify by name: Wharton’s unnamed narrator belongs to this “band of dumb conspirators” (Wharton, Age 203). In the novel, for example, Archer finally reveals his love for Ellen while they are alone in her “funny little house” and May is far away in Florida with her parents. After confessing his love for her, Archer suggests to Ellen that he cannot marry May. Their frustrated wrangling over the issue of his engagement to May is interrupted by a bell that “sent a long tinkle through the house” (108). A telegram has arrived for the countess. After she reads it, Ellen hands the telegram to Archer to read. The narrator allows us to read the telegram with him and then gives us little relief from the shock of its contents: “It was dated from St. Augustine and addressed to the Countess Olenska.” In it he reads, “Granny’s telegram successful. Papa and Mamma agree marriage after Easter. Am telegraphing Newland. Am too happy for words and love you dearly. Your grateful May” (108). The narrator stops abruptly for a moment (Wharton’s gap on the page) and then forces us to bear another telegram with Archer: “Half an hour later, when Archer unlocked his own front door, he found a similar


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envelope on the hall-table” (108). Gary H. Lindberg addresses this narrative strategy: “instead of accounting for lapsed time by postulating a chain of consequences, the reader is forced into Archer’s bewildered sense of what has happened” (433). Because the narrator limits so much of our knowledge about May and Ellen, we have to imagine how these telegrams were generated and the effect on Ellen at this point. The narrator does not make that easy for us. How could May, whom Archer contemplates as a model of “helpless and timorous girlhood,” have manipulated these events so expertly? What does Ellen think of Archer— and of her cousin who loves her so dearly—after she reads her telegram? We get no answers from our powerful and merciless narrator in The Age of Innocence, who slams the door shut on us more than once in the novel. We are never allowed membership in the conspiracy that entraps Archer. Blinded from any direct contact with May and Ellen, we are forced to piece together our images of the two women through other means. Scorsese responded to this limited narrative strategy as well: “I loved the way I was led by Wharton down the path of Newland’s point of view, in which he underestimates all of the women, and how he winds up being checkmated by them, and how his wife becomes the strongest of them all” (191). Scorsese and Cocks included many of May’s most revealing lines in their screenplay, which Scorsese reinforced subtly with visuals. “If you go back and look at the picture and study it,” Scorsese wrote, “you’ll see that when May is at Mrs. Mingott’s right after the ball, and her mother is helping her with her coat, she glances over at Ellen. That’s possibly the first time [that we see May’s notice of Archer’s interest in Ellen]” (192). Wharton scholar Cynthia Griffin Wolff has written about May: “The novel is filled with instances of May’s intuitive flashes. . . . Occasionally these are verbalized, but usually they are not. . . . [May and Archer’s] relationship is filled with a profound silence, but the very limitations of the code that governs their marriage fill the silence with meaning” (Feast 321–22). Scorsese addresses these silences in May by closing in on her face several times to help us understand her secret determination. During the scene where she reads the telegram she sent, she reads it to us while the camera gradually closes in on her smiling eyes. In the Newport archery scene, we see her, standing straight in white, as she shoots an arrow during an archery competition. A few shots later, we see a close-up of May’s final shot, a bull’s-eye. Wharton tells us that Archer sees May at this point as having “the same Diana-like aloofness as when she had entered


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the Beaufort ballroom on the night of her engagement” (Scorsese and Cocks 128). In Wharton’s exact prose, Scorsese’s narrator explains that May “would have been just as serene” had she lost the competition. But Scorsese’s camera tells us more. May and Archer walk toward us arm-inarm in slow motion, until all we see are May’s eyes. The camera tells us as much about May as the narrator does. Holding on to her husband, May confronts us with unblinking, resolute victory. Scorsese was also attentive to the details of the characters’ private rooms, where many of the revelations of Wharton’s story unfold. In the scenes depicting the newlywed Archers at home, we watch them interact most often in their private, upstairs spaces. In two scenes, we view them as they climb the stairs toward us. May, carrying a lone, flickering lamp, precedes Archer in both scenes. Scorsese lets us watch Archer being “led [up] the path” that May provides. Wolff also explains that Wharton’s Archer “perceives May’s moments of understanding as mere flickers of light in an otherwise unillumined darkness” (Feast 322). Never fully enlightened, Archer has only a dim sense that May is his keeper. Scorsese, with Wharton as his guide, locates much of Archer’s increasing sense of confinement and suffocation in Archer’s library. We see three important scenes between Archer and May in this room. The first scene comes just after one of the most evocative in the film, in which Archer and Ellen have ridden in a carriage together. In the carriage scene we see a series of short, quick dissolves in which Archer removes one of Ellen’s gloves and, after some passionate kissing, he has confessed that he wants “to get away” with her to a “different country” where they can be together. When Ellen tells him that she knows there is no place for them (“where is that country? Have you ever been there?”) Archer gets out of the carriage abruptly and walks away into the cold. What we see next is a close up of a beautiful Japanese print and then Archer, looking at the print in a book. We then see May, sitting and sewing. Archer looks at her hands—we see a shot of her wedding ring as she works—and May sees him watching her. After explaining to May that he is reading about Japan “because it’s a different country,” Archer rises, walks to the window, and opens it to the cold winter air. May warns him, “You’ll catch your death,” and he closes the window. The narrator explains what he thinks while he resumes watching May: “But then he realized I am dead. I’ve been dead for months and months.” Then, using one of Wharton’s funniest and darkest lines, Scorsese’s narrator continues: “Then


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it occurred to him that she might die. People did. Young people, healthy people, did. She might die, and set him free.” Of course, May does not die at this point, and we continue to watch and hear the conspirators as they move in on Archer: we see two silent figures watching from the shadows as Archer talks to Ellen outside her house, and we hear faint voices echoing from an adjoining gallery in the museum where the two make their plans for a secret liaison.14 We next see Archer again in his library, and we watch a close-up of his hand putting a key in an envelope. Just as he begins to seal the envelope, May enters, and he puts the envelope in a drawer. May explains that she is late because she has been visiting with cousin Ellen. As she continues to talk, Archer stands and tries to move, but May stands in his way, reminding him that he has not kissed her all day. As they exchange a short, chaste kiss, Scorsese makes sure that we notice that May is quivering. The farewell dinner party for Ellen, hosted by Archer and May, precedes the third library scene. Wharton presents the farewell dinner for Madame Olenska as a “silent punishment enacted through the conventions of a dinner party,” where the tribe expels Ellen (Bentley 48). “Retaining the drawing-room settings and the portraits of sensibility of a Jane Austen novel, Wharton adds a subtext of crime, surveillance, and punishment” (49). Scorsese, the director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas, understood Wharton’s subtext of savagery: In the final dinner scene, rather than playing it out in normal dramaturgy, with Newland at the head of the table talking to Ellen and everyone smiling, I decided to use mainly voice-over, literally from the book. . . . [The narrator] describes everybody at the table, Roman punch, gilt-edged cards, etc., and then the camera comes up on Newland’s face for the words, “at her farewell dinner for the Countess Olenska.” . . . I realized we had the footmen in the shot, too, all around the room like guards. . . . I said, “this is wonderful—the armed camp!” (Thompson and Christie 185–86)

This is the scene in which Archer finally realizes that he has been trumped by the group.15 Wharton tells us that Archer recognizes “a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration” (Age 203). He sees that among the conspirators who “believed him to be Madame Olenska’s lover,” his wife stands out, as he “caught the glitter of victory in his wife’s eyes, and for the first time understood that she shared the belief ” (203). By the time Archer says goodbye to Ellen, his rehabilitation has become painful: “Archer’s heart gave a jerk” (204). He watches in a daze as the van der


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Luydens march Ellen out to the carriage, and “he caught the dim oval of a face, eyes shining steadily—and she was gone” (204). In Scorsese’s film, as in the novel, we next find Archer sitting with May in the library one more time. Desperate for one last chance to break out of his prison, he gets just beyond “I want to make a break” before she inflicts one last turn of the screw. Scorsese took special care with this scene: when [May] gets up and says to Newland that she’s afraid the doctors won’t let her go, you know he’s finished. I figured out that as she gets up from the chair, we should do it in three cuts, three separate close-ups, because I thought he’d never forget that moment for the rest of his life. He’d play it back many times. When she gets up . . . we should play it back like a memory. It’s a medium shot, then a shot of her coming into the frame, and then a third one, so that she almost grows in stature. . . . There was something about the way her dress moved, like a flower opening, or something growing. . . . This was the key scene that made me want to make this picture. (Thompson and Christie 193–94)

After May rises, we see a close-up of Archer’s dazed face, and then, from his point of view, we see the library. As the camera pans slowly around the room, we hear the controlled words of the narrator: “It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had happened.” From that point, the panning camera begins to show us mementos and photographs while the narrator explains to us how Archer’s family grew and thrived through the years. As the camera moves around again, we begin to note the changes of furnishings, draperies, and more photographs, and as the narrator tells us about Ted’s christening, Mary’s wedding, and May’s death, we see short shots of an older Archer giving away his daughter and a close-up of a photo of May, dressed in her white archery dress. The narrator tells us, just before we hear a telephone ring, that “Newland Archer, in his fifty-seventh year, mourned his past and honored it.” Scorsese honors the integrity of Wharton’s text in this sequence, not just because he duplicates her language and follows her plot but because he acknowledges the significance of her silences as well. In one of the most manipulative narrative passages that she ever wrote, Wharton made clear by omission that which was most important to Archer. She relegates the twenty-five years between Archer’s farewell to Ellen and his son’s telephone call, to fourteen paragraphs—about three pages—of her final chapter of The Age of Innocence. In the narrator’s one act of mercy toward Archer and toward us, she spares us all but the surface details and the most public accomplishments of Archer’s real life between those two


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moments. We read this real life of Archer’s as the narrator preserves it: as if it were a few pages of names and dates in the family Bible, perhaps somewhere in Archer’s library.16 Scorsese saw the décor as “a character” in his film (Christie 442). He privileges Archer’s library, a room we have seen several times in the film. As the library changes before our eyes to become the room full of framed mementos and relics enshrined behind glass, Scorsese’s camera suggests to us what Wharton’s narrator tells us by omission. Near the end of the final chapter, Archer tries to imagine how Ellen has thought of him during the “half a lifetime” that “divided them” (Age 216). He reflects that perhaps “she too had kept her memory of him as something apart” (216). In the film, we understand that Archer has kept his memory of Ellen as “something apart” when we see his real life displayed as a series of museum artifacts. Because we have watched his story unfold, we know that what he most cherishes is not in this room but is hidden from his library and his family, so as to keep it alive. His private memory—this story—of the two-year madness that marked him twenty-five years before, defines him for us. The memory of his encounter with Ellen Olenska represents the heart of Archer’s real life.17 Scorsese affirms our understanding of the “real” story of Archer’s life in the last scene of the movie. Now in Paris, Archer sits alone on a bench below Madame Olenska’s window, having sent his son upstairs to meet her. Just as he sees a figure coming to her window, the sun’s reflection on the glass mars his vision. We cut from his face to the scene of another sunlit moment that looks familiar to us: a long shot of Ellen, with her back to us, standing on the pier in Newport while a sailboat glides past her. We have seen this still life earlier in the film, when Archer is asked to “fetch Ellen” from the pier. Wharton describes Archer, who has not seen Ellen in two years when he goes to fetch her: “Archer stopped at the sight as if he had waked from sleep” (Age 132). He decides to wait for a signal from Ellen: “If she doesn’t turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I’ll go back” (132). In the first lighthouse scene, Ellen does not turn around and Archer retreats to his wife in the house. In the second lighthouse scene, as the glare of the sun transports us to Archer’s memory of Ellen at the lighthouse, we see her do what she did not do the first time—she turns and smiles.18 As his final homage to Wharton’s language, Scorsese shows us what she describes:


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“It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other. He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters. At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel. (217)

Archer’s beautiful seaside portrait of Ellen comes alive, to turn around and smile at him (and us). As he rises to leave, we know that “the real things of his life” are moving pictures of Ellen that he can revise and rerun, and they are not in his library but alive in his memory. This final scene and others where Scorsese shows us fantasies, or lets his camera pan a room to signify a quarter of a century, or closes in on May’s eyes, tell us as much about Scorsese’s filmmaking as they do about his close reading of Wharton’s text. Like so many of his favorite directors, Scorsese presents The Age of Innocence as a celebration of cinema art. Brigitte Peucker points out that Scorsese “seems intuitively to grasp that the intriguing issue of cinematic adaptation” is its collaborative nature. The Age of Innocence, she notes, “substantiates the claim that, as a latecomer among the arts, film alludes to, absorbs, and undermines the language of the other arts in order to create its own idiom” (507–8).19 The film offers a panorama of this idiom of film art, with “the syntax of silent cinema with its irises, masking, and fades” and with a dancing camera that “sweeps across the long canvas that hangs in Ellen’s house” like “an artist’s paintbrush” (508, 511). Scorsese’s camera also shows us, from above, an elegant table laden with food and then glides down and circles the diners “as though to expose the painterly stasis in which they are entrapped” (511). His camerawork joyously reminds us that the “‘motion picture’ is the first medium that is able to animate visual representation” (511). His voice-over narrator duplicates Wharton’s language word for word, but his camera’s eye contributes the rest of the story. Scorsese’s film shows us how a motion picture can tell a story. A moving camera can make us understand that a beautiful room is a prison; it can illuminate a cabal of lovely conspirators, and it can project the anguish of desire and the grace of fantasy.


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Before we had ever met any of Wharton’s characters in Scorsese’s film, his title credit sequence introduced the story as a beautifully layered narrative about desire and control. In this opening sequence we see a shot of cursive handwritten prose; then, superimposed over this script is a veil of lace. A series of single flowers begin to bloom before our eyes (thanks to the magic of time-lapse still photography). The first flower is white and opens slowly. As the credits begin to roll and the music swells, we watch flower after flower bloom, each a deeper shade of pink, and each opening more quickly than the one before it. The final flowers are dark red, then orange, then yellow. The pace of their movement begins to slow to the point that they appear to be fanning out, and we can see seeds inside the flowers. Finally, we see the last of the blooming flowers fade into a bright yellow chrysanthemum just as we hear the first notes of an aria. A hand picks up the flower, and Scorsese’s moving picture of Edith Wharton’s moving story of Newland Archer begins. Using the camera to suggest how eroticism blooms in Wharton’s tale of unconsummated passion and lifelong yearning, Scorsese reminds us that we are watching a film—not a play, or a painting, or a tableau vivant. Wharton, who wove the language of flowers into all of her fiction, might have delighted in Scorsese’s provocative opening sequence. In her first highly acclaimed novel in 1905, the story of a twenty-nine-year-old orphan in need of a rich husband, Wharton had certainly had flowers on her mind. Almost one hundred years later, a motion picture would lovingly nurture her first beautiful Lily. Although she had published other works before 1905, The House of Mirth made forty-three-year-old Edith Wharton a celebrated author, both in the United States and in Europe. First published in monthly installments in Scribner’s Magazine, and then in book form in October of that year, the book became Wharton’s first bestseller and Lily Bart her first great character. Even before readers had read the final serialized chapter, literary critics and newspaper columnists began to react to the story. Were Wharton’s characters based on real people? Who were they? Was high society as shallow, cruel, and selfish as she suggested? By the time the final chapter was published and Lily was dead, critics were arguing. Was this book intended to condemn high society, as one headline proclaimed: “New York Society Held Up in Scorn . . .”? (Benstock, “Critical” 311). Was Wharton, like Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (the novel that was displaced from the top of the best-seller list by The House of Mirth), trying to shed


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light on a corrupt society? And why, oh why, did she let her heroine die of a drug overdose? The House of Mirth has never been out of print, and beautiful, doomed Lily Bart has probably attracted more attention than any of Wharton’s other characters. Lily was the talk of the town in the novel and then among critics in 1905, and she has never lost her status as a controversial figure. Through the years, Wharton scholars have characterized her as “rebellious and independent” or “a victim of a corrupt society.” They have read her as “a woman who simultaneously procrastinated and acted too quickly; a symbol of an attenuated, dying culture, a tragic heroine,” the personification of materialism gone amuck or patriarchy gone mad, or “an emblem of femininity” (Benstock, “Critical” 314). How we read Wharton’s novel—as “social realism or mannerist satire, psychological drama or tragicomedy”—depends entirely on how we read Lily, who continues to defy classification.20 If Lily resists all efforts to be classified in the text, then trying to capture her on film would also be a great challenge, especially for a Hollywood studio. Wharton sold the film rights sometime during World War I, probably to help finance her war charities, but this early adaptation, produced in 1918, no longer exists (Marshall, “Media” 288). Through the decades, none of the Hollywood studios ever attempted to adapt the novel, despite their proclivity for recognized best sellers by distinguished authors. (We can only imagine The House of Mirth by the producers of The Marriage Playground.) Finally, in 2000, with a century’s legacy of film art and House of Mirth scholarship at his disposal, British director and screenwriter Terence Davies finally brought Lily Bart to the screen.21 Davies’s screenplay deviates in minor ways from Wharton’s text. He created one character, Lily’s cousin Grace Stepney, from a composite of Wharton’s Gerty Farish and Grace Stepney; he eliminated or merely suggested others of the minor characters; and he did not include Lily’s encounter with working mother Nellie Struther on the final evening of her life. Davies also eliminated references to Sim Rosedale’s ethnicity, and he reworked Selden’s discovery of the bundle of returned love letters in his fireplace. Finally, in the one change noted by Wharton scholars, Davies allows Lily to try to use the stolen letters. Late in the film, she goes to Bertha Dorset’s house with the letters, only to learn from the butler that the Dorsets have left town. (In the novel, she only considers going to Bertha with the letters.)22


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Davies preserved much of Wharton’s language intact. He was especially careful with the language in dialogues between Lily (Gillian Anderson) and Selden (Eric Stolz). Twice in the novel and the film, Lily and Selden have moments alone where they try to express their feelings for each other: first in the woods at Bellomont and then in a garden after Lily’s performance in the tableau vivant. In the novel, these two conversations ought to enlighten us about the state of their relationship, but both characters dance around the issue in language that seems almost incoherent. We come away almost as confused and frustrated as Lily and Selden must be. Wharton scholar Maureen Howard has described these conversations: “The brightness with which Lily and Selden play against each other was . . . recognizable drawing-room comedy, but their repartee . . . has as desperate an undertow as the immensely clever exchanges in Oscar Wilde—brittle words” (140). In the movie, Davies allows Lily and Selden to play their word games using Wharton’s language, and so we hear the two approach each other tentatively in speech that “is mannered, fluent, flirtatious to an end that is self-defining, determinedly unphysical, protective” (140). But Davies provides us with further visual insight. He uses his camera to tell us what Lily and Selden cannot tell each other. Their conversations might be in riddles, but their choreography is clear: they have trouble keeping their hands to themselves. We see close-up shots of their deep kisses in both scenes—their two red-haired heads fused—and we know that despite their words, their bodies might start a blaze. These beautiful and erotic kissing scenes suggest that the power of this movie lies neither in the dialogue nor the turns of plot but in the stunning visual story that Davies tells. Davies captures the texture of Lily’s fading circumstances through sight and sound. He translates the visual dimensions of Wharton’s story with a sensitivity to the tactile that reflects Wharton’s own sensitivity to surfaces, ornamentation, and architectural structure in this most structural of her novels.23 Davies uses corollary arts—painting, architecture, music, sculpture, and photography—in ways that correspond to Wharton’s embedded allusions to the arts.24 From the opening title sequence to the final still of dead Lily in her bed, Davies affects Lily’s downward spiral with silent or muted pity. He constructs the House of Mirth that Wharton described, where “the gloves are off and there’s blood on the walls.”25 His mastery over the visual and aural compositions confirms Davies’s House of Mirth as the most Whartonesque of all of the film adaptations to date.


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In the title sequence, we hear a single oboe begin the melancholy strains of Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D Minor, while we watch the representation of an embossed ivory vine as it slowly begins to grow and curl around itself onto an ivory background. 26 The embossed pattern dissolves into a shot of a waiting train in a station. Through the steam, we see the darkened silhouette of a woman walking toward us. In the next camera shot, she continues to walk toward us, and we see that she is walking through a massive archway of a train station. She is walking slowly, and when she pauses under the arch, she seems to be part of a symmetrical design, where she is centered directly below a massive clock and between two large timetables. She comes into focus, and we see her red hair—the first color other than black and white that we have seen—under her elaborate blue velvet hat. Davies’s opening scene of Lily, where she appears out of nowhere, floats through steam, and lights under an archway that dwarfs her, has no counterpart in the novel. Wharton begins her story by showing Lily to us through Lawrence Selden’s eyes: “In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart” (Benstock, House 25). That we meet Lily before we meet Selden in the movie underscores the power of the camera to show us Lily’s story. Before we hear a word of dialogue or see any another character on screen, we have been given enough visual signs to anticipate Lily’s fate: the clock is ticking, the schedules are set, and Lily Bart, pinned alone under a massive structure, has been framed. From this point on, Davies uses visual composition and a hauntingly minimal soundtrack to help us understand the depths that lie beneath the hard surfaces of Wharton’s story. Throughout, we see that Lily is either pinned conspicuously among structural elements or that she serves as ornamentation and decoration inside the house of mirth. Throughout the film, the music, which Davies uses sparingly, is austere. In many of the most intimate scenes—those where Lily and Selden muddle through their flirtation, for instance, or those where Lily tries to talk with her unsympathetic cousin Grace (Jodhi May) or her stern Aunt Julia (Eleanor Bron)—we have no musical soundtrack to cushion our apprehension or mute the anxiety of the moment. The silences during these scenes can be deafening. After her near-rape by Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd), Lily arrives home to be upbraided by Aunt Julia. When Aunt Julia condemns Lily with a final, severe, “I consider that you are disgraced,


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Lily,” we hear nothing but a ticking clock, which simulates Lily’s silent desperation. Late in the movie, after Lily has been disinherited and comes to Grace for a loan, Lily pleads her case without benefit of a sympathetic soundtrack. “I’m at the end of my tether!” she cries, and her words echo off the dark, shiny walls of Grace’s dark sitting room. Grace, motionless and blank-faced, says nothing, while another clock ticks softly. From the large clock above her as she walks into Grand Central Station, to the tiny timepiece on her bedside table in the shabby boardinghouse room where she dies, Lily is surrounded by ticking clocks. These many timepieces never seem to help Lily, however. When we first meet her, she has missed a train; while at Bellomont, she (deliberately) arrives downstairs too late to go to church with Percy Gryce; she has to be awakened by her employer Mrs. Hatch (Lorelei King) because she has overslept; and she spends the money Trenor provides for her so quickly that she cannot repay it. In almost every one of these scenes, we see clocks or hear them in the background. Throughout the movie, clocks become one way of understanding that Lily cannot gauge her resources, especially time and money. Wharton’s narrator tells us what Davies shows us: Lily “had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations” (House 46). Lily squanders time, money, and the goodwill of people who have little invested in her, and ultimately, time will not forgive her. She miscalculates time in alarming ways. She confides to Selden that she has waited too long to marry, and “people are getting tired of me.” Later, she tells him that her “genius lies in doing the wrong thing at the right time,” a self-revelation that prefigures much more than she can imagine. Her timing is always terrible, despite the many clocks that surround her. She takes “the risk” of visiting with Selden in his bachelor flat at the wrong time and then lies to Simon Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia) when he sees her coming out of Selden’s flat, a miscalculation that begins her spiral downward. She waits until the last possible moment to say “yes” to Rosedale’s proposal, and she is too late—he no longer wants to marry her. She tries to negotiate the stolen love letters with Bertha Dorset (Laura Linney), and again, she has arrived at the Dorset doorstep too late. She miscalculates her aunt’s reaction to her gambling; she miscalculates her relationship with Grace; and she completely misjudges Selden’s allegiance to her. She procrastinates with Trenor to the point that he confronts her violently; and she completely miscalculates Bertha Dorset’s power to manipulate her on the yacht.


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In every instance, we are reminded by the timepieces not only that Lily’s time is running out but also that she does not—cannot—respond to time in the same way that the other characters do. Allowing us to watch Lily while she disregards or misinterprets time reinforces the Lily that Wharton created: a woman who knows what she must do but cannot do it. We cannot categorize Lily because she defies the rules by which she knows she must live, and she gambles with the timetables that govern her society. “Lily’s story,” writes Wharton scholar Frances L. Restuccia, “is an irreducible one. . . . Lily . . . slips away from the fixity, the clamp, the containment of marriage. . . . She seems dedicated to a certain freedom” (409). From the first scenes in both book and film, we recognize Lily’s resistance to the role she has been born to play. Wharton’s narrator confides to us that as Selden watched Lily in his sitting room, he realized that Lily “was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate” (House 29). Davies keeps reminding us, through ticking clocks, that Lily “I’ll take the risk” Bart is gambling among people who do keep track of time and who know more than she about the consequences of her miscalculations. In fact, all the clocks (except, perhaps the small one in Lily’s final room) belong to others, who use time to gain advantage over Lily. Lily cannot conform to the time of other characters because she is without time all the time. She has no home, no matrix, and no family. That she is “between trains at the outset of her story is appropriate, for Lily is eminently transient, without a setting of her own” (Howard 138). The clocks are only a minor property in The House of Mirth. Davies tells Lily’s story most spectacularly through his mise-en-scène. In almost every indoor sequence of the film, Lily is dwarfed by grand structures or framed by draperies, windows, mirrors, and works of art.27 Although she sometimes looks beautiful, she never looks natural or comfortable. Wharton describes many of the places where Lily struggles. Aunt Peniston’s house, “in its state of unnatural immaculateness and order, was as dreary as a tomb. . . . [Lily] felt as though she were buried alive in the stifling limits of Mrs. Peniston’s existence” (House 109). The Brys house, where Lily performs her triumphant tableau vivant, was almost as well-designed for the display of a festal assemblage as one of those airy pleasure-halls which the Italian architects improvised to set off the hospitality of princes. . . . so rapidly-evoked was the whole mise-en-scène that one had to touch the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to


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seat one’s self in one of the damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it was not painted against the wall. (136)

“Although her manner is grand,” writes Howard of Lily in the novel, “her sense of personal worth is so frail that all settings in the novel . . . enrich or diminish her” (138). Davies incorporates Wharton’s sense of mise-en-scène into the film by placing Lily among settings in which she appears singular and exposed or fixed in exquisite poses, sometimes almost squirming. She is most obviously trapped in the tableau vivant, where she is literally framed.28 After Lily takes leave of Rosedale at the Benedick, Rosedale and we watch her descend the stairs, framed by a huge, dark arch that makes her appear to be a miniature. When Lily meets Trenor and Rosedale at the Van Osburgh wedding reception, we see her standing between them, all three in another high-arched doorway, and she looks tiny, confined, and uncomfortable. At the opera, Lily is framed in a box, again between Trenor and Rosedale, the box itself draped in heavy velvet panels. In a perfectly symmetrical design, we see Lily as the central fixture of the shot. While Carry Fisher (Elizabeth McGovern) tries to give Lily advice (“marry as soon as you can”), the camera first shows us a close-up of Lily’s pale face and then moves out to reveal that she is sitting in a large wicker chair that once again frames her. We see few close-ups of Lily in the film. Most often, she is positioned on the left side of the screen, and the decor of whatever room she is in overwhelms her. She is often in shadows or marginalized in many shots where columns, staircases, tall doorways, or massive windows draw our attention to themselves, defining Lily as she defines herself to Selden late in the book: “I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life” (House 287). Like Charlotte Lovell in The Old Maid, Lily is framed by doors that close on her, staircases that lead to dark rooms, and mirrors—almost always above dark, massive mantelpieces—that reflect her loneliness, anguish, and fear. When we see two Lilys in a mirror, we can almost hear Wharton’s narrator describing Lily as she sits before her dressing table at Bellomont: “She had been long enough in bondage to other people’s pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers. . . . it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were in the same position” (46). In the film, we often gaze at Lily from behind while she gazes at herself, and we are allowed to watch the two Lilys: the one who reflects Lily’s fading image among her friends (she does become her own maid) and the one who watches herself as she combs her rich red hair.


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Davies uses Lily’s thick red hair, which Wharton describes several times as “exquisite,” as the most vivid color in his palette in The House of Mirth. In three important scenes, Lily’s hair blends in with the wallpaper so well that hair and wall are sometimes indistinguishable. The scene where she waits for the tardy Selden in her aunt’s sitting room is one of the most beautifully composed scenes in the film. Lily, dressed in lily white, sits motionless at the left edge of a long chesterfield covered with purple and red fabric, and her hair matches exactly the colors of the wall behind her. In the scene where Selden visits Lily in the hotel lobby to beg her to leave Mrs. Hatch’s employ, Lily, again on the left, stands next to a massive staircase and her hair again blends with the shiny wallpaper behind her. Finally, when Lily attends the opera with Trenor and Rosedale, she wears a bright scarlet dress and red feather in her red hair. We watch from above as a throng mounts the wide stairs leading to the opera house. The camera slowly moves in on Lily, in the center of the crowd, and we see the top of her red head. In this shot and the next, where she sits in a box surrounded by Trenor and Rosedale, she looks like the bull’s-eye of a target. The red of Lily’s hair and dress represents the only primary color that we see in the movie.29 Davies wanted his sets and lighting to suggest paintings by Vermeer, and they do: most of the interior spaces are in muted shades of gold and brown or various shades of gray and black, often with the only light coming in through one window. In an early scene, Lily walks into the large foyer of Aunt Julia’s house, where she stands for a moment in another perfectly symmetrical position between two side windows and a large arched door. She walks across the dark and somber sitting room to a window and adjusts the shade. The picture resembles Vermeer’s Woman with a Water Jug, complete with a shaft of light falling across Lily’s face and hand. Davies’s restraint with color and ornamentation distinguishes the film, as Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman explained in his 1993 review. “Davies’s sense of the material is closer to a Mizoguchi geisha drama than Masterpiece Theater,” writes Hoberman. “Davies resists the idealizing soft-focus glamour or nostalgic ostentatious opulence of similar period adaptations to conjure up a stark turn-of-the-century New York” (1). Davies especially restrains the final scene of the film, when Selden enters Lily’s boardinghouse room, which is dark and silent. He first goes to the window and opens the shade (another Vermeer moment). He looks through her papers (a final humiliation that Lily suffers, when he violates her privacy by ferreting through her meager belongings). Finally, Selden approaches the bed.


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He turns and sees Lily lying still on her bed, an empty vial of sleeping medicine in her hand. As Wharton wrote, “He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees” (House 305). We first see Lily’s dead body from Selden’s perspective, and then we see a shot of him as he grasps her hands. As he bows his head, the subdued colors of the shot begin to bleed out of the picture. In the final shot of the film, we are left with a faint black-and-white image of Lily, as white as marble, and Selden, outlined in gray, as he kneels beside her body. Too late to save her, Selden gazes at her as their images fade into darkness. Wharton might have recognized the artistry in Davies’ final shot, because she understood the relationship between restraint and unrelenting tragedy. Using the tropes of the nineteenth-century novel of manners, she had stunned her readers by denying the virginal Lily a last-minute rescue by her true love—in fact, Lily’s “true love” turned out to be the most criminally indifferent of all of the residents of the house of mirth. 30 The ornamental surfaces of Wharton’s prose belie the stark realities of Lily’s life and death, and Wharton’s House of Mirth finally resembles Sister Carrie more than it does any of Jane Austen’s novels.31 Davies uses Wharton’s strategy: although The House of Mirth looks like it ought to be another 1990s costume drama, Davies shocks us by presenting Lily’s story in tones and textures that belie the age of extravagant adaptation. Davies’s New York has a bleakness that Wharton describes: the trains are loud and dirty; the upper classes live by an invisible ruthless code of indifference; and the working girls live in a tenuous, seedy world where they must fight to get what they need. Like Wharton, Davies refuses to compromise Lily Bart’s tragedy to the expectations of an audience fed on predictable melodrama and romance. Instead, as his final shot reveals, he applies Wharton’s uncompromising forbearance and unyielding sense of the real when he reduces Lily’s tragedy to a black-and-white photograph that fades before our eyes. Like Wharton, Davies suggests that the cruel downward spiral of Lily’s life may be appreciated only after her death, and not by Selden or any of the other people who pinned her into a frame. Only those of us outside the (movie) frame have a wider perspective by which to explore the significance of Lily’s life and death. If Wharton’s House of Mirth suggests Sister Carrie more than it does Jane Austen, then Davies’s House of Mirth has more in common with the black-and-white women’s films of the 1940s than it does with any of the other costume dramas of the 1990s. Davies’s symbolic architectural structures, the many flights of stairs and the doorways, the clocks and


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mirrors, the restricted lighting, and the muted sounds all composite to project the same dark, confining atmosphere as The Old Maid and other women’s films of the 1940s. His still shots of “framed” Lily suggest scenes from Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Caught (1949), and Lola Montes (1955).32 Lily herself resembles one of the “framed” women in 1940s films such as The Letter (1940), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), and Deception (1946). In these films, female protagonists, “depicted as enigmatic” and “indecipherable,” are likely to commit “atrocious acts” because they fall in love with the wrong men (Doane 120–21). In Deception, writes Doane, “the woman totally misreads the situation. Her . . . feminine skill in deciphering the intentions and motives of others has gone awry” (121). Often these characters die because they misread their own circumstances, and they are framed and condemned as “bad girls” by those around them. Like these 1940s characters, Lily, to whom “the suppleness of indecision is preferable” to the frame of loveless sex and the chains of marriage, suffers and dies alone because she has rejected a system in which “one male suitor after another . . . attempts to capture, clarify, and crystallize” her (Restuccia 404). Others of Davies’s strategies in The House of Mirth: his use of dissolves to move us ahead in time, his muted colors, and his spare soundtrack, suggest an even earlier time in motion-picture history: the silent era of the movies. In uncanny ways, The House of Mirth behaves like an early silent film, one where, perhaps, the filmmaker decided to paint the gunfire of his cowboys red, or, in further experimentation with celluloid, tried to tint one dancing girl’s dress bright red so that she would stand out in the crowd. This special effect always surprised and delighted nickelodeon audiences and might keep them coming back for more, as Edwin S. Porter hoped they would after watching these special sequences in The Great Train Robbery in 1903. Edith Wharton, who surprised and shocked her reading audience two years later with The House of Mirth, also hoped her readers would return to her. Like Porter, she had told her story in episodes, using images, a dash of color, and silences. Also like Porter and his Great Train Robbery, this earliest of her great works would still be considered a masterpiece a hundred years later. At the edge of the twentieth century, neither the film artist nor the writer could have foreseen how their arts would unite and project—with flourishes of red—onto a screen at the edge of the twentyfirst century.


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I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

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dith Wharton’s despair over the popularity of mass-movie culture during her lifetime was a despair shared by a cluster of other writers, including H. L. Mencken, William Dean Howells, Maxim Gorky, Aldous Huxley, and many others. In terms that sound strikingly like Wharton’s, Mencken described “movie folk” as people who had “built their business upon a foundation of morons” and who had “very little ingenuity and resourcefulness in them” (Geduld 100). Mencken—and Wharton—reacted to what they considered a modern tumult “that yanked down the temple of critical standards” and threatened “an entire caste, namely [their] own” (Hoberman, Vulgar 46). Wharton belonged to the “last generation of American intellectuals to swear unswerving allegiance to the printed word and dictates of European taste,” writes Andrew Ross in No Respect (11). The same generation, he continues, used “their involvement with popular culture as a site of contestation” (11).1 In “Tendencies in Modern Fiction,” an essay she published in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1934, Wharton did contest modern experimental fiction and cited it as one of the sources of cultural deterioration.2 She accused contemporary novelists of lacking courage and of taking simple “short-cuts” through mechanical means: the “novelist exchanged his creative faculty for a Kodak. . . . Transmutation is the first principle of art, and copying can never be a substitute for creative vision” (Uncollected 171). Her reference to a Kodak camera places Wharton in a long line of writers who have reacted to the “development of mechanical

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means of reproduction” (Hoberman, Vulgar 46). “The printing press is likely the first” of the culprits, but “the camera is a better example: the sudden appearance of a machine by which any idiot could create a perfect representational likeness threw professional painters and their critics into a fertile confusion” (46). Wharton published “Tendencies in Modern Fiction” the same year that she published Charm Incorporated in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan and sold its rights to Hollywood. Her simultaneous publication of a mediocre short story in a popular magazine and a lament on the state of contemporary fiction might have reminded her that she was complicit in what she saw as a crime against her own work. For Wharton, “camera democracy” could yield little for one with “the story-telling gift,” who, like a “tough plant,” would grow naturally only with “the patience to explore and depict the enduring characters of human nature under the shifting surface” of the barren and mechanical modern world (Uncollected 173). Wharton, herself a “tough plant,” now survived tentatively in an unstable landscape where she might be mistaken for a weed and uprooted by mechanical means. Her oversimplified comparison between a camera and a plant provides us with more than just another example of her defensiveness, however. Wharton was sensitive enough to the plastic arts to have known that cameras do not merely duplicate. For someone who kept albums of photos, who had commissioned a documentary film, and whose characters compared their narratives to movies, Wharton belied her own understanding of the photographic arts. She knew that photography could be a powerful narrative device. J. Hoberman offers an example of the power of photography in the introduction to Vulgar Modernism. Pioneer photographer Fox Talbot loved taking pictures because of the “potential for each picture to include things unknown to its maker” (2). Only later, Talbot explained, might the photographer or another viewer discover unexplored aspects of the picture, and each of them will privilege and focus on something different. Hoberman quotes film scholar Siegfried Kracauer on the transformative nature of a photo: “Leafing through the family album, the grandmother will reexperience her honeymoon, while the children will curiously study bizarre gondolas, obsolete fashions, and the old young faces they never saw” (2). The function and value of photographs change from viewer to viewer and through time, transforming the photos from memorabilia to documents, to stories. Photography, like other arts, is faceted and suggestive. “This fortuitous quality . . . suggests that, mechanical though they


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may be, the camera-based arts are not without an unconscious—or a life of their own” (2). The life of its own, with its unpredictable, multifaceted nature, is a characteristic of film art that has always attracted enthusiasts from among the literati—the Mencken and Wharton references to the morons in Hollywood can be matched by equally engaging published essays on the potential of film, and by equally well-known writers. Tolstoy and Thomas Mann were intrigued by movies. Film was, according to Mann, “narrative in pictures. . . . film possesses a technique of recollection, of psychological suggestion, a mastery of detail in men and in things, from which the novelist . . . might learn much” (qtd. in Murray 131). James Joyce wrote and spoke about his debt to film art, and he included references to cinema in many of his works.3 In his epic trilogy U.S.A., John Dos Passos experimented with the relationship between narrative prose and film in his “Newsreels” sections and called another of his sections “The Camera Eye.” The cinema also fascinated Virginia Woolf. Like Wharton, however, she had her reservations about the medium. In “The Movies and Reality,” a 1926 essay she published in The New Republic, she described the potential of cinema: sometimes at the cinema in the midst of its immense dexterity and enormous technical proficiency, the curtain parts and we behold, far off, some unknown and unexpected beauty . . . while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found . . . fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets . . . and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time. (qtd. in Murray 91)

Woolf likened film art to something primitive but promising, and she was especially intrigued by its collaborative nature. Like other collaborative arts—theatre, opera, ballet—film relied on symbols of “visual emotion” that would work only through experimentation. Movies involved “something abstract . . . something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music. . . . When some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command” (90). Yet Woolf was not entirely enthusiastic. She qualified her endorsement of film art with a warning that sounded like Wharton’s: without further exploration of the means to expression, film art would be trying to duplicate


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something that could not be duplicated. Only when film art stopped trying to duplicate the language of novels, Woolf suggested, would it have a life of its own. Woolf, like Wharton and other prose writers, clearly wanted film art to be inconsistent with fiction. She “places film in the visual arts tradition and sets both in contrast and opposition to the prose novel” (Elliott 53). She described film art in terms that are “moralistically judgmental” and “ridiculingly scornful” (53). Film, like narrative painting (another art form she takes on in an essay entitled “Pictures”), is too primitive and too simple to tell stories, says Woolf, and when it tries, the stories it tells are insipid and inadequate: “with half a sheet of note-paper we can tell all the stories of all the pictures in the world” (53). For film to mature, Woolf recommended that whatever “is accessible to words and to words alone, the cinema must avoid” (54). For Woolf, cinema art appeals to “the sensory, bestial, and materialistic eye,” while novels appeal to the mind (54). Woolf, like Wharton, “mounts moralistic, dogmatic, even histrionic defenses of verbal territory” when she accused cinema of trying to copy something that could not be copied (53). Both “Tendencies in Modern Fiction” and “The Movies and Reality” set fiction and the photographic arts against each other in a turf war.4 F. Scott Fitzgerald joined this territorial conflict the year that Wharton was laid to rest in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles. Living once more in Hollywood, he had stopped trying to write fiction and needed income desperately, so he was trying his hand at screenwriting once more. A year earlier, he had rationalized his state as a failed novelist in a world dominated by film in The Crack-Up: the novel . . . was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. (Fitzgerald 78).

Perhaps because he understood the relationship between fiction and film in ways that neither Woolf nor Wharton did, Fitzgerald did not just fear that film might become more popular than fiction. He already assumed that film had displaced the novel. With The Crack-Up, he articulated the heart of the “perplexing paradox” of the film/novel adaptation debate: “on one side, novels and films are diametrically opposed as ‘words’ and ‘images,’ at war formally and culturally. . . . On the other side of the


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paradox, novels and films are integrally related as sister arts” (qtd. in Elliott 1). Not only did Fitzgerald articulate the classic film/novel debate by arguing that “words were subordinate to images,” but he would himself come to represent an emblem of the novel/film paradox after his death four years later, when writers like Edmund Wilson attributed his death to Hollywood’s “appalling record of talent depraved and wasted” (Elliott 86). Film critics, however, suggested that Fitzgerald was just another “bad screenwriter who simply could not succeed at that genre” (86). Film and fiction have always behaved like two relatives who share a similar legacy and appear to have a close relationship but who are “fitful . . . overtly compatible, secretly hostile” (Corrigan, Film 198).5 The fear that a novel will be mutated because it has “a separate content which may be detached and reproduced” has convinced those who decry or dismiss film that deviations from the text represent “a trick which much be concealed from the public” (200). Yet to expect a film to reproduce “a faithful adaptation” diminishes both fiction and film. “There is no such thing as a faithful adaptation,” writes film critic Robin Wood (Taylor 5). “To reduce a great novel to its plot is merely to reveal a total incapacity for reading it . . . but the notion of the faithful adaptation is equally insulting to film,” he continues, because it “implies that film is the inferior art and should be content (or even proud) to reproduce precisely what it can never hope to reproduce: the movement of the author’s words on paper” (5). Film and fiction are different in the “same sense that a historical painting becomes a different thing from the historical event which it illustrates” or when the photograph of a long-ago honeymoon that a grandmother shows a child becomes a historical document and a curiosity. Novels and movies “represent different aesthetic genera, as different from each other as ballet is from architecture” (Corrigan, Film 200). Ballet and architecture do share characteristics, but those who might compare them would probably not feel the need to defend one against the other. The study of fiction and film, however, becomes a “debate,” where they must be monitored, scrutinized, and searched to find out whether they have stolen something from one another. The vocal critics of film—among them Wharton, Woolf, and Fitzgerald—have been writers who feared that film might displace them. Why has film criticism been predominantly the realm of fiction writers? Why not those who study the theater or photography, whose own arts are as closely related (if not more so) to film than fiction? Edith Wharton’s relationship to film (like Fitzgerald’s and Woolf’s) embodies an answer to these questions. During the years when narra-


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tive film became the most popular genre of film art, Wharton suspected and then realized that fiction was not the only art capable of telling a good story. As she became familiar with how narrative movies worked, her fiction reveals that Wharton recognized that the affinity of narrative film to her own art was profound. Movies included elements of the same arts—opera, painting, architecture, music, and poetry—that she had included in all of her own fiction. When she discovered, sometime between the time she created Ethan Frome in 1911 and Charity Royall in 1917, that fiction and film art shared a complex legacy, that her storytelling was closely related to cinema, she disengaged from the movies. She stopped watching movies when she understood that they could engage an audience as fiction engaged a reader, through complicated narratives that combined words with other arts. Like other writers who saw—and still see—fiction and film as warring bodies, Wharton shielded herself in the armor of words. She tried to distance herself, like those who still need to see film as a poor beggar of a relative, by writing herself away from the movies. Yet in her depictions of Charity Royall’s private viewing of a sleeping Lucius Harney and Martin Boyne’s private screening of a dancing Judith Wheater, Wharton described something about moviegoing that she did not admit outside her fiction: a moving story can inspire a viewer’s imagination in the same way that a book can nourish a reader. Charity Royall and Martin Boyne, both of whom understand themselves better after watching moving pictures in the dark and by themselves, could have agreed that movies “are at once the most subjective of individual experiences” (Hoberman, Vulgar 3). Nona Manford and Sophy Viner might have agreed that film is also “the most public of public arts” (3). Zinnia Lacrosse would have agreed, given her own profile among the likes of Martin Boyne and Rose Sellars, that there “is still something suspect in taking the movies too seriously—except, of course, as a business” (3). The more Wharton realized that what she did was, in fact, intimately related to cinema storytelling, the more violated and hostile she felt about the film industry. She began to acknowledge film only as an institution, a business enterprise that, at the expense of working girls and obsolete movie stars, provided a ticket to wealth for immigrant Jews who built empires that “erupted from below” and became “America’s pyramids” (2–3). As Hollywood pyramids came to define the landscape of Wharton’s homeland, she must have understood that she helped build them. Feeling manipulated and diminished, she tried to diminish the movies. But,


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like Martin Boyne, who carries a photograph of the Wheaters with him, or Charity Royall, who reruns her day in Nettleton over and over in her mind, Wharton could not diminish the characteristic that most ties her fiction to the movies: her ability to present her characters’ dreams of a different world. “Do movies know what they are doing?” Hoberman asks (3). His answer is no. Movies behave like dreams and nightmares, with lives of their own. “The movies, which developed in tandem with psychoanalysis, have always suggested a model for conscious and unconscious thought processes” by projecting illusion onto a screen (3). Like fiction, which authors generate privately while they are sitting at desks or writing in bed, “movies exist, quite literally, in the heads of the people who watch them” (3). And although they are public spectacles, “industrialized day-dreams and individual nightmares,” movies become personal experiences to be treasured or avoided, for as many different reasons as there are viewers. Like the thousands of copies of a novel and its millions of words, the “thousands of individual images” of a film are projected from “behind our backs, up in the projection booth,” and transmuted into narrative dreams that shape themselves to our own dreams (3). The rivalry that Wharton and other writers created has proven to be an artificial, defensive, and fruitless construct by which to evaluate her work as text or on the screen. When she disparaged movie culture and wrote essays about how fiction ought to work (and when Woolf warned that movies should stay away from storytelling), she was trying to distinguish herself from a precocious relative, one who looked and behaved enough like her that she knew it was not a machine that merely duplicated but a living, breathing member of the tribe. Wharton might not have allowed that both fiction and film have unpredictable lives of their own, but adaptations of her works testify that neither fiction nor film knows what it is doing. This is especially fortunate for Wharton. When she and her characters reflected on their isolation and sense of loss, when they expressed or did not express their yearnings, their imaginings were embraced by film art. Movies have transmuted the most profound and powerful visions that Wharton ever provided for her readers: her hopeful glimpse of a different world. Film adaptation has ensured Wharton’s most profound longings a safe passage to another country. Considering film and text as mirror images of each other, instead of competing arts, allows Wharton’s fiction, and film versions of her fiction, to


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journey through each other to reveal glimpses of her alternative world. “Reciprocal looking glass analogies have for centuries fostered the sister arts tradition, for their rhetorical mirroring creates an effect of family resemblance,” writes Kamilla Elliott in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (210). Elliott quotes eighteenth-century writer Sir Richard Blakemore on the interaction between painting and poetry: “The painter is the poet to the eye, and a poet a painter to the ear. One gives us pleasure by silent eloquence, the other by vocal imagery” (210). To consider a novel and a movie through a reciprocal “looking glass” allows us to mirror text to film: Two arts contain and invert the otherness of each other reciprocally, inversely, and inherently, rather than being divided from the other by their otherness. Thus difference is as much a part of identity as resemblance. Moreover, it is an identical difference, for each art differs from and inheres in the other in exactly the same way. It is the same difference. In looking glass analogies, each art takes exactly the same grammatical, conceptual, and sensory position in the rhetoric of the other. (212; her italics)

“Verbalizing and visualizing,” continues Elliott, “thus prove to be connected rather than opposed. . . . they inhere looking glass fashion” (222). If fiction and film become looking glasses that reflect each other, one of the characteristics they reflect most clearly in each other is their use of metaphor. Although critics “have tended to see metaphor from a literary perspective” only, “filmmakers have been making filmic metaphors for decades; we simply have not recognized them as such” (234). The “connotative dimensions of filmic figures” become clear in “elements of the image (acting, costume, sets, and props) . . . in ways of presenting the image (lighting, framing, camera angle, and camera movement), . . . in juxtapositions of images (the rhythms, dissociations, and connections of editing), and in accompaniments to the image (music and sound)” (234). Adaptations of Wharton’s work, beginning with 1939’s The Old Maid, have provided us with remarkable filmic metaphors that reveal both the characters’ sense of entrapment and their projections of the alternative worlds in which they yearn to live. The Old New York matrons of Wharton’s Old Maid unwittingly help us to understand Charlotte’s secret transformation from sickly girl to robust woman. They explain to each other the striking “change in her,” and they chart the details of Charlotte’s distinct image after she returns from the South (83). She no longer conforms to their standards of dress. They describe “the oddness of her appearance”: she wears “plain dresses


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of Quakerish cut” and goes without “trinkets and watch-chains” (83). She always wears “the same grey cloak and small close bonnet” (83). Beyond her dress, Old New York decides that Charlotte’s “sudden zeal for visiting the indigent” can be explained by her exposure to “the hopeless degradation” of families she had seen while recovering “in the south” (83). Charlotte defies tradition a second time, by breaking her engagement and recovering from an illness in isolation from society again, but this time, she takes the “foundling” with her to the country. The matrons once again rationalize her odd behavior and transformation as a kind of queer illness: “Dr. Lanskell . . . said . . . that the baffled instinct of motherhood was peculiarly intense in cases where lung-disease prevented marriage” (117). When Charlotte returns to New York, the nameless matronly chorus decides that she has grown “robust and middle-aged, energetic and even tyrannical” (118). During the middle sequences of Goulding’s Old Maid, Charlotte appears distinct from all around her. Before she has relinquished her daughter to Delia’s care and has moved into Delia’s overly decorated home, Charlotte dresses, like Wharton’s Charlotte, in plain, close-fitting clothes and a dark cape and she wears no jewelry. She has an assured air—she speaks forcefully and looks straight into the eyes of other characters when she speaks to them. As a single woman who runs a foundling home in which she conceals her illegitimate daughter, Charlotte indeed appears robust, confident, and competent. After she has relinquished Tina to Delia, Charlotte appears ghostly and wan, as Old New York had prophesied: “Charlotte Lovell was meant to be an old maid” (117). However, near the end of the movie, while Charlotte struggles to decide whether to reveal herself to a grown Tina, the movie provides us with echoes of the robust Charlotte, not through flashback or dialogue but through movement and music. After Delia’s daughter has married (in the same overstuffed room where Delia’s wedding and Charlotte’s almost-wedding took place earlier in the film), Charlotte watches her lively daughter dance for a few moments, and then she slowly climbs the ever-present staircase. We are behind her, and we follow her from behind as she walks slowly back into her darkened room. Instead of walking to her chair, we watch her from behind as she dances gracefully and alone in the dark, in time to the waltz she hears from below. Suddenly, she stops and turns toward us, and we see that what must have been a smile has transformed into a knitted brow. The music, “My Darling Clementine,” has reminded Charlotte and those of us watching Charlotte that Tina is as robust and sexual as the young


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Charlotte was. For her mother, Tina’s dance becomes a warning. For us, Charlotte’s recognition suggests more. We remember earlier images of her that were accompanied by the same music: scenes of a vibrant, dancing maiden, and then a competent, happy mother. The suggestion of an alternative world in which Charlotte might have danced and celebrated with her daughter (and her daughter’s father) slips through in this scene. Through her graceful dancing to the thematic music, we experience a glimpse of the dreams that have sustained Charlotte as she has endured her lonely life and has watched, from afar, her daughter grow up. The camera and soundtrack have combined to provide us with Charlotte’s moment of private illumination and longing, which Wharton describes as “the shaft of moonlight falling across the swans and garlands of the faded carpet,” where “two young figures” lay “in each other’s arms” (141). For a moment, Charlotte remembers how it feels to be independently sure of herself. Then, as Wharton would tell us, Charlotte sinks “down with a broken murmur on the lounge” and hides “her face in the cushions” with the “same fierce maternal passion” that had sustained her during the brief interlude of her life when she lived happily (149–50). For a moment, the film creates an alternative world for Charlotte in which she could celebrate being Tina’s mother. All four of the 1990s Wharton productions involve characters who feel compromised and threatened by institutions and traditions and who dream of alternative worlds in which they would be free to define themselves. All four productions also mirror the yearnings of these characters through filmic strategies for which there are no direct verbal parallels in Wharton’s works. In Palmer’s 1990 production of The Children, we learn early in the film that Martin Boyne is engaged to Rose Sellars, but we never see the two of them show affection for each other—in fact, we see the opposite: icy distance and stiff restraint. Wharton’s narrator describes Rose’s “exquisite aloofness” more than once for us, and the choreography between Boyne and Rose in the film mirrors the narrator’s description in the text (Children 141). In the film, we understand Boyne’s increasing emotional distance from Rose during scenes when they are enclosed by the low ceilings of Rose’s chateau. When he is alone, Boyne does not pull a photograph of the singular Rose out of his pocket but instead smiles over the small photograph that he carries of himself surrounded by the Wheater children. By the time he watches his final moving picture of a dancing Judith, we have come to understand that she represents all that Rose did not.


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Judith mirrors Boyne’s own “taste for adventure, spontaneity, and freedom” (Pifer 222).6 As he tries to capture her one last time from outside the window, he cries because he realizes that Judith embodies a kind of freedom that he can only imagine. “The sylvan figure of Judith Wheater, whose untamed image captures all the spellbinding appeal of the wilderness,” reminds Boyne of the “shimmering freedom and possibility” (223). The movie reveals a glimpse of Boyne’s alternative universe (one that Wharton had suggested early in the novel when Boyne becomes disoriented by the Wheaters on the ship) at the very end of the film. We see a fleeting shot of the seven children standing on the deck of a swiftly moving yacht, Judith standing at the lead in profile, her hair blowing in the wind. In the film, as in the novel, Judith represents unpredictable motion. Gliding across a dance floor or gliding through the sea, Judith’s “elusive, indefinable nature and the thrill of uncertainty” mirrors the dream of liberty and energy for middle-aged, stiff, staid Martin Boyne. The image of the Wheaters moving through the water projects Boyne’s dream of an alternative world, this one a deep, watery ride that opposes Rose’s static iceberg. Boyne imagines the adventure of an unpredictable, ever-changing sea, where, as he once felt among the Wheaters on an earlier journey, he might feel liberated, happy, and passionate. In Ethan Frome, “Wharton’s technique is scenographic, and her nine brief chapters following the opening frame constitute a succession of local pictures” (Ljungquist xxiii). John Madden lays out Ethan Frome as if it were a primitive painting or a seventeenth-century parchment text. By repeatedly taking us from the dark interior of the Frome house to the stark white exteriors, Madden mirrors the landscape of sexless love and loveless sex that Wharton reveals when she opens “the door to Frome’s farmhouse” and brings “the reader to the threshold of Frome’s private world” (xx). In the film, Ethan feels most entrapped outside on the cold, white landscape, where he and Mattie will eventually seal their fate with one last fateful ride down the hill. In opposition to the whiteness of the exteriors, the dark interior of the house becomes the site of Ethan’s dream world, where Wharton’s Ethan projects into the parlor “an illusion of long-established intimacy” between him and Mattie (50). The only sequence in the movie where the interior of the house is bathed in warm colors is when Ethan and Mattie eat alone. The lighting distinguishes this scene as the site of Ethan’s alternative universe, one where, as Wharton tells us, he could “set his imagination adrift on the fiction that [he and Mattie] had always spent their evenings thus and would


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always go on doing so . . .” (50; Wharton’s ellipses). The most significant shot during this scene includes one of Wharton’s own strategies in the novella: her “descriptions of inscrutable New England faces” (Ljungquist xxv). Wharton describes Mattie’s face as “a window that has caught the sunset,” and near the end of this dining sequence, the camera closes in on Mattie’s face while she sings a song to Ethan, just before they climb the stairs for bed. We watch with Ethan, from a lower step, as Mattie sings from above us in the glow of the candle that she holds. In one continuous close-up shot, we see her flushed face through golden backlighting as she sings, and then we see a close-up of Ethan, also bathed in gold, from her point of view. Her intimate performance reveals for us Ethan’s momentary “sense of being in another world, where all was warmth and harmony and time could bring no change” (49). Through firelight and candlelight, the movie infuses Mattie’s singing face and Ethan’s listening one with what Wharton describes as “the glow” of another world (49). The film’s Ethan mirrors Wharton’s, as we see him transform from “part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe,” into “all that was warm and sentient . . . below the surface” (18). We can envision in Mattie’s singing face Ethan’s dream world, one where love and sex, promise and intimacy, passion and warmth, might be joined together and “would always go on doing so.” Martin Scorsese also includes music and singing among a variety of filmic elements he uses to mirror Newland Archer’s dreams in The Age of Innocence. That Scorsese’s is the most cinematically athletic of the Wharton adaptations seems appropriate. Wharton’s Archer, unlike the reserved Martin Boyne and the mute Ethan Frome, is one of Wharton’s most articulate dreamers. He expresses his own longing for another world more than once in the novel. He delivers his most desperate plea for another world to Ellen: “I want somehow to get away with you into a world where . . . we shall be simply two human beings who love each other” (174). Scorsese reflects Archer’s yearnings through a series of cinematic strategies: recitatives directly to the camera by May and Ellen; broad strokes of primary color associated with the two women (danger/red for May and freedom/yellow for Ellen); camera irises that close in on Archer and May or on Archer and Ellen; Archer’s final altered memory of Ellen’s turning toward him with a smile. However, the most effective means by which we understand Archer’s dreams of a different world are reflected to us through music.


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Whenever we see Archer and Ellen as a couple in the movie, they are almost always sitting in relatively small spaces: in an opera box, in the patroon house, in the parlor of Ellen’s funny little downtown house, on an uncomfortably small love seat at the van der Luyden’s—all places where they can, and often are, watched by others. We see a stark contrast to these scenes in a sequence in which Archer, having pursued Ellen in Boston, takes her to a public restaurant where they sit at a table outdoors. This single outdoor scene distinguishes itself by the clear candor with which Archer and Ellen speak to each other and react to each other—nowhere in either novel or movie are they more clearly besotted or more clearly frustrated with each other. They are sitting anonymously in a public place, oblivious to the voices coming from the next room. (In the novel, these voices belong to a group of “strident school-teachers” [147]). This scene, which falls almost exactly in the middle of the film and novel, becomes a turning point for the couple and for the viewers. Their lunch on the porch of a public restaurant represents the only truly private time that Archer and Madame Olenska will ever have. Scorsese uses much of Wharton’s dialogue here. Archer accuses Ellen: “You gave me my first glimpse of a real life. Then you asked me to go on with the false one. No one can endure that” (Scorsese and Cocks 83).7 Ellen replies, “I’m enduring it” (84). With the assurance that she “will not go back,” we see a close-up of Archer’s hand on the table, as Ellen puts her hand in his. With that still image of their clasped hands atop a table in a restaurant, Wharton’s narrator closes the chapter: “He must do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it” (149). To reflect Archer’s need to hold onto this final moment, Scorsese’s camera backs away and slows down, so that we see a series of stills that dissolve into each other: Archer rising from his chair; Ellen rising; the two of them leaving the space; finally, an empty table on a deserted porch. Wharton does not allow us to see the couple part, and neither does Scorsese. He does linger over their private scene, however, with musical accompaniment. As Archer rises and the series of slow dissolve shots begin, we hear a hauntingly beautiful rendition of a popular sentimental song of the day, “Marble Halls” sung by one plaintive female voice. The song continues throughout the final shots of the empty table and then the empty porch. As the final shot of the restaurant dissolves into the next sequence of the film, we continue to hear the song. Next we see an “extreme long lens shot of Broadway” and a screen “filled with men, Archer


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among them, all coming toward us on their way to work, and all wearing the same derby” (Scorsese and Cocks 85). Only when the camera closes in on Archer as he approaches a door does the song end, and we are suddenly brought back to Archer’s day through the voice of Count Olenska’s private secretary, M. Rivière. The music from Archer’s private, poignant lunch with Ellen bleeds into the next scene of a marching army of uniformed businessmen and reflects Wharton’s description of Archer’s dreamlike state at this point. As he travels back to New York, Wharton’s Archer cannot stop thinking about his day with Ellen: “In the train these thoughts were still with him. They enclosed him in a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked remote and indistinct” (150). As we simultaneously watch Archer walk among the other men and hear a woman singing about her dreams, we experience Archer’s dream of escape to another country. His dream to live with Ellen in a foreign land finds voice as he walks among his peers. He has projected himself into another place, where he is no longer imprisoned by the shackles of his New York life. Like Wharton’s Archer, Scorsese’s walks as a foreigner in New York, one who now speaks a secret language and has “a feeling that if he spoke to his fellow-travelers they would not understand what he was saying” (150). In Wharton’s House of Mirth, no one understands Lily’s dilemma better than Lily. (Should she marry a very rich man who is also boring? Should she marry the wealthiest man she knows, who is also a Jew?) She defines herself as a commodity to be packaged, circulated, and advertised, and she sees marriage as a business partnership. While she is taking tea with Selden in his apartment, she points out to him that he has the luxury of marrying or not marrying, but she does not. In her explanation, Lily foretells her own story: “Ah, there’s the difference,” she tells him; “a girl must, a man may if he chooses. . . . If I were shabby no one would have me. . . . We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership” (12). At twenty-nine years old, Lily knows her time is running out, but she resists the surety of marriage throughout the novel. Lily likes to take risks and gamble, and the most profound risk she takes in the novel is seeing how long she can resist the “partnership” of marriage. When she loses the gamble, she drops, but not before she has dreamed herself into a different world, one where the “partnership” between a woman and a man might be defined by genuine love and affection.


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Lily is fascinated with working women, and she projects herself as one of them several times in the novel. After she has given money to Gerty Farish for the settlement house, Lily compares herself to some of Gerty’s working girls. “These were young girls, like herself; some perhaps pretty, some not without a trace of her finer sensibilities. She pictured herself leading such a life as theirs” (88). She also compares herself with several maids. Carry Fisher’s maid impresses Lily, who admires her “quiet competence” (194). Although she cannot imagine their poverty, Lily seems to envy these women’s lives. Of all of the working women who pass through Lily’s life, Nettie Struthers, Lily’s first and only real friend in New York, allows Lily to dream of the possibilities of a different world. Nettie provides Lily with something that no other character has given her—a touch of human, physical affection—and Lily will take to her grave the vision of a world where humans thrive in unconditional love. On the last day of Lily’s life, Nettie takes Lily into her shabby flat, gives her tea, and tells her the story of her own life—how she had been betrayed by one man and yet found love with another who “cared for me enough to have me as I was” (245). Unknowingly, Nettie describes Lily as she tells this story about herself: “I never thought I’d get married, you know, and I’d never have had the heart to go on working just for myself” (245). Nettie puts her sleeping baby into Lily’s arms, and “Lily felt the soft weight sink trustfully against her breast . . . as she continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the child entered into her and became a part of herself” (245–46). Nettie and her baby have taken Lily to their hearts, a gesture that only makes her own solitary situation more painful. As she gets ready for bed, Lily thinks of herself as a rootless baby lily, a “stray uprooted growth,” without “any one spot of earth” in which “the poor little tentacles of self could cling” (248). Having Nettie’s baby nestled to her heart revives her: “the frozen currents of youth had loosed themselves and run warm in her veins: the old life-hunger possessed her, and all her being clamoured for its share of personal happiness” (249). She sees a vision of happiness in Nettie and the baby, and “the glimpse she had caught . . . made everything else of no account” (249). Lily glimpses happiness untainted by money and financial “accounts.” Nettie’s story opens a door to a different kind of house for Lily, one she dreams about as she falls asleep: a house built on a foundation of trust, warm affection, and love.


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Terence Davies does not include Nettie Struthers among his characters in his film of The House of Mirth, but he does mirror Lily’s rootlessness and her dream of happiness through visuals. Throughout the movie, we see Lily from afar many more times than we see her in close-up shots. Especially when she is among groups of people—walking up the steps to the opera house, standing in a room full of partygoers, sitting among other working girls at the milliner shop—Lily always appears singularly far away and isolated. There are only two scenes in the movie where Lily enjoys a human touch. In these two scenes, we see Lily in close-up shots that distinguish themselves from every other austere, pristine scene in the movie. In the two scenes where she and Lawrence Selden kiss, Davies suggests a glimpse of Lily’s “vision of happiness.” Both scenes take place out of doors, which reinforces their distinct quality from other scenes in the movie—Lily is not alone among others or overwhelmed by grand facades. In the first scene, Lily and Selden are lolling around in the woods at Bellomont as they carry on one of their flirty, patently incoherent conversations. When Lily sits down under a tree and Selden follows her, they sit face to face, but in a departure from other scenes, Lily is positioned on the right side of the screen. Their conversation becomes more clear and serious as the camera moves in on them. Lily, in Wharton’s words, asks Selden to marry her: “Do you want to marry me?” Selden answers slowly: “No, I don’t want to—but perhaps I should if you did.” As they talk, the camera shows us a close-up of their hands in the grass, Selden’s hand sliding atop Lily’s gloved hand. The camera moves back to their faces, and Selden leans into Lily’s face. Their long, open-mouth kiss fills the screen, with Selden’s face away from us and Lily’s flushed face toward us. They continue to talk through their kiss, and they linger over each other for a long time before they move away from each other and the camera moves away from them. Lily and Selden kiss for the second time just after Lily’s triumphant performance in the tableau at the Brys’s party. The two of them descend a flight of stairs into the garden of the Brys mansion, which looks like Wharton’s “fragrant hush of a garden,” complete with “hanging lights” and a “spray of a fountain falling among lilies” (House 108). This “magic place” becomes the site of the couple’s “dream-like” encounter in both text and movie, where they once again attempt to profess their love for each other (House 108). The choreography of the scene mimics the first kissing scene—Selden sits to Lily’s left. “Why do I never see you?” Lily asks, “Why can’t we be friends?”(109). “The only way I can help you is by


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loving you,” Selden replies, and with that line, Davies’s camera begins to move in on them (109). The camera moves in very slowly and stops just in time to focus on another deep, prolonged kiss. Lily puts her head on Selden’s shoulder, and he cradles her for a moment. Both are silent for a long time before Lily raises her hand, which has been below the frame during the kiss, and we see that she holds Selden’s hand in hers. She slowly lets go, and as she moves away from Selden’s side, the camera moves away from them both, showing us how small they are among the garden ornaments that surround them. “Love me,” Lily says as she searches his eyes, “but do not tell me so” (109). With that, the camera moves back to show us Lily as she begins to run back up the steps while Selden watches her. We see Lily running quickly by us from right to left. After she is out of the frame, the camera shows us that Gus Trenor, standing alone in a corner of the veranda, has also watched her run up the stairs and back into the house. We understand that Lily’s glimpse of another world has ended, and a looming nightmare is about to begin. In the same way that Wharton’s tableau vivant acts as a set piece in the novel and brings to life Lily’s “flesh and blood loveliness,” Davies’s two kissing scenes stop action and behave as tableaux where we glimpse the possibility of genuine affection and love for Lily. Both scenes are erotic, but both also suggest more than desire. Just as Lily’s tableau performance reminds Wharton’s Selden of their earlier encounter, where Lily “had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment,” Davies captures two moments where Lily seems genuinely content, if just “for a moment” (107). In both scenes we see Lily’s entire face, so often in shadow or far away from us in other scenes. Instead of overwhelming her with grand architecture or pinning her between other characters, Davies allows Lily’s eyes, in close-up, to become the mirror by which we recognize a hint of that feeling that Lily had after holding Nettie’s baby in Wharton’s text. Outdoors and amid other flowers, we watch as Lily slowly takes root on a “spot of earth,” nurtured by the embrace of someone whose touch warms her veins. Davies’s visual attention to Lily allows us to glimpse, if only for a fleeting moment, a thriving Lily who could grow outside and away from the house of mirth. In 1996, a television review in Time Magazine began with these questions: “Sick of Jane Austen yet? . . . Why Austen? . . . Why now?” (Looser 159). We can replace Austen’s name in this question with the names of other


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authors whose works were being adapted in significant numbers during the 1990s, including Forster, James, Shakespeare, and Wharton. Not just the popular press but also literary, film, and cultural critics have tried to explain the proliferation of literary adaptations during the 1990s. Some note adaptations are a Hollywood staple, always “one of the most popular, reliable, and profitable sources for the movies” (Corrigan, “Which,” 157). Others find in the explosion of Victorian and Edwardian adaptations “the locus of cultural nostalgia” for “our own fin de siècle” (Looser 160). Some see these films as a “symptom of some deep stirring to go backwards” to avoid the “sexual . . . political . . . and racial problems” of the late 1980s and 1990s (161). Others reject the model of “the elevation of low culture through the appropriation of high culture or the popular expansion of all into a general middlebrow culture” and instead explain these films as “performance driven” movies (Corrigan “Which” 158). Some find recent adaptations to be part of a feminist “mainstreaming” (Parrill 7). Still others see the trend as completely “cash driven” (160).8 All of these explanations have some merit. However, no one explanation provides a completely satisfactory reason for the four Wharton adaptations (or the Austen films) of the 1990s. Whatever else they might have in common, the timelines of Austen and Wharton adaptations are almost identical, and this seemingly uncanny parallel offers the first clues to “why Austen/Wharton?” and “why now?” “It is surprising,” writes Austen scholar Sue Parrill, “that after the filming of Pride and Prejudice in 1940—a film which was very successful at the box office—no other film adaptation of an Austen novel was made for theatrical release until 1995” (5). When we recast the question as “why not between 1940 and 1990?” we might not be so surprised. The fifty-year cinematic silence between The Old Maid and The Children offers us the most effective way to understand the relationship of Wharton’s texts to adaptations of those texts. Wharton’s narrator in Ethan Frome is correct: the deeper meaning of this story is in the gaps. Hollywood’s 1934 adaptation of The Age of Innocence represents an example of the years of Thalbergian Hollywoodization—a beautifully packaged but insubstantial product that failed because Wharton’s story could not be shaped into the tepid teacup formula of early Hollywood. The parameters of the story were too complex to conform to the established studio pattern. In 1939, Goulding translated The Old Maid in ways that subverted the prescription. Although labeled and packaged as another nostalgic, costume drama in competition with Gone with the


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Wind in 1939, The Old Maid actually corresponds more appropriately to the “women’s film” of the time. The Old Maid, like other women’s films, explores “problems defined as ‘female,’” most often “revolving around domestic life, the family, children, self-sacrifice” (Doane 3). In The Old Maid we see prominent characteristics of this genre: “constantly recurring figures of the unwed mother, the waiting wife, the abandoned mistress, the frightened newlywed or the anguished mother,” (3).9 With its claustrophobic sets, its ambiguous conclusion, and its suggestion of an alternative universe for Charlotte, The Old Maid assumes a posture that Wharton suggested in the novella: The Old Maid is not what she appears to be. In the spirit of Wharton’s own vision, where George Darrow or Lawrence Selden cannot categorize Sophy Viner or Lily Bart, The Old Maid defies formula and confounds our expectations. It represents the first Wharton adaptation to journey all the way through the looking glass of film, where it arrived intact and alive, in another country. The Old Maid languished there alone while filmmakers and producers were preoccupied with other issues. During the same period that Wharton’s works went out of print and moved underground, and as her reputation as a canonical American writer all but disappeared, the vital American film industry faced a series of challenges that would keep Wharton in the cellar for decades. Beginning with United States v. Paramount, a legal case that spanned ten years (1938–48), “Hollywood was subjected to decisive governmental interventions, which responded to, and served to deepen, internal divisions within the industry itself ” (Sklar 274).10 Almost simultaneously, the HUAC hearings began focusing on the motion-picture industry. Finally, “emerging trends reshaping entertainment and leisure activities,” especially television, changed the nature of the Hollywood product in ways that made adaptations of difficult texts like Wharton’s unlikely (274). At the beginning of Hollywood’s midcentury struggle, however, lay the seeds of Wharton’s rebirth on screen fifty years down the line: film noir, a film movement anticipated by The Old Maid, developed during these middle years of struggle. Noir was “distinctive for its dark and oppressive visual style, as well as its narratives of desperation and entrapment that defied Hollywood’s conventions of happy endings and good triumphing over evil” (278). Like The Old Maid and other women’s films of the time, the noir movement defies precise categorization (278).11 However it is defined, the fundamental characteristics of noir, many of which are reflected in The Old Maid, are themes “of paranoia and betrayal, of


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suspicious innocence and attractive guilt, of greed and desire in a world whose moral signposts have disappeared” (278). Noir influenced many Hollywood genres through the years of World War II and beyond. With its “distinctive style and perspective,” noir elements “cropped up in a wide variety of existing genres—gangster, crime, private eye” but also “women’s melodramas, historical costume pictures, and literary adaptations,” including The Old Maid (278). Like The Old Maid, a costume drama about women alone during wartime, other women’s noir films corresponded to the anxieties of the wartime home front, with their “intensity and an aberrant quality . . . linked to the ideological upheaval signaled by a redefinition of sexual roles and the reorganization of the family during the war years” (Doane 4). These women’s noir films defied category—like other noir pictures, they are characterized by “a kind of generic intertextuality” that reflects elements from “other genres . . . the gothic or horror film, even the musical” (4). Although the noir movement served as “the chief artistic expression of the culture of contingency that had marked the immediate post-war years,” the Cold War atmosphere that consumed Hollywood after the war gradually “isolated or co-opted” the noir vision of ambiguity and chaos (3). During the 1950s especially, noir films “gave way to more standard police and spy thrillers” (3). Women’s noir, with “the return of the absent GIs following World War II, began to lose its currency” after the war as well (Hollinger 79). Hollywood, desperate to stay out of trouble and to recoup its economic edge, looked backward to earlier staples—Westerns and musicals—and rejected problematic women’s films for “family or dynastic melodramas” (Hollinger 79). These Hollywood productions of the 1950s were still often adaptations, but because movies “were no longer considered an inevitably good investment,” Hollywood studios chose adaptations more carefully than they had before the war, often working from “popular novels and plays that had already proven lucrative” (Byars 88). They also produced remakes of earlier adaptations of popular fiction from the 1920s. None of Wharton’s short stories nor novels made the cut among the mainstream studios. She would certainly have recognized the names of some of the authors of the 1950s melodramas and family epics that Hollywood provided, because she had competed for magazine space with them in the 1920s and 1930s: Fanny Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1959) and Back Street (1961); Edna Ferber’s Show Boat (1951), Giant (1956), and Cimarron (1960). Often dubbed “weepies” at the time by critics, these melodramatic tales and


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others, including Grace Metalious’s controversial Peyton Place (1957), were big moneymakers. Serious film critics summarily dismissed these movies for the same reason that literary critics had dismissed the fiction on which they were based: they “lacked cultural valorization because of their association with female audiences” (13). Like the publishing industry that had benefited from the “middlebrow” label foisted on these popular authors, the film industry profited from the tearjerker designation that critics, who “kept defensively to the ‘classic’ (or ‘masculine’) genres such as the western or the gangster film,” encouraged (13).12 In so many of these adaptations of the 1950s and early 1960s, and in adaptations of other weepies based on novels by men, including Edna Lee and Harry Lee’s All That Heaven Allows (1955); William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) and Picnic (1955); Lloyd C. Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession (1954); Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956); James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1953) and Some Came Running (1958); and Robert Wilder’s Written on the Wind (1956), women suffer through any number of problems. Professional women are threatening and often associated with “moral inadequacy,” and families struggle though a series of social problems, including “juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, labor union corruption” and alcoholism (89, 115). In these 1950s adaptations, “although female characters may play crucial roles in solving the problem, the problem is rarely theirs” but instead belongs to white men, whose characters become the universal “self ” of the films (115). Midcentury melodrama, homogenized and contained, co-opted the dark, complicated perspectives that women’s noir films had provided ten years earlier.13 Wharton’s fiction, which had barely been acceptable to the publishing marketplace as popular fiction during the last two decades of her life and which had responded so well to noir strategies in Goulding’s The Old Maid, would not have been at all attractive to the major Hollywood studios during these years, when they were manipulating popular works by men and women to evade controversy and avoid bankruptcy and were celebrating the male gaze as “normal” and “universal.” Within the mainstream Hollywood “culture of suppression,” where studios avoided adaptations that “smacked of political controversy or presented too dark and unflattering a vision of American society,” Wharton’s fiction—dark, unrelenting, ambiguous, with manipulative, complicated narratives—would have offered Hollywood nothing but headaches (Cochran 13). The worlds she had created for her characters included much that Hollywood sought to avoid with its 1950s paradigm of conformity and normalcy.14


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Although Hollywood sought to “repress the darker aspects of American social thought—the strong sense of doubt and contingency, the fears born of World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War,” these anxieties found cinematic expression during the postwar years through independent film (13). At the same time that Hollywood was heralding the age of beautiful stars like “Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Natalie Wood, and Janet Leigh,” and while “overblown midcult best-sellers of authors like Herman Wouk, James Michener, and James Gould Cozzens” found mainstream appeal, a group of artists who “thrived on irony, ambivalence, paradox, and complexity” were working from below the mainstream surface (14). Underground B movies, for example—Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) and Underworld, U.S.A. (1960)—were spotlighting “the ugliness underlying the flawless exteriors of American consumer culture” (142). The “violence, chaos, moral ambiguity, and alienation” that defined film noir appealed to a group of artists, among them writers of hard-boiled pulp fiction, comic book artists, and filmmakers, who envisioned worlds not unlike the ones Wharton had provided in her fiction decades earlier (142). Wharton’s New York in The Age of Innocence, for example, bears a striking resemblance to the image of America’s underside that underground filmmakers were exposing in the 1950s: “a dark world below the placid surface, a world whose inhabitants tend to be grasping, dissatisfied, emotionally twisted creatures. Here, all is not well” (14).15 While Anna Leath waits for her audience with Sophy Viner’s sister at the conclusion of The Reef, she smells “a strong odour of tobacco” and encounters two sleazy men in Laura’s squalid hotel suite (348–49). The “short, swarthy and humble” one sizes her up silently and then signals “an intelligence as full as it was rapid” to the other creepy “long-lashed” man who opens the door to Laura’s bedroom, where Anna encounters Laura (349). An “odd chromo-like resemblance to Sophy Viner” amid the “roseate penumbra of the bed-curtains,” Laura resembles a character out of Sam Fuller’s Naked Kiss (1964), where we see “a close-up of a bald [prostitute], her face twisted with rage . . . [who] turns to the mirror and puts on her wig and makeup, transforming herself from grotesque to beautiful” (Reef 35; Cochran 142). Like so many of Wharton’s undesirable characters, those in the underground films of the 1950s were “selfish, immature bullies” who often “live on the margins of society” (Cochran 148). Noir cinema, marginalized and ignored by mainstream culture and dismissed by critics of traditional high culture, had never lost currency with some filmmakers including one of Wharton’s foreign invaders,


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Fritz Lang.16 Others, including Roger Corman and Fuller, who, during “the period of his greatest productivity,” was “virtually ignored by serious film critics in the United States,” told stories on film about a world of outcasts (135). For Fuller and other marginal directors, their outcast characters provided “a hope of America’s redemption” as they confronted “hypocritical pillars of respectability . . . and the internal contradictions of postwar American ideology” (134). They focused on “alienation and loneliness” to suggest the opposite of entrapment: all of these underground artists included “heavy emphasis on . . . freedom” in their visions (148). Like Wharton, Fuller and other underground filmmakers told stories in which they always featured “a moment of choice” and suggested a dream of “sanctuary and order” for their outcast characters (148–49). Fuller and the other maverick directors emerged from underground by the 1970s, thanks in part to the interest of European and Asian filmmakers and to a young generation of international film students. Now in the light of day and in the darkness of movie theaters, these directors inspired, encouraged, and influenced this new generation of filmmakers, including the young Martin Scorsese. When Mean Streets brought Scorsese both popular and critical attention in 1973, he mentioned Fuller as one of his most important influences. In an interview about Mean Streets, Scorsese described his debt to Fuller in words that Wharton would have understood. “What Sam always says,” says Scorsese, “is that emotional violence is much more terrifying than physical violence” (Thompson and Christie 47). Scorsese, Fuller, and another film maverick in Hollywood—Alfred Hitchcock—all shared the same vision that Wharton had limned in so much of her fiction—an American landscape characterized by deadness, danger, and betrayal through which we also see a fleeting glimmer of hope. In 1950, Hitchcock had been especially attracted to the fiction of an American novelist, also residing in America’s basement of unconventional noir outcasts, whose dark vision of emotional violence and yearning bears an uncanny resemblance to Wharton’s: Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith’s “universe both inhabited the comfortable and complacent world of the period’s dominant culture and existed beneath it” (Cochran 115).17 In Strangers on a Train (1950), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), and other novels, Highsmith “signaled a sustained critique of the major cultural assumptions of the period, challenging the rigid dichotomies . . . as well as the dominant gender assumptions and the concept of home and family as a place of salvation” (115). Many of Highsmith’s characters, like many


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of Wharton’s, are “Americans living abroad, involved in their own personal crises in a variety of European . . . settings. [They] are not wide-eyed ingénues, but largely an unsavory lot of con men, insufferable whiners . . . who wreak chaos and destruction wherever they go” (118). Highsmith (born in 1921), like Wharton, grew up in New York. Also like Wharton, she moved to Europe when she was in her forties and remained there until her death in 1995. After her first successful novel, Strangers on a Train, was published and then filmed by Hitchcock in the early 1950s, American critics began labeling her as a paperback “suspense” writer. She disliked the label and “eschewed the paperback market,” choosing instead to publish in some of the same popular magazines that had sustained Wharton in the 1930s: Woman’s Home Companion, Cosmopolitan, and Saturday Evening Post (116). In many of these stories, Highsmith explored “the way in which the home, far from providing a retreat from the world, frequently serves as a battleground where love quickly turns to hate, anyone can be a murderer, and the quest for an idyllic family life is, as often as not, a form of psychopathology” (117–18). Wharton and Highsmith explore the same unstable terrain of anguished entrapment.18 Newland Archer, stifling in his study, looks at his placid wife and experiences a revelation: “What if it were she who was dead! If she were going to die—to die soon—and leave him free! The sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and overmastering” (Age 178). Highsmith’s ambitious architect Guy Haines has the same revelation as he sits in a cramped train compartment, listening to crazy Charles Anthony Bruno’s theory of the perfect murder in Strangers on a Train. As he listens, Guy begins to understand “the logic” of murder, “like a problem or a puzzle to be solved” (34). Therese Belivet, a lonely New York shopgirl with no family in The Price of Salt (1952), cannot commit to her sometime lover, Richard, who wants to marry her. Like Lily Bart does throughout The House of Mirth when she sabotages her own chances to marry men she doesn’t love, Therese rejects Richard, unwilling to accept “anything from him, a birthday present, or an invitation to dinner at his family’s or even his time” (45). Alienated and without friends or family, Therese realizes that she feels lost. She tries to explain to her new acquaintance Carol Aird why she is so solitary, in words that a lonely, lost Lily Bart might have used: “I just disappeared. I suppose it was my idea of starting a new life, but mostly I was ashamed. I didn’t want anyone to know where I was” (56).19


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Highsmith also shares another legacy with Wharton. After Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train in 1951, her fiction was not adapted for an American film audience again for forty-eight years, and then came the first of several adaptations. In 1999, Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley became the first of several Highsmith adaptations to surface, followed by Ripley’s Game (2002), Found in the Street (2004), Ripley under Ground (2005), and the promise of a new adaptation of Strangers on a Train in 2008. Time Magazine’s question becomes relevant once again: “Why Highsmith? Why now?” The answer, of course, applies equally to why Wharton’s work did not see the light of day for fifty years: neither appealed, nor could conform, to Hollywood’s mainstream. Both had been written off by Hollywood, just as they had been filed away by literary critics at the time: too old-fashioned (Wharton) or too weird (Highsmith). Only after waves of cultural changes, especially the wave of feminist scholarship that brought Wharton to light and to print in the 1970s and 1980s, would female writers who wrote noir fiction attract attention. Highsmith and Wharton finally found their cinematic soul mates among a group of independent filmmakers who worked from the legacy of the film noir diaspora. The movies of these independents, often lowbudget films with diverse international crews of both men and women and financing from “outside Hollywood,” were characterized by a “fresh perspective, innovative spirit, and personal vision” and had unconventional sources: off beat original screenplays, pulp novels, and fiction written by little-known or long forgotten writers—like Highsmith and Wharton (Levy 3). Many of these outsiders, like Scorsese, were fluent in the language of international film as well, and a rich heritage of earlier European and Asian national cinema movements informed their work. With their “opposition to the dominant media,” their resistance to “the conventional and generic,” and their explorations of “marginal and disenfranchised cultures,” independent filmmakers have “made independent cinema a viable mode” (498). By the end of the century, the independents were making movies that did not merely defy Hollywood generic codes but were contributing to a revisioning of film genre, both inside the Hollywood paradigm and beyond it.20 The 1990s Wharton adaptations suggest the ways in which film genres reshape themselves. Like a shifting literary canon, where Wharton’s House of Mirth aligns with Highsmith’s Price of Salt, The Age of Innocence haunts Strangers on a Train, and The Children resonates throughout Nabokov’s Lolita, the 1990s Wharton adaptations defy strict categories. Although they


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might seem to be part of a “return of the classics,” they, like adaptations of Highsmith, also belong to a loose cluster of movies defined by the “gaze of the outsider” (Hollinger 83).21 The Wharton adaptations share as many characteristics—perhaps more—with other edgy, gaze-of-the-outsider films of the era: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape (1989), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996), and Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), as they do with other adaptations of classics, among them Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995) and James Ivory’s Howard’s End (1992).22 However adaptations of classic texts are eventually classified, they remain “ghosts . . . reminders of worlds that have vanished or that never existed” (Corrigan, “Which” 165). Like adaptations of the works of Henry James (some of which could also be classified as part of the gaze-of-theoutsider genre), Wharton films reflect “the imaginary elsewhere,” the other country, where outsiders project themselves as insiders through their losses (Nadel 197).23 Scorsese, who allowed the dreams of Newland Archer to bloom before our eyes, was drawn to the expressions of loss and yearning that Wharton provided: “I was . . . fascinated by the sense of loss in the love story [of Age of Innocence] . . . those feeling of wanting to take and not taking, of wanting to proceed with something and not proceeding” (Thompson and Christie 194). Scorsese recognized that Archer’s undefined loss actually defined his life and provided him with “a kind of sanctuary” for “his secret thoughts and longings” (Age 265). Scorsese allowed the “most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts,” Archer’s imaginary Ellen, to go where Wharton also takes us—we are transported to another country provided by Archer’s “vision of the past,” a “dream” that he cherishes “in his memory” and that nourishes his present life (216). Wharton’s affinity with her outsiders and her sympathetic capacity to express their dream worlds complements the cinematic reflections provided by Scorsese, Palmer, Madden, and Davies, all of whom began their own careers as outsiders.24 Wharton “liked to adopt an outside perspective, to observe herself in various situations in order to glean their dramatic possibilities” (Pifer 221). Her characterization of poor mountain girl Charity Royall, for example, took form after she sat alone in the Pittsfield library and tried to imagine “what such lives would be.” As much as she relied on her ability to “observe herself from outside,” however, not all of Wharton’s insights came from imagining the lives of people she would otherwise have not understood (221). Like the filmmakers who have reflected her works on screens, Wharton, by inclination and by choice, was herself an


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outsider. She did not need to imagine how someone on the other side of the window might feel. She had experienced life from the other side since at least 1880, when, as an eighteen-year-old, she had published five poems anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly (Benstock, No Gifts 38–40). Wharton’s early interest in becoming a professional writer set her apart from other women of her New York set, including her own mother, who tried to discourage her “intellectual habits” in several ways (40). Labeled facetiously by a Town Topics columnist as an “ambitious authoress” before she was twenty-one, Wharton found much more discouragement toward her “dream of a literary career” than she did encouragement (48). After her marriage to Teddy Wharton in 1883, she “spent the early years of her marriage attempting to be and do what a woman of her class was supposed to be and do” (French viii). During the final decades of the nineteenth century, Wharton wrote nothing for years at a time. Struggling with depression, anxiety, and other ailments, she tried many different cures during those years. The cure came, of course, when she took up her writing again and published The Greater Inclination in 1899. Wharton was now a New York society matron who was also a woman with “a literary career.” She would move further and further outside the life New York had prescribed for her—literally in her move to Lenox and then France, and figuratively through her fiction—for the rest of her life. If becoming an ambitious authoress were not radical enough, Wharton distanced herself further when, in a French court in 1911, she divorced her husband of twenty-eight years. Her divorce, a long time coming and later well documented by scholars, would have provided more lively reading for Town Topics subscribers at the time. New York still had as much sympathy for divorced women as it did for career women, especially those who came from the privileged classes. Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont described the reaction of society to her divorce from William Vanderbilt in 1895: I was one of the first women in America to dare to get a divorce from an influential man. Up to that time divorce had been the prerogative solely of actresses. Rich men could marry women, treat them in any way they chose, and ignore them. . . . I have gone down the aisle of the church when women I had known since childhood drew back in their pews and refused to speak to me. I have been the guest at parties where the hostess was the only woman in the room who talked to me. (Schneider and Schneider 146)

Wharton, the inside chronicler of New York society, knew what she had to look forward to if she were to return to live in New York after her


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divorce. Her new status as divorcée must have contributed to her decision to live permanently in Europe. She “had a horror of divorce” and did not mention the end of her marriage in any of her autobiographical writings, nor did she want to discuss it. “It’s a tiresome moment to traverse,” she wrote to Morton Fullerton shortly after having been granted the divorce in 1913 (Benstock, No Gifts 280).25 However she felt about her divorce at the time, she kept it to herself. She never mentioned her ex-husband by name when describing the lonely, unhappy state of her marriage: “The people about me were so indifferent to everything I really cared for that complying with the tastes of others had become a habit” (French xi). Wharton did not write much about her own divorce, but she explored the difficulties and disappointments of women whose lives have been touched by unhappy marriages and divorce in much of her fiction, including the novel she was writing at the time of her legal proceedings, The Custom of the Country. Often, like Ellen Olenska and Kate Clephane in A Mother’s Recompense, her divorced women choose to live in European exile, where their outsider status redefines the way they see the world. Because these marginalized characters have already been condemned by society, they enjoy certain freedoms, for example, “linguistic privileges” (Goodwyn 136). Unlike May Welland, whose only means of control is to deceive and who “has not been allowed to develop any independent resources” of her own, Ellen Olenska can say what she means and mean what she says (“Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress—since I can’t be your wife?”; Age 137). Having been married and then unmarried, Wharton could project both May and Ellen as outsiders, as women who embodied a series of opposites: the traditional comfort of marriage and the horror of divorce; the power of silent manipulation and the joy of unconventional expression; the landscapes of loveless sex and sexless love. Her own secret, passionate love affair with a man she knew she would not and could not marry, Morton Fullerton, both “freed her from the frigidity of her marriage” and gave her a glimpse of Archer’s other country (Bell 12). As the centerpiece, the tableau vivant, of her most private life, Wharton’s love affair provided her with insights that infused her fiction with both the ache of erotic longing and denial (as in Ethan Frome) and the ghost of lost love (as in Summer). Both the “idealized mutuality which lies at the heart of all [her] writing” and “the inevitable disappointment which her characters face in their personal relationships” are reflections of Wharton’s experience (Goodwyn 67). There are almost no happy


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couples—married or otherwise—in any of Wharton’s works. Marriage hangs on all of her characters like ill-fitting clothes, making them appear and feel like uncomfortable freaks and outcasts. Her exploration of the limitations of the institution of marriage and her characters’ inability to reconcile the edgy relationship of love to sex represent the noir of her mature fiction. Also like other noir works, she mirrored her characters’ anxieties and disappointments against their yearnings for an imaginary world where they would be insiders, free to live with lovers in a world where they “are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter” (Age 174). Her own experience with marriage, her exhilarating and frustrating love affair, and her keen observations of the relationships of others informed her double perspective. In A Backward Glance, she speculated about her parents’ marriage and her father’s unhappiness with a description that could apply to any number of her characters and to herself. Her father, she wrote, was a man “haunted by something always unexpressed and unattained” (39). Unlike her father, Wharton found a way to express those dreams that haunted her. Lily Bart’s vague glimpse of affection and love—through the voiceless warmth of a baby—reflects Wharton’s vague understanding of the power of yearning at the turn of the century, when she was struggling to thrive in a sterile marriage. After her own private love affair and public divorce, she used the institution she knew best—marriage—to infuse her characters with glimpses of ideal happiness born of real experience—they knew what they were missing, and what they were missing haunted them for the rest of their lives. With uncharacteristic candor, Wharton described this ache of yearning in a letter to a friend: “the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all” (Goodwyn 67). In her fiction, she projects “a sharing of all” most often as secret dreams that sustain Sophy Viner, Charity Royall, Ethan Frome, Newland Archer, and others. Wharton gives her characters dreams that transport them to places where they reshape the bonds of the institutions that bind them, and they become insiders who are loved, protected, and cherished. Near the conclusion of Summer, as a pregnant Charity remembers her love for Lucius Harney, she realizes that no matter how others might condemn her in the real world, she can transform her vivid memories of “a sharing of all” from condemnation to a celebration of their love. Her imagination nourishes and invigorates her: “These [memories] were hers; they had passed into her blood, and become a part


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of her, they were building the child in her womb; it was impossible to tear asunder strands of life so interwoven” (185–86). The glimpse of another country, where characters invert the institutions around them to create a place for themselves, lies at the heart of all of Wharton’s fiction and attests to her own creative journey. Like those of her characters whose hopeful dreams nourish their private inner lives, Wharton created a place for herself as an artist by questioning the structures of her own traditions and institutions in her fiction. By maintaining “a realist’s view of social conventions” she suggested that conventional “strictures could be corrupting, could even ruin lives” (Minot xv). Yet by reflecting a dark, relentless reality into the mirror of an alternate hopeful world, she also provided a “quiet, subversive song” of hope (xv). This undermining, underground quality of her work becomes most clear by reflecting her fiction into the looking glass of film, where, like Wharton’s fiction, it defies any number of other categories and labels to reveal itself as subversive literature. Reading Wharton on film exposes her aversion to blind conformity and her struggles to adapt to the standards of the American mass market, struggles she pointedly blamed on a voracious film industry that had the power to entrap and consume everyone, especially women like Mary Pickford. However, reading Wharton on film reveals something else as well—something that comes into clear focus when we reflect what she wrote about film against those movies adapted from her works: she understood that narrative cinema, like fiction, has the capacity to behave like our dreams. Watching Wharton on film affirms the power of her fiction and the power of film to move us to imagine ourselves elsewhere. Both suggest that in a world where boundaries can seem cruelly imposing and darkly static, our best hopes lie in our own moving narratives, where we create and celebrate our own dreams. Grounded in the real world, with all of its labels, traditions, and rules, Wharton’s hopeful glimmer of another country, where an artist can create a full life for herself, shines through her fiction and onto the screen.


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; > AB D < G 6 E= N CDI:H LD G @ H 8 > I : 9 >C9:M

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Filmography Extant Film Adaptations of Wharton Texts Year 1930 1934 1939 1990 1993 1993 2000

Title The Marriage Playground The Age of Innocence The Old Maid The Children The Age of Innocence Ethan Frome The House of Mirth

Director Lothar Mendes Philip Moeller Edmund Goulding Tony Palmer Martin Scorsese John Madden Terence Davies

Films Cited The following represents a comprehensive, chronological listing, by chapter, of all films cited in the text of Edith Wharton on Film. An asterisk indicates a Wharton adaptation. Year Title 1. Charm Incorporated: The Short Fiction 1915 The Foundling 1916 The Eternal Grind 1916 Hulda from Holland 1916 Less Than the Dust 1916 Poor Little Peppina 1933 Secrets 2. The Mechanical Terror: The Novels 1917 Cleopatra 1921 The Sheik 1927 Metropolis 1936 Fury 1937 You Only Live Once 1944 The Woman in the Window 1953 The Big Heat 1956 While the City Sleeps

Director John B. O’Brien John B. O’Brien John B. O’Brien John Emerson Sidney Olcott Frank Borzage J. Gordon Edwards George Melford Fritz Lang Fritz Lang Fritz Lang Fritz Lang Fritz Lang Fritz Lang


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3. Going Hollywood: The Thirties 1915 The Birth of a Nation 1918 The House of Mirth* [lost] 1919 Broken Blossoms 1922 The Beautiful and Damned 1923 The Glimpses of the Moon* [lost] 1923 Main Street 1924 The Age of Innocence* [lost] 1924 Greed 1925 Ben-Hur 1925 Stella Dallas 1927 The Jazz Singer 1929 Dance Hall 1930 Common Clay 1930 Fast and Loose 1930 Lovin’ the Ladies 1930 The Marriage Playground* 1931 Bachelor Apartment 1931 Behind Office Doors 1931 Born to Love 1931 Ladies’ Man 1931 Men Call It Love 1931 Personal Maid 1931 Private Lives 1932 Back Street 1932 Grand Hotel 1932 Strangers in Love 1932 Wild Girl 1933 Bed of Roses 1933 King Kong 1933 Little Women 1933 Morning Glory 1934 The Age of Innocence* 1934 The Barretts of Wimpole Street 1934 Cleopatra 1934 The Gay Divorcee 1934 Glamour 1934 Imitation of Life 1934 It Happened One Night 1934 Of Human Bondage 1934 The Thin Man 1935 The Informer 1935 Top Hat


D.W. Griffith Albert Capellani D.W. Griffith William A. Seiter Allan Dwan Harry Beaumont Wesley Ruggles Erich von Stroheim Fred Niblo Henry King Alan Crosland Melville W. Brown Victor Fleming Fred C. Newmeyer Melville W. Brown Lothar Mendes Lowell Sherman Melville W. Brown Paul L. Stein Lothar Mendes Edgar Selwyn Monta Bell, Lothar Mendes Sidney Franklin John M. Stahl Edmund Goulding Lothar Mendes Raoul Walsh Gregory La Cava Merian C. Cooper George Cukor Lowell Sherman Philip Moeller Sidney Franklin Cecil B. DeMille Mark Sandrich William Wyler John M. Stahl Frank Capra John Cromwell W.S. Van Dyke John Ford Mark Sandrich

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1936 Mary of Scotland 1937 Stage Door 1937 Stella Dallas 1937 That Certain Woman 1938 Jezebel 1938 Three Comrades 1939 Dark Victory 1939 Destry Rides Again 1939 Golden Boy 1939 Gone with the Wind 1939 Goodbye, Mr. Chips 1939 The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 1939 Ninotchka 1939 The Old Maid* 1939 Stagecoach 1939 We Are Not Alone 1939 The Wizard of Oz 1939 The Women 1939 Wuthering Heights 1941 The Great Lie 1941 How Green Was My Valley 1942 Now, Voyager 1943 Old Acquaintance 1943 Tender Comrade 1944 Since You Went Away 1945 Mildred Pierce 1946 It’s a Wonderful Life 1946 To Each His Own 1949 The Great Gatsby 1949 Little Women 1950 Sunset Boulevard 1962 Tender Is the Night 1974 The Great Gatsby 1976 The Last Tycoon 4: Wharton in Bloom: The Nineties 1903 The Great Train Robbery 1918 The House of Mirth* [lost] 1924 Greed 1930 Hell’s Angels 1930 The Marriage Playground* 1934 The Age of Innocence* 1939 The Old Maid*


John Ford Gregory La Cava King Vidor Edmund Goulding William Wyler Frank Borzage Edmund Goulding George Marshall Rouben Mamoulian Victor Fleming Sam Wood William Dieterle Frank Capra Ernst Lubitsch Edmund Goulding John Ford Edmund Goulding Victor Fleming George Cukor William Wyler Edmund Goulding John Ford Irving Rapper Vincent Sherman Edward Dmytryk John Cromwell Michael Curtiz Frank Capra Mitchell Leisen Elliott Nugent Mervyn LeRoy Billy Wilder Henry King Jack Clayton Elia Kazan Edwin S. Porter Albert Capellani Erich von Stroheim Howard Hughes Lothar Mendes Philip Moeller Edmund Goulding

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1940 1942 1944 1945 1945 1945 1945 1946 1946 1946 1947 1948 1949 1949 1949 1950 1952 1954 1954 1955 1958 1960 1961 1961 1963 1965 1967 1971 1972 1973 1975 1976 1976 1980 1984 1986 1987 1987 1987 1988 1989 1990 1990


The Letter The Magnificent Ambersons Experiment Perilous Detour The Picture of Dorian Gray Spellbound The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Deception The Spiral Staircase The Strange Love of Martha Ivers The Private Affairs of Bel Ami Letter from an Unknown Woman Caught The Heiress Madame Bovary Madeleine Carrie Rear Window Senso Lola Montes Vertigo Psycho The Innocents Jules and Jim The Leopard The Tomb of Ligeia Far from the Madding Crowd Two English Girls The Godfather Mean Streets Barry Lyndon The Innocent Taxi Driver Raging Bull The Natural Native Son The Dead Waiting for the Moon The Witches of Eastwick Dangerous Liaisons Valmont The Children* Frankenstein Unbound

William Wyler Orson Welles Jacques Tourneur Edgar G. Ulmer Albert Lewin Alfred Hitchcock Robert Siodmak Irving Rapper Robert Siodmak Lewis Milestone Albert Lewin Max Ophuls Max Ophuls William Wyler Vincente Minnelli David Lean William Wyler Alfred Hitchcock Luchino Visconti Max Ophuls Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock Jack Clayton François Truffaut Luchino Visconti Roger Corman John Schlesinger François Truffaut Francis Ford Coppola Martin Scorsese Stanley Kubrick Luchino Visconti Martin Scorsese Martin Scorsese Barry Levinson Jerrold Freedman John Huston Jill Godmilow George Miller Stephen Frears Milos Forman Tony Palmer Roger Corman

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1990 GoodFellas 1990 Henry & June 1992 Chaplin 1992 The Last of the Mohicans 1992 Orlando 1993 The Age of Innocence* 1993 Ethan Frome* 1993 Frankenstein 1993 Schindler’s List 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1994 Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle 1994 Il Postino 1994 Tom & Viv 1995 Carrington 1995 Persuasion 1995 Scarlet Letter 1995 Sense and Sensibility 1996 Emma 1997 Lolita 1998 Great Expectations 1998 Les Misérables 1998 Mrs. Dalloway 1998 Shakespeare in Love 2000 The House of Mirth* 2000 Nora 2001 Pitch ’n’ Putt with Beckett ’n’ Joyce 2002 The Hours Conclusion: Another Country 1934 The Age of Innocence* 1939 Gone with the Wind 1939 The Old Maid* 1940 Pride and Prejudice 1946 Great Expectations 1946 Henry V 1951 Show Boat 1951 Strangers on a Train 1951 The Tragedy of Othello 1952 Come Back, Little Sheba 1953 From Here to Eternity 1953 Pickup on South Street 1954 Magnificent Obsession 1955 All That Heaven Allows 1955 Diabolique


Martin Scorsese Philip Kaufman Richard Attenborough Michael Mann Sally Potter Martin Scorsese John Madden David Wickes Steven Spielberg Kenneth Branagh Alan Rudolph Michael Radford Brian Gilbert Christopher Hampton Roger Michell Roland Joffé Ang Lee Douglas McGrath Adrian Lyne Alfonso Cuarón Billie August Marleen Gorris John Madden Terence Davies Pat Murphy Donald Clarke Stephen Daldry Philip Moeller Victor Fleming Edmund Goulding Robert Z. Leonard David Lean Laurence Olivier George Sidney Alfred Hitchcock Orson Welles Daniel Mann Fred Zinnemann Samuel Fuller Douglas Sirk Douglas Sirk Henri-Georges Clouzot

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1955 1956 1956 1957 1958 1958 1959 1960 1961 1973 1989 1989 1990 1992 1993 1993 1993 1994 1995 1996 1999 2000 2002 2004 2005 2008


Picnic Giant The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Peyton Place Some Came Running Vertigo Imitation of Life Cimarron Underworld U.S.A. Mean Streets Do the Right Thing sex, lies, and videotape The Children* Howard’s End The Age of Innocence* Ethan Frome* The Piano Pulp Fiction Sense and Sensibility Fargo The Talented Mr. Ripley The House of Mirth* Ripley’s Game Found in the Street Ripley under Ground Strangers on a Train

Joshua Logan George Stevens Nunnally Johnson Mark Robson Vincente Minnelli Alfred Hitchcock Douglas Sirk Anthony Mann Samuel Fuller Martin Scorsese Spike Lee Steven Soderbergh Tony Palmer James Ivory Martin Scorsese John Madden Jane Campion Quentin Tarantino Ang Lee Joel Coen Anthony Minghella Terence Davies Liliana Cavani Terry Kinney Roger Spottiswoode Noam Murro

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Notes Introduction: A Glittering Place 1. My most useful sources on Mary Pickford’s work and career have been Barbas, Griffith and Mayer, and Whitfield’s very fine biography. Additionally, the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education in Culver City, California, maintains an exceptional Web site that includes Pickford’s complete filmography: www. marypickford.com. 2. There are many good works on the formative years of United Artists and Hollywood. I have found these works most useful to this study: Balio, Bordwell, Cook, Corrigan, DeCordova, Gunning, Hoberman and Shandler, and Koszarski. Also, all of Miriam Hansen’s works on silent film have been exceptionally helpful, especially “Early Cinema,” where she explores early spectatorship and social class. 3. I have used the few important works that deal with adaptations of Wharton’s works to film later in this study, but I have found few sources on the relationship of Wharton’s fiction to film. The most useful sources were Wharton’s letters and stories. Her biographers Lewis and Benstock both mention her distaste for the cinema, but there are no comprehensive sources that refer to how Wharton used cinema in her fiction. 4. There are some excellent essays and discussions of Summer, including those of Morante and Skillern. Others that have been helpful: Blackall’s discussion on Charity’s gaze; Elbert’s study of “maternality” in Summer; Grafton’s work on “forbidden love”; Holbrook’s indispensable work on Wharton’s unsatisfactory men; Mindrup’s essay on Summer as propaganda; and Walker’s essay on Wharton’s use of the “seduced and abandoned” convention. Also see Wolff’s introduction to the 1979 edition; White’s introduction in Edith Wharton’s New England; and Candace Waid’s introduction to the 1993 edition of Summer. Pfeiffer’s work on the critical reaction to Summer has also been helpful. One of the best treatments of Charity Royall is in Kassanoff’s chapter “Charity Begins at Home: Summer and the Erotic Tourist,” in Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, in which she discusses Charity as the hired help and Harney as one of the wayward summer people. 5. Brian Edwards mentions Charity’s movie experience in his discussion of Wharton and The Arabian Nights, “The Well-Built Wall of Culture.” He describes

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Notes to Pages 9–22

some important cinematic developments from Wharton’s era, and cites some significant “silent films set in the Arab world” from the 1920s that correspond to Wharton’s description of “palms, minarets, charging cavalry regiments” (485n). 6. Elbert’s is an especially helpful essay. She clearly identifies Charity’s interests and yearnings for consumer goods. 7. Many scholars have discussed Wharton’s use of spectacle in her works, and I will refer to these scholars in my discussions of individual works. Most useful to my study of Summer have been Montgomery’s excellent Displaying Women; Killoran’s study of Wharton’s allusions to art, Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion; Joslin’s essay, “The Age of Innocence and the Bohemian Peril,” on Ellen Olenska as spectacle; Tuttleton’s fine study of Wharton’s use of museum artifacts and displays; and Wagner’s interesting look at Wharton and Faust. A good study of Wharton’s women as spectacles is Honey’s “Erotic Visual Tropes in the Fiction of Edith Wharton.” 8. In Friedberg’s excellent essay, she reminds us that Frank Baum, before he wrote The Wizard of Oz, was a window dresser who wrote the following: “How can a window sell goods? By placing them before the public in such a manner that the observer has a desire for them and enters the store to make the purchase” (65). Friedberg also includes a fine discussion about the relationship between cinema and the modern shopping mall, which locates movies in the realm of consumer goods: “The shopping mall has not replaced the movie theater: it has become its logical extension” (71). Also see essays by Brewster and by Hansen, “Early Cinema.”

1. Charm Incorporated: The Short Fiction 1. Lipper’s study of teen mothers in 1990s Pittsfield is especially interesting and has been useful to my study in a variety of ways. In one of her final chapters, “Community,” Lipper describes how some of the teen mothers of Pittsfield participated in a workshop as part of a theater production of Summer for Shakespeare & Company, a theater group sited at Wharton’s home, The Mount. 2. The development and theory of film genre are important to my study of Wharton and the movies. I will discuss genre in the chapters of part two, “Watching Wharton on Film.” 3. For an excellent discussion of advertising in women’s magazines of the 1920s, see Churchwell, who discusses Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes within the context of its magazine publication. Also see Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings; Tomlinson’s essay on Jesse Fauset’s Chinaberry Tree; Bower’s very fine essay on Fanny Hurst’s Back Street; and Goldsmith’s work on shopping in the fiction of Nella Larsen. 4. During the 1920s and 1930s, Wharton published fiction and essays in The Red Book Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, and Hearst’s Cosmopolitan (Collected Stories, 842–45). 5. There are detailed discussions of Wharton’s publishing history in Benstock’s No Gifts from Chance, Lewis’s Edith Wharton, and Wright’s Edith Wharton A to Z.


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Balestra provides some insight into Wharton’s magazine publishing, and Dupree’s essay on how Wharton educated herself to become an astute businesswoman is also helpful. Wharton’s own letters, edited by Lewis and Lewis, are an invaluable source to understanding how she negotiated her publishing deals. 6. Discussions of domestic help in Wharton’s work are in Benstock’s biography of Wharton, Bentley’s fine essay on Wharton and manners, and Dimock’s work on rates of exchange in The House of Mirth. Also see Lewis’s biography, Montgomery’s work on Wharton and women of leisure, and Robinson’s very useful and accessible essay on women as currency in The House of Mirth, “The Traffic of Women.” 7. Among the writers who distinguished themselves during these years were Winnifred Eaton (Japanese American), Anzia Yezierska (Eastern European Jewish immigrant,) Edna Ferber (Jewish), and Jessie Fauset (African American). See Botshon and Goldsmith, Middlebrow Moderns. 8. White’s is the only book devoted to the short fiction. There are useful discussions of the body of Wharton’s short fiction in Erlich, who explores some of Wharton’s female characters in the short stories, and an overview in McDowell’s Edith Wharton. McDowell’s essay on Wharton’s ghost stories is very fine. There are useful entries and suggestions for further reading for all stories in Wright. The liveliest and most astute critical assessment of Wharton as short-story writer is Pierpont’s New Yorker review of the 2001 two-volume Library of America collection. 9. Brewster’s essay on early cinematic narrative strategies and all of Hansen’s essays on early spectatorship have been most helpful to this study. Also see Hansen’s Babel and Babylon, Mayne’s work on immigrant cinema audiences, and Merritt’s essay “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914” for more on the transformation of nickelodeon to narrative film. 10. Several scholars have written about women’s relationship to cinema. The following have been especially relevant to my study: Alexander’s wonderful study of urban female juvenile offenders, The ‘Girl Problem’; Jacobs’s book on the “Fallen Woman Film,” The Wages of Sin; and Ullman’s excellent study of sexuality and cinema, Sex Seen. 11. See especially Huyssen, After the Great Divide, for the best discussion of gendered culture. 12. For more on the short story “All Souls,” see Dyman’s interesting study, Lurking Feminism, and Zilversmit’s essay, “‘All Souls’”: Wharton’s Last Haunted House and Future Directions for Criticism.” 13. For example, Wharton’s example is privileged in the introduction to Middlebrow Moderns. Three of the essays in this wonderful collection also single Wharton out: Campbell’s “‘Written with a Hard and Ruthless Purpose,’” Churchwell’s “‘Lost among the Ads,’” and Honey’s “Feminist New Woman Fiction in Periodicals of the 1920s,” an essay that I found most relevant to my study. 14. Goodman explores Wharton’s friendships and relationships with women thoroughly in Edith Wharton’s Women and Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle. In their


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introductions to The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, Marilyn French and Kent Ljungquist respectively discuss Wharton’s complicated relationships with her women friends. 15. The other stories that Wharton published in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan were “The Rembrandt” (1900), “Expiation” (1903), “The Looking Glass” (1933), and “Confession” (1934). 16. “Charm Incorporated” seems to be one of those late stories that does not attract scholars, perhaps because it fails on so many levels and seems so contrived. Only her biographers have given any space to this story, which I see as an especially significant example of Wharton’s struggles to conform to the standards of popular magazines, and in which she deposits, however badly, her growing despair over her place among the literati. See Benstock, No Gifts; Lewis, Edith Wharton; and Wright for more on “Charm Incorporated.” 17. Jennie A. Kassanoff also discusses Wharton’s “mechanical reader” in Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. She concludes that “The Vice of Reading” reveals Wharton’s “political and economic critique. . . . democracy threatens the nation with civic unrest, cultural decline and even the wholesale redistribution of wealth” (49). 18. Douglas provides the best overview and clearest discussion of the power shift from Boston to New York in the publishing industry in Terrible Honesty, an invaluable source for any scholarship on popular American culture of the post–World War I era. 19. Churchwell is especially interesting on books as consumer goods. Radway explores the Book-of-the-Month Club in her fine A Feeling for Books, and Rubin also treats the book craze of the 1920s in The Making of Middlebrow Culture. 20. Studlar’s chapter on Douglas Fairbanks in The Mad Masquerade is exceptional. Barbas also discusses Fairbanks’s appeal in Movie Crazy. 21. The most useful examinations of the relationship of Loos’s work to Wharton’s are in Bauer’s indispensable Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics and in Churchwell’s essay on Loos, “‘Lost among the Ads.’” 22. Chapter 3 of this study addresses specifically Wharton’s dealings with Hollywood. 23. See White, note 5 (108) for an interesting list of Wharton’s “best” stories. 24. The same year that Wharton published “Charm Incorporated,” Mary Pickford also published a short story in a woman’s magazine: “Little Liar,” a story about a “golden-haired heroine” whose beloved mother dies and leaves her with a “humorless, unforgiving aunt” (Whitfield 303).

2. The Mechanical Terror: The Novels 1. I will discuss Wharton’s Age of Innocence in depth in chapter 4 of this study. 2. I have been helped by several useful discussions of Fanny Beaufort, including Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics; Edwards’s “The Well-Built Wall of Culture,” and Bentley’s essay on Wharton and manners, “‘Hunting for the


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Real.’” The most helpful has been “Wharton, Race, and The Age of Innocence” by Anne MacMaster, in which she points out that Fanny Beaufort, whose father Julius is Jewish, represents assimilationist racism. Fanny’s parents are “dissociated from their daughter who, like a second-generation immigrant, assimilates into ‘the tribe’ by leaving her parents’ identities behind” (471). Chapter 3 of this study includes more discussion of cinema and race with respect to Wharton. 3. Wharton’s female upstarts have attracted a good deal of attention from scholars. I have found these studies to be most useful: Bentley’s “‘Hunting for the Real’”; Montgomery’s Displaying Women; and Robinson’s excellent essay “The Traffic of Women.” Helen Killoran’s work on Wharton’s allusions in Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion has been especially valuable to my discussion. 4. The best discussion of similarities between Undine and Sophy are in Macnaughton, “Edith Wharton’s ‘bad heroine,’” and in Showalter’s lively study of Undine and her manipulations, “The Custom of the Country: Spragg and the Art of the Deal.” 5. Sophy Viner is certainly one of Wharton’s most complicated and interesting characters, and she has received some special attention from scholars. Benstock devotes a good deal of discussion to Sophy in her biography of Wharton, No Gifts from Chance; Faery provides an interesting reading of Sophy’s sexuality in “Wharton’s Reef ”; Killoran’s chapter on The Reef in Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion is remarkable; as is Macnaughton’s essay on Sophy as Wharton’s bad girl in “Edith Wharton’s ‘bad heroine.’” Also see Kassanoff, whose persuasive argument on the relationship of The Reef to the Titanic disaster of 1912 is invaluable. 6. I am indebted to Holbrook’s Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man, a study that provoked me to reread most of Wharton’s novels. I have also found these works valuable to my reading of Sophy: Faery’s work on Sophy’s sexuality, Killoran’s chapter on The Reef in Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion, and, most especially, Macnaughton’s discussion of Sophy as dramatic actress. 7. For more on how Wharton uses the color pink, see Killoran’s chapter on The Reef. Montgomery includes a good discussion on actresses/prostitutes in Displaying Women. 8. Several scholars have written about Sophy’s debt to earlier characters and about Wharton’s special debt to George Eliot, Thackeray, and others. My study has been enriched by Goodman’s Edith Wharton’s Women; Killoran’s chapter on The Reef; Macnaughton’s essay on Sophy as bad girl, and Showalter’s, “Spragg: The Art of the Deal.” 9. For more on the relationships among the works of Dreiser, Phillips and Wharton, see especially Macnaughton’s “Edith Wharton’s ‘bad heroine.’” 10. There are many good works on the Nesbitt/Thaw/White triangle. The most inventive is Doctorow’s Ragtime. 11. A good discussion of Nesbitt as celebrity is in Montgomery, Displaying Women. 12. There are many good sources for biographies of these film stars. A good starting place is Griffin and Mayer.


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13. On Sophy’s relationship to Society, I am especially indebted to Brian T. Edwards’s wonderful essay “The Well-Built Wall of Culture: Old New York and Its Harems.” 14. For being such a pain, the beautiful Lita has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Banta’s essay, “Wharton’s Women: In Fashion, In History, Out of Time,” is especially thoughtful. Bauer’s discussion of Twilight Sleep in Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics has been invaluable to my work. Other useful discussions of Lita and her role in the destruction of the family in Twilight Sleep appear in Holbrook’s Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man, and Killoran’s chapter on Twilight Sleep in Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion. 15. I explore Wharton and race in Chapter 3 and the Conclusion of this study. For other good studies of Wharton and race, see two excellent essays by Ammons, “Edith Wharton and Race,” and “New Literary History: Edith Wharton and Jessie Redmon Fauset.” Also see Bauer’s essay “Wharton’s ‘Others,’” and Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. Killoran’s essay on Twilight Sleep includes a good discussion of the invading “Goths.” Kassanoff’s book of Wharton and race has been most helpful to my own work. 16. Tommy Ardwin is one of the many gay characters, among them Gerty Farish in The House of Mirth, Count Olenska in The Age of Innocence, and Coral Hicks in The Glimpses of the Moon, who populate Wharton’s works. Wharton scholarship would be enriched by more study through the lens of queer theory. See especially Killoran’s chapter on Glimpses of the Moon in Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion. 17. The name “Klawhammer” might also refer to the very real Broadway producer Marc Klaw (1856–1936), who would have been Wharton’s contemporary. With his partner A.L. Erlanger, Klaw produced countless Broadway plays during the first three decades of the twentieth century, including several versions of Ben Hur, Somerset Maugham’s Rain, and The Jazz Singer. Wharton would certainly have been familiar with the name of the production company: Klaw and Erlanger, which sounds so similar to “Klawhammer” (Internet Broadway Data Base). 18. Wharton was actually writing to Minnie Jones about her despair over the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. 19. There are several good general discussions of The Children, all of which have helped me: Banta’s “Wharton’s Women’; Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics, in which she includes a very thoughtful reading of Rose; Bentley’s “‘Hunting for the Real’”; and Goodwyn’s excellent study of Wharton and travel, Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters. Holbrook’s work on Boyne is exceptional in Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man, and Stephanie Thompson’s Influencing America’s Tastes has also been useful. Killoran’s chapter on allusion in The Children is stunning. 20. For more on Rose Sellars, see Killoran’s chapter on The Children in Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion. Sensibar takes on Rose and Martin Boyne in “Edith Wharton Reads the Bachelor Type,” and Pifer provides an interesting reading of


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Rose and the novel in “The Children: Wharton’s Creative Ambivalence to Self, Society, and the ‘New World.’” 21. The most convincing and helpful discussion of Boyne is in Sensibar, “Edith Wharton Reads the Bachelor Type: Her Critique of Modernism’s Representative Man.” Also useful are Bentley’s essay on manners, “‘Hunting for the Real’” and Holbrook’s fine reading of Boyne as loser in Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man. 22. Hull’s novel has suffered the fate of other novels that were adapted into popular films: the novel was long ago eclipsed by the celluloid version, and nobody knows her name. The novel is now difficult to find and even more difficult to read. Although several scholars mention Hull’s book, almost always in passing, few devote more than a few sentences to the novel. Leider provides the fullest and most interesting discussion of Hull and the novel in chapter 9 of her biography of Rudolf Valentino, Dark Lover. 23. Miriam Hansen has contributed several good works on Valentino. In “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship” and in her exceptional book Babel and Babylon, she provides significant insight into Valentino’s relationship to the camera. Leider’s work on Valentino in The Sheik is also interesting, and Studlar’s wonderful chapter on Valentino, “‘Optic Intoxication’: Rudolph Valentino and Dance Madness” in The Mad Masquerade has been especially helpful to my discussion of Wharton’s dancing fools in Twilight Sleep. 24. The best discussion of how Hollywood dealt with Valentino’s “whiteness” is in Leider. 25. I have taken this quotation from a caption under a photo of Wharton in Benstock, No Gifts from Chance. 26. See especially Stange’s discussion of Wharton as circulated text, in her very fine book Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market of Women. 27. All serious histories of cinema include discussions of Lang and his German films. The most thoughtful work on Metropolis appears in Bordwell’s Classical Hollywood Style; Cook’s massive and indispensable History of Narrative Film; and Mast’s classic A Short History of the Movies. Minden provides further background in the collection of essays, Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, and Sklar’s handsome and thorough Film: An International History of the Medium includes valuable material on Lang and Metropolis. Also of interest are Grant’s book of interviews with Fritz Lang, and Gunning’s book on Lang’s films. For more on Lang’s American career, see Humphries’s very fine study. Thomas Leitch’s study of crime films includes especially accessible and thoughtful work on Lang. Also see the essay, “The Lang Twentieth Century,” in The Magic Hour, pages 9–12, by the incomparable J. Hoberman. 28. Perhaps the most scathing rebuke of Metropolis came from another writer who would also work in movies, H. G. Wells, who exclaimed, “I have recently seen the silliest film. I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier” (Geduld 59). Edith Wharton and H. G. Wells were friends.


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29. A good discussion on how Wharton’s late novels have been dismissed and trivialized is in Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New World.

3. Going Hollywood: The Thirties 1. That she chose to use film as part of her fund-raising strategy helps confirm that Wharton understood the value of motion pictures and suggests some interesting questions about Wharton and film. However, whatever we might have discovered from these documentary films commissioned by Wharton remains a mystery because they no longer exist. 2. This is not the first letter in which Wharton referred to Jews as “Yids.” In 1925 she wrote a cranky and disturbing letter to Minnie Jones about the terms of a scholarship endowment she was establishing at the New York School of Design. She did not want scholarships to be awarded to young women, especially to “female Yids” (Benstock, No Gifts 387). 3. Hoberman and Shandler’s Entertaining America is an especially thoughtful and thorough exploration of the relationship of Jewish culture and American popular entertainment. It is also a handsome book, with great photos and lively captions. One of the best chapters is “Moguldom,” about the earliest Hollywood producers. Also valuable is their discussion of The Jazz Singer (1927), in which they explore the relationship among Jewish entertainers, African American entertainers, and blackface. 4. Wharton was disturbed by eugenics. Bauer provides the fullest and most useful discussion of Wharton’s relationship to works like Ross’s, as well as to social engineering, in Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. 5. For a really fine discussion of Ford’s anti-Semitism, see Stephen Watts’s chapter “Bigot” in The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century. Watts also includes quotations from Charles Merz, who, in his capacity as newspaper columnist, criticized Ford. 6. Benstock (No Gifts), Lewis, and Marshall (“Media”) all provide consistent and useful information on the amount of money Wharton made through Hollywood. 7. I am especially indebted to the fine work of Scott Marshall, whose essay “Media Adaptations of Edith Wharton’s Works” has been critical to my own work here. Marshall’s remarkable annotated catalog includes listings of films, television productions, stage adaptations, and musical adaptations of Wharton’s works. 8. An interesting note on Fitzgerald’s screenplay is in Killoran, “An Unnoticed Source for The Great Gatsby: The Influence of Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon.” 9. For more on Thalberg, see Lambert’s biography of Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, and Marx’s anecdotal Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints. For more on von Stroheim, see Koszarski, Von and The Man You Loved to Hate. The following texts all provide good (sometimes funny) discussions of the clash between the two men: Cook’s History of Narrative Film; Griffith and Mayer’s


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The Movies; Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood; Marx’s Mayer and Thalberg; and Sklar’s Film. 10. Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood and Geduld’s Authors on Film are both wonderful collections of writings by and about fiction writers who watched movies, wrote for Hollywood, or sold their works to Hollywood studios. Wharton is not mentioned in either book. 11. Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood, a clever and well-documented study, includes some of the best material on Fitzgerald in Hollywood and has been essential to my work. 12. Griffith and Mayer provide a lively, irreverent discussion of women’s movies of the silent era. Also see Stamp’s wonderful Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon. 13. I have found the collection of essays Stardom: Industry of Desire delightful to read and helpful to this work. Among the essays, Britton’s fine work on the theory of genre and on melodrama in “Stars and genre” and Gledhill’s “Signs of Melodrama” were especially helpful. 14. The study of genre—its history and theory—has always engaged film scholars. Good overviews and starting points for this aspect of film studies are plentiful. I have found the best, most accessible work on genre in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s Classical Hollywood Cinema; Cook’s History of Narrative Film; and Sklar’s Film. Also see Belton’s text American Cinema/American Culture. 15. March was actually thirty-one and Brian was twenty-nine when they filmed The Marriage Playground (Cahir, “Wharton” 214). 16. Maltin and Bann’s The Little Rascals is an interesting and well-written work on Hal Roach and Our Gang. 17. Two of the child actors in The Marriage Playground would have long Hollywood careers: Anita Louise, who played Blanca, and Mitzi Green, who played Zinnie. Green would be promoted as Paramount’s answer to Shirley Temple later in the 1930s. 18. Unless otherwise noted, all dialogue from all films has been transcribed directly from VHS or DVD by the author. 19. Many Hollywood films rely on telephone calls to bring couples’ heads—and hearts—together. Perhaps the most famous of these scenes appears in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), when we watch George Bailey (James Stewart) melt with desire while he and Mary Hatch (Donna Reed) try to share a telephone receiver. 20. Cahir’s is a fine essay, the only one about Wharton that addresses the film versions of Wharton’s work in detail. This essay and Marshall’s have been the most comprehensive works I have encountered in my search for materials on Wharton and film. 21. See Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, for more on Hollywood films from 1930 to 1934. For more on Will Hayes and the Production Code, see Jacobs, The Wages of Sin; Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal; and Sklar’s Film: An International History of the Medium.


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22. One of the most useful and entertaining essays on women’s fashions and film during this time period is Herzog and Gaines, “‘Puffed Sleeves before TeaTime’: Joan Crawford, Adrian and Women Audiences.” 23. The montage sequence, “a segment of film that summarizes a topic or compresses a passage of time into brief symbolic or typical images” allowed filmmakers to cover much ground and time within their budgets (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 504). Russian filmmakers, particularly Sergei Eisenstein, are most often given credit for developing the “Montage approach” to film narrative. They in turn had been influenced by early French cinema and by the silent films of D. W. Griffith. During the 1920s, when Russian filmmakers were making documentary films for Lenin’s new Soviet state, they worked with limited resources and equipment. These early Russian Montagist films distinguished Russian films from all others during the 1920s. “Soviet narrative films tended to downplay character psychology as a cause; instead, social forces provided the major causes. Characters were interesting for the way these social causes affected their lives” (480). Montage sequences were edited into narrative films through “dissolves, fades, superimpositions, and wipes,” also techniques developed by Griffith, Eisenstein, and other early filmmakers (504). The most effective Russian montage sequences, perfected by Eisenstein, were not smoothly integrated but were shots that “did not fit together perfectly” to “create a jolt for the spectator” (480). Many good works have been written about Russian cinema, especially on Eisenstein and montage, among them Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, and Youngblood. 24. Of all of the novellas and short stories that Wharton wrote, perhaps none has received as much attention from scholars as The Old Maid. Bauer’s essay on Wharton’s outcasts, “Wharton’s ‘Others,’” includes an especially thoughtful reading of The Old Maid. In the collection of essays on Henry James and film, Henry James Goes to the Movies (Griffin), several contributors mention this story and the film adaptation. Lindberg also provides a good reading of The Old Maid in Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners; McDowell discusses the story in Edith Wharton; and Rae’s full-length study on the New York stories, Edith Wharton’s Old New York Quartet, is especially interesting. 25. Akins’s adaptation is interesting reading. For more about Akins’s Pulitzer and the controversy surrounding it, see Marshall, “Media Adaptations of Edith Wharton’s Works.” Weckerle’s essay “Taming the Transgressive,” is a particularly clear and thorough study of the film adaptation. 26. Sennett’s Hollywood’s Golden Year, 1939, though not an especially scholarly work, provides some interesting historical context and not a few good anecdotes about Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, and the filming of The Old Maid.

4. Wharton in Bloom: The Nineties 1. Perhaps the most interesting film about early-twentieth-century authors is a 2001 short called Pitch ’n’ Putt with Beckett ’n’ Joyce, a delightful three-minute movie where Samuel Beckett and James Joyce are playing miniature golf while they are waiting for W. B. Yeats.


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2. Among the adaptations of other classic books in the 1980s and 1990s are two films of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1988, Valmont in 1989), Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992), three versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1990, 1992, 1994), Hugo’s Les Misérables (1997), Dickens’s Great Expectations (1998), several Jane Austen novels (Sense and Sensibility [1995], Persuasion [1995], Emma [1996]), and an upbeat version (!) of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1995). 3. Wegener’s “Form, ‘Selection,’ and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s Antimodernist Aesthetic” is a thoughtful exploration of Wharton and the “modernists.” For more on Wharton and the modernists, see Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. Also see the conclusion of this study. 4. The same year that Wharton took on the modernists, Virginia Woolf published an essay, “American Fiction,” in which she gave Wharton faint praise. Wharton felt “dismissed” by Woolf (Benstock 385). Three fine studies of different aspects of Wharton’s relationship and the moderns are Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America; Bauer, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics; and Janet Beer Goodwyn, Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters. 5. Marshall includes the 1990 film in his catalog of Wharton adaptations (“Media” 291). Cahir devotes one short paragraph to it, describing the film as “a polite and restrained homage to its parent text” (“Wharton” 215). 6. The most lucid essay on New England sermons remains Davidson, “‘God’s Well-Trodden Foot Paths.’” 7. There are many good discussions of Ethan Frome. Dodson provides a perspective on Wharton’s landscape and language in his essay “Frozen Hell: Edith Wharton’s Tragic Offering”; Hovey’s fine work on Zeena in “Zeena: A Compelling Portrait of a Neurotic” is fascinating and valuable to any reading of Ethan Frome; Scharnhorst’s essay on good Mattie/bad Mattie in “The Two Faces of Mattie Silver” suggests an entirely new perspective on poor Mattie; and Shuman provides a historical overview on the reception of Ethan’s story in “The Continued Popularity of Ethan Frome.” Bauer discusses the outsider status of the characters in “Wharton’s ‘Others,’” and Goodwyn includes Ethan Frome among the works she discusses in the context of Wharton the traveler in Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters. McDowell discusses the novella in Edith Wharton. One of the best scholarly treatments of Ethan’s sad tale appears in Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words and in her fine essay “Cold Ethan and ‘Hot Ethan.’” Both Benstock’s and Lewis’s biographies also provide background on Ethan Frome. 8. John Madden has never documented his reasons for the lovemaking scenes. Film critics, whose reviews were generally scathing, did not mention this deviation from the text as a reason for their displeasure 9. Madden’s deviation from Wharton’s plot looks tame compared with other adaptations of the 1980s and 1990s in which someone did some serious tampering: The Natural (1984), The Scarlet Letter (1995), and The Witches of Eastwick


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(1987). There are more troubling examples of adaptations gone mad in Tibbetts and Welsh’s reference work, Novels into Film. 10. Whether deliberately or not, the final waltzing sequence in Palmer’s The Children also owes something to the ballroom scenes at the end of The Leopard. Other films that Cocks and Scorsese cite: William Wyler’s Carrie (1952); John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967); William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949); Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), an adaptation of James’s Turn of the Screw; François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1961) and Two English Girls (1971); Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and Lola Montes (1955); Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949); Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); David Lean’s Madeleine (1950); Albert Lewin’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947); Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1946) and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945); and Roger Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia (1965). 11. Lane’s is a wonderful, clever review of the movie, which he describes as “Raging Bull in a china shop” (29). 12. One of Scorsese’s filmic departures from Wharton’s Age of Innocence had to do with casting. Instead of casting Ellen as Wharton’s dark, foreign woman, he cast her as a blonde. May, whom Scorsese read as “the strongest of them all,” became a dark-eyed brunette, whose steely fortitude we can read in close-ups of her dark eyes more than once. This reversal has irked some Wharton scholars, particularly Elizabeth Ammons, who accuses Scorsese of being “as frightened and resistant to [Wharton’s] implied study of race . . . as his utterly obedient pale hero, Newland” (“Edith Wharton and Race” 83). Ammons finds Scorsese’s reversal to be an “inexplicable refusal . . . to follow Wharton’s color coding” (83). Scorsese, like all filmmakers, based his casting decisions—and all of his production decisions—on many variables, only some of which had to do with the source material. As Ammons’s remark suggests, moviegoing audiences react strongly to adaptations, especially when the source material is a novel with a pedigree. I will explore the rocky terrain of literary adaptation further in the conclusion of this study. 13. Wharton scholarship seems to include more on The Age of Innocence than on any of Wharton’s other writings, and many of these studies have been useful to my study of the film. Especially valuable have been Ammons, “Cool Diana and the Blood-Red Muse” and “Edith Wharton and Race,” both primarily because they deal with the dark status of Ellen Olenska; Banta’s study of both May and Ellen in “Wharton’s Women: In Fashion, in History, out of Time”; and Edwards’s, “The Well-Built Wall of Culture,” in which he compares the opera house boxes to museum displays. Also, Joslin’s, “The Age of Innocence and the Bohemian Peril” provides an interesting look at Ellen as subversive threat; Killoran’s masterly Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion includes a great chapter on The Age of Innocence; Knights explores the price of conformity in “Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence”; and Saunders discusses the specter of Archer’s women in “Becoming the Mask.” Tuttleton’s, “Edith Wharton: The Archeological


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Motive” is one of the best Age essays, in which he documents the ways in which Wharton’s interest in archaeology infiltrates the text of The Age of Innocence. Bauer provides a reading of the characters as outsiders in “Wharton’s ‘Others’”; Bentley looks at how manners operate in the novel in “‘Hunting for the Real’”; and Goodwyn includes Age among the novels she uses to explore Wharton’s use of travel in Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters. Newland Archer makes Holbrook’s list of male losers in Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man; Lindberg discusses the dangerous but charming code of conduct in Archer’s New York in Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners; and in Displaying Women, Montgomery devotes a good deal of discussion to women as spectacles and speculators. Pizer explores the connections between Age of Innocence and Dreiser’s American Tragedy in “American Naturalism in Its ‘Perfected’ State,” and Wolff devotes much discussion to Wharton and the novel in A Feast of Words. Wharton’s biographers, Lewis and Benstock, both provide ample material on Wharton and the writing of The Age of Innocence. 14. For more on the museum sequences in both the 1934 film and Scorsese’s adaptation, see Cahir’s essay on adaptations, “Wharton and the Age of Film.” 15. This scene has much in common with one in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, in which Tommy (Joe Pesci), who walks into a room thinking that he’s about to be honored by the crime organization, is summarily executed instead. 16. See Edwards’s essay, “The Well-Built Wall of Culture,” for an insightful exploration of the “primitive rituals” of Archer’s tribe, one of which is to “keep itself in boxes” throughout the novel (497). In the film, we see evidence of this when the camera pans around Archer’s desk, showing us photographs—boxes where Archer keeps his relics. 17. The most helpful explorations of Ellen Olenska’s character to my readings of the film characters are Ammons, “Cool Diana and the Blood-Red Muse: Edith Wharton on Innocence and Art,” and Edwards, “The Well-Built Wall of Culture.” Also, Greeson’s study of Wharton’s early outlines for the novel and the differing versions, “Wharton’s Manuscript Outlines for The Age of Innocence,” has been fascinating and helpful to my study of the film especially. 18. This is the last but not the only scene in which Scorsese shows us Archer’s capacity for fantasy. In the scene where Archer and Ellen are standing in the old patroon house at Skuytercliff, Archer fantasizes that Ellen comes up behind him and puts her arms around him. Scorsese finds the source of this fantasy in Wharton’s text: “Archer imagined her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck” (Age 84). We see this fantasy in a shot where Ellen gets up from her chair and indeed holds him for a moment, and then we cut to another shot of Ellen in the chair, but this time she merely stands. 19. Brigitte Peucker’s work on Scorsese’s film has been a pleasure to read, especially her essay “Scorsese’s Age of Innocence” and her exceptional book, Incorporating Images. 20. Lily Bart continues to fascinate literary scholars. Benstock, Lewis, and Wolff all include ample discussion of Wharton’s writing of The House of Mirth


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in their biographies. Killoran has an insightful chapter on House, especially in her discussion of Wharton’s allusions to Jonathan Edwards’s sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The usual suspects have provided me with wellwritten, insightful, sometimes provocative readings of Lily and her story: Bauer’s essay “Wharton’s ‘Others’” on House of Mirth; Bentley’s discussion of Lily and her circle in “‘Hunting for the Real’” has provided me with good background by which to read the film, as have Goodwyn’s study of Wharton and travel and Killoran’s work on allusions. Other scholarly works, including Holbrook’s work on Wharton’s unsatisfactory male characters, and Showalter’s great essay “The Death of the Lady (Novelist),” have provided me with differing perspectives by which to evaluate the film adaptation. Especially helpful have been the five essays at the conclusion of the Bedford House of Mirth: Dimock’s work on Lily as currency in “Debasing Exchange”; Norris’s exploration of speculation and speculum in “Death by Speculation”; Restuccia’s discussion of Wharton’s portrait gallery of women in “The Name of the Lily”; Robinson’s fine essay on the class issues among women characters in “The Traffic of Women”; and Sullivan’s excellent reading of the powerful influence of Lily’s parents, “The Daughter’s Dilemma.” Of all of the fine scholarship on The House of Mirth, two essays have been helpful to me in outstanding ways: Fryer’s essay on tableaux vivant, “Reading Mrs. Lloyd,” which has been especially valuable to my work on the visuals in the film, and Howard’s right-on reading of Lawrence Selden, “The House of Mirth: The Bachelor and the Baby.” 21. Davies’s 1996 interview with Mark Cousins is especially helpful. Although he does not mention The House of Mirth (still four years away), Davies discusses the affinity that he finds among film, poetry, and music. Providing me with good background have been Hoberman’s essay on Davies in The Magic Hour and Rosenbaum’s discussion of Davies’s work in Essential Cinema. 22. For a discussion of the implications of this change, see Cahir, House. 23. Howard characterizes this novel as “very ‘housey’’’ (139). 24. See Killoran’s chapter on The House of Mirth in Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion. 25. All quotations from Terence Davies have been transcribed from his commentary on the 2001 DVD of The House of Mirth. Also see Cahir’s interview with Davies; Villasur; and Rohrbach. 26. Davies has commented that he chose this computer-generated pattern because it looked “like a snake pit.” 27. Davies filmed The House of Mirth in Glasgow, Scotland, where he used both interiors and exteriors of historic Beaux Arts buildings to represent the interiors of Lily Bart’s New York milieu. 28. Although he does include the tableau vivant in his House of Mirth, Davies downplays this episode, explaining that modern audiences would not understand this party game. In the movie, Lily does not portray Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd but another painting, titled, appropriately enough, Summer.


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When Lily poses in the tableau vivant, all action stops in the novel, and Wharton scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to Lily as artwork. See especially Fryer’s “Reading Mrs. Lloyd”; Killoran’s Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion; and Norris’s “Death by Speculation.” 29. Davies’s use of red recalls other movies where a director shocks us with red: Hell’s Angels (1930); several of Hitchcock’s thrillers, including Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960); and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). 30. For more on Wharton and the novel of manners, see especially Lindberg’s book Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners and Montgomery’s study of women as spectacle, Displaying Women. 31. For a good discussion of Lily Bart and Carrie Meeber, see Howard, who writes about Wharton’s parody of popular melodrama in The House of Mirth. Howard suggests that the “two works that inform us in reading the novel . . . are Jane Austen’s Emma and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (142). Also see Pizer’s essay on Wharton and Dreiser, “American Naturalism in Its ‘Perfected’ State.” 32. Davies has acknowledged his debt to Ophuls and cites Letter from an Unknown Woman as one of his inspirations for The House of Mirth.

Conclusion: Another Country 1. Although Andrew Ross’s book, No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture, deals primarily with post–World War II American culture, it has been especially useful to this study. Others whose writing about the past and present culture wars in America have been most valuable to me, in various and general ways, are Hoberman (in all of his works), Huyssen, The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism; the fine collection of essays American Media and Mass Culture (Lazere, ed.); and especially the collection edited by Tania Modleski, Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. 2. Over the past two decades, Wharton scholars have written some great essays and books about Wharton’s long-neglected cinema-age fiction and about her rocky relationship with all she saw around her as the twentieth century progressed. Without these scholars, I would have been completely in the dark. Bauer’s study of Wharton, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics, has been central to my own work. Bauer’s astute reading of Wharton’s relationships to mass culture, to race, to eugenics, et cetera is unparalleled. Also, Kassanoff’s study of Wharton and race, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, is an exceptional book and has especially augmented my understanding of Wharton’s anti-Semitism. 3. Joyce was especially fascinated with Russian film, and he loved Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. After meeting Sergei Eisenstein in 1930, he suggested that Busby Berkeley and Eisenstein collaborate on a film version of his Ulysses. Joyce was also an early cinema entrepreneur. He opened the first movie theater in Dublin in 1909, where one of the first films he showed was the Italian film The Tragic Story of Beatrice Cenci (Murray 124).


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4. Wharton and Woolf never met, and so we can only imagine that scene. How they felt about each other has attracted scholars, however. Goodman’s Edith Wharton’s Women and Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle are the best studies of Wharton’s feelings about Woolf. 5. There are many good sources for a study of the relationship of fiction and film. Especially valuable are the collection of essays edited by Jim Collins, High-Pop, and Corrigan’s Film and Literature, which includes a useful discussion of the different perspectives on film and fiction. Any and all of J. Hoberman’s essays will provoke one to think about how we think about adaptation, as will all of Miriam Hansen’s essays. Especially enlightening to my work has been Kamilla Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, in which she articulates clearly and persuasively what I consider to be the most valuable way to read film and fiction—as reflections of each other. Taylor’s essay “Show and Tell: Moviegoers Ought to Learn to Love the Book and the Film” is as lively, clever, and thoughtful a piece on adaptation as I have read. 6. Pifer’s is one of the best essays on Wharton’s The Children. Her argument that Wharton “cuts loose from the weight of history and culture” and undermines “the traditional standards and values” of her own world is compelling and convincing. The film version of The Children certainly reflects this suggestion of Judith as promise and augments Pifer’s work on the novel. 7. This outdoor dining scene and Daniel Day-Lewis’s lines became the centerpiece of the trailers for the film when it was released in 1993. 8. The proliferation of classic adaptation has led to a proliferation of studies about this 1990s trend: most helpful have been the essays in Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (Neale). Of those essays, especially Hollinger’s study of women’s films, “From Female Friends to Literary Ladies,” and Sandler’s “Movie Ratings and Genre” have informed my work. Also important are Hillier’s American Independent Film: A Sight and Sound Reader; and Levy’s study of American cinema apart from Hollywood: Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film. Rosenbaum’s discussion of film canons, Essential Cinema, has given me new ways to think about genre, and Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, an informal story about the shenanigans of recent independent American moguls, is one great read. 9. Of course, film scholars will never agree on one definition for the genre of the “woman’s film,” which provides those of us who want to study “woman’s film” plenty to think about. The works that I have found most helpful for this work are Basinger’s historical perspective, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960; Doane’s essential and brilliant exploration of the male gaze in The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s; and Molly Haskell’s groundbreaking work on women and film: From Reverence to Rape. Hollinger’s essay on genre and contemporary women’s films is valuable, as is Mayne’s remarkable book, The Woman at the Keyhole. Linda Williams’s body of work is invaluable; I have found her essay “Melodrama Revisited” to be particularly relevant to my own work here.


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10. United States v. Paramount had far-reaching consequences for Hollywood. After years of negotiation, the court finally “ordered movie companies to divest their theater ownership” (Sklar 275). Sklar points out that the decision was based on the idea that local “communities had the right to decide” what movies to show (275). Ironically, at the same time that studios could no longer control theaters, commercial television, with little initial regulation, also threatened to undermine community control. 11. Film noir continues to attract great attention from scholars, and is perhaps the most popular of all genres, movements, and film tropes about which scholars write. In their massive works on film history and theory, Bordwell, Cook, and Sklar all provide thoughtful discussions, definitions, examples, and resources on film noir. I have found especially useful to this work Christopher’s accessible Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City; Duncan’s study of the emotional impact in noir films, Film Noir: Films of Trust and Betrayal; and Kaplan’s Women in Film Noir. Naremore’s wonderful More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts is especially well written and thorough. Alain Silver and James Ursini’s multivolume Film Noir Reader includes some of the best contemporary writing on noir. 12. Byars’s All That Hollywood Allows is one of the most interesting studies of the male gaze and female spectacle in 1950s melodrama. For historical context and gendered cinema studies, I have also relied on Basinger’s A Woman’s View; Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape; and especially Williams’s “Melodrama Revisited.” 13. Many of the 1950s melodramas, especially those based on popular women’s fiction, have been reevaluated in interesting ways. Like the fiction on which they are based, they look predictable and tame, but most, like Sirk’s Imitation of Life, include subversive, suggestive film elements that telegraph to a viewer that all is not well. See especially Byars and Cochran, American Noir. 14. Innovative English-language adaptations appeared during these years, but almost all of them had been produced in Europe: Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1945) and David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), both from Great Britain, and Orson Welles’s Othello (1951), from Italy. These adaptations, like those from Hollywood during the same years, spotlight big problems of big men. 15. I have taken this quotation from Cochran’s America Noir, but the original source is Geoffrey O’Brien’s fine book, Hardboiled America. 16. Cochran’s America Noir is an enlightened starting point for study of the ways in which B movie directors were ignored or dismissed in mainstream culture during the middle of the twentieth century. Levy’s Cinema of Outsiders and Grant’s and Gunning’s writings on Fritz Lang are good supplements. 17. Cochran includes an excellent, lengthy discussion of Highsmith in America Noir. Also see Andrew Wilson’s biography, Beautiful Shadow. 18. Wharton’s and Highsmith’s fiction also correspond to the fiction of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, two of whose novels were adapted into films in the 1950s: Clouzot’s wonderful Diabolique in 1955 and Hitchcock’s masterful Vertigo in 1958. In both films, husbands conspire with others to kill their wives.


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19. There are a number of uncanny resemblances between The Price of Salt, about Therese, a twenty-year-old New Yorker who falls in love for the first time in her life, with an older married woman, Carol Aird, and both House of Mirth and Age of Innocence. Like Wharton’s characters, Therese is constrained and thwarted by society: “Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?” she asks Carol (87). Sometimes compared to Henry James, whose Ambassadors inspired The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith also shares much with Wharton. In light of their similar adaptation histories, further study of the two would be interesting. 20. Dominant genres have always adjusted themselves to reflect their times and have always fit into multiple generic categories—even those movies marketed through Irving Thalberg’s factory have never fit easily into absolute groups. Although genres have traditionally “been malleable and open, able to accommodate through allegory issues too hot to handle in direct realist form,” during the last decades of the twentieth century, strict definitions of Hollywood genres (Western, weepie, musical, suspense, horror, etc.) have been in constant flux, especially because of the rise of the independent film movement (Sklar 393). 21. The 1990s “return to classics” has much to do with the contributions of a diverse group of women artists, “a coterie of female screenwriters, directors, stars and production executives” who represent “networks of talented women who band together in their determination to bring their contemporary vision of a classic women’s novel to film, even in opposition to studio directive” (Hollinger 88). The dominance, financial and cultural, that Hollywood still wields, has helped define the independent filmmakers as a group of ethnically and racially diverse artists who still “offer films made on modest budgets . . . reinvigorating narrative and generic conventions” and changing our perspectives through their own (Hillier xvi). 22. That all four recent Wharton adaptations were directed by independent filmmakers who were men is not insignificant and reaffirms to me that, like Highsmith’s work, Wharton’s fiction clearly transcends any designation as “women’s literature.” This study has provided me with my own dream of another country: I can only hope that one day soon, for example, someone like Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong, or any number of American women filmmakers will take on a Wharton project, perhaps The Reef. 23. The fine collection of essays Henry James Goes to the Movies has been an invaluable tool for my work on Wharton. I have been helped especially by Bousquet’s essay “Cultural Capitalism and the ‘James Formation’”; Graham’s wonderful essay on The Golden Bowl, “The Rift in the Loot”; and Mitchell’s fine study of The Golden Bowl, “Based on the Novel by Henry James.” My favorite essays in the collection—those that corresponded in significant ways to Wharton’s other country on film—were Nadel, “Ambassadors from an Imaginary ‘Elsewhere,’” and Sadoff, “Hallucinations of Intimacy.” 24. Emanuel Levy’s excellent Cinema of Outsiders and David Cochran’s American Noir most inspired my reading of Wharton’s fiction and the film


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adaptations as American noir. I find Cochran’s use of the term “American noir” especially useful, because the term expands a strict noir definition to include other works—among them fiction and movies—that would not otherwise be considered noir but that certainly share characteristics with traditional film noir. 25. I am especially indebted to Scott Marshall’s scrupulous documentation of Wharton’s divorce in The Mount: Home of Edith Wharton.


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Cochran, David. America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution P, 2000. Collins, Jim, ed. High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Colquitt, Clare, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid, eds. A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999. Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1990. Corrigan, Timothy. Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1998. ———. “Which Shakespeare to Love? Film, Fidelity, and the Performance of Literature.” High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment. Ed. Jim Collins. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 155–81. Corrigan, Timothy, and Patricia White. The Film Experience: An Introduction. New York: Bedford, 2004. Davidson, Edward H. “‘God’s Well-Trodden Foot-Paths’: Puritan Preaching and Sermon Form.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25 (Winter 1983): 503–27. DeCordova, Richard. “The emergence of the star system in America.” Gledhill, Stardom 17–29. ———. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990. Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.” Benstock, House 375–90. Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Dodson, Samuel Fisher. “Frozen Hell: Edith Wharton’s Tragic Offering.” Knight 251–57. Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, 1996. Duncan, Paul. Film Noir: Films of Trust and Betrayal. Harpenden, Eng.: Pocket Essentials, 2000. Dupree, Ellen. “‘Usually the Reward of Tosh’: Edith Wharton’s Business Education.” Edith Wharton Review 17 (Fall 2001): 1–12. Dyer, Richard. “Charisma.” Gledhill, Stardom 57–59. Dyman, Jenni. Lurking Feminism: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Lang, 1996. Edwards, Brian T. “The Well-Built Wall of Culture: Old New York and Its Harems.” Waid, Age 482–506. Elbert, Monika M. “The Politics of Maternality in Summer.” Knight 304–11. Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.


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Index advertising, 21–22, 29 advice columns, 22 “After Holbein” (Wharton), 24 Age of Innocence, The (movie): (1924), 65, 85, 88–89; (1934), 93–96, 160; (1993), 122–32, 154–56, 192n.12 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 10, 41–42, 69, 74; Broadway production, 93–94; narrative strategy in, 125–30 Akins, Zöe, 98 Alexander, Ruth M., 13 “All Souls” (Wharton), 30 alternative worlds, 150–54 Amalasuntha (Twilight Sleep), 49, 50, 67 American Cinema/American Culture (Belton), 11 American Women in the Progressive Era (Schneider and Schneider), 13–14 Ammons, Elizabeth, 82, 192n.12 Anderson, Doris, 90 Ansley, Christine (“Joy in the House”), 30, 32 anti-Semitism, 69, 79–82, 188n.2. See also Jewish characters; Jewish moviemakers Archer, Dallas (Age of Innocence), 41, 74, 94–95 Archer, Newland (Age of Innocence): in novel, 41, 74, 94–95, 166; in movie, 122, 124, 154–56, 193n.18 Ardwin, Tommy (Twilight Sleep), 50–52, 56 Ashby, Charlotte (“Pomegranate Seed”), 30–31, 32 Atlantic Monthly, 169 “Atrophy” (Wharton), 30 audience, xiii, 8–10, 28–29, 64

Austen, Jane, 159, 160 “Autre Temps” (Wharton), 24 Backward Glance, A (Wharton), 11, 171 Bara, Theda, 48, 56, 60 Barbas, Samantha, 2 Barnes, Margaret Ayer, 93–94 Barrymore, Katherine Harris, 85 Bart, Lily (House of Mirth): in novel, 9, 14, 33, 41–42, 68, 82, 132, 166, 171; in movie (2000), 132–41, 156–59 Bauer, Dale M., 68, 72, 73 Beaufort, Fanny (Age of Innocence), 41–42 Beaufort, Julius (Age of Innocence), 42, 69 Belivet, Therese (Price of Salt), 166 Belknap, Troy (“Marne”) Belmont, Mrs. O. H. P., 169 Belton, John, 11 Bennett, Constance, 98 Benstock, Shari, xi–xii, 24, 67, 74, 132, 133 Berman, Pandro, 93 Berry, Walter, xi bicycles, 13 Blackall, Jean Frantz, 8 Blakemore, Richard, 150 Boles, John, 94 Book-of-the-Month Club, 37 books, as consumer items, 37 Botshon, Lisa, 23, 31 “Bottle of Perrier, A” (Wharton), 24 Bow, Clara, 48, 56, 63 Boyne, Martin (Children): in novel, 57–65, 67, 90; in movie Children (1990), 112–18, 152–53; in Marriage Playground, 91–92 Brent, George, 99 Brewster, Ben, 27

Boswell Index.indd 213

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214

Index

Brian, Mary, 90 Bryan, Jane, 99 Cahir, Linda Costanzo, 90, 92–93, 102, 121 camerawork, 101, 131, 135, 150, 155–56; alternating background and foreground, 100–101; Steadicam, 115–16 Canfield, Dorothy, 24, 37 Capra, Frank, 96 celebrity worship, 77–78 characterization: female outsiders, 41–42; females, 1950s, 163; Jewish characters, 69, 82–83; movie-age characters, 48–51; older men, 20–21; working-class women, 23–24; writers as screen characters, 110–11 “Charity at the Window: Narrative Technique in Edith Wharton’s Summer” (Blackall), 8 charity girls, 14 Charlotte Temple, 97 Charm Incorporated (Wharton), 33–37, 39, 67, 144 children, effects of cinema on, 57–58, 61, 64 Children, The (Wharton), xi, xiii, 39, 40, 48–49, 57–65, 67, 69, 82; criticism of, 72; film rights to, 89–90; movie (1990), 112–18, 152; nightmare vision in, 61–65. See also Marriage Playground, The Churchwell, Sarah, 31, 33 cinema: children, devastating effects on, 57–58, 61, 64; as consumer product, 9, 11, 32–33; as disease, 57–58; as disorienting, 4, 6, 9–10; elaborate sets, 27; film adaptations, 159–62, 167–68; as gendered threat to status quo, 29–30; Jewish moviemakers, 69–72, 79–85; as mechanical terror, 38–40, 62–65, 72, 117, 143–44, 149; as mirror of text, 149–50; non-Jewish moviemakers, 80–81; as siren song, 28–29, 54, 57, 69–70; Wharton’s affinity with, 147–49; Wharton’s dislike of, xi–xii, 1–2, 107–8, 143; working class, association with, 4–5, 28; writers’ views of, 143–47. See also genres


“Cinema and the Postmodern Condition” (Friedberg), 10–11 classical allusions, 54–55 Clayburn, Mrs. (“All Souls”), 30 Cleopatra, 56 Cochran, David, 164–65, 198–99n.24 Cocks, Jay, 122–23 collaborative arts, 145 Colonial Theater (Pittsfield, Mass.), 19– 20 “Coming Home” (Wharton), 26–28 confession films, 98 consumers, women as, 12–15, 21–22, 66– 67; loss of identity, 32–33; Wharton as, 25–26 Cook, David A., 87 Corman, Roger, 165 Cornell, Katharine, 93 Corrigan, Timothy, 147, 160, 168 Cosmopolitan, 33–34, 85, 144 Crack-Up, The (Fitzgerald), 146–47 Crisp, Donald, 99 Crispin, Lady Ulrica (Reef), 43–44 Cromwell, John, 96 Cunningham, Michael, 110 Custom of the Country, The (Wharton), 10, 42, 122, 170 Dark Victory, 99 Darrow, George (Reef), 9–10, 42–47, 49–50, 67, 122 Davies, Terrence, 133–34, 138–40, 158–59 Davis, Bette, 96, 98, 99 Davis, Donald, 108 Deception, 141 DeMille, Cecil B., 96 Desire to Desire, The: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Doane), 102–3, 105–6 detail, 56, 123–24, 126 Displaying Women (Montgomery), 10 Doane, Mary Ann, 102–3, 105–6, 141 documentaries, 1–2, 77–78 Dodson, Samuel Fisher, 118 Dorset, Bertha (House of Mirth), 136 Dos Passos, John, 145 double mimesis, 105–6 doubles, 119

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Index dreams/dreamworlds, 149, 154, 158–59, 171–72 Dreiser, Theodore, 47 Dunne, Irene, 94 duplications, 119–20 Durant, Will, 37 “Early Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?” (Hansen), 10, 29 economy, entertainment industry and, 22 Edison, Thomas, 81, 85 Edith Wharton (Lewis), xi Edwards, Brian T., 124 Eisenstein, Sergei, 190n.23 Elbert, Monika M., 12 Elliott, Kamilla, 146, 150 Eternal Grind, The, 20, 21 Ethan Frome: movie (1993), 108, 112, 118–22, 153–54; novel, 31, 96, 170 ethnic stereotypes, 34–36, 39, 42; Jewish characters, 69, 82–83; Jewish moviemakers, 69–72, 79–85; Valentino and, 66–67 Etiquette (Post), 37 Faery, Rebecca Blevins, 44–45 Fairbanks, Douglas, 37, 78 Farish, Gerty (House of Mirth), 157 Faulkner, William, 31 Federal Code of the Motion Picture Industry, 1, 92–93, 95, 96 Ferber, Edna, 24, 37 film adaptations, 162; reasons for, 159–60; reshaping genres, 167–68 film industry: cosmopolitanism of, 85; culture of suppression, 163–64; governmental interventions in, 161; power of, 65, 69 film rights, 65, 85, 88–90, 98, 133 Fisher, Carry (House of Mirth), 42, 138, 157 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 31, 32, 86–87, 88, 107, 146 flashback, 119 Fleischauer, Mr. (Custom of the Country), 69 Ford, Henry, 81, 82, 84 formula stories, 23, 25


215

Foundling, The, 20 Fox, William, 83 framing, 137–38, 140–41, 159 French, Marilyn, 32 Frenway, Nora (“Atrophy”), 30, 32 Friedberg, Anne, 10–11, 182n.8 Frome, Ethan (Ethan Frome), 118–22, 153– 54 Frome, Zeena (Ethan Frome), 119–22 Fullerton, Morton, 170 Funston, Judith E., 97, 106 Gabler, Neal, 83, 84–85 Garbo, Greta, 35, 48 genres: confession films, 98; formula stories, 23; melodramas, 20, 89–90, 162–63; noir film and fiction, xiii, 161–64, 167, 171, 198–99n.24; reshaping of, 167–68, 198n.20; teacup drama, 94–95. See also woman’s film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Loos), 38 Ghosts (Wharton), 2 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 12 “Girl Problem,” The (Alexander), 13 Glimpses of the Moon, The (movie, 1923), 85, 86–87 Gods Arrive, The (Wharton), 111 Goldsmith, Meredith, 23, 31 Goldwyn, Samuel, 83 Gone with the Wind (movie), 99, 160–61 Good Housekeeping Magazine, 25 Goodwyn, Janet Beer, 170 Goth metaphor, 54–55, 57 Goulding, Edmund, 98–99, 150, 160 Great American Band-Wagon, The (Merz), 78–79 “Great Books” series, 37 Great Depression, 93 Greater Inclination, The (Wharton), 169 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 32 Great Train Robbery, 141 Greed, 87–88, 106 Greer, H. Macy (“Coming Home”), 26, 28 Griffith, D. W., 48, 81, 85, 99 Griffith, Richard, 20, 86, 89, 94, 98 Growing up Fast (Lipper), 19–20

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216

Index

Haines, Guy (Strangers on a Train), 166 Hale, Ruth (Ethan Frome), 119–20 Hansen, Miriam, 10, 27, 28–29 Harney, Lucius (Summer), 3–9, 12–13 Hatch, Mrs. (House of Mirth), 42 Hawes, Julia (Summer), 5, 14 Hayes, Will, 1, 92 Hayes Code, 1, 92–93, 95, 96 Hearst, Randolph, 33–34, 85, 144 Heerman, Victor, 94 Hemingway, Ernest, 31 Hepburn, Katharine, 93 Highsmith, Patricia, 165–68 Hitchcock, Alfred, 165–66 Hoberman, J., 85, 139, 143–44, 148, 149 Hoboe, Halma (Charm Incorporated), 34–36, 48 Hollywood, caricatures of, 52–54, 56–57 Honey, Maureen, 23, 24 Hopkins, Miriam, 99 Hours, The (Cunningham), 110 House of Mirth, The (movie, 1918), 65, 85 House of Mirth, The (movie, 2000), 132–41, 156–59; color, use of, 138–40; framing in, 137–38, 140–41; tableau vivant, 134, 137–38, 158, 194n.28; timepieces in, 135–37 House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 9, 33, 42, 58, 68, 82; film rights to, 133 House Un-American Activities Committee, 161 Howard, Maureen, 134, 138 Hudson River Bracketed (Wharton), 111 Hulda from Holland, 20 Hull, Edith Maude, 65–67, 187n.22 Humphries, Reynold, 72 Hurst, Fanny, 24, 37, 94 identity, loss of, 32–33 Inarticulate Longings (Scanlon), 33 Ince, Thomas, 81, 85 incest, suggestions of, 20–21, 90–91 independent filmmakers, 167, 198n.22 Innocent, The, 123 international film, 167 Irving Award, 107 isolation, 62–63, 118, 120, 122, 158, 166 IT Girl, 56


James, Henry, 11 Jewett, Rutger, 85; Wharton’s letters to, 31, 33, 37 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 11 Jewish characters, 69, 82–83 Jewish moviemakers, 69–72, 79–85, 188n.3. See also anti-Semitism Jones, Minnie, 84 Joyce, James, 145 “Joy in the House” (Wharton), 30 Killoran, Helen, 54–55 Klaw, Marc, 186n.17 Klawhammer, Serge (Twilight Sleep), 52–53, 56, 69, 82–83 Kouradjine, Boris (Charm Incorporated), 34–36, 39, 67 Kouradjine, Nadeja (Charm Incorporated), 34–36, 39, 67 Kracauer, Siegfried, 144 Lacrosse, Zinnia: in novel Children, 40, 49, 58, 59–61, 62, 69, 82; in movie Children (1990), 113; in movie Marriage Playground (1930), 91, 92 Ladies’ Home Journal, 22, 23, 30, 96 Laemmle, Carl, 83 Landish, Kitty (Twilight Sleep), 49, 54 Lane, Anthony, 124 Lang, Fritz, 70–72, 164–65 Lapsley, Gaillard, 19, 78 Lasky, Jesse, 83 Leath, Anna (Reef), 42–43, 44, 47, 69, 164 Leitch, Thomas, 72 Lenox, Mass., 11–12 Leopard, The, 123 Less Than the Dust, 20 Lewis, R. W. B., xi, 11 Lewis, Sinclair, 86, 88 lighting, 115–16, 153–54 Lindberg, Gary H., 126 Lipper, Joanna, 19–20, 182n.1 Ljungquist, Kent, 31, 154 Loew, Marcus, 83 looking glass analogies, 149–50, 172 Loos, Anita, 38 Looser, Devoney, 159–60

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Index Lovell, Charlotte (Old Maid), 150–52, 96– 108, 138 Lullmer, Syb (Children), 61, 62 Madden, John, 118–22 magazine publishers, 22–24, 68–70 magazines, 21–22, 29, 166 Main Street (Lewis), 86 Making Life Worthwhile (Fairbanks), 37 male writers, 31–32, 37 Manford, Dexter (Twilight Sleep), 49–50, 67 Manford, Pauline (Twilight Sleep), 49–52, 54 Mann, Thomas, 145 Marion, Frances, 22 “Marne, The” (Wharton), 26, 28 marriage as theme, 169–71 Marriage Playground, The, xi, 89–93, 118 Marx, Samuel, 87 Mason, Sarah Y., 94 Mast, Gerald, 93 Mayer, Arthur, 20, 86, 89, 94, 98 Mayer, Louis B., 83, 85, 87, 88 McTeague (Norris), 87 Mean Streets, 165 mechanical terror metaphor, 38–40, 62–65, 72, 117, 143–44, 149 melodramas, 20, 89–90; 1950s, 162–63 Mencken, H. L., 143 Mendes, Lothar, 90 Merz, Charles, 78–81, 83 metaphor, 150 Metro, 65, 85 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 88 Metropolis, 70–72 Michelangelo (Twilight Sleep), 54–55, 67 middle-class women, 21 Minghella, Anthony, 167 Minot, Susan, 172 mirroring, 149–50, 154 mise-en-scène, 27 “Modern Library” series, 37 moment of choice, 165 Mongrel (Parker), 83 montage sequencing, 95–96, 190n.23 Montgomery, Maureen, 10


217

Morante, Linda, 3 Morning Glory, 93 Movie Crazy (Barbas), 2 “Movies and Reality, The” (Woolf), 145– 46 movie stars, 1–2, 14–15 movie-within-a-movie, 8 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 110 Murrett, Mrs. (Reef), 43–44 music, 104–5, 135, 154, 155 Naked Kiss (Fuller), 164 narrative strategies, xii, 125–30; photography as, 144–45 Negri, Pola, 51–57 Nesbitt, Evelyn, 48 New Movie Magazine, xi, 90 New Republic, The, 145 new women, 13–15, 21, 42, 66; twentiethcentury actress, 45–48 New York, 79, 83–84, 164 nightmare visions, 61–65 No Gifts from Chance (Benstock), xi–xii, 67, 74 noir film and fiction, xiii, 161–64, 167, 171, 198–99n.24 Nona (Twilight Sleep), 49, 51–55, 57, 68 No Respect (Ross), 143 Norris, Frank, 87 Norris, Kathleen, 1 novel, sentimental, 97 novel, twentieth-century development of, 109–10 novel of manners, 140 Old Maid, The: movie (1939), 96–108, 111, 141, 150–52, 160; novel, 96–108, 138, 150–51 Old New York (Wharton), 98 Old World in the New, The (Ross), 80 Olenska, Ellen (Age of Innocence), 41, 95, 124–28, 155–56, 170 opera, 10 Ophuls, Max, 141 Orlando (Woolf), 110 Our Gang, 91 outsiders, 41–42, 82, 85, 168–70

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218

Index

Palmer, Tony, 112, 152 Paramount, 65, 89–90 Parker, Dorothy, 83 Parrill, Sue, 160 Peiss, Kathy, 21 Personal Property (Stange), 33 Peucker, Brigitte, 131 Phillips, David Graham, 47 photographs, 143–45 Pickford, Mary, 1–3, 15, 29, 48, 61, 73, 78, 172; endorsements, 21–22; later years, 39–40, 106; persona of, 20–21 Pictorial Review, 22 Pifer, Ellen, 153 Pittsfield, Mass., 19–20 “Politics of Maternality in Summer, The” (Elbert), 12 “Pomegranate Seed” (Wharton), 30–31 Poor Little Peppina, 20 popular culture, xiii; new women and, 13– 14; in popular writings, 37–38; Wharton’s complicity in, 68–69; Wharton’s indictment of, xiii, 33–36, 73–74 Porter, Edwin S., 141 Post, Emily, 37 Price of Salt, The (Highsmith), 166 Pride and Prejudice (movie), 160 Printzlau, Olga, 89 prostitutes, 28–29, 45 public spectacle, 9–10 public sphere, women in, 29–30 publishers: magazine, 22–24, 68–70; New York industry, 36–37 Pulitzer Prize, 86 Quirk, James, 40 Ralston, Delia (Old Maid), 97, 100–105, 151 Reef, The (Wharton), 9–10, 40, 42–48, 58, 67, 69, 122 Restuccia, Frances L., 137, 141 Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Elliott), 150 Ring, Fanny (Age of Innocence), 41–42 RKO Radio, 93 Robinson, Casey, 98, 99–100


Roosevelt, Eleanor, 37 Roosevelt, Theodore, 37 Rosedale, Simon (House of Mirth), 9, 69, 82, 136, 138 Ross, Andrew, 143 Ross, E. A., 80 Royall, Charity (Summer), 3–15, 19–20, 26, 40, 65, 171–72 Royall, Mr. (Summer), 5–7 Ruben, J. Walter, 90 Sabin, Florence, 1 salons, 52 Saturday Review of Literature, The, 143 Scanlon, Jennifer, 25, 33 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 96, 97 Scharnhorst, Gary, 118 Schildkraut, Joseph, 56 Schneider, Carl J., 13–14 Schneider, Dorothy, 13–14 Schulberg, Budd, 80, 81–82 Scopes, Miss (Children), 58 Scorsese, Martin, 122–32, 154–56, 165, 168, 192n.12 Scribner’s Magazine, 22 Selden, Lawrence (House of Mirth), 133–41, 156, 158–59 self-help programs, 55 Sellars, Rose: in novel Children, 58, 59, 61–62, 90; in movie Children (1990), 113–15, 152; in movie Marriage Playground (1930), 90, 92 Senso, 123 sentimental novel, 97 servants, 24, 26–27 set design, 27, 123, 150 Shandler, Jeffrey, 85 Sheik, The (Hull), 65–67 short stories, xii, 23–26 Shuman, R. Baird, 119 Silver, Mattie (Ethan Frome), 118–22, 153–54 Sinclair, Upton, 132 siren song, cinema as, 28–29, 54, 57, 69–70 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 47 Skillern, Rhonda, 4 Sklar, Robert, 66, 88, 89, 161, 197n.10 Spender, Clem, 99, 100–102

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Index Spragg, Undine (Custom of the Country), 10, 42, 122 staircase imagery, 104, 116, 117, 151 standardization, 62–63, 72–73 Stange, Margit, 33 Stanwyck, Barbara, 98 Steadicam, 115–16 Stein, Gertrude, 110 Steiner, Max, 94 Stella Dallas, 98 Stepney, Grace (House of Mirth), 133, 135– 36 Story of Philosophy, The (Durant), 37 Strangers on a Train (Highsmith): novel, 165, 166; movie (2008), 167; movie by Hitchcock, 165, 166, 167 Struthers, Nettie (House of Mirth), 157–58 Summer (Wharton), 3–15, 19, 29, 96; performance scenes, 4–5, 7–11 Sunset Boulevard, 106 Susan Lenox (Phillips), 47 Swanson, Gloria, 48, 56–57, 60, 63, 106 Taking Stock of Ourselves (Fairbanks), 37 Talbot, Fox, 144 Talented Mr. Ripley, The (Highsmith): novel, 165, 167; movie, 167 Targatt, Jim (Charm Incorporated), 34–37, 67 teacup drama, 94–95, 160 television, 161 “Tendencies in Modern Fiction” (Wharton), 143–44, 146 Thalberg Award, 107 Thalberg, Irving, 87–88, 89, 107 theater, 10 Tina (Old Maid), 97, 99, 101–106, 151–52 Trenor, Gus (House of Mirth), 9, 135, 138, 159 Twilight Sleep (Wharton), xiii, 39, 48–58, 65, 67–68, 122; caricatures of Hollywood, 52–53, 56–57; criticism of, 72; Jewish characters in, 69, 82–83; reptile metaphor, 53, 55 Ullman, Sharon, 14 underground B movies, 164–65


219

United Artists, 2 United States v. Paramount, 161, 197n.10 unwed mother story, 5, 14, 15, 96, 98, 171– 72 Updike, D. B., 12 U.S.A. (Dos Passos), 145 Valentino, Rudolph, 56, 57, 65–67 vamp, 54, 56 Vanderbilt, William, 169 Van Dyke, W. S., 96 Vermeer, Johannes, 139 “Vice of Reading, The” (Wharton), 33, 36 Viner, Sophy (Reef ), 9–10, 40, 42–49, 60, 122 Visconti, Luchino, 123 visual representation, xii, 71, 131, 150; in short stories, 26–27 voice-over narrative, 125–30 von Stroheim, Erich, 87–88, 106–7 voyeurs, moviegoers as, 64 Vulgar Modernism (Hoberman), 85, 139, 143–44, 148, 149 Walker, Nancy A., 8 Wallis, Hal B., 99, 107 Warner, Harry, 83 Warner, Jack, 83 Warner Brothers, 65, 88 weepies, 162–63 Welland, May (Age of Innocence), 124 Welland family (Age of Innocence), 10 Wharton, Edith: anti-Semitism of, 69, 79, 81–82, 188n.2; as bread-winner, 36; cinema, negative view of, xi–xii, 1–2, 26–27, 107–8, 143, 172; complicity in popularization of culture, 68–69; as consumer, 25–26; detail, use of, 56, 123–24; divorce, 169–70; documentaries commissioned by, 77; as elite writer, 22, 30–32, 31–32, 36; financial losses, 22, 24; high society, view of, 48–49, 132–33; Hollywood income, 65, 84, 88, 107; as outsider, 168–69; poetry of, 169; publicity photos, 69; publishers and, 22–24, 68–70; stops watching movies, xii, 73; war charities, 77, 133

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220

Index

Wharton, Teddy, 169 Wharton’s New England (White), 11 What Makes Sammy Run? (Schulberg), 80 Wheater, Cliffe (Children): novel, 58; movie (1990), 112 Wheater, Joyce (Children): novel, 58, 61, 62; movie (1990), 112 Wheater, Judith (Children): novel, 58–65, movie (1990), 112–18, 152–53 Wheater, Judith (Marriage Playground), 91–92 Wheater, Zinnia (Children), 58, 64 Wheater, Zinnia (Marriage Playground), 58, 64 Wheater children (Children), 57–58 White, Barbara A., 11, 23–24, 35, 39 Whitfield, Eileen, 21 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt, 1 Wilkins, Mary, 11 Wilson, Edmund, 147 window-shopping, 3, 10–11 Wizard of Oz, The, 99, 102, 182n.8 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 118, 126 Woman Marches On (documentary), 1–2, 78


woman’s film, 89–90, 98–99, 102–3, 140– 41; elements of, 103–5; Old Maid as, 160–62 Woman’s Home Companion, 22, 23, 31 Woman with a Water Jug (Vermeer), 139 Women and Economics (Gilman), 12 women filmmakers, 198n.21 Wood, Robin, 147 Woolf, Virginia, 109–10, 111, 112, 145–47 working class, cinema associated with, 4–5, 28 World War I, 21 writers: elite, 22, 30–32, 31, 32, 88, 107, 146; popular, 37–38; as screen characters, 110–11; self-advertisement, 38 “Writing of Ethan Frome, The” (Wharton), 118 Writing of Fiction, The (Wharton), 111 Wyant, Arthur (Twilight Sleep), 49–50, 69 Wyant, Jim (Twilight Sleep), 49–50, 67 Wyant, Lita (Twilight Sleep), 49–57, 63, 122 Zukor, Adolph, 83

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Parley Ann Boswell is a professor of English at Eastern Illinois

University, where she teaches courses in American literature and film studies. She is the coauthor of Reel Rituals: Ritual Occasions from Baptisms and Funerals in Hollywood Films, 1945–1995, and has published numerous essays on Hollywood film and American literature.


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8/15/07 1:06:04 PM

Parley Ann Boswell is a professor at Eastern Illinois University and the coauthor of Reel Rituals: Ritual Occasions from Baptisms to Funerals in Hollywood Films, 1945–1995.

Southern Illinois University Press 1915 University Press Drive Mail Code 6806 Carbondale, IL 62901 www.siu.edu/~siupress

ISBN 0-8093-2757-0 ISBN 978-0-8093-2757-7

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

88888888 88888888 88888888 88888888

Jacket illustration: Lily (Gillian Anderson) as decoration in The House of Mirth (2000). Publicity still courtesy of Photofest Inc.

Boswell jkt mech.indd 1

“Engaging and informative, Edith Wharton on Film offers new perspectives on Wharton’s work as it has been treated by filmmakers. The analyses of Ethan Frome and especially Scorsese’s Age of Innocence and Davies’s House of Mirth made me want to go right out to reread the novels and rescreen the films. Boswell combines literary and cinematic readings with insight and grace.” —Jo Keroes, author of Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film

•

Printed in the United States of America

“Parley Ann Boswell’s knowledge of the early movies made from Wharton novels and her meditations on the Wharton film explosion in the 1990s are major highlights of this terrific book. Her work here is meticulous and exciting, a valuable addition to Wharton scholarship.” —Dale M. Bauer, author of Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics

EDITH WHARTON ON FILM

in The Reef as pre-Hollywood ingénue, characters in Twilight Sleep and The Children and the real Hollywood figures who might have inspired them, and The Sheik and racial stereotypes. Boswell traces the complicated relationship of fiction and narrative film, the adaptations and cinematic metaphors of Wharton’s work in the 1990s, and Wharton’s persona as an outsider. Wharton’s fiction on film corresponds in striking ways to American noir cinema, says Boswell, because contemporary filmmakers recognize and celebrate the subversive qualities of Wharton’s work. Edith Wharton on Film, which includes eleven illustrations, enhances Wharton’s stature as a major American author and provides persuasive evidence that her fiction should be read as American noir literature.

888 8 8 8 8 8 Edith 88888888 888 88888 Wharton 88888888 BOSWELL

(Continued from front flap)

onFilm

PARLE Y ANN BO SWE LL

E

dith Wharton (1862–1937), who lived nearly half her life during the cinema age, when she published many of her well-known works, acknowledged that she disliked the movies, characterizing them as an enemy of the imagination. Yet her fiction often referenced film and popular Hollywood culture, and she even sold the rights to several of her novels to Hollywood studios. Edith Wharton on Film explores these seeming contradictions and examines the relationships among Wharton’s writings, the popular culture in which she published them, and the subsequent film adaptations of her work (three from the 1930s and four from the 1990s). Author Parley Ann Boswell examines the texts in which Wharton referenced film and Hollywood culture and evaluates the extant films adapted from Wharton’s fiction. The volume introduces Wharton’s use of cinema culture in her fiction through the 1917 novella Summer, written during the nation’s first wave of feminism, in which the heroine Charity Royall is moviegoer and new American woman, consumer and consumable. Boswell considers the source of this conformity and entrapment, especially for women. She discloses how Wharton struggled to write popular stories and then how she revealed her antipathy toward popular movie culture in two late novels. Boswell describes Wharton’s well-documented disdain for popular culture, her struggles to publish in women’s magazines, and her financial dependence on the American movie industry, which fueled her antagonism toward Hollywood culture. This full-length study, the first to examine the film adaptations of Wharton’s fiction, covers seven films adapted from Wharton’s works between 1930 and 2000 and the fifty-year gap in Wharton film adaptations. The study also analyzes Sophy Viner (Continued on back flap)

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Edith Wharton on Film

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Wharton, Edith - The Angel at the Grave

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Wharton, Edith - La sonnette de Madame

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The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two

On Film

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Edith Wharton on Film

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome

Wharton, Edith - The Touchstone

Wharton, Edith - The Reef

Wharton, Edith - Afterward(1)

Wharton, Edith - HouseofMirth

Wharton, Edith - Summer

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Wharton, Edith - Kerfol(1)

Wharton, Edith - The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Wharton, Edith - Bunner Sisters(1)

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Wharton, Edith - The Glimpses Of The Moon

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth

Wharton, Edith - The Angel at the Grave

Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton

Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Wharton, Edith - La sonnette de Madame

Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence

Wharton on Making Decisions

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two

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