Mise-en-scène

Aristotle’s Poetics was written circa 335 b.c.e. but then lost for many centuries, available only through a translation of an Arabic version. Much of its meaning has been argued over, although a few elements are generally accepted. Aristotle discusses drama and lyric and epic poetry. He also talks about the importance of form, diction, the ideal qualities of characters represented in literature, and the emotive or cathartic effect of the whole literary work. Disagreement about his meaning is due partly to the fact that Poetics was the most influential extended writing in literary analysis and theory in the West for two millennia. By the eighteenth century, writers and journalists were certainly discussing what they cared about in literature—particularly the Enlightenment values of rationalism and skepticism. Literary scholarship, or the study of texts and textual history, began with biblical scholarship, particularly in Germany at the end of the century.

However, literary criticism in Aristotle’s tradition, focusing on traits of literary texts themselves rather than their history or influences, wasn’t widespread until the twentieth century. The New Critics showed interest in the formal aspects of language and style and how they work together to comprise unity of form. Later in the century, Postmodern critics, partly in reaction to what had gone before, were intrigued by the chaotic, ungovernable nature of those elements and how they threatened coherence and meaning.

Writers have always thought less about theory or approaches to the study of literature and more about the elemental aspects of their work. Style comes naturally to one’s own voice, while plot, setting, mood, and the feel of a work—what the writer invents and puts on the page—need to be thought about and given coherence.

The world of theater offers a useful phrase to describe both the concerns of writers in fashioning their works and the concerns of critics in assessing them. Mise-en-scène, “putting on stage,” is a wonderfully loose term that refers to the setting, scenery, and mood of a play or movie as well as blocking and movement. When applied to literature, this term refers to the “feel” of a work expressed through setting, atmosphere, style, and—in fiction—the story itself.

Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” provides a fine example of mise-en-scène in a short story. The story has a dramatic setting, as two middle-aged rich New York widows sit and knit at a restaurant overlooking the Roman Forum while their two unmarried daughters go off with young men for dinner. Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade have known each other since childhood and have been unadmitted rivals since young adulthood. The time is late afternoon, and the setting is one that literally overlooks a key place from their own pasts, since they—like their daughters—came here as young women and had romantic encounters. Wharton takes a neutral view toward both women despite the fact that one of them, Mrs. Slade, is openly emotionally needy and discontented. She was in fact married to the “star” husband, Delphin Slade, while Grace Ansley’s husband was low key and unnoteworthy, rich family or not. Yet Mrs. Slade is irritated because Grace’s daughter is the “star” daughter—brilliant, beautiful, daring—while her own daughter, Jenny, although kind and helpful, is in her view hardly a vibrant person. How can her “loser” friend have the ideal daughter? To get back at Grace, she tells her what she has long wanted to confess: that in one of their youthful visits to Rome, she wrote a fake love letter from the dashing Delphin Slade telling Grace to meet him in the Colosseum, hoping that she would go there, be disappointed by Delphin’s absence, and maybe even catch Roman fever (malaria).

As the two women knit and talk over their pasts in the quiet evening, set against the backdrop of a beautiful Roman twilight, a fact is revealed that dramatically rearranges their assumptions and all but drives a stake through the self-satisfied but greedy and discontented heart of Mrs. Slade. Grace reveals that Delphin did meet her in the...