Edith Wharton on Film

Preface

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 xii Preface 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...