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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 The 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 110 Watching Wharton on Film 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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