Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

While she approved of the adaptations of her fiction to the theater, Edith Wharton, we are told, had little or no use for the cinema. Wharton's experience of the movies was probably limited to one visit in Bilbao, Spain, in 1914, a visit that may have given rise to the brief rendering of cinematic spectatorship we find in Wharton's novella Summer , published three years later. Insofar as Summer 's evocation of cinematic experience emphasizes visual sensations such as “swimming circles of heat and blinding alternations of light and darkness,” it participates in an attitude of the times that sees the moving images of cinema as waging an assault on the human sensorium. From this point of view, cinema constitutes one aspect of the “chaos” of urban experience, of which the crowds constitute another. In Summer , interestingly, Charity Royall's act of spectator-ship merges the images on the screen with those of the crowd around her, whose faces “became part of the spectacle, and danced on the screen with the rest.” Wharton may have absorbed this contemporary perspective on cinematic images, but it is also likely that the traumatic merging of screen images with those of real world experience has its origins in Wharton's personal abhorrence for a “spectacle shared by a throng of people.” In any case, in 1917 Wharton shared the American attitude toward cinema that stressed its entertainment ... log in or subscribe to read full text