Modern art, modern women, modern idols: Representations of film in the novels of Edith Wharton

"Modern Art, Modern Women, Modern Idols: Representations of Film in the Novels of Edith Wharton" explores Edith Wharton's treatment of Hollywood, the cinema, and the film star in her novels Summer, Twilight Sleep and The Children. Examination of Wharton's antagonism toward the cinema permits the reader to explore and better comprehend her complex and often prescient thoughts regarding modern art, mass culture, feminism and religion. The first chapter of this essay explores the author's view of film as an art form particularly detrimental toward the American critical imagination. The second chapter demonstrates Wharton's consideration of the film actress as a serious inhibitor to female autonomy. The final chapter examines how the author justified her own increasing attachment to Catholicism by condemning modern America's spiritual homelessness as it manifested itself in the country's veneration of the insubstantial film idol.