© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Temporality and queer consciousness in The House of Mirth
Temporality and queer consciousness in The House of Mirth
This essay looks at Terence Davies's adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1905 novel, The House of Mirth. Written only ten years after the birth of the cinema, the novel associates its heroine, Lily Bart, with what might be called a cinematic consciousness. Bart's self-consciousness, her persistent habit of seeing and staging her public self as a visual object, is what leads to her downfall. In the novel, her tragedy is essentially a tragedy of modernity, which leaves her "publicly branded as the heroine of a ‘queer’ episode."
The novel obviously does not mean ‘queer’ in the same way that we do. But the film allows us to see the connection between the two meanings and their two moments. In Davies's film, the story of Lily Bart is bound up with the intervening history of cinema, and in particular with the heroines of melodrama and their paradoxically flamboyant self-denial. Davies exploits the temporal disjunction of the period film – the distance between modern bodies and historical characters – to figure a version of queer consciousness, one whose emergence is entwined with the emergence of cinema itself.