Seeing Wharton Through Scorsese’s Lens: Fidelity and the Blonde Siren in The Age of Innocence (1993)

The otherwise remarkably faithful adaptation, however, makes an incongruent turn when Scorsese reverses Wharton’s color casting of the two female protagonists by portraying Ellen Olenska and May Welland as blonde and brunette respectively, opposite to that in the novel. Strangely, critics overlooked his conspicuous and consequential decision. Contra broad indifference, I argue that it is essential to analyze this significant deviation from Wharton’s vision, for it challenges the apparent import of fidelity to Scorsese, and confuses the understanding of his philosophy regarding text-to-film adaptation.

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The 1934 film adaptation by RKO Pictures1 of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence (1920) bombed. Parley Boswell attributes its dismal performance at the box office to “Thalbergian2 Hollywoodization” – a 1930s phenomenon that attempted to shape the complex narrative into the “tepid teacup formula” (160). Importantly, the film earned censure for its multiple distortions of Wharton’s novelistic vision. Scott Marshall explains, “It opens in the present-day and returns to that setting [1870s New York City] at the end, rendering the story an extended flashback as told by Newland to his grandson, and not his son” (18). Indeed, fidelity to the source text has long held primacy in the value judgment of adaptations and translations. Such prejudice becomes especially prominent against screen adaptations of novels, as a consequence of the historic valorization of literature over cinema.

Sixty years after the debacle, Wharton’s pièce de résistance found an unlikely champion in crime drama auteur Martin Scorsese. Captivated by Wharton’s writing, he elected to “play the film like the book,” closely adhering to the original plot, scene sequence, dialogue, and character development (Scorsese qtd. in Thompson 192). Not surprisingly, his direction and the screenplay, co-written with Jay Cocks, received critical acclaim for “staying faithful to Wharton’s classic” (Travers, Rolling Stone 1993). Vincent Canby applauds Scorsese for “getting almost everything of any importance in the novel onto the screen,” and Francine Prose concurs, “Mr. Scorsese’s film is so faithful to the novel that we find ourselves looking for reasons why this seemingly unlikely director was the obvious choice to do it” (The New York Times 1993).

Sumptuous settings, interior décor, food, and costume design imbue the film with Gilded Age opulence, reflecting the myriad of vivid textures captured with exquisite detail in the novel. Cocks describes Scorsese’s relentless commitment, “Marty is scrupulous about character behavior and nuance, and in the case of Age, more protective even than I of Wharton’s language” (Scorsese and Cocks xvii). Recreating Wharton’s incisive and poised narrator with a third-person voice-over (Joanne Woodward), to share the very impressions he had while reading the book, represents another example of his meticulous approach to fidelity.

Scorsese wields his artistic genius to animate, not alter, Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story. With his longtime filmmaking collaborators, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, he manipulates the visual medium to emphasize pertinent story elements. The opening scene takes place at an operatic performance of Faust in the Academy of Art, where émigré Countess Ellen Olenska’s arrival alarms New York’s haute monde, for it deems the public appearance of a woman estranged from her husband (and rumored to have had an extramarital affair) unacceptable. Ellen’s sartorial choice exacerbates her scandalous presence. Dressed in a diamond headdress and dark blue velvet Directoire3 gown, “theatrically caught up under her bosom by a girdle with a large old-fashioned clasp” (Age 7), she attracts particular ridicule from the men in attendance that are more interested in watching Ellen than the stage performance. Here, Scorsese applies flickering, strobe editing to “literalize the effect of what it looks like when you look through binoculars,” effectively underscoring the voyeuristic tenor of the scene (qtd. in Smith 212).

Daniel Day-Lewis (Newland Archer) and Michelle Pfeiffer

Frequent screen dissolves create a seamless flow to the intricate and nuanced narrative, and Scorsese marries a subtle yet powerful musical score with deft reaction shots to express the volatile, psychosexual subtext between the protagonists. For instance, when May tells her fiancé, Newland Archer, that she had shown her cousin Ellen the engagement ring, the camera cuts to the face of Archer (who is secretly smitten with Ellen) as we hear the words “Ellen” and “ring.” The scene at the elite Van der Luydens’ dinner party further illustrates the director’s cinematic innovation. When Ellen vacates her seat and walks across the room, leaving one gentleman to seek the company of another, Scorsese employs freeze-frame and slow-motion techniques to highlight the shocking and transgressive nature of her action, as deemed by the guests. Undoubtedly, Scorsese’s adaptation passes the fidelity test with distinction.

Primacy of Fidelity Criticism

André Bazin asserts that a film adaptation must maintain equivalence with the original work of art: “Filmmakers should have enough visual imagination to create the cinematic equivalent of the style of the original […] faithfulness to a form, literary or otherwise, is illusory: what matters is the equivalence in the meanings of the forms” (42).

Bazin’s film theory of equivalence echoes Eugene Nida’s conception of “dynamic equivalence” in the field of translation studies, which defines a translated work as “the closest, natural equivalent to the source text” (Nida 136). This principle, fundamental to fidelity criticism, follows an instrumental (not interpretive) view of adaptation as a process in which the form, meaning, and intent of the original work must be transferred to the other medium.

The equivalence model regards the essence of the original as an invariant that must be preserved to render an accurate adaptation or translation. As mentioned earlier, the stress on achieving equivalence is grounded in dominant cultural opinion that deems original authorship as a deserving, individualistic art form, while relegating adaptations – particularly those made for film and television – to a derivative and thus inferior4 station. Small wonder then that Scorsese’s film won plaudits from American and British film academies.

Winona Ryder

The otherwise remarkably faithful adaptation, however, makes an incongruent turn when Scorsese reverses Wharton’s color casting of the two female protagonists by portraying Ellen Olenska and May Welland as blonde and brunette respectively, opposite to that in the novel. Strangely, critics overlooked his conspicuous and consequential decision. Contra broad indifference, I argue that it is essential to analyze this significant deviation from Wharton’s vision, for it challenges the apparent import of fidelity to Scorsese, and confuses the understanding of his philosophy regarding text-to-film adaptation.

It is worth noting here that literary scholar Elizabeth Ammons accuses Scorsese of transforming Ellen because of his “fear and resistance” toward the study of race (“Edith Wharton and Race” 83). Her allegation fails to convince in light of his bold, self-conscious exploration of racial prejudice through the lens of “white ethnic criminality” in several films (Kennedy 129). For example, in Gangs of New York (2002), he depicts complex race relationships in 1860s New York City, which serve as critical interrogations of the construct of whiteness and its evolving definition in America. Ostensibly, Ammons objects to Scorsese’s choice, for the image of a blonde Ellen, imparted to cultural memory by his film, undermines the academic reimagining of Countess Olenska as a dark, racialized character.5

Domestication in Anglo-American Adaptations

In his seminal lecture “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813), Friedrich Schleiermacher distinguishes between two major approaches: “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him [foreignizing], or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him [domesticating]” (49). Lawrence Venuti observes that Anglo-American cultures exhibit bias in favor of the domesticating method, requiring acceptable translated works to read fluently by adhering to current language usage, maintaining continuous syntax, and avoiding linguistic or stylistic peculiarities.

Edith Wharton, circa 1889-1890. Photo by E. F. Cooper. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Regarding film adaptations, attaining fluency involves “a reconstitution of the values, beliefs, and representations” in the foreign source text to make them compatible with the “intelligibility, canons and taboos, and codes and ideologies” of the intended audience (Invisibility 18). I contend that domestication, in addition to the equivalence model, serves as an adaptation technique in Scorsese’s pursuit of fidelity to the novel. Specifically, he reversed Wharton’s color casting, making Ellen a blonde and May a brunette, to domesticate the Gilded Age tale for audiences at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Widely held, American cultural connotations about blonde and dark-haired women in 1873 dramatically differ from those in 1993. Brian McFarlane indicates that changes in “social mores, generic prestige, and family values” over time influence tastes to such a profound extent that the same narrative will produce vastly dissimilar effects on later generations (qtd. in Leitch 162). Therefore, Wharton’s characterization of the two female protagonists in The Age of Innocence should be regarded as a foreign cultural construct, which Scorsese needed to “bring back” in a form “recognizable and familiar” to modern viewership (Venuti Invisibility 19).

Emergence of the Blonde Bombshell

American authors began associating hair color with moral character in a prominent manner around the mid-nineteenth century. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne are credited with popularizing the “attribution of deep philosophical significance” to women’s hair color in their novels (Carpenter 253). In Melville’s Mardi (1849) and Pierre (1852), and Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860), blondes appear as sexually and morally virtuous while brunettes inhabit religious evil and sexual promiscuity. For her unbridled passion, the dark-haired seductress is meted out divine punishment in the form of social and romantic desertion or death; in contrast, fair maidens are rewarded with love and marriage. The influence6 of this literary convention is evident in Wharton’s novel, set in 1870s New York City, wherein she constructs a similar binary between cousins May Welland (blonde and conforming) and Ellen Olenska (bohemian, dark-haired, and sensual).

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, new perceptions associating blondeness with sensuality arose in American society. Lois Banner dates the advent of this change to the late 1800s with the United States tour (1869-1900) of the burlesque dance troupe British Blondes (124). Not only did blondeness usurp the hypersexuality surrounding her dark-haired sister but it also evolved into a distinctly Anglo-Saxon or American attribute of female sexual attractiveness. The latter development should be understood against the backdrop of the rapidly changing, sociocultural landscape of late-nineteenth-century America.

As the Second Industrial Revolution attracted mass waves7 of immigrants, it led to sudden and sweeping demographic upheavals. In her memoir Young in New York: A Memoir of Victorian Girlhood, Nathalie Dana recalls the impact: “Between 1875 and 1900 New York changed from a comfortable town where all one’s friends lived within walking distance and where one met them all day walking or driving, into a great city extending for miles and housing thousands of people of all nationalities” (92).

Ensuing anxieties of racial corruption in the predominantly white American milieu encouraged the exaltation of blondeness – a trait understood as a guarantee of whiteness. As a result, the blonde, blue-eyed woman turned into an all-American (i.e., White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant) symbol of desirable feminine beauty.

Hollywood Mythologizes the American Blonde

American cinema played a critical role in encouraging Fair and Dark Lady stereotypes by linking women’s hair color to distinct personality and moral traits. In the early 1920s, dark-haired Theda Bara became the nation’s first femme fatale, acquiring the nickname of “The Vamp” (short for vampire). Studio executives deceptively promoted this American actress of Polish Jewish origin as “the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French woman, born in the Sahara” to elevate her exotic persona (The Montreal Gazette 1955). By the 1930s, however, Hollywood had embraced the ‘blonde bombshell’ stereotype, promoting a new cadre of blonde actresses as sex icons for the masses (LaSalle 77). Jean Harlow, for whom MGM Studios coined the epithet, gained more notoriety for her unique shade of platinum blonde hair than for her films.

Theda Bara in Carmen, 1915. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The trend gained momentum with the continuing popularity of blonde beauties including Marlene Dietrich and Mae West in the 1930s-40s; Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak, Brigitte Bardot, and Ursula Andress in the 1950s-60s; Goldie Hawn, Bo Derek, Farrah Fawcett, Morgan Fairchild, Cybill Shepherd, and Heather Locklear in the 1970s-80s, and Madonna, Sharon Stone, and Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1990s. Correspondingly, blondeness in America moved along the axis of female beauty from once signifying purity and innocence to sexual seductiveness (Landay 224).

Further, these ideas traveled beyond national borders and influenced global conceptions of American femininity. In the aftermath of the Second World War, as the United States funded the reconstruction of Western Europe, countries such as Italy (struggling to forge a new national identity after its Fascist decades) became major consumers of Americana. Italians imported U.S. consumer products from textiles to toys (such as the widely popular Mattel Barbie8 doll), and 1950s Hollywood films with their pin-up culture. Stephen Gundle observes that strong American influences on local culture led Italians to regard the blonde, cheerful, young woman with “button-nosed, wide-eyed, long-legged, ample hips and breasts” as the quintessential American belle (361). In contrast, the darker-haired, traditional Italian beauty was seen as simple and rural with emphasis on facial features.

By the mid-twentieth century, the American blonde as a sex icon became solidified in the national and international cultural imagination. Growing up in New York City’s Little Italy during that era, Scorsese imbibed the prevalent sexual fascination with blondeness, which appears to have shaped his ideal of desirable American femininity. “When I went to the university,” he says, “I met girls who were blonde. As a kid, I had literally known only dark-haired girls” (qtd. in Wernblad 238). Indeed, Scorsese’s formative fixation manifests in the recurring motif of the blonde siren (dressed in white when introduced on screen and/or in pivotal scenes) in his oeuvre. For example, consider Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver (1976), Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull (1980), Sharon Stone in Casino (1995), and Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). That Scorsese should imagine Ellen, with whose erotic beauty Newland becomes obsessed, as a blonde follows his emphasis on the sexual allure of light-haired American women.

Following the Silver Screen: Blondes Monopolize Print Media

The American print media mirrored Hollywood’s foregrounding of blondes, increasingly representing women with light hair as beautiful and sultry over the course of the twentieth century. A brief discussion of person perception case studies and magazine archival research follows to provide quantitative evidence.9

In Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair, Anthony Synnott details three surveys of male preferences for female hair color conducted in the late 1970s and 1980s. The first by Glamour magazine showed that 3 percent of men liked brunettes, 29 percent preferred blondes, and 32 percent said that they were indifferent to hair color (April 1983). The second survey by The New York Times demonstrated that 35 percent of the respondents liked blondes compared to 29 percent that preferred brunettes (October 1986). In a third survey, published in Psychology Today (1979), males described blondes as “beautiful, rich, and extremely feminine,” and brunettes as “good, intelligent and friendly.” This research indicates that American men are two to three times more likely to prefer blondes as sexual-romantic partners.

Melissa Rich and Thomas Cash conducted an exhaustive study on the depiction of female beauty with respect to hair color in American print media from 1940 to 1989. They examined images of adult, Caucasian women published over the 40-year span in three major monthly magazines – (1) cover models from Ladies Home Journal and Vogue, and (2) centerfold models from Playboy – to decipher the visual messages directed at women and men respectively. The data obtained from the analysis (i.e., percentages of blonde, brunette, and red-haired women featured) was then compared to actual base rates of each hair color, as self-reported in a normative sample population of 138 Caucasian women, aged between 18 and 35 years.

The results demonstrate three salient findings: 1) the proportion of blondes in Ladies Home Journal and Vogue exceeded the base rate of natural blondes among adult Caucasian women, 2) Playboy magazine featured a greater proportion of blonde women compared to the other magazines,10 and 3) the proportion of blondes increased over time so that the 1970s had a higher ‘blonde rate’ than the 1960s and 1950s. It is evident that the media mythologized blondeness as a function of inaccurately representing the adult, white female demographic in the United States for decades.

Conclusion: Scorsese’s 1990s Faithful Telling of Wharton’s 1870s Tale

By reinforcing blonde hair as an ideal of feminine sexual attractiveness, the American media played a crucial role in changing its prime cultural symbolism in the twentieth century. Indeed, the figure of the blonde as ravishing seductress takes center stage in the context of this film adaptation. It informs the auteur’s personal vision as well as the ability of modern viewers to appreciate the psychosexual politics among the three protagonists that forms the crux of Wharton’s 1870s tale.

Infusing the character with her striking beauty, sensuality, and grace, Michelle Pfeiffer embodies Ellen as the epitome of American blonde glamor and sex appeal in the film. In contrast, Winona Ryder’s sweet and friendly May evokes connotations that align with prevailing cultural beliefs surrounding brunettes, as established by the previously referenced studies. Now, what if the adaptation had retained the original vision of the heroines? Presenting May as a blonde in the 1993 film would have insinuated sensuality, thus detracting from her characterization as an orthodox ingénue. In parallel, portraying Ellen as a dark-haired temptress, along the lines of Ammons’ readings for instance, would have required rewriting Ellen as non-Caucasian. This rendition would have injected racist and colonialist tones into her liaison with Newland and, consequently, muddied the audience’s reception of the story’s central relationship, Wharton’s intent, and the moral integrity of her authorship.

Instead, Scorsese privileges fidelity to the source text. By creating the cinematic equivalent of Wharton’s masterpiece, wherein familiar visual signifiers replace markers of sociocultural difference, he adapts it into an intelligible and entertaining film for contemporary audiences. Roger Ebert’s remark, in his 1993 Chicago Sun-Times review, sums up the achievement, “It is all Wharton, and all Scorsese.”

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Unless otherwise indicated, all images are screenshots from the film.