Helga Crane’s camera obscura: Nella Larsen, Garbo’s face, and the modernist longing for plot

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through an examination of Nella Larsen’s repeated viewings of George Cukor’s 1936 film Camille, this paper argues that we must understand modernism’s troubling of realist Bildung within the context of the classical Hollywood cinema and its invocations of nineteenth-century literature. Starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor, Camille is based on the stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s The Lady of the Camellias (1848), a novel critical of the Balzacian Bildungsroman, predicating the self-possessing, bourgeois individualism of its protagonist Armand Duval on the expulsion of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier. Cukor’s Camille, to the contrary, integrates Marguerite, through the legerdemain of classical Hollywood style, into a bourgeois liberal plot of social arrival and self-becoming. Larsen’s fascination with Cukor’s Camille offers a new way to read her first novel Quicksand (1928), not as a rejection of novelistic plot and its racialized promises of social belonging, but as a deeply vexed and ambivalent longing for it. Building on the speculative turn in the historiography of Black literature, film, and cinematic spectatorship–as well as recent work in asynchronic literary historiography–this essay suggests that it may have been a complicated form of desire and longing that brought Larsen again and again to Camille, since she would have been primed to detect the remarkable ease with which the film stylises out of existence the skepticism about Bildung that animated Dumas fils’s novel, and the resolute impossibility of Bildung that her own Quicksand so systematically laments.