Goals for This Project
Creative interpretations allowed us to further navigate the text and explore not necessarily Mr. Andrew Culwin, but the man behind the man. His colleagues all seem to have a certain impression of him, and he certainly had his own impression of the eyes, but how do these two overlap? What we wanted to express through these interpretations is why this overlap is relevant.
Edith Wharton is no stranger to ghosts or bachelors. Throwing them together just makes it all the more fun, but it also gives us more material to connect the dots of her society. The picture she was trying to draw us into perhaps could not be fully appreciated in its time, but we appreciated its obvious relations to our theme of ghosts and gave the cultural hauntings behind it more stage to show.
Each of our projects wanted to encourage another lens into Mr. Culwin’s character, to magnify the vision that Wharton presented us and find the minute details that could answer questions about the eyes. One thing that all of our projects might represent is the theory that he is not seeing the eyes, but the eyes are seeing him.
An omniscient narration is nice, but it is useful to explore a different perspective to a character in this context. It might be interesting to hear one of the young fellows’, dinner guests’, or even his aunt’s interpretation of Mr. Culwin’s story, if she’s heard it. But what makes Mr. Culwin’s perspective so valuable is deeper than getting some sort of confession to his behavior with the young fellows he has mentored. The type of character that he presents is telling enough; investigating his perspective can tell a lot more than probably he or Wharton could say in this time.
Half of the creative projects are visual interpretations, featuring the gathering of the original group and a picture of the eyes. The other half include poems that navigate Mr. Culwin’s internalized rationalizing and a short story that wonders what might’ve happened if he visited the doctor and the oculist to relieve himself of the eyes. We hope that the dots we present here connect well to the picture Wharton hoped to draw.
