I've read The Age of Innocence (fairly recently, too), but no other Wharton.

Well, okay, short version of Citizen Kane is: parents strike it rich out west (gold, I think) and plop their frontier kid into the richest eastern schools and society they can find. Kid grows up to have a lot of idealistic dreams -- muckraking newspapers, etc. -- but ends up betraying his youthful ideals with a series of middle-aged ego-moves. He comes to understand his shmucky-billionaire late life as a tragedy of "Having grown up rich, I missed out on the seasoning I needed to fulfill my true potential! O for the log-cabin of my youth!!"

That's wildly out of the film's order (it's all roundabout flashbacks), but the idea is that those raised rich all turn out Paris Hiltons rather than latter-day Rockefellers.

Now here is Undine Spragg, late of Kansas, and although the formal thesis of the novel is all about social patterning and hierarchies, I was reading it in total fascination that she as a character dominates in part because she doesn't know the rules of each hierarchy, and thus runs roughshod over those rules.

She's like Daniel Boone, opening up new territory, trying to climb the heights because they are there. In other ways, she's Kane-like because you get the sense that the reason she's such a twerp of a person is she's never been told "no", and that if she'd ever had a hardship in her life, she might have been better for it.

And amid all this is the fact that Boone and Kane are male characters; Undine doesn't have their avenues to success (even if she had the brains or brawn to pursue them). I kept going back and forth over whether to admire or loathe her -- she's bold and strategic and unabashed, but the goals she's seeking are so empty.

Anyway, it's a 30-page paper waiting to happen.

According my grandmother, we're related to Daniel Boone. I wear no coonskin, though

Hey! I am too!

Heh. I've never read Wharton, but I can disagree with you about Citizen Kane. I don't think he betrayed his youthful ideals, because his youthful ideals were as ego-driven as everything else he did; I don't think he had the realization you describe, and I don't think the point of the story was that wealth corrupts. I don't think Kane is the point of the movie, particularly. It's a story about storytelling, not about him.

Well, okay, you can see the movie that way, but, given the formalism of the movie, what was the story about?

And if he never had the realization, what was the point of "Rosebud"? Was it just a joke on the guy trying to assemble a narrative of Kane's life?

According my grandmother, we're related to Daniel Boone. I wear no coonskin, though

Hey! I am too!

Then...we must be cousins! If you have Boone/Morgan cousins in or originally from West Virginia, we have to talk.

Was it just a joke on the guy trying to assemble a narrative of Kane's life?

Yes. The point is that there is no point. "Rosebud" doesn't explain Kane's life because no one thing can. (all my opinion, of course.)

I saw "Rosebud" as an attempt to find meaning in a world that was inadvertently destroying it.

But then I was big on the symbolists back in the day.

Also, I don't think Kane betrayed his youthful ideals, either, Nutty -- I think the revelation of "Rosebud" at the end was more a last-ditch realization that sometimes simple things are more or as pleasant wealth and privilege.

What you people aren't agreeing with me? What is wrong with you??

Okay. Let's scratch Citizen Kane, although I SWEAR there is a thesis about the American Dream in there, honest, and other people have agreed with me before. Compare Undine to various mythic heroes of pioneering.

Vigor = west, effete shmucks = east? Is Undine's journey manifest destiny? Are the New York elites she creams so effectively Nobly Doomed the ways that Native Americans were mythologized out of primacy?