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?

I'm with Betsy. The point of the movie is that we don't know why he said, "Rosebud," or if it meant anything at all,because all we know is what other people thought of him; not what he thought of himself. For all we know, right before dying he was all, "Damn, what was the name of that sled? It's on the tip of my tongue..."

We don't know for sure what "Rosebud" means, but the way the movie is structured it is significant in itself that (a) that's the last thing he says, and (b) what that information means is withheld from the reporter but revealed to the audience.

Aside from the meta of "Rosebud", I do think the connoted meaning is that Kane is human and that while the complexities of his character are not defined by his childhood, what happened in his childhood does need to be factored into the whole of our judgement.

Whether that is entirely supported or undermined in the text is a trickier question.