‘I know it to be synthetic but it affects me strongly’: ‘Dead Mabelle’ and Bowen's emotion pictures

Bowen's writing is well recognised for its preoccupation with the cinema, and its cinematic techniques, leading recent criticism to align her writing with the experimentations and innovations of literary modernism. As a result Bowen's cinema writing has been read after modernism, and, in particular, after Virginia Woolf. Through a close reading of Bowen's critically neglected 1929 cinema short story ‘Dead Mabelle’, however, I show how Bowen is not simply writing in the wake of Woolf's cinema aesthetics, but in dialogue with them. Although similarly preoccupied with the cinema affects - or emotion pictures- that fund Woolf's writing, Bowen's story highlights the philosophic blind spots on which these aesthetics turn. Rather than agree with modernist aesthetics, 'Dead Mabelle' offers a critical counterpoint to modernist writing about the cinema that deconstructs the very discourses with which her work has been aligned.