/lit/ - Literature

Ultimately, Griffith's works highlight the dialectic between modernity and a Victorianism then seen as innately traditional. Despite upholding Victorianism as a cherished ideal, his work points to its limitations for Progressivism's very different society - one with its own understanding of public/private spheres, gender, progress, and vision. Griffith was not an old-fashioned director - his work displayed the Progressive era's modernity and his dialectic didactism intervened in its dilemmas. For example, this approach is encapsulated in Griffith's dialectic between voluptuary and spirituelle women. His excess of rhetorical flourishes and incompatible systems of graphic inscription belie his own dreams of representing the medium as a form of universal language. This would be utterly meaningless without the emphatic display of the opposite: a representation of femininity that vilifies all of the excesses of the body. The one cannot exist without the other. Indeed, many of the paradoxes and problematics of female embodiment in his works can be traced as a metaphysical conduit for vestigial beliefs and sociological concern