Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie is a story about art, with a bit of fantasy peering around the edges of its pages. The narrator and protagonist is Eben Andrews, an everyman starving artist living in the rumbling belly of New York City during the Depression era. He is lonely, faithless and uninspired until he meets Jennie, his ethereal muse. Published in 1939, a movie adaptation was released in 1948 by Selznick Studios, starring Jennifer Jones as Jennie and Joseph Cotten as Eben. The movie stayed fairly faithful to the book, but shifted the focus from art to love with a healthy dose of fantasy in its eerie dreamscapes and misty surrealism. When comparing and contrasting the two mediums of Jennie, it quickly becomes a debate of art versus love. The novel and movie lends us fascinating, tortured, complex characters, ripe for some analysis, as well as the countless themes and motifs […]
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