Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

The Age of Innocence
is Edith Wharton’s most romantic novel, yet our expectations for her lovers, Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, are disappointed at every turn. Wharton’s genius lies in offering the pleasure of a romance, then engaging the reader in a stunning exploration of boundaries between the demands of society and personal freedom, illicit passion and moral responsibility. In this novel of bold design, we are the innocents unaware of the more demanding rewards to come, just as the readers of the
Pictorial Review
were as the monthly installments appeared in 1920. Luring us with the high comic tone of the opening chapters, Wharton admits us to Newland Archer’s dreamy certainty about love and marriage, all that lies ahead in an ordered universe, his little world of fashionable New York in the 1870s.

The strict rules of that society are rendered in detail—the moments when talk is allowed during the opera, the prescribed hours for afternoon visits, the lilies of the valley that must be sent to May Welland, the untainted girl who is about to become Newland’s fi ancee. In the opening scenes there are two observers, Wharton and Newland. The novelist is full of historical information about the city of her childhood and the customs of her privileged class. New York, constructed out of memory and verified by research, is not a discarded back-lot affair of an old Hollywood studio, but a place that must come alive for the writer as well as her readers. This lost world, lavish with particulars of dress, food, wine, manners, is weighted with an abundance of reality, all the furnishings of excessively indulged, overly secure lives. But as the writer calls up her New York of fifty years earlier, Newland Archer also instructs us in the mores of the best of families and the questionable behavior of flashy intruders on the rise. This dual perspective is playful: the novelist assessing her man, placing him in a rarefied world that he too finds narrow and amusing, though all the while he is a player in it.

Wharton’s education of the reader continues as each character comes on stage. Newland is a self-declared dilettante, May an innocent thing, Countess Olenska an expatriate with a problematic past. Julius Beaufort, a freewheeling climber, may be the scoundrel of the piece. The novelist is knowingly leading us into melodrama, the dominant mode of the popular theater of the age she recreates, a theater of plays in which good and evil were clearly sorted out, not tainted by moral ambiguity or shaded feelings. As we read what has so often been praised as an historical novel, we must bear in mind the year it was composed, 1919.
The Age of Innocence
calls upon history to inform the present, and Wharton portrays a cast of clueless characters who could not conceive the slaughter of World War I or President Wilson’s ill-fated proposal for the League of Nations. Turning back to the untroubled era of her childhood, she entertains with a predictable old form that is a lure, even a joke, but not on the reader. We are drawn by the broad humor at the outset of the novel to the discovery of a darker story without the simple solutions of melodrama. Edith Wharton had a gift for comedy that has often been obscured by a reverence for the elegant lady novelist or probing for feminist concerns in her work.

The opening chapters of
The Age of Innocence
are given to caricature and sweeping mockery. In fact, Wharton mentions Dickens and Thackeray, whose comic exaggerations she must have had in mind. Newland Archer, superior and instructional, is foolish in the romantic projections of his marriage to May: “ ‘We’ll read Faust together... by the Italian lakes...’ he thought, somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honeymoon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride.” An understanding of
Faust,
the most popular opera of the nineteenth century, with its unbridled passion and soul-selling contract, will presumably improve May: “He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton” (p. 8). Meanwhile, Nilsson, the great diva, sings gloriously in the tacky garden scenery of the opera house. Early on, we suspect there will be no paradise and little innocence as the next months’ installments of the novel unfold. May, corseted in virginal white with a “modest tulle tucker” over her bosom, is too good to be true. It may be difficult for a contemporary reader to find Ellen Olenska, fated to be May’s rival, shocking in that revealing Empire dress, “like a night-gown,” according to Newland’s sister.

As they set the scene, Wharton and Newland are gossips who have the scoop on who’s in and who’s out, and on intricate family histories—the Chiverses of University Place, the Dallases of South Carolina, the Rushworths, Mrs. Manson Mingott, with two daughters married off to Europeans. We begin to hear the difference between Newland Archer’s view of his set, for it is his more than ever with his engagement to May Welland, and Edith Wharton’s parody of society tattle recreated from memory and notched up a bit. Old Sillerton Jackson, the expert on family, is a cartoon figure, one of the many minor characters who make up the closely worked tapestry of the novelist’s old New York. There’s Lawrence Lefferts, with his prissy attention to correct social form, and the newcomer Mrs. Lemuel Struthers in “her bold feathers and her brazen wig,” but it is in the portrait of Mrs. Mingott that Wharton creates a true grotesque. “The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon” (pp. 24—25). She is immobile, though far more flexible in her views than those who seek her approval, among them Newland’s mother and May’s.

Mrs. Mingott, larger than life, breaks whatever rules she pleases. In depicting the matriarch as an original, Wharton sets her apart from the proper society she can observe from above, quite literally, by building her house uptown (uptown being above Thirty-fourth Street in those days). And it is Mrs. Mingott, in her pale stone house with frivolous foreign furniture, who, with largesse of spirit, takes in “poor Ellen Olenska,” upon her return to America with bright, somewhat girlish hopes of freedom while still entangled in the disasters of a foreign marriage. In book one of
The Age of Innocence
these two exotics are housed together, women who understand liberty and its limits. There is a good deal of Edith Wharton’s independence of mind in Mrs. Mingott and of her troubled memories of New York in Madame Olenska’s return to the city of her childhood. Wharton composed the first installments just after the Great War, writing each installment in France, where she had lived during the war, and where she would settle for the rest of her life. In 1913 she had been through a difficult divorce from her husband, Edward Wharton—society fellow, sportsman—whom she married in haste after her first engagement was broken, a wounding business. Her marriage to Teddy Wharton was a washout from the start, yet the tribulation and scandal of their divorce remained. Her passionate love affair with Morton Fullerton—journalist, charmer, lady’s man—was long over.

All of this personal material can be detected in the novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, but the autobiographical material is transformed. In the lives of her characters freshly imagined, the historical novel becomes immediate in its themes. Wharton had received the Legion of Honor for her work in France with refugees, and many of her close friends had died in combat. Her mentor and friend Henry James, having renounced his American citizenship in 1914, died soon after. As R. W. B. Lewis, Wharton’s biographer points out, she found this renunciation deeply disturbing. Edith Wharton was committed to her American heritage, and when her publisher informed her that the public had lost interest in war stories, she chose to look back, to rediscover the past with an historical accuracy that never admits to nostalgia.
The Age of Innocence
ends just before the Great War. In the novel Wharton questions if her country had already lost its innocence before this first European conflict, if American innocence was mythic, like “the fresh green breast of the new world” that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, eulogizes at the end of
The Great Gatsby.
In
The Age of Innocence,
Wharton asks who are these people I came from? Were they really so class-ridden and dismissive of those who did not belong to their insular tribe? Was Europe no more than a tourist site featuring the romantic past, a shopping mall for art and exquisite gowns, a setting in which to observe the charming, or perhaps the unsettling, morals of foreigners? Did the swank Americans in her novel travel simply to test their allegiance to all that was admired as acceptable in what was left of Society in New York? If that is all Mrs. Wharton was asking we would be reading, these many years later, a delightful novel of manners. The power of
The Age of Innocence
lies in her transcendence of that genre, in dramatizing more urgent questions of allegiance and national identity, questions that concern many writers today in dealing with the hyphenated themes of race and ethnicity.

Ellen Olenska, who has lived much of her life abroad, questions old New York’s claim to America and its imitation of European class and culture. “It seems stupid to have discovered America,” she tells Newland, “only to make it into a copy of another country.... Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?” (p. 196). We can read this witty complaint as Wharton‘s, yet Ellen, like the novelist, is conflicted, bridling at the fact that she is considered exotic, judged as “foreign.” She longs to be free of the past, though in one of her most telling exchanges with Newland Archer—its as close as they come to a full-blown love scene—she tells him, petulantly: “I don’t speak your language.” His language is at once too simple and too romantic—too simple in its claims for a life free of duty and honor, too romantic in presuming that love conquers all. Madame Olenska refers to deep cultural rifts, untranslatable experience that is more complex than his impassioned love-talk. If Newland was merely a young man viewing the world through rose-colored glasses, his fate would not hold our attention, but he is aware that Ellen speaks “from depths of experience beyond his reach.” His self-excoriating thoughts portray an inner man possessed of feelings that are beyond the knowing young suitor we first encountered at the performance of
Faust.
He is aware of this failure even as he sets up an assignation with Ellen: “It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures already wearied of: it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary” (p. 251). Yet that is exactly how he speaks when proposing that they flee to a place where they will be “simply two human beings who love each other....” She replies with a laugh: “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?” (p. 235).

The depth of his attraction to Ellen is not to be doubted, but his self-doubts are a burden, particularly his knowledge that the freedom he proposes is impossible. Newland is a man trapped between two women: the Countess, who understands how cruel the world can be to those who believe they can cut loose from obligations, and May Welland, who enforces the boundaries of what her husband knows to be honor and decency. When Newland urges a short engagement, simple May, holding to custom, delivers one of Wharton’s most telling lines: “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?” Which is precisely what the three principles in this love triangle do. His reply: “Why not—why not—why not?” suggests his longing for a plot more compelling than May’s conventional story line of their future marriage. May, the boyish American girl who turns their honeymoon into a sporting holiday, never gains any emotional depth, but she exacts what is her due. With sleight-of-hand deceptions, she outplays both her husband and her “foreign” cousin in the game plan that carries the novel forward. At each turn when Newland is about to declare his love for Ellen Olenska, May trumps him. Wharton echoes May’s manipulations in drawing us into the love story only to cut off the possibility of freedom. We may gasp at the end of a chapter in which Newland’s wife wins another round: more melodrama, but without the easy solution of that genre which would render May demonic: She is a realist with a healthy desire for self-preservation. Looking at May’s mother before their marriage, Newland “asked himself if May’s face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence. Ah no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!” (p. 125). This cautionary thought becomes a prediction in the course of the novel. Though he may contemplate “poor May‘s” limitations, his efforts to deceive her are naive in comparison to her strategies to hold him.

If Newland is unable to speak Ellen’s language, he is also at a disadvantage with his wife, often unable to reply to her cheery or mocking views, driven to “inarticulate despair.” The scenes of their marriage in which they talk past each other are chilling. In one painful instance, Newland opens the window in his library.