I always rolled my eyes a little bit at Virginia Woolf’s famous assertion that "on or about December 1910, human character changed.” Really, lady, human character changed because you and your friends wrote some experimental novels and dared to utter the word “semen?” Obviously she’s aware of her own hyperbole, but it nevertheless carries a whiff of what can be off-putting about Woolf and Bloomsbury and artistic scenes in general: their provincialism and snobbishness, their assumption that nothing of interest could possibly happen south of the Thames or above 14th Street, the idea that a shift in what is acceptable to write or say among a small group of people in North London really does, on some deep level, constitute a revolution in human consciousness itself.
Yet recently, as I’ve been reading more novels from around the turn of the century, I have started to better see what she meant. The period from 1900-1925 now seems to me a much bigger leap than any period since, bigger than the transition from the buttoned-up 1950s to the groovy 1970s and certainly bigger than from the turn of the millennium to today. It’s not just technological changes that account for this, rather there is a feeling that the human soul itself underwent some sort of metamorphosis. Anyone who knows anything about art and literature can tell you that the First World War sent an already-begun process of modernization into overdrive, and that those years produced a gigantic artistic and social revolution, the effects of which reverberate even today. But it’s one thing to know it and another to feel it, viscerally, which is one of the unique pleasures of literature. Not too long ago, I read A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910); the last great novels of the English class system before the war swept it all away. While they’re both wonderful novels, when I try to think of their characters, who live supremely sheltered lives governed by a set of arcane and inscrutable social codes, interacting with those from The Great Gatsby (1925) or The Sun Also Rises (1926) or even Decline and Fall (1928), I short-circuit a bit. I can’t make it cohere. Those, to me, are two different species of human being.
I mention all this temporal stuff because Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence occupies a fascinating place within it. Before I picked it up, I had for whatever reason assumed that it was written around the 1870s, the time in which it takes place, and that it was a fat, long Victorian novel full of winding circumlocutions and minute descriptions of rooms and furniture, the kind of book that can of course be wonderful and rewarding but that does require a real conscious commitment to tackling. But no! The Age of Innocence was in fact published all the way in 1920, a contemporary of This Side of Paradise and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And it’s a brisk 270 pages, written not in a Dickensian forest of clauses but in a clear, direct, vigorous, and understatedly beautiful style that descends from Flaubert and sets the tone for nearly all twentieth century American fiction. This makes it a novel curiously out of time, one whose ironic title connotes both nostalgia for the world it depicts and self-conscious awareness of its own modernity. It is poised on the knife edge between the society of Joyce and Fitzgerald, which for all its differences is fairly recognizably our own, and a society whose customs may as well be from Pluto, a vision of the 1870s that is also about the 1910s, just as Chinatown is a movie about the 1930s that is really about the 1970s. When characters in The Age of Innocence talk about the opera or what dresses are fashionable or about reading Middlemarch, it is a self-conscious and even slightly cornily insistent evocation of its era, like when you watch a biopic of some famous figure and the headlines in the background say JFK ASSASSINATED or MAN LANDS ON MOON.
In addition to those interesting questions of world and time, I must also admit that I write about it here because, in the midst of my reading for another essay (soon to appear), I idly picked it up one evening and found myself utterly captivated, unable to think about or read anything else until I had finished. So, if you’re looking for a straightforward answer as to whether it’s good or not, as well as an answer to why this post is slightly later than my usual bimonthly clip, there you go.
Set in aristocratic New York society just before oil and steel and railroad money stormed through the gates, The Age of Innocence is the story of a love triangle between hapless, paralyzed protagonist Newland Archer, his beautiful, respectable, and utterly conventional fiancée May Welland, and her exotic and semi-disgraced cousin Ellen Olenska, who has returned to New York in shame after the destruction of her disastrous marriage to a wealthy Polish count. Archer is just smart enough to chafe against the bonds of his incredibly rigid and formal way of life, while Ellen finds herself outcast from society’s good graces, and the two begin an unconsummated but not unrequited love affair, while Archer schemes desperately for a way to escape his marriage, having realized not only that he loves Ellen but that May is in every respect a perfect product of her society and so “never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion.”
It’s hard to decide whether Wharton is ultimately a kind novelist or a cruel novelist. It’s certainly true that she is a ruthless and sharp-tongued anatomist of her society, that the primary mode of The Age of Innocence is cruel irony, and that the primary internal reaction one experiences while reading it is Oh God—Oh God—I can’t watch! Like any tragic hero, Archer is the architect of his own fate: it is he who convinces Ellen not to go through with her divorce (given the great shame that any divorce, no matter how justified, would bring her cousin May’s family). Trying to escape his own feelings for Ellen, he convinces May to move the date of their wedding up, setting up a masterful twist of the knife in which just after Archer and Ellen confess their love to one another, a telegram from May arrives announcing their imminent marriage. And the further Archer marches down the path that signifies respectability and success in Old New York, the more its banal concerns come to seem “like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.”
Yet Wharton is not like her model Flaubert, who dissects his pinned and wriggling characters with a casual and cheerful pitilessness (though a scan of Wharton criticism has led me to understand that The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country operate more in this vein). Throughout the novel there is sympathy for its characters, who fumble along doing the best they can in their prescribed roles, here too passive, there too much a hostage to the dictates of good society, but rarely consciously mean or selfish. Wharton, for all her emulation of the European novel (and her residence in France at the time of The Age of Innocence’s composition), attributes to the American character something essentially honest, exemplified in a scene where an emissary from Ellen’s aristocratic husband, sent to convince Ellen to return, renounces his mission:
She's an American. And that if you're an American of HER kind—of your kind—things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take—become unthinkable, simply unthinkable.
At the novel’s end, after much twisting and turning, Archer realizes that May, whom he has consistently denigrated as incurious and empty-headed, nevertheless possesses an acute social intelligence that has allowed her to outmaneuver him. Always portraying to his face a placid ignorance regarding Archer’s feelings towards her cousin, she has orchestrated the situation so that Ellen is able to return to Europe with an income source that prevents her from having to go back to the cruel count, and gently pushed Ellen out the door by revealing to her that she (May) is pregnant with Archer’s child. In a startling moment, at Ellen’s going-away party, Archer realizes that all of society has conspired to put an end to this indiscretion, while never revealing to him for a moment that they all know exactly what is going on.
…it became clear to Archer that here also a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was going on. The silent organisation which held his little world together was determined to put itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of Madame Olenska's conduct, or the completeness of Archer's domestic felicity. All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary; and from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska's lover. He caught the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes, and for the first time understood that she shared the belief.
Could it have happened any other way? When I wrote about Norman Rush’s Mating a few months ago, I discussed how heartening it felt to see, in our profoundly unromantic age, a book that genuinely believes in risking it all for love; an intelligent, demanding, and odd novel that is nevertheless not afraid to get a little Hallmark Channel with it. The pleasures of The Age of Innocence are of the opposite kind. It is a novel in which no questions have easy answers. It’s possible that there is a brief moment somewhere in the first third of the novel in which Archer could have extricated himself from his engagement with May and married Ellen with some degree of scandal but not a life-ruining level. But he fails to realize his own situation quickly enough and from then on, the die is cast. The more worldly-wise Ellen, having been through a difficult marriage and the subsequent social shame, realizes this, and when Archer proposes they escape together, she gently rebukes him.
"I want—I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that—won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter."
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: "I know so many who've tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo—and it wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."
The only way their love can be something meaningful instead of something tawdry is if it is never acted upon: "We're near each other,” Ellen explains, “only if we stay far from each other.”
Wharton, looking back on her past at the threshold of the free-and-easy Jazz Age, does not allow us to simply condemn old-fashioned morals and move on. The tragedy of Archer and Ellen is in certain ways the fault of their rigid society: it is that society that pushed Newland Archer along the path that he did not realize led away from his true desires until it was too late. But mostly it’s a simple case of bad timing, of failing to realize one’s own feelings, and of confusing what you want for yourself with what society says you should want. Such tragedies, in our supposedly more enlightened and advanced age, continue to happen every day, and in fact, as Wharton gently reflects in the epilogue set twenty-six years later, the admittedly silly and stifling customs of Old New York nevertheless allowed for the situation of Archer and Ellen to be handled with exquisite delicacy and tact rather than explode into a scandal that destroyed their lives and the lives of their families. It’s possible Archer would have been happier if he had run away with his true love rather than living out his life in a genial and harmonious if not particularly passionate marriage, raising a fine family, and becoming a respected pillar of society. And there is a particular appeal to books like Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, that depict the tragic consequences of these decisions but nevertheless locate a certain heroism and grandeur in the defiant actions of their protagonists. But, Wharton asks the reader, if you were faced with a similar situation, would you really be brave or foolish enough to stake your entire life on it?
I realized something else reading The Age of Innocence. When I was younger, I never really understood why people spent their time reading stuffy bourgeois realist novels about love and marriage. There are people who can get really into Austen and Eliot and even midcentury stuff like Updike or Yates as a teenager; I was never one of them. To me, fiction was for doing things that no other art form could do: for traveling to fantastic worlds, whether historical or science fictional, for creating mind-bending Borgesian concepts or crafting vivid and sustained performances of argot or shaggy picaresque narratives. While I could appreciate certain exceptions like the aforementioned Anna Karenina for their prose mastery and for their vivid portrait of life in another age, the thought dogged me: why this? Why is so much of the canon such banal stories of the everyday? Why not something more exciting? I just didn’t understand why, of all things under the sun and with no limits to the prose medium but one’s own imagination, so many novels were fixated on middle and upper-class domestic life and particularly on marriage.
Recently, though, I’ve been reading bourgeois domestic realism at a furious clip; not just Wharton but Sentimental Education and Revolutionary Road and James Salter and others. What changed is not that I got married (I didn’t) or that I live a comfortable bourgeois life (I don’t, though feel free to help me do so by clicking the “upgrade to paid” button below) but that I began, like anyone, to accumulate regrets and see roads not taken. I’m not that old or anything, in fact I would hazard a guess that I’m a bit younger than my median reader. But ten years in the adult world is enough time to begin to understand that as you age, certain doors close forever, certain choices that seemed trivial at the time are in fact meaningful and irrevocable, and certain chances that could have been taken, for better or for worse, were not. I’ve lived long enough to see friends with whom I once promised to conquer the world fall, like Newland Archer, into dull routine and proceed along predetermined tracks, the light imperceptibly fading from their eyes a bit more every day; long enough to have relationships fall apart for ultimately silly and stubborn reasons, or because I failed to be as courageous or as honest as I might have been. And I realize now that that’s what all these novels are actually about. The bourgeois realist novel is not really about how marriage is hard, how adultery is tempting, or how life in the suburban middle classes or in high society presents various obstacles to happiness. It’s about getting older.
So I get it a bit more now. It’s not that novels like The Age of Innocence are moral teachers, or that they advise us to seize the day and throw your life away for love, or anything like that. But in their tragedy, in their complexity, in their rueful appraisal of the everyday human predicament and in the clean, fresh, penetrating air of their prose, perhaps they help to remind us to hold fast to our goals and be attentive to our true feelings, to not be swept along by the currents of propriety, and above all, to keep the flame of life, which flares so hot in youth and dwindles for so many of us as we age, burning steadily within us.
I’m a huge Wharton fan, and rereading her work has also shown me how *witty* she is. Thanks for sharing your love of her!!
Edith Wharton is wildly out of time. There exists a novel of hers that I have read, Twilight Sleep, that's about wealthy society ladies experimenting with new age religion in New York. It's her Jazz Age novel.
She also has a collection (that I have not read) of her reporting from France during WWI. Think how bizarre that is: Edith Wharton was a war reporter...during World War I.