The Age of Innocence (Novel)

I'm ending my tribute to Edith Wharton's sesquicentennial with The Age of Innocence, which she published in 1920 and won the Pulitzer Prize for (she was the first woman to win it). It is another of her looks at New York society, with not so much a gimlet eye as a sigh and an eye roll.

Set in New York in the 1870s, the book tells of Newland Archer, who has it all. He is rich and a member in good standing of society. He is engaged to the beautiful and rich May Welland. He has a job at a law firm, though he doesn't really need it. But something gnaws at Newland--the book is told from his point of view, and though he does not narrate, it's his thoughts that we hear.

Enter May's cousin Madame Ellen Olenska, who arrives in New York bathed in scandal. She has fled her abusive husband, a Polish count. Though she is one of Mrs. Manson's Mingott's grandchildren, she has become accustomed to European ways, and dares to attend a party thrown by Bohemians.

Newland befriends her, and persuades her, per the family's wishes, not to divorce her husband. It is acceptable to live apart, but divorce is scandalous. He feels a stirring in his soul when he's with her, and to overcome it he urges May to push forward their marriage. But he can't help it--he is in love with Ellen, and she with him, but by his own hand he has made it impossible to marry her.

The second half of the book is Newland and Ellen trying to stay away from each other. His marriage to May is dreary, while Ellen goes from New York to Newport to Boston to Washington. Newland subtly rebels against the constraints against him, and is ready to chuck everything to be with Ellen, until May reveals she is pregnant, which she has already told Ellen before the latter has fled to Europe. Checkmate.

The Age of Innocence, unlike House of Mirth, is not a critical view of the ways of these people, but more of an anthropological treatise, like Margaret Mead among the Samoans. Of course, Wharton lived among these people--she was born Edith Jones, the same Jones family that was responsible for the phrase, "Keeping up with the Joneses." The rules laid out in the book have a lovely comic tone.

"New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was 'not the thing' to arrive early at the opera' and what was or was not 'the thing' played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago."

Other rules included: "It was not the custom in New York drawing-rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another. Etiquette required that she should wait, immovable as an idol, while the men who wished to converse with her succeeded each other at her side."

"Everyone in polite circles knew that, in America, 'a gentleman couldn't go into politics.'"

"No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he travelled, took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to Paris or Italy."

"In the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once."

All of this is very funny, but Newland's predicament is also sad. He is a man trapped by his position, without the slightest clue of how to get out of it. He comes to the conclusion that "The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else." Being inside Newland's head can make for melancholy times, such as when: "The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses. In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life."

In addition to the characters in the love triangle, there is Mrs. Manson Mingott, long widowed and living north of 42nd Street, in what was those days the hinterlands. She has inestimable power, and wields it by making people come to her, as she is so obese that she can hardly leave her house: "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 neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon." More powerful than her were the van der Luydens, at the top of the social heap, who only come into town and open their doors when they needed, as if they reside on high in Olympus. Or Beaufort, who lusts after Ellen, but is the ruined in a bank failure, and shunned by society. When his wife goes to Mrs. Mingott for help, it such a breach of decorum that it causes the old lady to have a stroke.

The Age of Innocence was written almost fifty years after the fact, and Wharton includes a coda of Newland Archer years later, when society has changed. Theodore Roosevelt is introduced as Governor of New York, giving the lie that gentlemen don't go into politics, and the new generation, such as Newland's son, don't go in for the boring realities of law or business, but more academic pursuits. Newland can't understand all this, but is secretly happy with it all.