Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

The important words here are “felt like adding.” He is driven to silence, to inner thoughts, betrays himself with a gentleman’s kindness, perhaps even the niceness he deplores. At times Newland is a study in pent-up anger at the life he has accepted—one of “habit and honor,” to put the best light on it, but also one of irreparable loss. It is the life that Wharton turned from, but the portrayal of his fury surely recalls her pain, suffered in the stultifying atmosphere of old New York, and her inability to speak the same language, if speak at all, to her husband. As we read of Newland’s suffering and alienation, it may be appropriate to recall that he is a man without a calling. He is a great reader, like Wharton, but the novelist had the salvation of her work and her devotion to it.

In this novel of emotional infidelity, of duty to family and to the social standards of old New York, Edith Wharton incorporates a tale of money, which at bottom is what made the whole system of that endowed society work. Money is not window dressing. It is the substance of who her characters are, or claim to be. Newland does not work with much diligence at his law office. Ellen is something of a financial hostage to her Polish husband, Count Olenski. Inherited money is more desirable than riches got by the sweat of the brow or by recent grubby acquisition. The manufacture of shoe polish provides Mrs. Struthers with her tasteless costumes and arty entertainments. As for Julius Beaufort, who would he be were it not for the power of his extraordinary wealth? Wharton makes it perfectly clear that old New York was a commercial society, whatever its pretense to aristocracy. Only the van der Luydens, generous yet stiff with moral rectitude, can trace their line to Dutch heritage. Colonial heritage, is that aristocracy? Henry van der Luyden is still patroon of their vast estate at Skuytercliff, up the Hudson. Wharton does not leave their heritage at that; with great wit she invents the van der Luydens’ connection to royalty through the patroon’s wife, who had been a Dagonet. In a highly amusing construction of a family tree, she stretches branches to English nobility and to the Duke of St. Austrey, who comes to visit in America. The Duke is less pretentious than the stuffed shirts of New York society who put on an elaborate show for him. The Duke is a charming fuddy-duddy, perfectly happy to attend Mrs. Struthers’s salon, which is scorned by the proper people.

Throughout the novel Wharton entertains with a cast of somewhat raffish characters, including Medora Manson, a marchioness no less, who has made unfortunate foreign marriages and is a champion of Ellen’s. It’s faddish Medora who introduces Dr. An thony Carver into the novel, in a stroke of comic relief Dr. Carver’s Valley of Love in Kittasquattamy, New York, is a reference to the many nineteenth-century sects that broke with traditional religion and advocated free love. Dr. Carver’s program against marriage comes at a most distressing time in the negotiations of the Olenski divorce proceedings, a light note in Wharton’s moving examination of that honored institution that may hold, or trap, Newland Archer to the end. Carver is a curiosity, not a major disturbance. Medora passes on to the next enthusiasm, but Wharton has worked her theme of freedom and responsibility with a light touch.

Less swift, indeed dwelt on at length, is the overabundance of delicacies served at the dinners in
The Age of Innocence.
They are gluttonous, costly, but price tags are seldom in evidence—Archers, Wellands, Lefferts, Chiverses, well aware of who wears last year’s gown, who lives on the incorrect street, have a convenient amnesia about the source of their money. What we might read as the Beaufort plot is integral to Wharton’s themes of false innocence and the false security of old New York. The financial system, built on credit, was fragile. In an era without market regulations, Beaufort was dealing with borrowed money. He’s a speculator, not a crook; but when he fails the whole market is sold down, bringing with it the holdings of the Mingotts and the Sillertons, all of the establishment. Their presumption—that they are above risk, not connected with the commercial interests of an outsider like Beaufort—is ill founded.

The real outsider is Ned Winsett, a journalist—and when fi nances permit, a serious writer—whom Wharton uses to develop the theme of the value of work. Newland, always the voyeur, looks on with envy at Ned’s world of working artists and writers, a bohemian set that seems to him free of the duties that bind him. Edith Wharton, dedicated to her writing life, kept strict account of her earnings. Amazingly prolific, she was always conscious of how far she had traveled from her beginnings as a proper little girl whose mother disapproved of her storytelling. The imprint of what she was supposed to become, as a woman of her class, can be detected in May, but that was too easy. In Newland she drew the portrait of the dilettante she feared she might become. Unlike the novelist, he never buckles down, never cuts free. In a poignant scene that takes place in Newport, the summer resort of these very rich New Yorkers, he breaks away to see Ellen Olenska, who is staying in a simple cottage. When he finds her standing alone at the end of a pier, he simply looks on from a distance. He is audience to Winsett’s dedication to work and to Ellen’s fight for independence, only occasionally finding a role for himself in their stories.

The tone of the novel has become more somber with Beaufort’s failure, with Ellen’s intricate divorce proceedings, with the Archers settling into the misfit of their marriage. Wharton goes back to the opera, to a repeat performance of Gounod’s
Faust,
no doubt having in mind the dramatic announcement of the heroine, Marguerite, that she is to bear a child. All references in
The Age of Innocence
are constructed with exacting care; all details are relevant, enriching each scene, each progress of the story. Reading it today we need not know that Faust will run off when given the news that he is about to become a father, but many of Wharton’s readers in 1920 would have seen the cruel wit of May announcing she was about to have their first child just as her husband was to declare his love for her rival. Newland Archer is no Faust. His romantic nature, crippled by honor, dictates that he cannot spend one illicit night with Ellen, never mind sell his soul to the devil. As the curtain comes down on his prospect of freedom, May’s eyes are “wet with victory.”

The story is not over: In a masterful final chapter the tone modulates once again, from the drama of entrapment to sympathetic reverie, from then to now. Many years later, Newland Archer reviews his life. Here Wharton’s voice works in close to Newland‘s, becomes one with a self-assessment that is both personal and historical. In an age-old storyteller’s device, she reveals the afterlife, what happened to her characters. Do they live on in the present? In a sympathetic portrait, May, dead after many years of marriage, is memorialized by her husband as energetic mother and devoted wife. Newland has found work as a useful minor player in public life, accepting his nature as “a contemplative and a dilettante.” Now Wharton asks her readers to consider Newland as a survivor, suggesting that there is something near heroic in his accommodation to the inescapable facts of his life, to living out the duties and pleasures. He treasures his love of Countess Olenska, knowing she is most fully realized in memory. The false rhetoric of freedom, the hackneyed phrases of that romance no longer come to mind. He speaks to himself as he always has when he is most truthful, most self-revealing. The show is not quite over; there is one more scene, elegiac and surprisingly dramatic. Newland Archer frames his view as he has from that first night at the opera. He stands apart as he did that day in Newport when Ellen appeared at a distance on the pier. He is fifty-seven years old as he looks up at her window in Paris, treasuring the past, possessing their love in imagination. His perspective is no longer innocent. He remains a dreamer, but a dreamer self-aware.

Edith Wharton amused her readers with the portrait of a society that was self-indulgent, ignorant of the coming end of its reign. She wrote of loss and heartbreak, staged thwarted passion, and went beyond to tell of Newland Archer’s accommodation to an honorable life. In her memoir
A Backward Glance,
which for the most part is far less revealing, less personal than
The Age of Innocence,
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton wrote: “Habit is necessary, it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.” This is not an accurate description of the novelist who led an adventurous life of the mind, who forged her life with difficulty, who found her salvation in work; but it might be a description of Newland Archer, a man of necessary habit, who steered clear of the rut, was happy in small ways.

Moving beyond her readers’ expectations of a romance, Edith Wharton portioned herself out to realize Newland’s coming of age in his assessment of the past, Ellen’s depth of emotional experience, and the unimaginative May, the woman she refused to become. Her publisher advised against a war novel, but looking back to discover the flawed innocence of an era, she informed the present days of her writing in 1919.
The Age of Innocence
can be considered with Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs.
Dalloway and Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
(both 1925) as novels that deal with the aftermath of war, of inquiry into the passage of time and dramatic change in the social order. From her distance in Paris, Wharton upset the idea of American innocence and insularity. Moving from satire to sympathy, this novel, perhaps her greatest, makes us contemplate false security and the nature of national identity while witnessing the mysterious transformation of her experience into art.

 

Maureen Howard
is a critic, teacher, and writer of fiction. Her seven novels include
Bridgeport Bus, Grace Abounding,
and
Expensive Habits. A Lover’s Almanac
was the first novel in a quartet of the four seasons, followed by
Big as Life, Three Tales for Spring,
and
The Silver Screen,
the summer season, which will be published in 2004. She has taught at Yale, Amherst, Princeton, and Columbia. She is the editor of
The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton
from Library of America. Her critical works include introductions to
Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather, Three Novels,
and an essay on Wharton’s
The House of Mirth.
Her reviews have appeared in the
New York Times Book Review,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Nation,
the
New Republic,
and the
Yale Review.
Maureen Howard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. A former vice president of PEN, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City with her husband, Mark Probst, a novelist and financial consultant.

1

ON A JANUARY EVENING of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson
^a
was singing in
Faust
at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances “above the Forties,” of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendor with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.