The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics) | Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics) | Edith Wharton | Wharton's mastery of subtlety of nuiance transcends that of Noh Drama of Japan

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The Age of Innocen...

	The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics) Edith Wharton Oxford University Press, USA, 2006 - 278 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's most famous novel, is a love story, written immediately after the end of the First World War. Its brilliant anatomization of the snobbery and hypocrisy of the wealthy elite of New York society in the 1870s made it an instant classic, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future, until the arrival of May's cousin Ellen Olenska. Independent, free-thinking, scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
Stephen Orgel's introduction and notes set the novel in the context of the period and discusses Wharton's skilfull weaving of characters and plot, her anthropological exactitude, and the novel's autobiographical overtones.

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Edith Wharton as Literary Catalyst

For general readers Wharton has constructed a book that is everything the other reviewers here claim for it regarding their enjoyment of it.

For a writer, as in my case, I needed more than entertainment.

I read Age of Innocence as a source of information on the era Wharton knew so well - Old New York and Newport in the Gilded Age. For that purpose I found it outstanding indeed. But Wharton's selection of characters and the plot suggested a lot more reading would be valuable. I started with her latest biography by Herminone Lee, a striking work in itself. (Knopf, 2007.) I recommend it to anyone interested in Wharton. This aroused curiosity as to the extent Wharton's life may have contributed to her selection of material and her dark brown treatment of it. She always seems to be trying to get even with someone, as Louis Auchincloss has observed as well. He is must reading on Wharton. Curious on that point, I ended up reading at least two dozen books that I would not normally read, such as Henry James, parts of Balzac, another reading of Madame Bovary, even Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, which I thought was more soundly written than Age of Innocence. It certainly was a lot happier book.

I was disturbed by Age of Innocence, especially it's conclusion. Other professional writers have told me of a similar reaction. One, a lady friend of my wife's, who is a highly successful writer of mysteries, said, "When I got to the end I simply screamed!" Figuratively, so did I.

Tastes in books are obviously subjective. I tend to history and biography. Neither I, nor anyone else, is qualified to criticize Wharton simply based on individual taste. But there is a fair basis of more objectively considering her work: her own book about how to write novels and short stories. After reading Age, I was surprised to find that, as a writer, I agree with almost everything Wharton wrote about the subject. She doesn't follow her own views in any of her writing that I have read and I have read a lot of it recently.

Wharton and I agree on the first principle of all good writing: "Write only about what you know about." Next in importance, and of equal weight are: (1) know your characters thoroughly (2) keep characters in character (3) after that turn them loose and let them write the plot in interaction with each other and don't meddle. This was Mailer's approach, but there are striking contrasts in approach that produced sterling writing, such as Steinbeck (his Winter of Our Discontent is a masterpiece of plotting). (4) avoid contrived situations which always involve unsound motivation (an annoying offense that almost every reader will catch, since people are basically logical). There are many more good rules to follow, such as avoiding Acts of God (the Deus ex Machina of Greek drama.) Instead let the characters get into their own scrapes due to their own limitations and out by their own ingenuity. If she had not ignored her own rules and allowed her two main characters to step out of character, Age would have demanded a different ending.

Therefore, judged by herself, I think Age of Innocence and many other of her works flunk the course.

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Wharton's mastery of subtlety of nuiance transcends that of Noh Drama of Japan

This literary drama is a far cry from Noh Drama's long haired monster dwelling in a cave in a mountain top. Yet the mangitude of restrained subtlety of expressions veiling wide gamut of human passion from each drama is the same. Set in Jim Crow and Chinese Exclusion Act days, Edith Wharton offers unique insight of the subject matter and extraordinary foresight in what she knows best, her own social milieu. The uneasy relationship that Wharton describes so honestly and tenderly is provocative simply because Archer considers Ellen his "team" notwithstanding.

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Where convention rules

The book begins with wit and irony, as Edith Wharton describes the small élite of New York society in the early 1870s. They lived within a whole series of well-understood conventions and assumptions which included nice and minute distinctions within the social hierarchy, a censorious and gossipy attitude towards any member of the set who strayed from what was expected of them in the manners, appropriate cultural interests, dress and furniture, and relations between the sexes. Those who were felt not to conform, such as the American-born Countess Olenska who had returned from Europe, leaving her husband and intending to divorce him, imperilled the reputation of their entire families. In that society, young unmarried women, in particular, were brought up in ignorance of the ways of the world, into which they were initiated only after their marriage. Until then, theirs was the age of innocence of the title.

That is the state in which May Welland was when she was engaged to Newland Archer. May Welland belonged to the same family as the Countess. They were cousins and the granddaughters of the powerful and wealthy matriarch, Mrs Mingott, a pivotal and superbly drawn character, both as to her personality and to her vast appearance. Newland was in a dilemma: he had really shared all the assumptions of his class; but now, to protect his fiancée, he felt he had both to defend the Countess and to dissuade her from going ahead with the divorce. The Countess is `unconventional' in other ways: she consorts with artists, who never mix with the social élite of New York, and she claims the right as a woman to live her own life. She is also very attractive, and Newland, in taking her side, not only finds himself unaccustomedly critical of the conventions in which he has been brought up, but falls in love with her, as she does with him. Then of course he wants her to divorce her husband so that they can marry, though he is engaged to May. The Countess thinks this impossible - perhaps out of loyalty to her cousin May (though this is not made explicit at the time); and Newland then does in fact feel bound to marry May, though he already feels the dread that he would be sucked into the conventional life which he was beginning to find stifling.

May's interests and attitudes indeed turned out to be much the same as those of the society into which she had been born (though she was no fool, understood more than her innocent air suggested, and knew how to use the coded language which said so much more than its surface would suggest). After a year and a half of marriage, Newland was just getting used again to the world in which he had after all also spent most of his earlier life, when the Countess Olenska reappeared in his life. Their love for each other has never died down, but they are no nearer to being able to make a life with each other: his code forbids divorce, and hers forbids the role of a mistress and the betrayal of other members of her family. And of the two, the enigmatic Countess is always the stronger and the saner one.

The strength of the tribe is irresistible, and it is brought out especially in the superlative description, both sardonic and touching, of the farewell dinner given, at May's insistence, in honour of the Countess' return to Europe.

A quarter of a century elapses between then and the last chapter of the book. This, too, is quite outstanding, describing not only how Newland`s family and public life had developed respectably in that time, but also what changes had come over New York society in the interval. Newland's son Dallas is so much less inhibited than his father had been; the stuffy mores of his father's generation have long passed away. In the brief portrayal of Dallas and of the relationship between him and his father Edith Wharton again shows herself as both a brilliant social historian as well as a sophisticated novelist.

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Love, Loneliness and the Strictures of Society.

Imagine living in a world where life is governed by intricate rituals; a world "balanced so precariously that its harmony [can] be shattered by a whisper" (Wharton); a world ruled by self-declared experts on form, propriety and family history - read: scandal -; where everything is labeled and yet, people are not; where in order not to disturb society's smooth surface nothing is ever expressed or even thought of directly, and where communication occurs almost exclusively by way of symbols, which are unknown to the outsider and, like any secret code, by their very encryption guarantee his or her permanent exclusion.

Such, in faithful imitation of Victorian England, was the society of late 19th century upper class New York. Into this society returns, after having grown up and lived all her adult life in Europe, American-born Countess Ellen Olenska, after leaving a cruel and uncaring husband. She already causes scandal by the mere manner of her return; but not knowing the secret rituals of the society she has entered, she quickly brings herself further into disrepute by receiving an unmarried man, by being seen in the company of a man only tolerated by virtue of his financial success and his marriage to the daughter of one of this society's most respected families, by arriving late to a dinner in which she has expressly been included to rectify a prior general snub, by leaving a drawing room conversation to instead join a gentleman sitting by himself - and worst of all, by openly contemplating divorce, which will most certainly open up a whole Pandora's box of "oddities" and "unpleasantness:" the strongest terms ever used to express moral disapproval in this particular social context. Soon Ellen, who hasn't seen such façades even in her husband's household, finds herself isolated and, wondering whether noone is ever interested in the truth, complains bitterly that "[t]he real loneliness here is living among all these kind people who only ask you to pretend."

Ellen finds a kindred soul in attorney Newland Archer, her cousin May Welland's fiancé, who secretly toys with a more liberal stance, while outwardly endorsing the value system of the society he lives in. Newland and Ellen fall in love - although not before he has advised her, on his employer's and May and Ellen's family's mandate, not to pursue her plans of divorce. As a result, Ellen becomes unreachable to him, and he flees into accelerating his wedding plans with May, who before he met Ellen in his eyes stood for everything that was good and noble about their society, whereas now he begins to see her as a shell whose interior he is reluctant to explore for fear of finding merely a kind of serene emptiness there; a woman whose seemingly dull, passive innocence grinds down every bit of roughness he wants to maintain about himself and who, as he realizes even before marrying her, will likely bury him alive under his own future. Then his passion for Ellen is rekindled by a meeting a year and a half after his wedding, and an emotional conflict they could hardly bear when he was not yet married escalates even further. And only when it is too late for all three of them he finds out that his wife had far more insight (and almost ruthless cleverness) than he had ever credited her with.

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize and the first work of fiction written by a woman to be awarded that distinction, "The Age of Innocence" is one of Edith Wharton's most enduringly popular novels; the crown jewel among her subtly satirical descriptions of New York upper class society. By far not as overtly condemning and cynical as the earlier "House of Mirth" (for which Wharton reportedly even saw this later work as a sort of apology), "The Age of Innocence" is a masterpiece of characterization and social study alike: an intricate canvas painted by a master storyteller who knew the society which she described inside out, and who, even though she had moved to France (where she would continue living for the rest of her life) almost a decade earlier, was able to delineate late 19th century New York society's every nuance in pitch-perfect detail, while at the same time - seemingly without any effort at all - also blending together all these minute details into an impeccably composed ensemble that will stay with the reader long after he has turned the last page.

Also recommended:
Wharton: Four Novels (Library of America College Editions)
Edith Wharton: Vol 1. Collected Stories:1891-1910 (Library of America)
Edith Wharton: Vol.2 Collected Stories 1911-1937 (Library of America)
Henry James : Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians (Library of America)
Henry James: Novels 1901-1902: The Sacred Fount / The Wings of the Dove (Library of America)
Ethan Frome
The House of Mirth
Washington Square
The Portrait of a Lady
The Wings of the Dove

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one of the greatest books ever written

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

This is an interesting and a compelling read. The novel is very well written.

reviews: page 1, 2

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