The Age Of Innocence

Book 0: Vintage Classics

by Edith Wharton

Genres: Classics; Romance

Synopsis

Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" is a piercing exploration of the constraints and conventions of upper-class society in New York during the Gilded Age. The novel tells the story of Newland Archer, a privileged lawyer engaged to the conventional and lovely May Welland. However, the sudden arrival of May's cousin, Ellen Olenska, who has fled a disastrous marriage in Europe, disrupts Archer's settled life. As he grows increasingly captivated by Ellen, Archer grapples with his commitment to May and his deep longing for a life less bounded by societal norms. Wharton's novel, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, skillfully dissects the complexities of love, passion, and duty, all set against a backdrop of fading aristocratic values.

Release date: June 5, 2012

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, thus making Edith Wharton the first woman to be so honoured. It sold around 115,000 copies in the English-speaking world and earned its author some $70,000 dollars in its first two years. It is the novel of her maturity in which she contemplates the New York of her youth, a society now extinct and even then under threat. “DO NEW YORK!” Henry James had urged her, back in 1902, at the beginning of their long friendship, and eventually she did. She wrote hurriedly, in the midst of personal upheavals, and she was writing to make money, for despite her wealth she felt pressed for cash; the book was published by instalments in the Pictorial Review amid advertisements for soap flakes and lavatory cleaners and is generally regarded as one of her best.

Edith Jones had been born in 1862 into the exclusive, entrenched and apparently immutable world of wealthy New York families, Rhinelanders and Schermerhorns, Winthrops and Roosevelts, Astors and Vanderbilts—the Four Hundred. It was a world of structured leisure, in which attendance at balls and dinners passed for occupation, in which the women devoted themselves to dress and to the maintenance of family and system and the men kept a watchful eye on the financial underpinning that made the whole process possible. It was a complacent and philistine world, but one with inflexible standards, those of “scrupulous probity in business and private affairs” as Edith Wharton herself described them in her memoir A Backward Glance. This alleged probity, and offences against it, lies at the heart of The Age of Innocence: the sexual passion between Newland Archer, a married man, and Ellen Olenska, nonconformist and separated from her husband, threatens conventional mores and family security; the financial irregularities of Julius Beaufort require that he and his wife be ejected from society before they corrupt its most cherished integrities. The form of the novel allows its author to examine, with the wisdoms of hindsight, a world which was in the process of breaking up when she was a girl and which she herself rejected in any case, fleeing for the major part of her life to the fresh air of Europe.

The flight, though, was not superficially unusual. Rich New Yorkers were accustomed to frequent travel; the women needed dresses from Paris, everyone went to Italy to refresh the spirit and replenish their stock of objets d’art. But with Edith Wharton what had begun as a fashionable obeisance became an addiction. At twenty-three—a shy, somewhat diffident young woman—she had married Teddy Wharton. The two of them took off soon after on a prolonged Greek cruise which they could not afford. Teddy was an amiable but limited man whom Edith was to outgrow with distressing rapidity; he could not share her burgeoning literary tastes or her enthusiasm for intellectual companionship and the marriage deteriorated into irritable cohabitation until it was eventually ended by divorce in 1913. But the improvident Greek cruise had set Edith on a course that became irreversible—she was soon spending far more time in Europe than America. Meanwhile a legacy from a cousin of her grandfather’s of whom she had barely heard gave her—with the trust fund she already had—an income sufficient to make her rich for the rest of her life, and Teddy disastrously dependent upon her.

It is tempting to see Edith Wharton’s wealth as a character-forming factor—certainly the awkward twenty-three-year-old changed out of all recognition into the confident, furiously energetic, tempestuous woman whom Henry James called with affectionate terror “the Firebird” and “the Angel of Devastation”. It enabled her to indulge her restlessness, her generosity and her curiosity—migrating from capital to capital, and continent to continent, descending upon James and other cronies to sweep them off in her chauffeured limousine for prolonged and indulgent motor tours of France or Italy. It enabled her to relegate Teddy to an appendage. And yet—and this is what both surprises and compels admiration—she wrote compulsively and strenuously from the moment her first tentative literary experiments began to find publishers when she was twenty-eight. Later, she was indeed to write for money—by then her tastes and requirements had far outstripped her resources. But at the start, and for many years, she was driven by none of the pecuniary needs that dogged most of her fellow writers—notably, of course, Henry James himself. (He, indeed, thought that her money insulated her and made her to some extent insensitive.) She wrote simply because she wanted and needed to, and because it took her out of the world she wished to discard and into another, in which she could meet and talk to kindred spirits, in which she was not just another pampered and restricted young woman, but a person consorting on equal terms with those she admired and respected.

Edith Warton’s reputation has undergone interesting vicissitudes. In her own lifetime, she moved from small beginnings to bestsellerdom, enjoying both wide readership and high literary esteem and enabled by her earnings to make the well-meant but grandiloquent clandestine gesture of diverting part of her own royalties from Scribners to Henry James as a hefty advance on a new novel (James was astonished, deceived and gratified). But she was always an uneven writer—her large oeuvre veers from the accomplishment of masterpieces like Ethan Frome, The Reef, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence to secondary works like Hudson River Bracketed and some of the stories. She was prolific, writing travel books, a manual on interior decoration and even a startling fragment of unpublished pornography (included as an appendix to Richard W. B. Lewis’s biography). But by the end of her life, in 1937, she had fallen victim to swings in literary taste and social preoccupations—her novels were seen as old-fashioned and her concerns as elitist and of minimal interest: it was the age of Lawrence and Joyce. She was relegated to the ranks of lesser writers. In England, indeed, she remained a fairly unknown name until a recent revival of interest and the appearance of her work in paperback. Her biographer felt constrained to wonder, in the first comprehensive examination of her life and work,* whether her reputation might today stand even higher if she had been a man. She has been seen, indeed, as a poor man’s Henry James, a comparison that is inevitable given their relationship and her undoubted debt to his advice and criticism, with its consequent reflection in her style and approach. This, though, is both to underestimate and misinterpret her work; Edith Wharton was her own woman, and at her best she combines muscularity and dash with an individual perception and strong psychological insight.

She now has her due, with the present rehabilitation of her fiction; the large output can be seen as inevitably uneven but also as far more eclectic than has been thought and often in advance of its time. She wrote of the ambiguities of sexual conduct and expectations with great force and subtlety (most powerfully, perhaps, in The Reef); in Ethan Frome and Summer she showed that she could write convincingly and with feeling of the American rural working class as well as of the background from which she came. The Fruit of the Tree is an attempt, if not entirely successful, to address herself to the problems of industrialism. But for many of her admirers the summit of her work is the group of novels and stories in which she set herself to examine the codes and practices of that powerful and apparently impregnable group, the wealthy and patrician New York families of the late Victorian and Edwardian period: The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, Old New York and The Custom of the Country. Her strength was that she was able to combine the encyclopaedic knowledge of an insider with the accuracy and selective power of a fine novelist and the detachment of a highly intelligent social and historical observer. She saw that she had lived through years of galloping change, that the society of her girlhood had vanished and had been under threat at the time; she was able to analyse the nature of these changes and give fictional life to them in the form of characters like Mrs Manson Mingott, Undine Spragg, Ellen Olenska and others.

Edith Wharton herself rejected over-precise relation between life and literature: “to introduce actual people into a novel would be exactly like gumming their snapshots into the vibrating human throng of a Guardi picture”. She did what indeed most writers have always done; she took real people and real situations and then tampered with both for her own purposes, thus transforming life into art—“the elusive, bright-winged thing, that mysterious fourth-dimensional world which is the artist’s inmost sanctuary and on the threshold of which enquiry perforce must halt”. This Jamesian flight of fancy is an uncharacteristic passage in an otherwise down-to-earth and at times positively didactic essay on “The writing of Fiction”, in which the marriage of practical bossiness with highflown language—“[dialogue] should be reserved for the culminating moments, and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore”—gives the reader an irresistible impression of her complex and bracing personality. One feels a mixture of regret and relief that she lived before the present vogue for Creative Writing Professorships; she would have revelled in the role.

But however authoritarian her views on the craft of fiction, the results are seamless. From the opening pages of The Age of Innocence, when young Newland Archer attends the opera (Faust, with an appropriateness that is undoubtedly intentional) at the Academy of Music in New York and we see through his eyes the stage and the cast of the book, we know that we are in the hands of an accomplished novelist. Not the least of her skills is the selection here of points of view: of the two central figures, Newland and Ellen Olenska, with whom he falls fatally in love, only Newland is allowed a voice; Ellen is seen always at one remove, through his eyes and those of others, and is thus given a detachment which makes her both slightly mysterious and strengthens her role as the novel’s catalyst. Newland, on the other hand, by being given absolute definition of thought and action, is laid out for inspection and judgement: he has the vulnerability of exposure, while Ellen is left with privacy and silence. It is a vital distinction between the two characters who have been seen by one critic as conflicting aspects of Edith Wharton herself, the one ultimately trapped by custom and circumstance, the other a free spirit, harbinger of the future.

Newland, as the novel begins, is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a conventional alliance with a beautiful girl from a suitable family. He loves her, but sees her, even at this early stage, with a clarity that is prescient: “when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product”. May, indeed, can be seen as embodying in her personality all the rigidity and implacable self-righteousness of the society itself—a kind of innocence, but a dangerous and eventually self-destructive innocence. The novel falls naturally into two halves, before and after the marriage, and it is in the second half that we see the characters of both Newland and May mature and conflict. In the first part of the book, Newland himself is allowed to appear as something of an innocent, more sophisticated of course than his fiancée because he is a man and has been permitted both emotional experiences (he has had a brief affair with a married woman) and an intellectual range not available to a young woman, but nevertheless conditioned and relatively unquestioning. He views the New York of his birth and upbringing with a degree of affectionate impatience. He bows to the dictates of convention (“silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair ... never appearing in society without a flower ... in his buttonhole”) and accepts a world in which people move in “an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies”. But at the same time he is capable of criticism and rebellion, and it is in the second half of the novel that we see this capacity fanned into active life by his feelings for Ellen Olenska and his assessment and understanding of her situation and what it is that is being done to her by “the tribe”. Newland’s tragedy is that in the last resort he is unable to obey his own instincts: nurture triumphs over nature. Let us return, though, to May, who is a more interesting character than she immediately appears and in many ways the most Jamesian. It is towards the end of the novel that she comes into her own and a hitherto slightly negative figure emerges as positively Machiavellian. Ellen Olenska is her cousin, returned from Europe to the family fold after the collapse of a disastrous marriage to a philandering Polish count. May, initially, has been graciously kind to her and has encouraged Newland’s friendly support and advice over Ellen’s complex and precarious situation: should she divorce her husband? On what is she to live? But in the months after the marriage the passion between Newland and Ellen (fostered by deprivation—there are in the whole novel only four or five seminal scenes in which they are together) has become apparent to May. We never know quite how, and must assume that she is more astute and perceptive than she has appeared. And so, with stealthy adroitness, she moves to save her marriage and avert the threat to social tranquillity—the outsider cannot be allowed to strike at the heart of all that is sacrosanct, and must be ejected. The family—tacitly, as always—close ranks around her and Ellen is put under subtle pressure to return to Europe. In the final scenes between Newland and May, it is impossible not to see overtones of The Golden Bowl in Newland’s mute and helpless anguish as he realises what is happening and that there is nothing he can do about it because to protest would be to betray himself—and Ellen.

Ellen, of course, is the pivot upon which the whole book turns. She, and her situation, are the challenge and the threat to the status quo. She is the renegade, the prodigal daughter who has become Europeanised and who both fascinates (the men) and repels (the women) by her cosmopolitanism, her taste for literature and art, her coolly amused view of the world of her childhood. “I’m sure I’m dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven”, she says to Newland at their first meeting, and from that moment he is doomed. Indeed, it is Ellen who, at the start, appears to have set her cap at him with her offhand and unconventional assumption that he will visit her—it is one of the actions whereby she is allowed to remain mysterious and unexplained. Indeed, it would be possible to construct a whole alternative interpretation of the novel in which Ellen is a scheming adventuress and May the virtuous and wronged wife (as indeed on the face of it she is). Fiction prospers upon ambiguities, and the apparent ambiguity here is one of the strengths of the novel. For Ellen is herself both victim and eventually a kind of victor.

On her return to New York, she is afforded the protection and support of her family, and especially of her grandmother, the formidable society leader Mrs Manson Mingott. They will look after their own, in the last resort; indeed, determinedly, they solicit the help of the ultimate social arbitors, the almost fossilised van der Leydens, to ensure her acceptance. But Ellen is fatally tainted; although it is she who is the innocent party in her failed marriage, she is polluted—there are even unconfirmed rumours that she has consoled herself. Here, the double standards on which that society functioned become most apparent: a woman must be blameless, but a blind eye is turned on male sexual indulgence. Initial sympathy for Ellen turns to suspicion and eventually to rejection as it is realised that she is not going to conform, that she has a freedom of mind and of spirit unacceptable in a woman, that she is no longer one of them. And it is the matriarchs who sniff her out—the custodians of tradition, of family integrity and of sexual regularity. Ellen is successfully routed; she goes back to Europe, and in doing so she becomes also the victor, escaping to the freedoms of a more expansive and imaginative society. The price, though, is her relationship with Newland Archer.

This, then, is the story — on the face of it a simple one of frustrated love. Edith Wharton’s skill and success is that she has made it a parable of a time and a place. The fates of Newland and of Ellen, and indeed of May Welland, are determined by history: they are products of their time and whatever their instincts and their inclinations, they are obliged to obey its dictation. That being said, it is not entirely without sympathy that Edith Wharton looks at late-nineteenth-century New York. There is a touch of affection as well as of astringency in her portraits of Sillerton Jackson and Lawrence Lefferts, authorities respectively on “family” and on “form”, of Mrs Manson Mingott, cushioned by flesh, money and prestige, of the home life of the van der Leydens, who are so strangled by ancestral glory as to be almost incapable of spontaneous speech or action. And then there is the louche figure of Julius Beaufort, the banker whose dubious business dealings and eventual ruin form a secondary plot and further illustration of the lengths to which that society was prepared to go in its determination to fend off those who threatened its standards. Edith Wharton expressed her view of that world in A Backward Glance, reflecting with a mellowed eye in her seventies on the mores from which she, like Ellen, had fled in youth.

From the vantage point of the 1930s she described what she saw as its strengths as well as its weaknesses: the incorruptibility, the horror of commercial irregularity, the integrity—a view with which present-day historians of that era might in any case quarrel. Edith Wharton’s picture of her own society is a restricted and a personal one and ignores entire aspects of late-nineteenth-century America; it is impossible to deny that stricture. But as one survivor’s testimony of the practices of a ruling order it has a value. She saw it as a society in which wealth was still founded upon property; trade was suspected and certainly not welcome in a drawing-room. A significant offstage character in The Age of Innocence is Mrs Lemuel Struthers, “the widow of Struthers’s Shoepolish” who is infiltrating New York and seducing the men to her amusing but still proscribed parties: the women, more clairvoyant, see her correctly as the shape of things to come. But Edith Wharton criticised the society for its dread of innovation, its conformity, its philistinism and, perhaps most tellingly of all, for its lack of civic responsibility. These were patricians and aristocrats, but national leaders who eschewed leadership, who preferred business life to that of politics, who failed to shoulder the burdens of an expanding democratic society and paid for it in the end by being shunted to one side. She contrasted this stance with that of the British aristocracy, traditionally involved with government and therefore retaining political significance along with financial power.

But, for all her rejection of much that old New York stood for, Edith Wharton saw it also as the last link between those Americans who were “the heirs of an old tradition of European culture which the country has now totally rejected”. Writing in the thirties, she had come to be, herself, more at home in Europe than in America, a process started in her childhood when her father had swept the family off to Europe for years on end in order to benefit from the rent on their two houses in Manhattan and Newport. By the time she died, she had lived for far longer in Paris, Italy and England than in America; she spoke French as much as she spoke English; her friendships were cosmopolitan. But she remained essentially American, incorporating in her own outlook and personal culture that successful and perennial fusion of the Old World and the New, while her intelligence and perception enabled her to see that this was her great advantage and to make fictional use of it.

The Age of Innocence is the fruit of Edith Wharton’s own cultural versatility. Written when she was fifty-seven and at a creative peak, it reflects her own life in ways that are both obvious and indirect. She was “doing” New York, as Henry James had suggested, but she was bringing to the subject insights and observations that she would never have been able to make if she had remained within the confines of American society. She was able to see it through the eyes of both Newland Archer and of Ellen Olenska. More than that, she brought to her account of the charged and frustrated passion between Newland and Ellen her own experience of sexual and intellectual affinity—her love affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton in her forties had been an antidote to the long sterility of her marriage. Conceived to make money, written against a background of domestic crisis and published unceremoniously in a magazine, it survives today as one of her finest works—a rich and powerful description of a vanished world, alternately witty and moving, presenting with marvellous control and range a group of characters who between them define a whole period and culture.

Penelope Lively, London, 1988

 

* Richard W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, Constable, London, 1975.

ON A January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson 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 splendour 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.

It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as “an exceptionally brilliant audience” had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient “Brown coupé.” To come to the Opera in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one’s own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin-congested nose of one’s own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the club box the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. There was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at seven, alone with his mother and sister, and had lingered afterward over a cigar in the Gothic library with glazed black-walnut bookcases and finial-topped chairs, which was the only room in the house where Mrs. Archer allowed smoking. But, in the first place, 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.

The second reason for his delay was a personal one. He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were; and on this occasion the moment he looked forward to was so rare and exquisite in quality that—well, if he had timed his arrival in accord with the prima donna’s stage-manager he could not have entered the Academy at a more significant moment than just as she was singing “He loves me—he loves me not—he loves me!” and sprinkling the falling daisy petals with notes as clear as dew.

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.

“M’ama ... non m’ama ...” the prima donna sang, and “M’ama!”, with a final burst of love triumphant, as she pressed the dishevelled daisy to her lips and lifted her large eyes to the sophisticated countenance of the little brown Faust-Capoul, who was vainly trying, in a tight purple velvet doublet and plumed cap, to look as pure and true as his artless victim.

Newland Archer, leaning against the wall at the back of the club box, turned his eyes from the stage and scanned the opposite side of the house. Directly facing him was the box of old Mrs. Manson Mingott, whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to attend the Opera, but who was always represented on fashionable nights by some of the younger members of the family. On this occasion, the front of the box was filled by her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lovell Mingott, and her daughter, Mrs. Welland; and slightly withdrawn behind these brocaded matrons sat a young girl in white with eyes ecstatically fixed on the stage-lovers. As Madame Nilsson’s “M’ama!” thrilled out above the silent house (the boxes always stopped talking during the Daisy Song) a warm pink mounted to the girl’s cheek, mantled her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a single gardenia. She dropped her eyes to the immense bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee, and Newland Archer saw her white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly. He drew a breath of satisfied vanity and his eyes returned to the stage.

No expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the Opera Houses of Paris and Vienna. The foreground, to the footlights, was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink and red roses. Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses, and closely resembling the floral penwipers made by female parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath the rose-trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose-branch flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank’s far-off prodigies.

In the centre of this enchanted garden Madame Nilsson, in white cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes to M. Capoul’s impassioned wooing, and affected a guileless incomprehension of his designs whenever, by word or glance, he persuasively indicated the ground-floor window of the neat brick villa projecting obliquely from the right wing.

“The darling!” thought Newland Archer, his glance flitting back to the young girl with the lilies-of-the-valley. “She doesn’t even guess what it’s all about.” And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity. “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. It was only that afternoon that May Welland had let him guess that she “cared” (New York’s consecrated phrase of maiden avowal), and already his imagination, leaping ahead of the engagement ring, the betrothal kiss and the march from Lohengrin, pictured her at his side in some scene of old European witchery.

He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the mos