The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

A beautiful, marvelous book. Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, in 1921, the first woman to do so. The prize is well-deserved, although she received it only because the judges’ original choice, Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street was vetoed by the Pulitzer Prize board, led by the conservative President of Columbia University. (Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel prize in 1930, so don’t feel too bad for him). Wharton’s writing is filled with detail and humor. The main characters are real, and the secondary characters just as true, if reduced more to “types”. The central conflict is small: a man, Newland Archer torn between two women who represent two opposing sides of himself. May Welland is his conservative, social rule-respecting, fiancee. Ellen Olenska is May’s cousin, and the free-spirit that awakens Newland’s own desire for adventure. May is “Welland”, happy with the “land”, her social world, as it is. Newland Archer’s name includes a hint that he may be aiming in his life for a new land. Olenska, the still-married but estranged wife of a Polish Count, returned alone to New York, becomes Newland Archer’s target.

I had meant to read more of Edith Wharton after enjoying The House of Mirth a year and a half ago. Like that novel, The Age of Innocence is primarily set in New York City, with one excursion to Europe in the second half of both novels. Like George Elliot’s Middlemarch, which I read earlier this summer, The Age of Innocence is set in an earlier time than its writing: the early 1870s, for The Age of Innocence, as an old New York of strictly defined social strata was giving way to new people and a more relaxed social code. Middlemarch, written in 1870, looks back to the 1830s, and also features a woman feeling constrained by the social position allowed to her. Both novels have playful fun with the contemporary eye of the author gently teasing the characters of the past with the yet-to-arrive dreams of the future: trains coming to rural England in Middlemarch, the technological wonders made possible by electricity for The Age of Innocence, as well as a scene where the fact that no tunnel yet exists to allows trains from Washington to come all the way into the city, gives Newland sufficient time to enact an important scene in a carriage when he travels by carriage to Jersey City to fetch Ellen Olenska and they have an important private conversation on the way back.

Middlemarch must have been on Wharton’s mind because the novel appears in a list of books Newland receives from London, “The box was full of things he had been waiting of impatiently; a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant tales, and a novel called “Middlemarch,” as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews.” (p. 156 – I read a paperback “100th Anniversary Edition” from Scribner).

Newland Archer is thirty-one or so. He’s a lawyer, which matters a little, later, and from a good family, which matters a great deal. He’s asked May Welland, also from a good family, to marry him, and at the beginning of the novel she has just said yes earlier that day but they haven’t officially announced their engagement. The opening scene is at the opera. The novel begins, “On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing Faust at the Academy of Music in New York” which dates the year to 1871 exactly. Ellen Olenska appears in the Welland box. The gentlemen in Newland’s club box recognize her as the Countess Olenska, who, if she’s here in New York, must have left her husband the Polish Count. They relish the scandal. Ellen is May’s cousin. They have the same grandmother, Catherine, also known as Mrs. Manson Mingott. Newland, realizing Ellen’s precarious position in society and wishing to rescue her, proposes to May that they announce their engagement at a ball that very night, thus, the vulnerable Ellen will be supported by two prominent families rather than just one.

Ellen establishes herself in New York. The men of the tight social circle are charmed by her. But she also shows herself to be unconventional. She does what isn’t done in attending the Sunday salon of a woman who has yet to be included in the proper world. Society shuns her, not only has she left her husband but there are rumors she may have been unfaithful with the male secretary that helped her return to New York. Newland saves her by arranging for the couple at the pinnacle of society, the Van der Luyden’s, to invite her to dinner and a reception. Ellen begins to be accepted, though still seen as “”foreign”. Newland begins to be torn between the completely conventional May, who he hopes he will be able to transform once he marries her into a more liberated and stimulating companion than she has been brought up to be, and Ellen, who has daring in her soul.

Then the family engages Newland (remember he’s a lawyer) to help persuade Ellen to go back to her husband, counter to his own interests. Divorce will not do, according to their rules, and an unhappy marriage is preferable to being cut off form the money now controlled by her husband. But Ellen doesn’t care for the money and will not go back. Newland, then, against the family’s wishes, proposes that she go through with the divorce, and that he end his engagement to May and marry Ellen. In an amazing chapter, Wharton has Newland and Ellen rehearse the conflicting motivations and duties that make the scheme impossible. Ellen loves Newland because of the way he protected her in society. She could not love him if it required doing something that would hurt May and the other members of society that stood up for her. If Newland willfully hurt May, he would not be the man she loved. She says, “I can’t love you unless I give you up” (p. 189). And then, after much fruitless pleading from Newland, a telegram from May arrives agreeing to move their wedding up to Easter and the trap closes.

Then comes a Book Two, which begins with Newland and May’s marriage. It’s a wonderful scene exemplifying the traditions that govern the social world. There’s a lovely elision that happens just after, “‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here,’ the Rector began…” (p. 204) followed immediately by the couple exiting the church. There’s another elision a little later as chapter XIX becomes chapter XX and the wedding afternoon fades into a scene several weeks later on the couple’s honeymoon trip to Europe. Here there’s an odd scene where Newland and May have an awkward dinner with a couple of women that May and her family had met on an earlier trip to Europe. There’s also a Frenchman at the dinner, a tutor to the nephew of one of the ladies, who seems out of place, both at the dinner and in the novel, but who returns later.

The scenes, and time, move more quickly in Book Two. The couple return from Europe. They spend the summer in Newport. Newland continues to obsess about Ellen but has fewer chances to see her. She’s moved down to Washington with her mother. Her hears she’s going to be in Boston and arranges to find her there. They have lunch together. He lies to his wife about having business in Washington just so he can see Ellen. The Frenchman from London shows up in New York and we learn that he has been hired by the Polish Count to bring an offer to Ellen to hopefully persuade her to return. It’s a bit of an contrivance in an otherwise flawless novel that this same man has connections both to the random ladies from May’s past and Ellen’s husband. In any case, the messenger fails in his mission to get Ellen to return.

And then the grandmother, Catherine, has a small stroke and requests that Ellen come up to see her. That’s the scene where Newland meets Ellen’s train and they share a kiss in the carriage. He meets her again at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and begs if they can’t be married that she at least consent to spend a night with him. It feels a shocking step too far that he would suggest it. She agrees; for a night two days later, but doesn’t go through with it. Instead, Newland learns that Ellen has abruptly decided to sail to Europe, not to return to her husband, but to live alone in Paris. Then May reveals to Newland that she is pregnant, and that two weeks earlier, just before Ellen made her decision to leave for Paris, May had shared the news of her pregnancy with Ellen, and that the final impossibility of Ellen ever being with Newland was confirmed.

In every case, as the obstacles to Newland and Ellen being together mount, it’s always Ellen wishing to preserve order and respectability and show kindness to the New York society and Newland who have supported her, that steals her to refusing Newland’s entreaties. And though May is portrayed as “innocent” and never reveals that she knows or even suspects Newland’s affair, at every juncture where Newland might actually leave, she throws up a new length of rope that further ties him to her. There’s a thrilling piece of writing (p. 284) where Newland and May have a casual conversation, he’s lying to her about his reason for going to Washington, with a single sentence spoken, followed by a long paragraph that extrapolates everything that May actually communicates in her terse, polite, answer. The reader is torn, because there is such romance and “rightness” to Newland and Ellen being together, but it is clearly and obviously impossible for him to abandon May, and there is an equal “rightness” to Newland and May being together as they finally are.

There’s a final chapter, XXXIV, where the timeline leaps twenty-six years ahead. Newland and May had a life together, parented three children. Newland is shown to have been much more conventional after all than he imagined himself. May has recently died. The eldest son, Dallas, is an architect. He’s been asked by his firm to travel to Europe for some research and takes dad with him. In Paris, he decides to look up the old cousin of his mother’s, Ellen Olenska. He teases his father, genially, about Ellen being an old flame, which seems not to phase the son. In the final scene, Newland, now fifty-seven, lets his son go up to Ellen’s apartment but declines to see her himself. He imagines the scene of her rooms, and his son entering, and what she may have become and says outloud, but to no one, “It’s more real to me here than if I went up” (p. 376).

Wharton herself seems ambivalent about the world that was lost. Her nostalgic look back is filled with both fondness and critique. Born in 1862, she would have been a dozen or so years younger than May Welland and come of age more in the new world than the old. Newland’s fate isn’t tragedy because his nature belongs half in the old world and he’s happy there. Ellen’s fate is sadder but I wouldn’t say she’s a tragic figure either. Though her life is constrained by the social manners of the old world, she respects the ethic behind them, and regards the people and the system that sustains them with gratitude not rancor.

The milieu is people of wealth. This is the New York of opera, dinner parties, household staff, Fifth Avenue, new dresses every year ordered from Paris (and then not worn for a year so as not to be seen as ahead of the fashion) and summers in Newport. Although the Civil War has just ended, it’s never mentioned, none of the characters or their families seem to have been involved, and the war’s conclusion seems to have caused no effect on them or their way of life.

Wharton moved permanently to Europe in the years following the publication of The House of Mirth and before the first world war. She wrote The Age of Innocence in France, not New York. She died in 1937.

Jim and I had been in Tucson for the weekend of September 27-29. I had finished Samuel Steward’s Parisian Lives while I was there and was looking for something to read on the plane ride home. I bought The Age of Innocence at the Tucson airport. While I was browsing, the bookstore clerk approached helping another customer. He wanted a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which they didn’t have. I encouraged him to try In Cold Blood, if he wanted Truman Capote, but told him not to expect light romantic comedy. He accepted my recommendation. I wonder what he thought. For my part, I was quite pleased with my purchase.