Another in my Edith Wharton series...

My most recent Wharton (1862-1937) was The Custom of the Country, last November, with Haley Larsen's Closely Reading book group.

The Age of Innocence was published seven years after that one, in 1920, and it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. I was vaguely familiar with the story, as I'd seen Martin Scorsese's film version in 1994 (very faithful to the book, by all accounts). Here's the beginning of my diary summary of that: "A most beautiful film. Every shot a tableau. Beautiful montages of the opera, formal dinners, balls..." But I'd never read the book, and I'd forgotten many of the details. So I was really happy that Henry Eliot chose it as a read-along for the month of February. I opted for the audio-version, which was exquisitely read by David Horovitch.



The novel is set in 1870s New York, in the "Gilded Age" that Wharton herself knew so well (she was born into the wealthy Jones family -- the one that is said to have been the origin of the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses").

It's a brilliant book... Wharton offers us a richly critical picture of the high society of the day, which is tightly knit, conservative, and rigid. Everything about it squeezes the life out of any who want to do things differently -- or more honestly.

Newland Archer, our male protagonist, is born into this world; so is May Welland, who becomes his fiancee. Within it circulate characters like the van der Luydens, arbiters of taste and respectability, and Sillerton Jackson, the arch-gossip.

But there are disturbers of the peace. Julius Beaufort is one. Of uncertain origins, he's a womanizer and a financial disaster. He comes and goes throughout the narrative like a fox among the chickens. Much more respectable, but still somewhat unconventional, are May's Granny Mingott and Aunt Medora.

But our disruptor-in-chief is Ellen Olenska. She has spent much of her life in Europe, and is now separated from her European husband, and back in New York. Her family (she's a cousin of May's) attempts to rehabilitate her, but she never quite escapes that initial whiff of scandal. The arbiters of morals and behaviour can't contemplate a divorce, so she's stuck in a kind of limbo, unwilling to return to her husband, but not free to marry again either.

And she and Newland fall in love, sparking a flash of the brightest fire beneath the formal etiquette and tightly constrained reticence of their environment.


Madrid, 2020. But I'm sure Wharton's characters swooshed through rooms like these...

Newland starts the novel very firmly on the side of convention, announcing his engagement to May (as a means of supporting the family's Ellen-rehabilitation efforts) and employing his legal credentials to persuade her not to seek a divorce. Still not totally in touch with his feelings for her (he's a blockhead in many ways), but instinctively wanting to stay on solid ground, he urges May's family to allow their wedding to go ahead earlier than planned -- a request that's granted just when he becomes aware that it's actually Ellen whom he loves...

But what to do? "What to do" is the question that haunts this book. Would it have been more honourable of Newland to call the engagement off? What a scandal... What social suicide.. And anyway, what then? Ellen is still legally married (thanks to Newland's own efforts...).

If you're a woman, alone, and in the least bit autonomous, you're suspect in this society. Women will look askance at you; men will look appraisingly at you... Later in the novel, when Newland is married, and his marriage is dull and unsatisfying, and this rogue love is nagging away at him, he suggests to Ellen that they run away together, to some part of the world where categories like "wife" and "mistress" are not so hard and fast. But Ellen has been around long enough to know that this would not be a pleasant way to live. And anyway, what about all the people they would hurt?

Nothing "happens" between these two beyond a kiss, and yet the tension that connects them is electric. Eventually, he pleads: "Come to me once." She agrees on the day after tomorrow, after which she will go to Europe. But this "once" scheme is spiked by May...

Ah yes, May... Wharton is very clever in the way she shows us events from Newland's perspective, allowing us to speculate for ourselves on others' points of view. And Newland is pretty obtuse at times. He regards May as beautiful, but a little superficial (snobbish and unintellectual). We, however, rapidly see what he's overlooking. May's a sportswoman. She's no shrinking violet. She's competitive. She's TOUGH. She sees fairly early in the piece the way her husband's affections are trending. In fact, she thinks he and Ellen are out-and-out lovers. But she doesn't confront him. That's not what New York society does. New York society communicates in codes, hieroglyphics.

There's a brilliant example when Newland cooks up an excuse to go to Washington. "On business..." Oh, says May, looking him straight in the eye: "You must be sure to go and see Ellen..." I need to quote Wharton's gloss on this simple statement, because it's a bravura performance:

"It was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant: 'Of course you understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen, and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort to get her to return to her husband. I also know that, for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement that Ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind of criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably gave you, this evening, the hint that has made you so irritable... Hints have indeed not been wanting; but since you appear unwilling to take them from others, I offer you this one myself, in the only form in which well-bred people of our kind can communicate unpleasant things to each other: by letting you understand that I know you mean to see Ellen when you are in Washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for that purpose; and that, since you are sure to see her, I wish you to do so with my full and explicit approval -- and to take the opportunity of letting her know what the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely to lead to.'"

And then May adjusts the wick of the lamp... "'They smell less if one blows them out,' she explained, with her bright housekeeping air. On the threshold she turned and paused for his kiss."

The whole tacit communication is an object lesson in how to convey meaning without actually saying anything... How powerful restraint can be, if wielded by someone as determined as May.



And May wins. Just after Newland and Ellen decide on the rendezvous that will take their relationship one step further, May has a conversation with her rival. There will have been no pleading, of course, not even any open acknowledgement of the situation. But soon Newland hears that Ellen is returning to Europe. And no-one, she insists, should try to dissuade her.

May decides to throw a farewell party for her cousin. And if Newland's wife has up to now just seemed tenaciously, if justifiably, self-protective, now she seems cruel... She's the victor. And she knows it.

And that's how the rest of society sees it too. At this public dinner, the first of this scale that the young couple have given, Newland realizes exactly that everyone has believed that he and Ellen were lovers. But he also realizes that there's a tacit societal agreement to just whitewash it all. The dinner is a confirmation of the story the guests want to tell, which is the story of the irresistible power of the family and society. This is a tribal rite. It's all very civilized on the surface, but it's vicious underneath.

Newland still treasures the glimmer of a possibility for seeing Ellen again. Why can't he travel? Why can't he visit her in Paris? But this option is foreclosed when May tells him she's pregnant. In fact, she announced this news to Ellen before she even knew for sure. That's what prompted Ellen's sudden desire to go back to Europe without any further intimacy with Newland.

May, backed by her "tribe", has managed the whole situation...


At one point, Newland accompanies Ellen to the Parker House hotel, pictured here in 1866, so that she can leave a note for her husband's emissary. "The Parker House hotel was founded in 1855 by Harvey D. Parker. It was a huge marble building, the first hotel in America that operated on ‘the European plan’ with meals charged separately. Charles Dickens stayed there for five months in 1868-9 during his American tour and gave a performance of A Christmas Carol at the hotel..."

***

In the final section, we fast-forward 30 years. Newland can congratulate himself on being a good, upstanding citizen. May has died, and he genuinely mourns her. They have three children, one of whom is engaged to Beaufort's daughter. Beaufort's daughter... Beaufort with the louche reputation back in the day... But nobody cares any more. Times have changed...

Newland is well aware that he has missed "the flower of life". But he is resigned, tranquil, accepting: "Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways." And yet he also acknowledges that society has progressed in some respects: "There was good in the new order too."

His older son, Dallas, is determined to drag his father off to Paris. Newland acquiesces, but decides not to meet Ellen when the opportunity arises. She's right there, in the house outside which he's waiting. But he doesn't go in.

He considers the "rich atmosphere" in which she has lived for the past 30 years. He has been "living with his youthful memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship". Does he feel inferior? Does he feel jealous? The trip to Paris has already brought him face to face "with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime". Does she just represent, in too painful and stark a way, everything he didn't pursue?

The novel ends with Newland continuing these musings. He envisages the room she occupies: "'It's more real to me here than if I went up,' he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

"He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.

"At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel."

What a beautiful, restrained, poignant ending...

But as readers we're left wondering: Did they do the right thing, Ellen and Newland...

I certainly felt, watching the movie back in 1994, that the whole thing was a tragedy. I wrote in my diary: "Edith Wharton is a scientist vivisecting her characters, and watching how they writhe. Passion hidden under opulent interiors. Fire beneath the formality and form and etiquette. Sad lives. Stupid May was the ultimate victor. The passionate and intelligent suffer for the rest of their lives."

Now, all these years later, I don't know... Would Newland have been happier if he'd thrown his marriage to the four winds, and sailed off to Europe with Ellen? I don't know... And we certainly wonder whether Ellen would have been happier if she'd yoked herself to what Sarah Blackwood calls "a flawed man trying to achieve his own freedom through her"...

What of the title? Henry Eliot argues that it's "an ironic reference to Newland's unquestioning acceptance of the New York codes and traditions, before Ellen arrives to open his eyes -- his loss of 'innocence'." By the time Wharton was writing, the Gilded Age she was depicting lay half a century in the past. Did she genuinely see it as an "age of innocence", compared with the shifting mores of her own post-war era? Or is that title offered to us in a spirit of tongue-in-cheek archness? Surely the latter... There's little that's innocent about the characters we meet in The Age of Innocence -- except perhaps the relationship between Newland and Ellen...


On the same excursion that took Ellen and Newland to Parker House, they take a steamboat to Point Arley (actually Point Shirley), and eat at what was probably Taft’s Inn (pictured here around 1885). Wharton describes its "long wooden verandah, with the sea coming in at the windows". The clientele at Taft’s Inn included over the years Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes

***

This post does little justice to the detail of this novel, which is very intricately plotted.

There's lots more, though, in the following sources:

-- Writing The Age of Innocence offers plenty of interesting cameos, reproductions of documents, and photos.

-- Nasrullah Mambrol sums up the reactions to the novel from different generations and points of view.

-- Sarah Blackwood points to the way The Age of Innocence was "trivialized" in its day both by enthusiasts and detractors, and discusses the novel's genesis in Wharton's own life story (she was unhappily married to Edward Wharton for almost 30 years, before they finally divorced in 1913; experienced a passionate affair with journalist William Morton Fullerton; and spent long periods abroad, where she grappled with "the feelings of national exile that had been with her since childhood"). Blackwood also argues that The Age of Innocence actually has a happy ending...

-- Sam Jordison explores the small details that convey so much: Windows, flowers, envelopes... And he quotes Martin Scorsese, who highlights "the brutality under the manners" of New York's Gilded Age.

-- Hugh Rockoff discusses the origins of the great fortunes of the Gilded Age.

-- Benner et al expose the new Gilded Age in the US, "one in which millionaires are turning into billionaires overnight".

***

The short version, though, is that this is a magnificent novel. Beautifully crafted, it offers us fascinating characters to ponder, and prompts us to ask hard questions about the way individuals relate to society.