Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

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.

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 honorable 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 he was 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 realization. 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 molded: 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 disheveled daisy to her lips and lifted her large eyes to the sophisticated countenance of the little brown Faust-Capoul,
^b
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)
^c
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 center 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
¹
... 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,
^d
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 most popular married women of the “younger set,” in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it. If he had probed to the bottom of his vanity (as he sometimes nearly did) he would have found there the wish that his wife should be as worldly-wise and as eager to please as the married lady whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years; without, of course, any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred that unhappy being’s life, and had disarranged his own plans for a whole winter.

How this miracle of fire and ice was to be created, and to sus tain itself in a harsh world, he had never taken the time to think out; but he was content to hold his view without analyzing it, since he knew it was that of all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and turned their opera-glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product of the system. In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old New York gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world, than any other man of the number. Singly they betrayed their inferiority; but grouped together they represented “New York,” and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine in all the issues called moral. He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome—and also rather bad form—to strike out for himself.