Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (49 page)

Reynolds’s
The Age of Innocence
depicts a five-year-old girl sitting in profile. She wears a sun-yellow dress that nearly covers her small, bare feet. Her folded hands clasp her heart, and a yellow bow cleaves her tousled hair. The girl’s face is cherubic as she faces away from a listing tree toward an open, celestial sky. The landscape, dotted with distant trees, is dusky, and it looks as if the child’s caretakers have abandoned the day’s picnic, leaving her alone as a cold night descends. The portrait’s luminosity arises from the girl’s sweet, curious face and her yellow dress.

We can no more do without some notion or other of an age more golden than our own than we can do without bread. There must be, we assure ourselves, a more delectable day yet to come, or there must have been one once. The evidence of prophecy, however, is stronger than that of history, which, somehow, fails to find the perfect age. Mrs. Wharton has never ranged herself with the prophets, contented, apparently, with being the most intellectual of our novelists and surveying with level, satirical eyes the very visible world. By the “Age of Innocence” she means the seventies in New York during the past century; and the innocence she finds there is “the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience.” To the hotter attacks which angrier critics have recently been making upon that age she does not lend herself. Her language is cool and suave. And yet the effect of her picture is an unsparing accusation of that genteel decade when the van der Luydens of Skuytercliff were the ultimate arbiters of “form” in Manhattan, and “form” was occupation and religion for the little aristocracy which still held its tight fortress in the shaggy city so soon about to overwhelm it. The imminence of the rising tide is never quite indicated. How could it be, when the characters of the action themselves do not see it, bound up as they are with walking their wintry paths and hugging their iron taboos? Newland Archer suspects a change, but that is because he is a victim of the tribal order which sentences him to a life without passion, without expression, without satisfaction. The Countess Olenska suspects it, but she too is a victim, too fine for the rougher give-and-take of her husband’s careless European society and yet not conventional enough for the dull routine which in her native New York covers the fineness to which also she is native. The peculiar tragedy of their sacrifice is that it is for the sake of a person, Archer’s wife, who is virtuous because she is incapable of any deep perturbation, and willing to suit herself to the least decorum of their world because she is incapable of understanding that there is anywhere anything larger or freer. The unimaginative not only miss the flower of life but they shut others from it as well.

Mrs. Wharton’s structure and methods show no influence of the impressionism now broadening the channel of fiction; she does not avoid one or two touches of the florid in her impassioned scenes; she rounds out her story with a reminiscent chapter which forces in the note of elegy where it only partially belongs. But “The Age of Innocence” is a masterly achievement. In lonely contrast to almost all the novelists who write about fashionable New York, she knows her world. In lonely contrast to the many who write about what they know without understanding it or interpreting it, she brings a superbly critical disposition to arrange her knowledge in significant forms. These characters who move with such precision and veracity through the ritual of a frozen caste are here as real as their actual lives would ever have let them be. They are stiff with ceremonial garments and heavy with the weight of imagined responsibilities. Mrs. Wharton’s triumph is that she has described these rites and surfaces and burdens as familiarly as if she loved them and as lucidly as if she hated them.

—from
The Nation
(November 3, 1920)

The Age of Innocence
is spare and neat. It is also quick with a certain kind of dry sympathy and at times like a tongue of fire. The “best people” are, after all, a trite subject for the analyst, but in the novel Mrs. Wharton has shown them to be, for her, a superb subject. She has made of them a clear, composed, rounded work of art. In thinking that this old New York society is extinct, succeeded by a brisk and confident generation, Mrs. Wharton is amazingly sanguine, but this does not impair her essential perceptions. She has preserved a given period in her amber—a pale, pure amber that has living light.

—from
The New Republic
(November 17, 1920)

 

For many English readers
[The Age of Innocence]
will be a revelation of the depths which can be sounded by international ignorance. Gentlemen of unbounded leisure and a taste for commercial probity which amounts to a disease, ladies combining the angel and the bore in a measure beyond the dreams even of a Thackeray, troops of obsequious and efficient white domestics! Not such are the inhabitants whom most of us have mentally assigned to New York—at any stage of that city’s existence. But Mrs. Wharton abundantly demonstrates this state of things obtained only in a very limited circle, to a degree inconceivable by older and more corrupt civilizations. A happy circle it cannot well be called, since to assert that happiness may be compatible with dullness is to state a contradiction in terms; by rights it should not be attractive any more than happy, but the author contrives to make it so, partly no doubt through the easy laughter called forth by its patently ludicrous standards, but partly also from admiration for the finer element contained in them.

—December 4, 1920

 

What about us? What about her readers? Does Mrs. Wharton expect us to grow warm in a gallery where the temperature is so sparklingly cool? We are looking at portraits—are we not? These are human beings, arranged for exhibition purposes, framed, glazed and hung in the perfect light. They pale, they grow paler, they flush, they raise their “clearest eyes,” they hold out their arms to each other, “extended, but not rigid,” and the voice is the voice of the portrait:

“ ‘What’s the use—when you will go back?’ he broke out, a great hopeless
How on earth can I keep you?
crying out to her beneath his words.”

Is it—in this world—vulgar to ask for more? To ask that the feeling shall be greater than the cause that excites it, to beg to be allowed to share the moment of exposition (is not that the very moment that all our writing leads to?) to entreat a little wildness, a dark place or two in the soul?

We appreciate fully Mrs. Wharton’s skill and delicate workmanship; she has the situation in hand from the first page to the last; we realize how savage must sound our cry of protest, and yet we cannot help but make it; that after all we are not above suspicion—even the “finest” of us!

—from her review of
The Age of Innocence
in the
Athenæum
(December 10, 1920)

1. “The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies,” (p. 16) writes Edith Wharton. But “What about us? What about her readers?” asks Katherine Mansfield—is it vulgar “to ask that the feeling shall be greater than the cause that excites it?” In short, is Wharton herself guilty of faint implications and pale delicacies?

2. What historical circumstances, would you say, produced the social order of
The Age of Innocence?

3. “The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else,” (pp. 284—285) writes Edith Wharton. Do you feel a subversive impulse in this novel? If you were Ellen Olenska or Newland Archer in Wharton’s world, would you have done anything differently?

4. If Edith Wharton were to write about a different class of people, would she need to come up with a different prose style? (You might consider her novella
Ethan Frome.)

5. “His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.” (p. 185) Whose fault is this dismal vision of Newland Archer’s future? Is it the fault of a person or persons, or society, or human nature in general, or an extra-human force?

Benstock, Shari.
No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton.
New York: Scribner‘s, 1994.

Gimbel, Wendy.
Edith Wharton: Orphancy and Survival.
New York: Praeger, 1984.

Lewis, R. W. B.
Edith Wharton: A Biography.
New York: Harper and Row, 1975. The most authoritative biography of Wharton.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin.
A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. A fine in terpretive biography.

Bell, Millicent, ed.
The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. This collection includes many fine essays on Wharton.

Bloom, Harold, ed.
Modern Critical Views: Edith Wharton.
New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

Nevius, Blake.
Edith Wharton: A Study of her Fiction.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953.

Price, Alan.
The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. A perceptive study of the novel’s relation to the historical time when it was written.

The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton, 1891—1937.
2 vols. Edited by Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001.

The House of Mirth.
1905. With an introduction by Mary Gordon; notes by R. W. B. Lewis. New York: Vintage Books/Library of America, 1990.

The House of Mirth.
1905. With an introduction by Jeffrey Meyers. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.

The Letters of Edith Wharton.
Edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Scribner‘s, 1988.