"The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this novel was written in 1920 but is set in New York in the 1870s in the upper echelons of society (described as "rich and idle and ornamental"; Ch 11). It is a world of balls and opera evenings, a world of a tight-knit group of rich families, and a world where respectability is everything. Men are allowed to break the rules with impunity providing that the affair is hidden and the scandal is suppressed. 

The hero, Newland Archer, has had his fling, an affair with a married lady. Now he is engaged to May, a girl whom he assumes is not only virginal but utterly innocent. But on the night that their engagement is announced he meets May's cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, who married a Polish nobleman, was mistreated, and fled the marriage. She faces ostracism from the NY social circle because she refuses to go back to her husband. Newland, who harbours vague notions of gender equality, falls in love with Ellen. Will he flout convention and run off with her? Or will he knuckle down to do his duty to his fiancee and his family?

I find it difficult to understand why this novel enabled Wharton to become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (although the three judges actually awarded the prize to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street but were overturned by the supervising board). Perhaps at the time it was written, The Age of Innocence was a ground-breaking book but I found it little more than a rather conventional romance. There are implied criticisms of the hypocrisy embodied in the double standards allowing men to have (discreet) mistresses and expecting women to be pure, but at the end of the day the book explores the dilemma of the male protagonist and the feelings of and consequences for his would-be paramour are only glimpsed from her reactions to him. It would be interesting to have the book rewritten from Ellen's point of view.

It's and easy read and quite fun. It's well-paced, with major turning points at the 50% and 75% mark; although it rather surprisingly skipped about thirty years to provide a sort of epilogue in the last few chapters. There are some astute observations in it but few of the characters progress beyond the caricature stage. The period is rather clunkily set by referring to the latest novels (eg The Marble Faun, Middlemarch, Dickens and Thackeray and Ouida and Bulwer) and quoting poems from, eg Tennyson, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and recent inventions such as the telephone "this new dodge for talking along a wire" (Ch 15) and the "fascinating new game of lawn tennis" (Ch 20)

In a 2015 lecture entitled The Novel & Psychology and available on the Gresham College website, Professor Belinda Jack says that this novel is more than just social satire but social satire inextricably entangled with psychology. "For Wharton, characters are not separable one from another. Identity is rather a function of multiple relationships and not simply with other ‘characters’.”

Selected quotes:

• "Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the 'new people' whom New York was beginning to dread" (Ch 1)
• "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." (Ch 1)
• "Let the young man have his way, my dear; don't wait till the bubble's off the wine." (Ch 4)
• "'He - eventually - married her.' There were volumes of innuendo in the way the 'eventually' was spaced, and each syllable given its due stress." (Ch 5)
• "It was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts." (Ch 5)
• "What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a 'decent' fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?" (Ch 6)
• "He saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other." (Ch 6)
• "In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs." (Ch 6)
• "She had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at HIS jokes)" (Ch 6)
• "As was always the case with legal associations of old standing in New York, all the partners named on the office letter-head were dead; and Mr Letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking, his own grandson." (Ch 11)
• "Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, had inaugurated a 'literary salon'; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it." (Ch 12)
• "Everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams." (Ch 18)
• "Watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell." (Ch 21)
• "In the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once." (Ch 31)
• "The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else." (Ch 34)

April 2023; 502 pages (mine was a large print edition)

On 23rd April (Shakespeare's birthday!) 2023 I watched the 1995 Martin Scorcese film. It starred Daniel Day-Lewis as Newland, Michelle Pfeiffer as the Countess Olenska and Winona Ryland as May. It's a surprisingly old-fashioned film: the opening credits felt like a 1950s or even 1930s film. The screenplay, involving a lot of voice-over narration (also a 1950s feel), was surprisingly faithful (appropriately for a story about never quite being unfaithful) to the original book. As a film it was perfectly placed, with the big turning point (he loves her but he is marrying someone else) almost exactly at the 50% mark.

TAOI was rated 45th by Robert McCrum on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God