Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. “But, I say, Dad: do you mean you won’t come up at all?”
“I don’t know,” said Archer slowly.
“If you don’t she won’t understand.”
“Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you.”
Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.
“But what on earth shall I say?”
“My dear fellow, don’t you always know what to say?” his father rejoined with a smile.
“Very well. I shall say you’re old-fashioned, and prefer walking up the five flights because you don’t like lifts.”
His father smiled again. “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s enough.”
Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture, passed out of sight under the vaulted doorway.
Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged balcony. He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall, and then ushered into the drawing room. He pictured Dallas entering that room with his quick assured step and high delightful smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy “took after him.”
Then he tried to see the persons already in the room—for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one—and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it ... He thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.
“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.
ENDNOTES
1 (p. 8) “We’ll read Faust together ... by the Italian lakes ... ” he thought: Edith Wharton was acquainted not only with Gounod’s opera of the Faust legend but also with the epic poetic drama by Johann von Goethe (1749-1832) in which Faust, an aging intellectual, makes a contract with the devil, Mephistopheles, to procure immortality. Wharton knew German and copied passages by Goethe into her notebook (unpublished), translating some verses. Her use of the opera in The Age of Innocence not only reproduces the fashion of the day but provides a contrast between Faust’s contract and Newland’s honor and, at the end of the novel, his aging. In the opera, when Faust’s lover, Marguerite, becomes pregnant, he runs off. For Newland Archer, May’s announcement of the coming child seals his fate.
2 (p. 13) like her Imperial namesake, she had won her way to success by strength of will: This passage displays Catherine Mingott’s free spirit in her acquaintance with singers and dancers of note, with European nobility, and even with Catholics. Wharton allies her with Ellen Olenska, Medora Manson, Mrs. Struthers, Ned Winsett—characters in the novel who are not bound by convention. Like Catherine the Great (1729-1796), the powerful Empress with a flamboyant sexual nature, Catherine Mingott has been a patron of the arts, but she never shared in the Czarina’s sexual spirit. Throughout the novel, Wharton sets up opposing camps of those who are relatively free of social constraint and those who live strictly by the rules of old New York.
3 (p. 30) Mrs. Archer, who had long been a widow, lived with her son and daughter... Bulwer—who, however, was beginning to be thought old-fashioned): In this paragraph, Wharton describes the genteel taste of Archer’s family, always ordinary and safe. A Wardian case was a glass apparatus for raising plants; Good Words, an English periodical; Ouida’s novels, the popular works of Marie de la Ramée (1839-1908). The family’s preference for the historical novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) over those of Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray reveals a humorless streak. Wharton read voraciously in English, French, German, and Italian. The literary references in the novel are carefully chosen to reflect the various characters. Newland is a gentleman reader who takes pleasure and refuge in his library. His reading list comes close to Wharton’s own in her reconstruction of the fashionable literature of the 1870s. At the outset of the novel, we learn that he does not admire Dickens or Thackeray, though her rendering of society brings to mind their comic vein, particularly Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. The difference between Wharton and Newland lies in his being tagged a dilettante, while throughout the novel she demonstrates with wit and brilliance the usefulness of her reading.
4 (p. 37) “Women should be free—as free as we are”: The question of women’s freedom runs throughout the novel. Here Newland’s exclamation is provoked by the “case of the Countess Olenska.” Ellen’s marriage to the Polish count was a complicated morganatic marriage. However, the ideal of freedom for women, like much of Newland Archer’s right thinking, remains rhetorical. According to Black’s Law Dictionary (1891), morganatic marriage is “a lawful and inseparable conjunction of a man of noble and illustrious birth, with a woman of inferior station, upon condition that neither the wife nor her children shall partake of the titles, arms or dignity of the husband, or succeed to his inheritance.... The marriage ceremony was regularly performed, the union was indisoluable.” (The article is signed “Wharton,” an amusing coincidence.)
5 (p. 42) who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family portraits and Chippendale: Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779) was an English furniture designer. Wharton’s use of decor and architecture of the era figures in her depiction of character. She was particularly attentive to architecture in her descriptions of old New York—to the brownstone rows, to the extravagance of the Beauforts’ mansion and Mrs. Mingott’s stone house uptown. With Ogden Codman, Jr., a Boston architect, she wrote The Decoration of Houses (1897), considered a classic book on interior design. Newland’s fears that May will adopt her mother’s fussy furnishings reflect Wharton’s own dislike of her mother’s overdressed rooms. Ellen Olenska’s house in the wrong part of town is casual and inviting, the van der Luyden’s colonial cottage spare and enchanting. All details of paintings and statues in the novel reveal character as well as class and are never mere decor.
6 (p. 71) She glanced at the writing-table ... opened a volume of the “Contes Drolatiques”: Newland is up-to-date as he reads the poetic drama of Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909). Contes Drolatigue is a collection of racy tales by the French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). Both works would be inappropriate reading for the innocent May.
7 (p. 85) Others had made the same attempt ... and some of the magazine editors and musical and literary critics: This paragraph and the one following mention celebrated performers and writers of the day. Edwin Booth (1833-1893) was the most famous tragic actor of the age. Washington Irving (1783-1859) would be the best-known American author.
8 (pp. 85-86) Newland Archer had been aware of these things ... to reach a stage of manners where they would naturally merge: This passage lists nineteenth-century writers of interest to Newland, including the French novelist Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) and the English poets Robert Browning (1812-1889) and William Morris (1834-1896), who was also a designer and painter.
9 (p. 103) “You’re like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: ‘The Portrait of a Gentleman. ’”: This is a reference to Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Literary critic R. W. B. Lewis points out that the portrait of Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence might be read as a tribute and reply to that novel.
10 (p. 112) “If only this new dodge for talking along a wire ... and the question of the telephone carried them safely back to the big house: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. Throughout the novel Wharton mentions inventions and technological advances: an
early typewriter, a stylographic pen, the telephone (as here), and long distance—all as ways of tracking the passing years in the novel. Her characters’ attitude toward innovation reflects their closed- or open-mindedness. Their allusions to Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the American poet who wrote tales of mystery, and to Jules Verne (1828-1905), the French writer of futuristic fantasy, are appropriate for their conversation on the new invention of the telephone.
11 (p. 114) That evening he unpacked his books ... as far outside the pale ofprobability as the visions of the night: This paragraph opens with reference to Newland’s reading of recently published works, among them a volume by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the English scientist and interpreter of Darwin, and the great novel Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1819-1880), as well as tales of the French writer Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897). The House of Life is a series of love poems by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).
12 (p. 210) a text from Jeremiah (chap. ii., verse 25) for his Thanksgiving sermon: The Bible text (Revised Standard Version) is: ”Keep your feet from going unshod / and your throat from thirst. / But you said, It is hopeless, / for I have loved strangers, / and after them I will go.“ Wharton is weaving in a verse on outsiders, foreigners or newly arrived people, which is misconstrued by Newland’s mother to mean fashionable trends.
13 (p. 219) Wall Street, the next day, had more reassuring reports of Beaufort’s situation: The panic of 1873 was, to put it simply, caused by the overextension of railroad bonds and a shrinking national economy. The failure of Jay Cooke, the financial expert who kept the Union afloat during the Civil War, begot other failures that would have an impact on the holdings of the privileged families of old New York. Beaufort brings to mind Jay Gould, the extravagant investor; unlike Gould, Beaufort did not buy devalued stocks to sustain the market. Taking up the insurance business was a comedown for Beaufort, who appears at the end of the novel to have been a survivor.
14 (p. 251) the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum: The current Metropolitan Museum ”in the Park“ was not built until 1880. Wharton is recalling the old museum at Fifty-third Street in Manhattan. The Wolfe collection is a collection of paintings given to the museum. Luigi Cesnola (1832-1904) was a collector of antiquities and the first director of the Metropolitan Museum.
AN INSPIRATION FOR THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
Edith Wharton took the title for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of old New York from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s 1788 painting The Age of Innocence. A British portrait painter and aesthetician, Reynolds (1723—1792) founded the Royal Academy and was elected its first president in 1768, and was knighted by King George III the following year. In his Discourses Delivered at the Royal Academy (1769—1791), which instantly became the foundation for the art criticism of his time, Reynolds justified the relevance of the Academy: “It is indeed difficult to give any other reason why an empire like that of Britain should so long have wanted an ornament so suitable to its greatness than that slow progression of things which naturally makes elegance and refinement the last effect of opulence and power.”
Wharton admired Reynolds; in fact, in her 1905 novel The House of Mirth, her heroine Lily Bart appears in a tableau vivant (literally, living picture) of Reynolds’s 1776 painting Mrs. Lloyd. But it is Reynolds’s grandiloquence and naivete that Wharton, an unfaltering ironist, invokes by using his title The Age of Innocence for a novel, written just after the devastation of World War I, that looks back to an earlier era.
In chapter five of The Age of Innocence (p. 30), Wharton writes:
Mrs. and Miss Archer were both great lovers of scenery. It was what they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels abroad, considering architecture and painting as subjects for men, and chiefly for learned persons who read Ruskin. Mrs. Archer had been born a Newland, and mother and daughter, who were as like as sisters, were both, as people said, “true Newlands”; tall, pale, and slightly round-shouldered, with long noses, sweet smiles and a kind of drooping distinction like that in certain faded Reynolds portraits. Their physical resemblance would have been complete if an elderly embonpoint had not stretched Mrs. Archer’s black brocade, while Miss Archer’s brown and purple poplins hung, as the years went on, more and more slackly on her virgin frame.
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.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
CARL VAN DOREN
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 c
ontrast 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)
FRANCIS HACKETT
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)
THE SATURDAY REVIEW
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.
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