The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence / Edith Wharton
NY: Penguin Classics, 1996, c1920.
330 p.

I have been reading a few more classics in the last little while; after greatly enjoying The House of Mirth, I moved on to The Age of Innocence, Wharton's 1920 novel that won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize (the first to be awarded to a woman).

The story follows Newland Archer, who is about to marry the young, beautiful and conventional May Welland. But just as their engagement occurs, May's cousin the Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York, after fleeing her cruel husband. This scandal threatens to overshadow the Wellands so Archer steps in to help out, and ends up spending quite a bit of time with Ellen. 

Her unconventionality, her bohemian tendencies, and her uncertain social status, all appeal to him. She seems to bring a breath of air from outside the very constrained, rule-bound New York society that Newland Archer exists within (and benefits greatly from, it must be said.) Newland conceives a grand passion for Ellen, one that is never consummated, although this doesn't really matter in the end as appeareances are against them. 

The sweet and gentle May, on the other hand, seems like exactly the innocent blank slate that Newland was looking forward to shaping to his tastes. This kind of blankly reared girl, with “the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience” is the ideal of Golden Age New York, and just the kind that men like Newland feel they are entitled to. 

He compares them, and falls in love with Ellen while deprecating May for her lack of worldly knowledge, but when May shows she is not incapable of social manoeuvring, her sudden abilities do not delight Newland but disgust him. He is an inconsistent individual, who -- at least to me -- seems to only see the women in his life as props for his ideal of himself. Even his passion for Ellen is a way to enlarge his vision of himself as different to all the other men in his social strata. 

The grand passion fails; Newland stays within his conventional marriage and retains his social standing, they have children, times change and his long ago love affair seems like something that would be considered tame in the 1920s New York of his children. The Age of Innocence is past, and a nostalgia permeates the book, for a lost age even though it was rigid and unforgiving socially; at least a nostalgia from the older members of society's perspective. Even when Newland is given a chance to meet Ellen again after 30 years, he chooses his memories instead. Heaven forbid that a woman who has lived independently in Paris for 30 years should give him the sense that she hasn't needed him all this time. 

While I enjoyed this book, I found it a little slower going than some of the others. Perhaps because it is from the viewpoint of Newland Archer, who I didn't much like (can you tell?). Wharton's writing is exquisite, piercing, unforgiving -- the characters aren't able to hide from her scrutiny. Nobody is perfect, and her sharp critique of the social rules show that regular people's lives are twisted by "good form" and the expectations of What Is, or Isn't, Done. 

But I didn't love any of the characters here, didn't hope for one result for anyone, didn't engage with their struggles like I did with Lily Bart's in The House of Mirth, for example. This story of lost love is a great exposé of New York hypocrisies, and features fantastic writing with incisive comments on the status of marriage and expectations of women in this age. I just didn't connect with the characters in the same way as some of her other books. Nonetheless it's still a classic with quite a lot to say about the status of women and social expectations, even 100 years later.