Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton depicts with a sharp pen the 1870′s New-York upper-class society and its weaknesses: hypocrisy, absurd conventions, strict etiquette, pitiless judgments…
The events and people are perceived through the consciousness of the main character, Newland Archer. Archer considers himself superior in learning and wisdom to his peers. However, he is a perfect product of the proud society he overlooks:
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 on all the issues called moral.
This complex and torn personality will bring the dramatic development of the story: soon-to-be wed to the pretty and innocent May Welland, Newland falls in love with her cousin, Countess Olenska. The Countess, born in New York, spent most of her adult life in Europe, from where she has brought back a touch of independence and scandal. Indeed, she has left her unfaithful husband and fled with his secretary, before deciding to settle down where her roots are. Moreover, she seems unaware of the strict standards of New York: she lives in the wrong part of town, frequents the wrong people and shocks the upper-class by her liberal manners. Newland, who, on request of her bride’s family, has taken up to convince the countess against the idea of divorcing her husband, will soon be drawn to her by passionate feelings: he realizes that a woman of experience is a better companion to a man than a young ingénue who’s been taught to see the world through prejudiced eyes. He begins to see the flaws in May’s seemingly perfect upbringing:
As he dropped into the armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a large photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him in the first day of their romance, and which had now displaced all the other portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul’s custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland’s familiar features and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he has been taught to think, but an uncharted voyage on seas. [...] he reviewed his friends’ marriages – the supposedly happy ones – and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriage about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
Newland will learn that there can be more to a wife than beauty and a capacity to organize impressive dinners for the sake of notoriety; by getting to know Countess Olenska, he realizes that an experience of life and of love, along with a common interest and curiosity for travels and culture, could be a better basis for marriage. But how can one stand against the very values that one is supposed to represent? Can one find the courage to turn his back to his upbringing, his peers, his family?
In this tragic story, Wharton shows the prevailing of society and his standards against the individual, who is chained and kept on the "right" track. A society where a single slip from the path is hardly forgiven, where the only alternative to conformity is being an outcast. As the author point out, the world is not large enough to find happiness, if such a happiness doesn’t fit in the schemes of society:
" I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that – categories like that – won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other; and nothing else on earth will matter."
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear – where is that country? have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: "I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo – and it wasn’t different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."
However, the novel ends on a hopeful note. The conclusive chapters takes us some thirty years later, as Archer’s son is about to be married himself, to the girl he truly loves. Society has evolved, not only in the technical fields (the introduction of the telephone for privates, for example), but also on moral issues: what was unconceivable yesterday becomes possible, old conservatism fades away, liberal ideas emerge and make Archer wonder " what was left in the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?".
In his lifelong conflict between love and reason, we cannot help feeling that there was all along a touch of masochism in Archer’s personality, that what has made his passion so strong was precisely the impossibility to surrender to it, as perceivable in his remarks on the young generation:
"The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t. Only – the thing one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as wildly?"
So that finally, maybe Archer was more adapted to the old standards than he believed himself to be. This makes the reader look back through the book, finding that maybe, Archer, with his a false air of a rebel, is the most hypocrite and deceitful of them all. Instead of teaching his wife to be free-spirited, he has preferred to maintain her in a state of ignorance and in strict conformity with the standards. His wife, despite a lack of culture and interest in intellectual matter, is more clever than he gives her credit for, she is a passive-manipulative character that finally achieves her goals. The Countess, though experienced and learned, is maybe the most "innocent" of the two feminine characters; she reveals herself not cunning enough to understand the ways of society or the real motivations between the acts and words of individuals; she appears to be the real victim in this story.
The Age of Innocence is not only a picture of nineteenth century New York society, but also an timeless mirror of human nature, in its contradictions and complexities…
Rating: 4/5
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