Book Review: The Age of Innocence
When beauty becomes a prison...
The First World War hurt everyone: rich and poor, old and young. Edith Wharton wrote her masterpiece after she helped countless orphans and widows to thrive in the desperate ruins in France. Small wonder that she would look back over her life after the war, and reminisce with great insight on her coming of age in New York’s elite social circles in the 1870s.
In fact, Edith Wharton’s maiden name was “Jones,” of the idiom “keeping up with the Joneses.” Much of her childhood was spent in Europe, and she settled in France permanently after her divorce from Teddy Wharton became official in 1913. The first female to win the Pulitzer prize for fiction, Wharton was a maverick novelist, exposing adultery, women’s liberation and the hypocrisy of the social elites.
The novel opens at the opera, where Newland Archer is among those seeing and being seen. He is happily engaged to marry May Welland, a lovely young woman whose life and family are perfect for a man of his station in life. When May’s questionable cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, joins her family’s box, tongues begin to wag. Newland rushes to support her family’s embrace of their black sheep. In the process of ‘helping’, he falls for the woman.
And to his horror, although he does not give in to his impulse to have a real affair with the countess, all of society assumes that he has already done so by the end of the book. The beauty that he glimpses in Ellen seems closed to him, as if it is simply not possible for him to share in so great a reward.
Wharton juxtaposes innocence and ignorance throughout the novel, and by the end, the “innocent” memories that Newland Archer held of the Countess have kept him in a prison of his own making. Certainly the social conventions of his class in upper crust society are in part to blame, and yet, those very rules also provided a stability that he needed. Wharton is critical of elite society, and yet she cannot reject its morals outright.
Wharton explores the anthropology of social customs, but she also digs deeper, to the very core of the question. Is man affected more by nature or by nurture? Part of the brilliance of this novel is that she does not answer the question for the reader. The surprising ending is not so much a denouement as a mirror, to which the reader must make a response.
Discussion Questions:
When Archer finally visits Paris after May’s death, he wonders if the Countess views him “like a relic in a small dim chapel,” a figment of imagination rather than reality. Are the regrets of youth more imagined than real? Are yours?
The unfettered and passionate beauty that Ellen Olenska came to represent for Newland Archer is contrasted with the boring, unimaginative beauty of his wife, May. Yet, when his son reveals to him that his wife understood the depth of his sacrifice in not following his true love, Archer discovers a depth to his life that surprises him. Beauty can only be united in truth and goodness, and despite the fears and intrigues of his social set, Archer had lived a beautiful life. Has beauty ever surprised you by sneaking into your life under the form of goodness or truth? How?
Which is more influential in life: nature or nurture? Is it possible to separate the two?