The Age of Innocence

Summary (from the publisher): Set in old New York, this novel details the thwarted romance between Newland Archer, a young dandy, and the beautiful, unconventional divorcée Countess Ellen Olenska. The cast of characters includes Newland's docile - and calculating - fiancée, May Welland and the lordly Mrs Manson Mingott.

 

Review: Set in high society New York of the 1870s, this novel follows Newland Archer, who is torn between his perfect societal match, his fiancée May Welland, and the passionate attraction he feels for the married Countess Ellen Olenska. The love triangle is highly shaped and defined by the rigid and all powerful social conventions of New York social order.

 

This novel is an adept commentary on gender, class, and societal distinctions. The Countess Ellen Olenska represents a threat to old New York social order in that Ellen aspires to a bohemian and artistic social order beyond the ideas of current class and social conventions. Yet at the same time, she also represents infidelity and the breakdown of marriage, as she has scandalously left her husband and refuses to be reunited with him.

 

Wharton does an admirably convincing job of conveying the novel through a male's perspective. Aside from a few dramatic scenes where Newland clandestinely sees Ellen, the vast majority of the drama of this novel is the inner conflict of Newland over what he feels he ought to do and what he wants to do. Interestingly, while typically novels depict women enslaved by marriage and convention, it is Newland who is trapped in this novel. The author of Newland's life is undoubtedly his social order. It is Ellen who defies convention and it is Newland's fiancée May who uses societal conventions and marriages to her advantage, leaving Newland the one feeling trapped and hopeless, with empty years rolling out before him.

 

Wharton masterfully conveys the subtle nuances of a rigid social order that is absurdly constrained by its own conventions. "The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done" (16). Although Newland at first revels in the rules and regulations of his world, Ellen, by voicing her own discontent with the status quo, jolts Newland into consciousness of the boundaries of his world with an "electric shock" (72). In consequence, "the things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had every understood" (182).

 

What Newland fails to note is the immense, inescapable power that his own societal conformity holds over him. Additionally, he vastly underestimates May's ability to use Newland's conformity to her advantage. All the while Newland looks for a way out, May is steadily tightening the snare of expectations and the code of behavior around Newland.

 

In addition to the beautiful subtlety of Wharton's writing, it is humorous in a very tongue in cheek manner, such as her clear mockery of the societally revered Mrs. Manson Mingott: "The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. [...] the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom" (27). Or later when Mrs. Lovell Mingott is described as having "the high colour and glassy stare induced in ladies of her age and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress" (184).

 

An absorbing love triangle set in a Victorian age on the cusp of immense change. Society itself functions as the predominant and most powerful character and reveals the little say that Newland truly has over his own life.

 

Stars: 4