The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize — the first novel by a woman to do so — and is Wharton's most perfectly controlled work. It is less brutal than The House of Mirth and more precisely ironic: a novel about a man who is not exactly trapped but who cannot quite choose freedom, set in the 1870s Old New York that Wharton herself grew up in and wrote from a distance of fifty years and an ocean (she was living in France when she wrote it).

Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland — the perfect product of the social world, beautiful, conventional, incapable of surprise — when his fiancée's disgraced cousin Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe, having left her abusive Polish husband. He falls in love with Ellen. He continues to love May. He continues to marry May. He continues to love Ellen for the next thirty years without doing anything about it.

This sounds like tragic passivity, and it is — but Wharton is more interested in what that passivity costs and what it does not cost than in simply condemning Archer. He is complicit in the system that constrains him. He believes in the system's values even as he suffers under them. His final renunciation — the novel's extraordinary last chapter, thirty years later in Paris — is at once cowardly and, maybe, something like dignity: the recognition that a life has been lived, and that the alternative life is now only an idea.

Wharton was writing about 1870s New York from 1919, after a world war had destroyed the European civilization she loved, after her own marriage had collapsed, after she had herself pursued the love she wanted rather than the love her class permitted. The novel's irony is not only about Archer. It is about what that world — its innocence, its conventions, its orderly rituals — cost and what it preserved.

Newland Archer — a young lawyer, engaged to May Welland, who falls in love with Ellen Olenska. He is intelligent, aesthetically sensitive, and socially captive: he understands the system's cruelty but cannot separate himself from its values. His tragedy is that he is too inside his world to act against it and too aware of it to be comfortable inside it.

May Welland Archer — Newland's fiancée and wife. She is often read as the conventional foil to Ellen's complexity, but Wharton gives May more intelligence than Newland credits her with. May understands what is happening between Newland and Ellen. She responds with the social system's tools — pregnancy announced at exactly the right moment, a dinner party that functions as an exile — with a precision that is more formidable than anything Newland manages.

Ellen Olenska — May's cousin, who has returned from an unhappy European marriage and refused to perform the social rituals her class requires. She is the novel's freest figure: she says what she thinks, lives where she wants, befriends people outside the class, and refuses to be made small by the world's opinion of her. She is what Newland cannot be.

Old New York — not exactly a character but the novel's collective protagonist: the network of families, rituals, dinners, and unspoken rules that constitutes the society Wharton is anatomizing. Its innocence — its ignorance of anything outside its own system — is the novel's subject and its irony. It is "innocent" the way a closed room is innocent: complete, orderly, and airless.

No. 1 · The dinner that exiles Ellen. The Archer family hosts a farewell dinner for Ellen Olenska — the novel's most concentrated set piece. Every guest knows the dinner is not farewell but exile: the social group is collectively sending Ellen back to Europe to prevent her continued presence from disrupting the existing arrangements. No one says this. The coordination is achieved entirely through the shared understanding of what the dinner means. Wharton's rendering of this scene is the novel at its most coldly brilliant.

No. 2 · Newland's imaginary life. Throughout the novel, Newland cultivates an elaborate internal life — books, ideas, an imagined fellowship with Ellen — that substitutes for the external life he cannot have. Wharton tracks this substitution with great precision: the books he buys and reads alone, the thoughts he attributes to Ellen that she may not be having, the way the imagined relationship becomes richer as the real one becomes more impossible. He is sustained by a fantasy that costs him nothing and gives him nothing he actually wants.

No. 3 · Paris — the final chapter. Thirty years later. Newland, widowed, is in Paris with his son, who has arranged a visit to Ellen Olenska. They arrive at her building. Newland sits on a bench outside while his son goes up. He remains sitting. He does not go up. He goes back to his hotel. The novel ends. It is one of the great endings in American fiction: the life not lived, chosen not to be lived, one more time.

Read this if you are…

• A reader who has found that the most interesting tragic protagonists are not destroyed from outside but choose, repeatedly, to remain confined. Newland is this character in his most exquisite form.
• Interested in Wharton as a social historian. She is reconstructing from memory a world that no longer existed when she wrote the novel; the combination of intimacy and distance produces something more complex than satire.
• Looking for a way into Wharton. The Age of Innocence is slightly less brutal than The House of Mirth and the male protagonist gives it a different angle than Wharton's other major novels. A good entry point.

Skip it if you are…

• Impatient with novels whose central drama is entirely internal. Nothing very dramatic happens in The Age of Innocence by plot-novel standards. The catastrophe is Newland not doing things. If inaction frustrates you as a reader, this will too.
• Already bothered by the representation of Gilded Age society's norms without irony. Wharton is ironic throughout, but the irony is controlled and quiet; she does not flag it. Some readers miss it and read the novel as endorsement.

Read the last chapter twice — once through and once backward through the novel. The Paris chapter changes everything that comes before it. On first reading, Newland's hesitations seem like minor frustrations; from the vantage of the ending, they are the entire story.

Notice what Newland pays attention to: what he notices, what he buys, what he reads, what he imagines. Wharton builds his interior life through accumulation of detail. The aesthetic sensibility he cultivates is the alternative self he never becomes.

Pay attention to May. The novel is often read as being about Newland vs. Ellen. It is actually about Newland vs. May — and May, it turns out, is the smarter and more formidable person in the marriage.

• Edith Wharton — The House of Mirth (1905). The companion and predecessor; the same social world, a female protagonist, a less ambiguous catastrophe. Read The House of Mirth first for the social context, then The Age of Innocence for the different angle.
• Henry James — The Ambassadors (1903). Lambert Strether in Paris, arriving to retrieve a young man from the corrupting influence of Europe, discovering that Europe is better than home — and that the discovery arrives too late to change anything. The male protagonist in the grip of too-late knowledge: the James version of Wharton's ending.
• Gustave Flaubert — Sentimental Education (1869). Frédéric Moreau spending a lifetime loving a woman he never acts to be with, the whole of a generation's political energy squandered on private obsession. The French original of the Newland Archer plot.

1. Newland is intelligent enough to see the social system's cruelties clearly and complicit enough to enforce them anyway. Is he a victim of the system or its perpetrator? Does Wharton allow you to decide?
2. May understands what is happening between Newland and Ellen. Her response — the perfectly timed pregnancy announcement, the farewell dinner — is more effective than anything Newland or Ellen do. Does this make her the novel's most powerful character?
3. The final chapter: Newland sits outside Ellen's building and does not go up. Is this choice cowardice, dignity, or resignation? What does Wharton want you to feel about it?
4. The novel is titled The Age of Innocence. Whose innocence? What does "innocence" mean in Wharton's usage — is it a quality to be admired or a polite word for deliberate blindness?
5. Wharton wrote this novel in France in 1919-1920, fifty years after the period it describes and in the aftermath of a world war that had destroyed the European civilization she loved. How does the distance — temporal and physical — affect what the novel is able to see?
6. Ellen refuses to perform the rituals of her class and says what she actually thinks. The social system exiles her. Newland performs all the rituals and says nothing he actually thinks. He remains. What is Wharton's argument about the price of conformity vs. the price of honesty?