The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
I just finished reading this book, although it feels like perhaps I read it before, years ago. The 1993 movie adaptation is so faithful overall (except perhaps the looks of the two main women characters) that I am probably remembering that, since I watched most of it recently. Hearing Joanne Woodward do the narration, as Wharton's voice, is a joy.
It is a masterpiece of style and subtlety and of depicting a world gone in the last century of when it was written. However, overall I have to say good riddance to that world, because these people are so wealthy, self-righteous, self-contained, and unaware of the larger world other than European fashion and art that I am not sure what their purpose is other than to keep merchants in business. Talk about conspicuous consumption. Wharton writes of them with a certain nostalgia because they are her people, but she is writing forty years later and knows they were in a bubble that would have to pop and long since had.
The world is New York around 1870/1880. This is not the world of tenements and immigrants but rich people whose families had come long, long before and established businesses so successful that the current members could pretend to work at professions. Some of them have intermarried with aristocracy in Europe; at the same time, there is a sense of cultural inferiority in New York. It's just not as good as the "real civilization, "even though that "old world" one is corrupt and lascivious. (I love that word.)
Being respectable is everything, but if a family can't be respectable in reality, it must negotiate this world in a way that makes them maintain respectability. The surface matters more than the depth. In short, the plot revolves around a rich young man, Newland Archer, who is getting engaged to a young woman of similar family background. She is beautiful and charming but needs his tutelage to be totally worthy of his intellect. In other words, he thinks she's shallow. But she knows how to work the system, to live in this world, and ultimately to manipulate him. The night he wants to announce his engagement, their world is invaded by a cousin of his wife's who married a Polish Count and therefore is "Countess Olenska" rather than the plain "Ellen Mingott," her birth name. She is fleeing her philandering husband, but she may have some past of her own.
Slowly Archer is smitten and then convinced he is enough in love with the Countess to run away with her, but his fiancee, perhaps suspecting something, agrees to hurry their marriage and soon they are off on their honeymoon in Europe, spending money mostly. (Wharton has a keen eye for all the fashion and interiors.) When they return, he finds he is still attracted to Ellen and they meet clandestinely, but he is also her lawyer and has to keep her from divorcing her husband because it would be a family scandal. She agrees not to because of the family and he is in the straits of wanting her to divorce so he can marry her (after leaving his own wife, which would have been scandalous) and upholding the family's viewpoints, and also the crazy goal of just running away with her or even keeping her as a mistress, even though she is a cousin by marriage.
As this struggle goes on, he sees the shallowness of his "society life," the hypocrisy of men having mistresses but keeping a respectable veneer, and his own trappedness, his captivity. He gets to enjoy the best of everything but at a price to his self-honesty. Finally, Ellen agrees to go back to Europe to at least look like she is still married to the Count, and his wife announces she is pregnant, so Archer cannot follow Ellen.
My opinions: As I read the book, I am never convinced that Ellen loves him. She depends on him, but I think she uses him. She has no intention of running off with him. Other men are after her, and she uses them, too, because she has no source of funds for a while. The other men are more than willing to help, and she is more than willing to be helped.
I spent most of the book thinking Archer was a creep. He looks down on his wife, whom he married because she was seen as desirable by other men and would make him look good; he is trying to cheat on her (he and Ellen never really do the deed, or at least that's how I read it); he is spoiled and unaware of the wider world of suffering; he allows himself to be manipulated. But in retrospect, he symbolizes, to some extent, longing and ultimately doing the right thing despite the longing. Why does he love Ellen? Perhaps because she is exotic and different; perhaps because she needs him, because she makes him believe they are outsiders in this world who can find refuge with each other. But he's really not that much an outsider as he would imagine. At the end he feels like a man who has missed what he wanted most, but my take was that he only felt that way, mistakenly, and realized on the last page that he hadn't lost it. One could argue that, I suppose.
The last chapter is really the most important. It explains the whole rest of the story, and I'm glad Wharton wrote it as she did, because it redeemed Archer and made me feel that the book was more human and less of a soap opera about a man wanting to cheat on his wife. The presence of children in a marriage gives it a grounding, I think she is saying. He would only have been the man he was because of his children.
However, I don't want this to seem like I missed the larger point. Archer also realizes that everything was orchestrated, very subtly (and subtlety is a theme here, too) by the family members to make sure he could not run away with her, because everyone knew. What he thought was his and Ellen's secret affair was not at all. The eyes were seeing them all the time and the family was moving into place to be sure it didn't go any further than a flirtation. Almost like a body that rallies the antibodies to protect against infection, the society was so tight and sensitive to itself, so self-contained and self-protective, that the relationship could not be allowed.
But such a closed system is unsustainable in an open world. Thirty years later, in the last chapter, all had changed. The modern world had arrived without their knowing. In taking a specific world that is gone, Wharton has, like Faulkner in Yoktawhatever County (sorry, that is lazy, I could look up the spelling--Yoknapatawpha, there), shown us what all little worlds are like. This is common to great literature. The world of the story might seem small, rather than epic, but it is really as wide as the "real world."
There is a great deal of irony and close observations in the novel; the narrator's voice is ironic and bitingly satirical, but ultimately sympathetic to the characters. None of them is evil, only convinced they are right. May, the wife, is protecting her husband for their way of life, and is certain of the rightness and righteousness of her life and her actions to protect it. Archer has doubts about his world but is too weak to stand up to it, which would do harm to his wife, and his supposed virtuous life after Ellen leaves is not a virtue from choice but from expectations and not being brave enough to do otherwise. A virtue of mediocrity or fear, perhaps. We only see in the mind of Archer,who is passionate about Ellen, so Ellen is inscrutable, in a way. She is willing to flirt and seem to be in love with her cousin's husband and still appear like May's best friend in the world in public and private.
It's a fascinating book even if some of my descriptions sound like Day of Our Lives.
It is a masterpiece of style and subtlety and of depicting a world gone in the last century of when it was written. However, overall I have to say good riddance to that world, because these people are so wealthy, self-righteous, self-contained, and unaware of the larger world other than European fashion and art that I am not sure what their purpose is other than to keep merchants in business. Talk about conspicuous consumption. Wharton writes of them with a certain nostalgia because they are her people, but she is writing forty years later and knows they were in a bubble that would have to pop and long since had.
The world is New York around 1870/1880. This is not the world of tenements and immigrants but rich people whose families had come long, long before and established businesses so successful that the current members could pretend to work at professions. Some of them have intermarried with aristocracy in Europe; at the same time, there is a sense of cultural inferiority in New York. It's just not as good as the "real civilization, "even though that "old world" one is corrupt and lascivious. (I love that word.)
Being respectable is everything, but if a family can't be respectable in reality, it must negotiate this world in a way that makes them maintain respectability. The surface matters more than the depth. In short, the plot revolves around a rich young man, Newland Archer, who is getting engaged to a young woman of similar family background. She is beautiful and charming but needs his tutelage to be totally worthy of his intellect. In other words, he thinks she's shallow. But she knows how to work the system, to live in this world, and ultimately to manipulate him. The night he wants to announce his engagement, their world is invaded by a cousin of his wife's who married a Polish Count and therefore is "Countess Olenska" rather than the plain "Ellen Mingott," her birth name. She is fleeing her philandering husband, but she may have some past of her own.
Slowly Archer is smitten and then convinced he is enough in love with the Countess to run away with her, but his fiancee, perhaps suspecting something, agrees to hurry their marriage and soon they are off on their honeymoon in Europe, spending money mostly. (Wharton has a keen eye for all the fashion and interiors.) When they return, he finds he is still attracted to Ellen and they meet clandestinely, but he is also her lawyer and has to keep her from divorcing her husband because it would be a family scandal. She agrees not to because of the family and he is in the straits of wanting her to divorce so he can marry her (after leaving his own wife, which would have been scandalous) and upholding the family's viewpoints, and also the crazy goal of just running away with her or even keeping her as a mistress, even though she is a cousin by marriage.
As this struggle goes on, he sees the shallowness of his "society life," the hypocrisy of men having mistresses but keeping a respectable veneer, and his own trappedness, his captivity. He gets to enjoy the best of everything but at a price to his self-honesty. Finally, Ellen agrees to go back to Europe to at least look like she is still married to the Count, and his wife announces she is pregnant, so Archer cannot follow Ellen.
My opinions: As I read the book, I am never convinced that Ellen loves him. She depends on him, but I think she uses him. She has no intention of running off with him. Other men are after her, and she uses them, too, because she has no source of funds for a while. The other men are more than willing to help, and she is more than willing to be helped.
I spent most of the book thinking Archer was a creep. He looks down on his wife, whom he married because she was seen as desirable by other men and would make him look good; he is trying to cheat on her (he and Ellen never really do the deed, or at least that's how I read it); he is spoiled and unaware of the wider world of suffering; he allows himself to be manipulated. But in retrospect, he symbolizes, to some extent, longing and ultimately doing the right thing despite the longing. Why does he love Ellen? Perhaps because she is exotic and different; perhaps because she needs him, because she makes him believe they are outsiders in this world who can find refuge with each other. But he's really not that much an outsider as he would imagine. At the end he feels like a man who has missed what he wanted most, but my take was that he only felt that way, mistakenly, and realized on the last page that he hadn't lost it. One could argue that, I suppose.
The last chapter is really the most important. It explains the whole rest of the story, and I'm glad Wharton wrote it as she did, because it redeemed Archer and made me feel that the book was more human and less of a soap opera about a man wanting to cheat on his wife. The presence of children in a marriage gives it a grounding, I think she is saying. He would only have been the man he was because of his children.
However, I don't want this to seem like I missed the larger point. Archer also realizes that everything was orchestrated, very subtly (and subtlety is a theme here, too) by the family members to make sure he could not run away with her, because everyone knew. What he thought was his and Ellen's secret affair was not at all. The eyes were seeing them all the time and the family was moving into place to be sure it didn't go any further than a flirtation. Almost like a body that rallies the antibodies to protect against infection, the society was so tight and sensitive to itself, so self-contained and self-protective, that the relationship could not be allowed.
But such a closed system is unsustainable in an open world. Thirty years later, in the last chapter, all had changed. The modern world had arrived without their knowing. In taking a specific world that is gone, Wharton has, like Faulkner in Yoktawhatever County (sorry, that is lazy, I could look up the spelling--Yoknapatawpha, there), shown us what all little worlds are like. This is common to great literature. The world of the story might seem small, rather than epic, but it is really as wide as the "real world."
There is a great deal of irony and close observations in the novel; the narrator's voice is ironic and bitingly satirical, but ultimately sympathetic to the characters. None of them is evil, only convinced they are right. May, the wife, is protecting her husband for their way of life, and is certain of the rightness and righteousness of her life and her actions to protect it. Archer has doubts about his world but is too weak to stand up to it, which would do harm to his wife, and his supposed virtuous life after Ellen leaves is not a virtue from choice but from expectations and not being brave enough to do otherwise. A virtue of mediocrity or fear, perhaps. We only see in the mind of Archer,who is passionate about Ellen, so Ellen is inscrutable, in a way. She is willing to flirt and seem to be in love with her cousin's husband and still appear like May's best friend in the world in public and private.
It's a fascinating book even if some of my descriptions sound like Day of Our Lives.
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