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| Long, Long Ago, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art |
The 2020’s are going to be a big decade for literary centennials.
Over the next few years, hundredth anniversaries will be celebrated by
stalwarts of the high school canon, epic modernist masterpieces, foundational
African-American poetry, and essential feminist novels. Also Mein Kampf. It seems trite to point out
that the literature, art, and culture of the 1920’s had an outsized impact on
the century that followed, but get ready to hear that basic point repeated
quite a bit in the not-too-distant future.
To my mind, the biggest literary centennial of 2020 belongs
to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.[1]
It is a fitting kickoff to a decade of big anniversaries, because Wharton’s
novel is obsessed with the passage of time. Specifically, Wharton writes about
the ways that an era can leave traces on the future even as the specific textures
of the present are constantly erased. Time in The Age of Innocence is imagined variously as geological and
ephemeral, as characters are weighed down by cumulative layers of tradition
while the most important moments of their lives vanish in a glance.
Wharton also thinks about time in a much more obvious way: The Age of Innocence is a period piece.
Wharton set her book roughly five decades in the past, and her rendition of the
1870’s is nostalgic, but also exasperated with the styles and strictures of New
York high society. Modernity lurks implicitly around every corner of the book,
as Wharton can’t resist the occasional knowing quip about impending changes in
American life.
Like many a Gen X cinephile, I was introduced to Wharton’s
novels through Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. On its surface, this still seems like an
incongruous pairing of director and text. But Scorsese at the time pointed out
that the novel is filled with “brutality”[2]—it
is about a rich, powerful family deciding how to address violations of its
codes of behavior. Characters in the book surveil and maneuver behind one
another’s backs, and one misspoken sentence can upend a character’s world.
Perhaps the transgressor gets shipped to Europe rather than frozen in a
shipping container, but the effect is nevertheless chilling.
In this tense, mannered world, our main character Newland
Archer is earnest, oblivious, and a bit of a dork. While his social circle goes
to the opera primarily to gossip and be seen, Newland legitimately enjoys the
theater. Most of the men in the book share a carefully calibrated omerta regarding one another’s
philandering, but Newland idealistically daydreams about life with his
bride-to-be May Welland. Even when he develops feelings for another woman—the
Countess Ellen Ollenska—it mostly takes the form of an “emotional affair.”
There’s a small moment in one dinner party scene where one of the other men in
the novel, aware of Newland’s split affections, comments that neither May nor
Ellen are particularly good looking. There are a few ways to read this, but one
way to take it is that, whatever else you want to say about Newland, he is actually
attracted to inner beauty.
And yet. Like most self-understood “nice guys,” Newland is
more than a little entitled. Some of this is inevitable—he’s an absurdly rich
white man in the nineteenth century whose job is to be his firm’s token
attorney from a “good family.” It’s no wonder he’s surprised when the world
doesn’t bend to his will. But he also seems to live so thoroughly in his own
head that he has trouble empathizing with people. At multiple moments he
expects Ellen to drop everything, even sick relatives, to spend time with him.
With May, he assumes he’ll be able to transform a society girl with a penchant
for horses and tennis into a serious student of poetry. Poor May tries her
best—she reads Robert Browning, for God’s sake—but Newland finds her opinions
so insipid that he ceases reading any poetry in her presence, lest she decide
to ask him about it.
I’m making him sound worse than he is. He is always at least
a little myopic, and the innocence mentioned in the title belongs more to him
than any other character. But without that innocence, he might lose his genuine
curiosity about the world, his aesthetic susceptibility, and his desire to live
a life defined by real human connection. In a society of rules, codes, and narrow
traditions, he wants to live authentically. His love for his family is deep,
but there are moments where it seems that the only way he can be true to
himself is to cast them aside. Wharton manages on more than one to occasion to
make you root for infidelity in spite of the fact that the wronged spouse is a
likable character. As she explores the twists of Newland’s story, Wharton is
marvelously attuned to the ways that life can sometimes seem terrifyingly free,
only for the shackles of fate to click shut a moment later.
Newland’s desire for freedom is constantly hemmed in by
convention, and as such, there’s a good case to be made that the famous
characters from other novels who most resemble him are women. The Age of Innocence is a riff on the
adulterous love triangle novel, but Newland resembles Emma Bovary or Anna
Karenina far more than he does any of the men in those books. Perhaps Wharton’s
cleverest expression of male privilege is that Newland is allowed a happier
ending than his predecessors.
And it really is one hell of an ending. I won’t spoil it,
but the last chapter is a favorite of mine, and it is why I prefer The Age of Innocence to The House of Mirth, a novel which has an
indelible protagonist, but also a boatload of third-act problems. The last
chapter of The Age of Innocence contains
one of the few paragraphs in any book that reliably makes me tear up every time
I read it. After a life in which luck, family, and society have so often
undermined Newland’s ability to determine his own path, Wharton presents him in
the final pages with a choice that is entirely his to make.
The choice he makes tends to infuriate my students, though
they sometimes talk themselves into it by the end of the class. It might not be
the right ending for every romantic hero, but it’s the right ending for this
one.
A hundred years later, The
Age of Innocence remains easy to get into simply because Wharton herself
was already looking backward when she wrote it. She finds the quaint habits of
old New York as charmingly silly as we do, and as she wrote this novel she,
like us, was living through a period in history when a story about a quaint,
charming era must have seemed like a welcome respite from the present. Anyone old
enough to remember the late-twentieth century has probably felt at least a
momentary pang of nostalgia for it while living through the escalating calamities
of the twenty-first, and in that, our perspective echoes Wharton’s. That said,
the novel is also a reminder that nostalgia blinds us. In particular, the lives
of many American women were almost certainly fuller and freer in 1920 than they
had been in 1870, and Wharton shows quite powerfully that unchecked patriarchy
could stifle the development of a man like Newland as well. And so, ironically,
the lesson of looking back on Wharton’s brilliant backward glance is that we
shouldn’t let ourselves get too seduced by the pleasures of looking back.
[1]
I’m hardly alone in this belief—there’s been lots of good writing in various
places on the hundredth anniversary of the novel, including Wharton scholar
Sarah Blackwood’s introduction to Penguin’s newest edition of the novel.
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