The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [150]
3 (p. 30) Mrs. Archer, who had long been a widow, lived with her son and daughter... Bulwer—who, however, was beginning to be thought old-fashioned): In this paragraph, Wharton describes the genteel taste of Archer’s family, always ordinary and safe. A Wardian case was a glass apparatus for raising plants; Good Words, an English periodical; Ouida’s novels, the popular works of Marie de la Ramée (1839-1908). The family’s preference for the historical novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) over those of Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray reveals a humorless streak. Wharton read voraciously in English, French, German, and Italian. The literary references in the novel are carefully chosen to reflect the various characters. Newland is a gentleman reader who takes pleasure and refuge in his library. His reading list comes close to Wharton’s own in her reconstruction of the fashionable literature of the 1870s. At the outset of the novel, we learn that he does not admire Dickens or Thackeray, though her rendering of society brings to mind their comic vein, particularly Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. The difference between Wharton and Newland lies in his being tagged a dilettante, while throughout the novel she demonstrates with wit and brilliance the usefulness of her reading.
4 (p. 37) “Women should be free—as free as we are”: The question of women’s freedom runs throughout the novel. Here Newland’s exclamation is provoked by the “case of the Countess Olenska.” Ellen’s marriage to the Polish count was a complicated morganatic marriage. However, the ideal of freedom for women, like much of Newland Archer’s right thinking, remains rhetorical. According to Black’s Law Dictionary (1891), morganatic marriage is “a lawful and inseparable conjunction of a man of noble and illustrious birth, with a woman of inferior station, upon condition that neither the wife nor her children shall partake of the titles, arms or dignity of the husband, or succeed to his inheritance.... The marriage ceremony was regularly performed, the union was indisoluable.” (The article is signed “Wharton,” an amusing coincidence.)
5 (p. 42) who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family portraits and Chippendale: Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779) was an English furniture designer. Wharton’s use of decor and architecture of the era figures in her depiction of character. She was particularly attentive to architecture in her descriptions of old New York—to the brownstone rows, to the extravagance of the Beauforts’ mansion and Mrs. Mingott’s stone house uptown. With Ogden Codman, Jr., a Boston architect, she wrote The Decoration of Houses (1897), considered a classic book on interior design. Newland’s fears that May will adopt her mother’s fussy furnishings reflect Wharton’s own dislike of her mother’s overdressed rooms. Ellen Olenska’s house in the wrong part of town is casual and inviting, the van der Luyden’s colonial cottage spare and enchanting. All details of paintings and statues in the novel reveal character as well as class and are never mere decor.
6 (p. 71) She glanced at the writing-table ... opened a volume of the “Contes Drolatiques”: Newland is up-to-date as he reads the poetic drama of Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909). Contes Drolatigue is a collection of racy tales by the French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). Both works would be inappropriate reading for the innocent May.
7 (p. 85) Others had made the same attempt ... and some of the magazine editors and musical and literary critics: This paragraph and the one following mention celebrated performers and writers of the day. Edwin Booth (1833-1893) was the most famous tragic actor of the age. Washington Irving (1783-1859) would be the best-known American author.
8 (pp. 85-86) Newland Archer had been aware of these things ... to reach a stage of manners where they would naturally merge: This passage lists nineteenth-century