The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [151]
9 (p. 103) “You’re like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: ‘The Portrait of a Gentleman. ’”: This is a reference to Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Literary critic R. W. B. Lewis points out that the portrait of Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence might be read as a tribute and reply to that novel.
10 (p. 112) “If only this new dodge for talking along a wire ... and the question of the telephone carried them safely back to the big house: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. Throughout the novel Wharton mentions inventions and technological advances: an early typewriter, a stylographic pen, the telephone (as here), and long distance—all as ways of tracking the passing years in the novel. Her characters’ attitude toward innovation reflects their closed- or open-mindedness. Their allusions to Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the American poet who wrote tales of mystery, and to Jules Verne (1828-1905), the French writer of futuristic fantasy, are appropriate for their conversation on the new invention of the telephone.
11 (p. 114) That evening he unpacked his books ... as far outside the pale ofprobability as the visions of the night: This paragraph opens with reference to Newland’s reading of recently published works, among them a volume by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the English scientist and interpreter of Darwin, and the great novel Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1819-1880), as well as tales of the French writer Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897). The House of Life is a series of love poems by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).
12 (p. 210) a text from Jeremiah (chap. ii., verse 25) for his Thanksgiving sermon: The Bible text (Revised Standard Version) is: ”Keep your feet from going unshod / and your throat from thirst. / But you said, It is hopeless, / for I have loved strangers, / and after them I will go.“ Wharton is weaving in a verse on outsiders, foreigners or newly arrived people, which is misconstrued by Newland’s mother to mean fashionable trends.
13 (p. 219) Wall Street, the next day, had more reassuring reports of Beaufort’s situation: The panic of 1873 was, to put it simply, caused by the overextension of railroad bonds and a shrinking national economy. The failure of Jay Cooke, the financial expert who kept the Union afloat during the Civil War, begot other failures that would have an impact on the holdings of the privileged families of old New York. Beaufort brings to mind Jay Gould, the extravagant investor; unlike Gould, Beaufort did not buy devalued stocks to sustain the market. Taking up the insurance business was a comedown for Beaufort, who appears at the end of the novel to have been a survivor.
14 (p. 251) the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum: The current Metropolitan Museum ”in the Park“ was not built until 1880. Wharton is recalling the old museum at Fifty-third Street in Manhattan. The Wolfe collection is a collection of paintings given to the museum. Luigi Cesnola (1832-1904) was a collector of antiquities and the first director of the Metropolitan Museum.
AN INSPIRATION FOR THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
Edith Wharton took the title for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of old New York from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s 1788 painting The Age of Innocence. A British portrait painter and aesthetician, Reynolds (1723—1792) founded the Royal Academy and was elected its first president in 1768, and was knighted by King George III the following year. In his Discourses Delivered at the Royal Academy (1769—1791), which instantly became the foundation for the art criticism of his time, Reynolds justified the relevance of the Academy: “It is indeed difficult to give any other reason why an empire like that of Britain should so long have wanted an ornament so suitable to its greatness than that slow progression