The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [152]
Wharton admired Reynolds; in fact, in her 1905 novel The House of Mirth, her heroine Lily Bart appears in a tableau vivant (literally, living picture) of Reynolds’s 1776 painting Mrs. Lloyd. But it is Reynolds’s grandiloquence and naivete that Wharton, an unfaltering ironist, invokes by using his title The Age of Innocence for a novel, written just after the devastation of World War I, that looks back to an earlier era.
In chapter five of The Age of Innocence (p. 30), Wharton writes:
Mrs. and Miss Archer were both great lovers of scenery. It was what they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels abroad, considering architecture and painting as subjects for men, and chiefly for learned persons who read Ruskin. Mrs. Archer had been born a Newland, and mother and daughter, who were as like as sisters, were both, as people said, “true Newlands”; tall, pale, and slightly round-shouldered, with long noses, sweet smiles and a kind of drooping distinction like that in certain faded Reynolds portraits. Their physical resemblance would have been complete if an elderly embonpoint had not stretched Mrs. Archer’s black brocade, while Miss Archer’s brown and purple poplins hung, as the years went on, more and more slackly on her virgin frame.
Reynolds’s The Age of Innocence depicts a five-year-old girl sitting in profile. She wears a sun-yellow dress that nearly covers her small, bare feet. Her folded hands clasp her heart, and a yellow bow cleaves her tousled hair. The girl’s face is cherubic as she faces away from a listing tree toward an open, celestial sky. The landscape, dotted with distant trees, is dusky, and it looks as if the child’s caretakers have abandoned the day’s picnic, leaving her alone as a cold night descends. The portrait’s luminosity arises from the girl’s sweet, curious face and her yellow dress.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
CARL VAN DOREN
We can no more do without some notion or other of an age more golden than our own than we can do without bread. There must be, we assure ourselves, a more delectable day yet to come, or there must have been one once. The evidence of prophecy, however, is stronger than that of history, which, somehow, fails to find the perfect age. Mrs. Wharton has never ranged herself with the prophets, contented, apparently, with being the most intellectual of our novelists and surveying with level, satirical eyes the very visible world. By the “Age of Innocence” she means the seventies in New York during the past century; and the innocence she finds there is “the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience.” To the hotter attacks which angrier critics have recently been making upon that age she does not lend herself. Her language is cool and suave. And yet the effect of her picture is an unsparing accusation of that genteel decade when the van der Luydens of Skuytercliff were the ultimate arbiters of “form” in Manhattan, and “form” was occupation and religion for the little aristocracy which still held its tight fortress in the shaggy city so soon about to overwhelm it. The imminence of the rising tide is never quite indicated. How could it be, when the characters of the action themselves do not see it, bound up as they are with walking their wintry paths and hugging their iron taboos? Newland Archer suspects a change, but that is because he is a victim of the tribal