The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [154]
“ ‘What’s the use—when you will go back?’ he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.”
Is it—in this world—vulgar to ask for more? To ask that the feeling shall be greater than the cause that excites it, to beg to be allowed to share the moment of exposition (is not that the very moment that all our writing leads to?) to entreat a little wildness, a dark place or two in the soul?
We appreciate fully Mrs. Wharton’s skill and delicate workmanship; she has the situation in hand from the first page to the last; we realize how savage must sound our cry of protest, and yet we cannot help but make it; that after all we are not above suspicion—even the “finest” of us!
—from her review of The Age of Innocence in the Athenæum
(December 10, 1920)
Questions
1. “The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies,” (p. 16) writes Edith Wharton. But “What about us? What about her readers?” asks Katherine Mansfield—is it vulgar “to ask that the feeling shall be greater than the cause that excites it?” In short, is Wharton herself guilty of faint implications and pale delicacies?
2. What historical circumstances, would you say, produced the social order of The Age of Innocence?
3. “The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else,” (pp. 284—285) writes Edith Wharton. Do you feel a subversive impulse in this novel? If you were Ellen Olenska or Newland Archer in Wharton’s world, would you have done anything differently?
4. If Edith Wharton were to write about a different class of people, would she need to come up with a different prose style? (You might consider her novella Ethan Frome.)
5. “His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.” (p. 185) Whose fault is this dismal vision of Newland Archer’s future? Is it the fault of a person or persons, or society, or human nature in general, or an extra-human force?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biographies
Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner‘s, 1994.
Gimbel, Wendy. Edith Wharton: Orphancy and Survival. New York: Praeger, 1984.
Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. The most authoritative biography of Wharton.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. A fine in terpretive biography.
Criticism
Bell, Millicent, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. This collection includes many fine essays on Wharton.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Edith Wharton. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Nevius, Blake. Edith Wharton: A Study of her Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953.
Price, Alan. The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. A perceptive study of the novel’s relation to the historical time when it was written.
Other Editions of Wharton
The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton, 1891—1937. 2 vols. Edited by Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001.
The House of Mirth. 1905. With an introduction by Mary Gordon; notes by R. W. B. Lewis. New York: Vintage Books/Library of America, 1990.
The House of Mirth. 1905. With an introduction by Jeffrey Meyers. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.
The Letters of Edith Wharton. Edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Scribner‘s, 1988.
a
Swedish opera singer (1843-1921) known for her role as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust.
b
Victor Capoul (1839-1924), singing the role of Faust.
c
A well-known aria in Faust.
d
An opera by Richard Wagner (1813-1883); the march is often played at weddings.
e
Maria Taglioni (1804-1884), Italian ballerina.
f
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), French painter