• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4527 0

the Rushworths, Mrs. Manson Mingott, with two daughters married off to Europeans. We begin to hear the difference between Newland Archer’s view of his set, for it is his more than ever with his engagement to May Welland, and Edith Wharton’s parody of society tattle recreated from memory and notched up a bit. Old Sillerton Jackson, the expert on family, is a cartoon figure, one of the many minor characters who make up the closely worked tapestry of the novelist’s old New York. There’s Lawrence Lefferts, with his prissy attention to correct social form, and the newcomer Mrs. Lemuel Struthers in “her bold feathers and her brazen wig,” but it is in the portrait of Mrs. Mingott that Wharton creates a true grotesque. “The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon” (pp. 24—25). She is immobile, though far more flexible in her views than those who seek her approval, among them Newland’s mother and May’s.

Mrs. Mingott, larger than life, breaks whatever rules she pleases. In depicting the matriarch as an original, Wharton sets her apart from the proper society she can observe from above, quite literally, by building her house uptown (uptown being above Thirty-fourth Street in those days). And it is Mrs. Mingott, in her pale stone house with frivolous foreign furniture, who, with largesse of spirit, takes in “poor Ellen Olenska,” upon her return to America with bright, somewhat girlish hopes of freedom while still entangled in the disasters of a foreign marriage. In book one of The Age of Innocence these two exotics are housed together, women who understand liberty and its limits. There is a good deal of Edith Wharton’s independence of mind in Mrs. Mingott and of her troubled memories of New York in Madame Olenska’s return to the city of her childhood. Wharton composed the first installments just after the Great War, writing each installment in France, where she had lived during the war, and where she would settle for the rest of her life. In 1913 she had been through a difficult divorce from her husband, Edward Wharton—society fellow, sportsman—whom she married in haste after her first engagement was broken, a wounding business. Her marriage to Teddy Wharton was a washout from the start, yet the tribulation and scandal of their divorce remained. Her passionate love affair with Morton Fullerton—journalist, charmer, lady’s man—was long over.

All of this personal material can be detected in the novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, but the autobiographical material is transformed. In the lives of her characters freshly imagined, the historical novel becomes immediate in its themes. Wharton had received the Legion of Honor for her work in France with refugees, and many of her close friends had died in combat. Her mentor and friend Henry James, having renounced his American citizenship in 1914, died soon after. As R. W. B. Lewis, Wharton’s biographer points out, she found this renunciation deeply disturbing. Edith Wharton was committed to her American heritage, and when her publisher informed her that the public had lost interest in war stories, she chose to look back, to rediscover the past with an historical accuracy that never admits to nostalgia. The Age of Innocence ends just before the Great War. In the novel Wharton questions if her country had already lost its innocence before this first European conflict, if American innocence was mythic, like “the fresh green breast of the new world” that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, eulogizes at the end of The Great Gatsby. In The Age of Innocence, Wharton asks who are these people I came from? Were they really so class-ridden and dismissive of those who did not belong to their insular tribe? Was Europe no more than a tourist site featuring the romantic past, a shopping mall for art and exquisite gowns, a setting in which to observe the charming, or perhaps the