The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [1]
‘‘Ah, I’m beyond that,’’ he groaned.
‘‘No, you’re not! You’ve never been beyond. And I have,’’ she said in a strange voice, ‘‘and I know what it looks like there.’’
The Age of Innocence can be summed up as a passionate love story followed closely by the story of a marriage. Wharton’s twist on the classic romance is that the marriage involves only one of the lovers. The other respectfully declines the pleasure of witnessing, as a spectator, the marriage of a man she would have preferred to take as her own husband. Newland Archer is the scion of a prominent New York family; his relationship with the equally well-born, well-brought-up May Welland is profoundly threatened by his unacceptable passion for her first cousin Ellen Olenska. The meticulously described wedding of May and Newland might be at the center of Wharton’s novel, but wedlock is not in—or at—the heart of her characters.
According to Shari Benstock’s biography of Edith Wharton, a conspicuous, if unconscious, indication of this disparity between love and marriage is the fact that Wharton inadvertently substituted passages from the services for the burial of the dead in place of the marriage service for the mismatched hero and his bride. Benstock quotes Wharton’s embarrassed editor as commenting, ‘‘ ‘I am not cynical enough to insinuate that perhaps . . . you selected the correct service after all,’ ’’ but contemporary readers of The Age of Innocence might be less wary of producing precisely that pronouncement. Marriage is a dead end for most of Wharton’s characters, and the lovers in The Age of Innocence are no exception. In her sometimes ruthless but ultimately compassionate social satire, Wharton seems to offer the observation— or perhaps the lesson—that if you marry someone you do not love, you will inevitably fall in love with someone to whom you are not married.
Love and marriage are rarely in one another’s company in Wharton’s vision of New York; they may be coincidental in The Age of Innocence, but they are not causal. ‘‘[W]ith a shiver of foreboding’’ the narrator tells us, the hero ‘‘saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.’’ Drawn together by issues more fiscal than physical, couples pair off with the ‘‘random’’ choice offered to dance partners at a large ball; suitably wealthy and attractively packaged young men and women line up at social engagements and, like strands of DNA, eventually reproduce exactly the same structures that produced them.
Like Newland Archer, the young men and women of his day are ‘‘content to hold [these] views without analyzing’’ them because ‘‘all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated, button-hole-flower gentlemen’’ who unofficially legislate their world are themselves ‘‘the product of this system.’’ Nevertheless believing himself to be superior to his peers, Newland understands that ‘‘grouped together’’ this group of gentlemen ‘‘represented ‘New York’ and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral.’’ Newland resists ‘‘striking out’’ for himself, reluctant to form his own opinions and systems of belief, not so much because he accepts the wisdom of their collective judgment but because to formalize his own way of thinking would ‘‘be troublesome—and also rather bad form.’’
One of the most important tasks for this group is to see that the right people marry. Under the watchful eyes of various ‘‘brocaded matrons,’’ marriageable couples are united even though each partner knows very little about the other. True understanding of an individual is virtually impossible inside the social circles described by Wharton because every man sees it as ‘‘his duty, as a ‘decent’ fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal.’’ Such so-called ‘‘intimate’’ relationships are virtually barred from genuine intimacy by the