The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [150]
At that, as if it had been a signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
Afterword
It is easy to forget that The Age of Innocence is a modern work. The detailed authenticity of its nineteenth-century setting tends to obscure the fact that it was created by a twentieth-century sensibility. Published in 1920, although its principal action is set in the early 1870s, the book is nearly half a century closer to us in time than is the world it portrays. Indeed, Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is as much an artifact of its time as other examples of literary modernism that appeared in the same decade, on both sides of the Atlantic: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) in America, for example, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), in England. As Wharton’s biographers have pointed out, the fifty-year interval between the novel’s setting and its date of composition allows her to reflect upon the social context of her own past, but her scrutiny of a bygone era is fueled by larger purposes, which transcend the personal. Her object is to examine late-nineteenth-century customs and values through the lens of twentieth-century ideas about human nature.
Wharton undertook this project at the age of fifty-seven, when she was at the height of her artistic powers. At this point in her life, she had participated, like her contemporaries, in a technological revolution that changed the face of everyday life in America. She witnessed the advent of the automobile (an invention she embraced with enthusiasm), the telephone, the washing machine, and the gas stove, to name just some of the machinery that had become available since her childhood. More important stimulus for her as a novelist was provided, however, by the emerging social sciences: psychology, anthropology, sociology. These disciplines came of age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they put forward radically new ways of understanding the human mind in its social framework. A woman of unquenchable intellectual curiosity, proficient in several European languages, Wharton kept well abreast of developments in these fields (as she did, it should be noted, in an impressive range of subjects spanning the arts and science). Anthropology, in particular, fascinated her, and she familiarized herself with groundbreaking studies, ethnographic and theoretical, that provided an abundance of new information about human culture.1 Fieldworkers were gathering evidence of a previously unimagined diversity in custom and belief, while theoreticians traced cross-cultural parallels and patterns, seeking to identify universal human tendencies.
Wharton’s long-term engagement with the work of well-known thinkers in the rapidly growing field of anthropology shapes crucial features of The Age of Innocence . Terminology and lore drawn from ethnographic studies are woven persistently into the text: there is talk of tribes, totems, and taboos. Indeed, recurring references to premodern or non-Western social systems prove central to the development of character and theme. Wharton sets the stage for the anthropological underpinnings of the novel by assigning to her protagonist interests very like her own. Newland Archer is presented from the beginning as a young man distinguished by keenly developed intellectual and aesthetic concerns. Caring ‘‘immensely’’ for the life of the mind, he visits museums and exhibitions; he orders new books by the boxful—in history, philosophy, science, and literature; he prefers a quiet evening in his library to a social gathering. He has been influenced by his ‘‘readings in anthropology,’’ moreover, to regard his own social community with growing dispassion, to assume the disinterested stance of an outside observer. The anthropological habit of mind