The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [151]
The ‘‘books on primitive man’’ that he and others with ‘‘advanced’’ interests are ‘‘beginning to read’’ encourage him to see vestiges of ‘‘savage’’ superstition in the supposedly ‘‘civilized’’ environment he inhabits. The formal process of calling on relatives following Archer and May’s engagement, for instance, is described in mockingly anachronistic terms: the series of obligatory visits takes them ‘‘from one tribal doorstep to another,’’ the prospective groom on display ‘‘like an animal cunningly trapped.’’ In general, Archer finds, the rigidity with which members of his community adhere to established convention resembles the reverence displayed by ancient peoples for their rituals and gods. After all, ‘‘what was or was not ‘the thing’ played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.’’ The selection of clothing is a ‘‘solemn rite’’; ‘‘Good Form’’ is an ‘‘invisible deity’’ to whom all pay unquestioned homage; ‘‘Taste’’ is a ‘‘far-off divinity’’ demanding propitiation. Customs regulating even the most trivial matters are sacred: how and when flowers must be worn in button holes, the number and type of brushes to be used in parting hair, the color of tie to be worn with evening clothes. Persistent comparisons between preindustrial peoples and Archer’s twentieth-century neighbors serve to ridicule his community’s sense of superiority, disparaging its claims to sophistication. With its relentless demands for conformity to a host of arbitrary rules, Archer’s New York has simply devised a new set of ‘‘totem terrors,’’ as ‘‘inscrutable’’ or absurd, evidently, as those governing the behavior of any aboriginal group living in prehistoric times.
Archer’s tendency to see parallels between other culturesand his own makes him increasingly reluctant to grant New York society any special status. ‘‘Yet there was a time,’’ he recalls, ‘‘when . . . everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with worldwide significance.’’ Labeling his community a ‘‘little tribe,’’ he effectually dismisses its claims to global importance or centrality. To a very considerable extent, Archer has overcome the ethnocentricity characterizing his social group, embracing in its stead the concept of cultural relativity. In so doing, he illustrates one of the most crucial sets of ideas anthropology has contributed to twentieth-century thinking. Collecting and analyzing data from peoples living and dead, all over the globe, the new social scientists were beginning to cast doubt on the inherent superiority of any single culture. The sheer multiplicity of laws, beliefs, and practices that fieldworkers discovered was daunting. It was disconcerting, as well, to learn that every social group encountered—even the tiniest tribe of locust-eating nomads—regarded its own way of life as unquestionably better than all others. Comparative value judgments in the cultural arena gradually came into disfavor. Ethnography cast an unflattering light on the work of missionaries, for example, because cross-cultural studies of religion eroded the presumption that any one belief system was more valid than others: once all religions are regarded as equally legitimate, proselytizing loses its moral justification. Asserting that his community is no more important than other ‘‘little tribes,’’ its ‘‘manners and customs’’ certainly no more admirable, the protagonist of Wharton’s novel expresses his commitment to distinctly modern views.
Archer’s disenchantment with prevailing social norms focuses with special intensity on ‘‘innocence’’: an intricate set of assumptions and prescriptions regulating female sexuality. On the eve of his marriage he begins to realize that the training of his bride-to-be has unfitted her for ‘‘the passionate and tender comradeship’’ he envisions. Marriageable girls in old New York are guarded assiduously from