The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [154]
His appreciation of cultures outside and ‘‘beyond’’ his own tends to liberate Archer’s inner life rather than its outward circumstances. Like other Wharton characters who chafe against culturally imposed barriers to happiness, he is compelled to admit that humans are social animals who cannot live in a cultural vacuum. He fantasizesthat he and Ellen might flee to ‘‘ ‘a world where . . . categories like that’ ’’—e.g., categories such as wife and mistress—‘‘ ‘won’t exist,’ ’’ for example, only to have her point out that there is no such place (‘‘ ‘Oh, my dear— where is that country?’ ’’). Every community classifies, coerces, and restricts its members in some fashion; the particulars vary, but compliance with social forms is an inescapable fact of human existence. The exaggerated requirements of ‘‘innocence’’ in Archer’s society, for example, are not necessary or permanent but, rather, the product of a particular time and place. Like the stone age or the bronze age, the age of innocence will pass, giving way to new social systems. When Archer and Ellen meet at the art museum in the park, Wharton places them in a room housing the ‘‘Cesnola antiquities.’’ Staring at bits of pottery, statues, and tools—all relics of an extinct civilization—they confront with special poignance the transience of human culture: ‘‘It seems cruel . . . that after a while nothing matters . . . any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: ‘Use unknown.’ ’’ These words express the tragic insight at the heart of the novel: individual destiny is to a large extent defined, and human potential frequently circumscribed, by social conventions as ephemeral as they are ‘‘inscrutable.’’
The twenty-six-year time jump at the end of the novel underlines this point. Reflecting on his own past, considering the compromises he has made with his own time and place, Archer observes that ‘‘the old ways’’ have given way to a ‘‘new order.’’ His daughter, though not innately more sensitive or intelligent than her mother, leads ‘‘a larger life’’ and holds ‘‘more tolerant views.’’ This is the consequence of revised ideas about female education: the daughter has been raised under different conditions from those that prevailed during her mother’s girlhood. The result is good, Archer finds, but it is not the result of any concerted effort to initiate change. Looking around him, he sees numerous shifts in communitystandards and social judgments, none consciously designed. Illegitimacy of birth, for instance, has lost much of its stigma, so his son can marry one of ‘‘Beaufort’s bastards’’ without scandal. Social change has been so sweeping, in fact, that not much is left of ‘‘the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him.’’ Wistfully he notes that his children will enjoy freedoms unknown to people of his own generation. He can rejoice in his offspring’s liberation from ‘‘the old ways’’ even as he perceives how meaningless his own struggles appear in retrospect. It is cheering to see evidence that social prescriptions are neither absolute nor permanent, but the individual suffering they cause appears all the more arbitrary and accidental.
Alert readers come to realize, finally, that only the setting of The Age of Innocence is dated (and deliberately so), not its conception, although the novel lacks such obvious hallmarks of literary modernism as stream-of-consciousness, distorted chronology, fragmented structure, or syntactic experimentation. Its most conspicuously modernist feature is, rather, the author’s engagement with research and theories that at the time of the novel’s publication were excitingly new. Insights emerging