The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [4]
It can be argued that the specificity with which Wharton documents the familial networks makes her into at least as much of a social anthropologist as a writer of fiction. After flawlessly dissecting the customs of the country, she manages nevertheless to disengage herself from the descriptions she meticulously chronicles, which indicates most obviously familiarity but also indicates a perspective dependent upon distance from the world described. She writes as both an insider and an outsider, which is not surprising given that Wharton’s life was lived on exactly this boundary.
Brought up inside the world of wealthy fin-de-siècle New York, Wharton deliberately deserted it for a bohemian existence that reflected her rejection of those airless drawing rooms that so dominate her fiction. More than any of her other works, The Age of Innocence is emblematic of Wharton’s brilliant depiction and rejection of a lost land which remains only in the memories and nearly indecipherable hieroglyphs of her tribe. Satire created by Wharton does not have a corrective function, however, and she remains fascinatingly problematic because while her prose mimics the accents of the ruling class, she mirrors power only to ridicule it.
Edith Wharton’s sharp and acerbic prose cuts through the authority of everything from the way old New York dressed, to the small insanities of sexual repression, to the intimate parlor games of a society redefining itself sexually and psychologically. Wharton’s prose is emblematic of the way women writers, in particular, question, mock, and demystify the world of inherited and institionalized power and money.
Wharton herself bought experience at a high market price, and she often structures metaphors for emotion by juxtaposing the heart with the wallet by discussing love and affection in terms of investment and repayment. When Ellen and May’s grandmother comments, ‘‘After all, marriage is marriage, and money’s money—both useful things in their way,’’ she makes explicit that gridwork Wharton has used as the structuring device throughout her fiction: Marriage and money are crucially and inextricably bound up with one another. Like her predecessors Jane Austen and George Eliot (whose novel Middlemarch—about love between a couple deemed by their society as inappropriately matched—is discussed by Wharton’s characters), Wharton is as deeply concerned with the way that honesty—sexual, social, and intellectual—at once deflates and invigorates social intercourse as she is with the way that money inevitably affects emotion.
We have seen, for example, that Newland Archer is meticulous in timing his arrival at the opera. Specifically, he arrives at the moment when the opera’s heroine is plucking petals off a flower to determine rather unscientifically whether she is loved or not loved, but more generally Newland’s entrance upholds the revered custom of arriving late to the theater. Why is arriving late at the theater a social requirement? ‘‘New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was ‘not the thing’ to arrive early at the opera; and 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.’’ In other words, ‘‘the thing’’ is done for no reason save the continuation of an established ritual divorced of any real meaning, and Wharton wryly and ruthlessly establishes Newland Archer as a willing participant in these rituals—at first.
Unquestioning in his conservative belief that whatever is, is right, Newland Archer follows the score orchestrated by his culture without