The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [8]
Ellen continues to stand outside the social order even when invited in; she remains uninitiated, unassimilable, and unreliable. She is dangerous because she cannot be counted upon to play her part; she threatens the social order because she is willing to risk leaving the system in order to be free from it. Wharton focuses her attention on Ellen, the dangerous, adult orphan, the not-so-young woman of unsettled social standing who is trying to decide on a fixed persona in The Age of Innocence. Ellen, whose life in Europe hints not only at a failed marriage but at lovers, is presented by Wharton as, paradoxically, the most innocent of figures. It is Ellen who believes that New York, with its streets so straightforwardly labeled, will itself be easy to decipher. Newland, too, is innocent: Believing himself to be a man of the world who understands not only New York but the ways of life of adult men and women, he discovers that he is being played like a harp by those figures he once dared hold in contempt. Only May—with her naive, apparently unrehearsed simplicity—understands how the system really operates. May is no innocent: She gets her way in the end. Her blue eyes are ‘‘wet with victory,’’ Wharton tells us.
Despite their passion, intelligence, and perspective, Ellen and Newland are the innocent ones here. They find themselves sacrificed to a world which, in twenty years’ time, no longer exists. Having been born ‘‘in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs,’’ the lovers cannot translate their relationship into terms both understandable and viable. Newland settles for the life scripted for him since birth, worshipping at the shrine of Ellen’s memory and using the idea of her as an inoculation against any genuine intimacy in his life. Ellen carves a destiny of her own, much as Wharton did, and creates a life of quiet heroism and integrity. Each watches, from a different corner, the passing of an age. They do not mourn its passing.
—Regina Barreca
University of Connecticut
BOOK I
1
ON A January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances ‘‘above the Forties,’’ of a new opera house which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘‘new people’’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.
It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as ‘‘an exceptionally brilliant audience’’ had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery snow streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient ‘‘Brown coupé.’’ To come to the opera in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one’s own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of one’s own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was one of the great livery stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the club box the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. There was no reason why