Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

 

Edith Wharton at The Mount, the country house she designed and had built in 1902

This was a very disappointing read. I read two or three books by Wharton when I was much younger, but perhaps I am more discerning today. What was wrong with this book? I can think of several reasons.

Lack of characterisation

I couldn’t believe that the main characters, May Welland, Newland Archer, and Ellen Olenska, could carry the weight of thought that Wharton tried to invest in them. In fact, of these three, only Newland Archer’s thinking is revealed. The novel could have been written in the first person by him.

Perhaps this lack of characterisation is a problem with a genre where if you decide to write about boring characters trapped in their environment, the book risks being boring itself.

The book attempts to present a Jamesian moment of decision: will Newland Archer desert his wife for an adulterous affair with Countess Olenska? But we feel he is too slight for us to bother much either way.

I was fascinated by the minutiae of New York life for the super-rich around 1890. At that time, it appears that if it didn’t happen in New York society, it wasn’t worth thinking about – at least, for the lucky participants. A social whirl of balls, opera, summer houses in Newport (where Wharton also had a house) but a life of complete philistinism, a cultural desert. Plus the way the men were able, if they wished, to run a double life with the tacit acceptance of their behaviour, clearly known about by the women, but not mentioned.

I was not impressed by Wharton’s feeble attempt to depict a bohemian artist, the tutor M. Riviere. Clearly she has a fondness for things cultural and presents this as a foil to the empty lives of the rich – but  Riviere’s character is as shallow as the main three roles.

The love scenes descend into romantic fiction, and resemble romantic fiction in that these characters are no better drawn or believable than the heroes of Mills & Boon.

How is Countess Olenska so notable, so individual? Newland is struck that she calls one of the wealthy relatives’ houses “gloomy” (“the words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der Luydens gloomy”). In contrast, he states, of her rented house “It’s delicious – what you’ve done here”. But we never hear quite what she has done; she remains shallow, as are the other characters, since we have no evidence otherwise.

Nor was I impressed by the plot. It is very unlikely that as a lawyer, Newland Archer would be given a case involving his own family. But his legal work seems so undemanding of his time that perhaps it doesn’t really matter. There is no problem in him having time off for his emotional life,

Perhaps the lovingly detailed description of East Coast life  is to be expected. Wharton was born into a rich New York family; she privately published a collection of poems, and “came out” as a debutante. For much of her life she lived financially secure, from a legacy and her husband’s income. I would have imagined her experience in the First World War would have hardened her, yet this novel was only published in 1920.

Nostalgia?

Perhaps the book is, as some have claimed, an exercise in nostalgia, for a world that would never return. However, if this was New York in the 1890s, I want nothing of it. This is an existence totally dependent on slavery; Olenska’s visit to Boston is noted because she did not have a servant with her. She states it wasn’t worth it for only two day: “For two days it was not worth while to bring her”. Newland sees this as “unconventional”. Olenska is unusual in having a named servant, but one maid in the novel has no name except the description “mulatto”: we first hear of a “a mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban”. There is no description of the ethnic background of any of the other slaves, except for Olenska’s Nastasia, so why the repeated mention of “mulatto”? It must have some significance that escapes me (and escapes the World’s Classics edition editor).