Edith
Wharton was fifty-eight when she published her masterpiece, although she was
about ten years old when the events of The Age of Innocence start
up—not much older than the little girl in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait from
which the novel takes its title—and had nearly finished her first novel, The
Valley of Decision, when Newland Archer arrives outside Ellen Olenska’s
apartment in Paris thirty years later.
The novel spans her conscious life before she
became a fulltime professional novelist, then—before James had urged her to “Do
New York!” The italics were his. By then she was already said “not to
relish the frequent references made by her readers to her indebtedness to Henry
James.”[1] Two decades later, when she had come fully
into her own, she was able to allude playfully to the master without fear of
being relegated forever to the status of his disciple. Newland Archer’s very
name is Jamesian. As always, her method is Jamesian, conforming to James’s
precept that “every great novel must first of all be based on a profound sense
of moral values.”[2] But the novel’s message turns James’s values
inside out.
At
the age of fifty-seven, after his wife May has died and Ellen (“the composite
vision of all he had missed”) has returned to Europe, Newland reflects upon his
experience. He knows that he has been “what was called a faithful husband,” and
he also knows that, “if marriage was a dull duty,” the disregard of it was a
“mere battle of ugly appetites.” And yet the suspicion gnaws at him:
The worst of doing one’s duty was that
it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view
that the men of his generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right
and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so
little scope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a man’s imagination, so
easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and
surveys the long windings of destiny.[3]
She
divorced Teddy in 1913 and published The Custom of the Country, her
divorce novel, the same year. By then divorce was beginning to be so common in
the United States that a Duchess says of Undine Spragg, “she’s an
American—she’s divorced,” as if these were two ways of saying the same thing.
Coming out seven years later, The Age of Innocence was
Wharton’s marriage drama. She was ambivalent about marriage. Her biographer
reports that she was “grimly fond” of a remark in Middlemarch:
“Marriage is so unlike anything else—there is something even awful in the
nearness it brings.”[4]
Her
unequivocal contempt for the “ugly appetites” unleashed by adultery did not
affect her tragic view of marital duty. The Age of Innocence is
her subtle, carefully concealed refutation of The Portrait of a Lady,
in which Isabel Archer consciously decides against rising above her daily level
and agrees to be buried alive in marriage to a moral monster, sacrificing the
long windings of her own destiny to the duty of protecting her stepdaughter.
About a third of the way through the novel, Henrietta Stackpole enunciates
James’s view of life, scolding Isabel that
you think you can lead a romantic life,
that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You’ll find you’re
mistaken. Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it—to make any sort
of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I
assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can’t always please yourself; you
must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you’re very ready to do; but
there’s another thing that’s still more important—you must oftendisplease
others. You must always be read for that—you must never shrink from it. That
doesn’t suit you at all—you’re too fond of admiration, you like to be thought
well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic
views—that’s your great illusion, my dear. But we can’t. You must be prepared
on many occasions in life to please no one at all—not even yourself.[5]
Her
return to her husband is Isabel’s fulfillment of this prophecy. For Wharton,
however, this is itself a romantic view of “disagreeable duty.” If it were not
such a howler of an anachronism, I would venture to characterize Wharton’s view
as existentialist. Between the duty of marriage, which disqualifies a person
from realizing his imagination, and the “ugly appetites” of erotic passion
there is no exit. Man is tragically imprisoned between duty and appetite.
Newland’s
manacles are forged by his own moral decisions. Even before he conceives a
passion for Madame Olenska, Newland acts out of public kindness to her—moving
up his engagement to May so that two families instead of one stand behind her,
interceding with the van der Luydens to ratify her acceptance by Society—which
creates a public debt of gratitude that Madame Olenska cannot ignore or default
upon without moral damage to herself and Newland.
It
is May Welland, of all people, who lays out the principle. When Newland flees
to the Welland’s winter home in St. Augustine to escape his rapidly growing
desire for Madame Olenska, May infers that something (as she puts it) has
happened. He declares that he has come to implore her to move up the date of
their marriage. She is innocently skeptical. “Is it,” she says—“is it because
you’re not certain of continuing to care for me?“ When Newland reacts with
anger, she asks quietly if there is “someone else.” Newland assumes that she is
referring to his old mistress, discarded before he had begun to court May; and
certainly that is the only assumption May would ever admit to. She insists upon
knowing whether there is any feeling between Newland and another woman. “I
couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else,”
she says (ch 16).
Precisely
because he shares this moral conviction, Newland cannot abandon May for Ellen
Olenska, even when they openly acknowledge their love for each other at last.
What is more, he had an earlier opportunity to do so—before any immorality
would have attached to the break. In St. Augustine, May had offered to release
him from his pledge. Out of a baffled inability to own the depth of his feeling
for Madame Olenska, even to himself—out of a greater respect for respectablity
than for the scandalous truth of deepening love—Newland refuses the offer. He
makes his choice, and the iron door of tragedy slams shut.
That The
Age of Innocence was conceived as a reversal of The Portrait
of a Lady is made clear early on. After seeing Ellen at the theater
(where he is vouchsafed a glimpse of the lovers’ parting that she and he will
be obliged to reenact), Newland runs into his friend Ned Winsett. Newland is a
dilettante; Winsett, a literary critic turned journalist. Their talk turns to
culture. Winsett is properly scornful:
Culture! Yes—if we had it! But there
are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of—well,
hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition
that your forebears brought with them. But you’re in a pitiful little minority:
you’ve got no centre, no competition, no audience. You’re like the pictures on
the walls of a deserted house: “The Portrait of a Gentleman.” You'll never
amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right
down into the muck. That, or emigrate . . . God! If I could
emigrate . . . (ch 14)
Both
Isabel and Newland Archer—distant cousins, apparently, who share the same last
name—belong to the natural aristocracy of open-hearted men and women, but their
well-painted portraits—the moral graces they have cultivated in themselves—are
wasted in empty houses. James saw greatness in the waste where Wharton saw only
the waste.
The
glittering and pharisaic Society of old New York, with its “elaborate mutual
dissimulation,” which barricades it against the unpleasant, modestly draws a
curtain over Newland Archer’s tragedy. By the end of the novel, that world has
“reeled on its foundations.” The gain is knowledge of the tragedy; the loss is
innocence.
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