Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

New Centenary Essays

Arielle Zibrak

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350065567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Following the publication of The Age of Innocence in 1920, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. To mark 100 years since the book's first publication, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays brings together leading scholars to explore cutting-edge critical approaches to Wharton's most popular novel. Re-visiting the text through a wide range of contemporary critical perspectives, this book considers theories of mind and affect, digital humanities and media studies; narrational form; innocence and scandal; and the experience of reading the novel in the late twentieth century as the child of refugees. With an introduction by editor Arielle Zibrak that connects the 1920 novel to the sociocultural climate of 2020, this collection both celebrates and offers stimulating critical insights into this landmark novel of modern American literature.

1

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, and American Individualism

Carol J. Singley
Rutgers University-Camden

After decades of disparagement by critics who viewed her as either a disciple of Henry James or a grande dame of literature out of touch with American life, Edith Wharton has been elevated, notably through the efforts of biographers and feminist and cultural critics from the 1970s onward, to the stature she deserves. She is now widely hailed as a major American writer, not only of manners but also of morals, not only of the upper class but also of class dynamics, and not only of women’s lives but also of gender relations. The growing body of critical work on Wharton addresses the broad range of her writings—poems, plays, and nonfiction as well as novels and short stories—and notes her contributions to modernism as well as to realism and naturalism. This criticism is also increasingly comparative, further signaling Wharton’s significant, secure place in the American literary canon. Despite this critical attention, however, Wharton’s work remains curiously outside one traditional line of inquiry that would instantiate her in a conversation routinely associated with American literature: that related to myths of American individualism and to qualities of American heroism. Indeed, explorations of selfhood have been so pervasive in discussions of American writing as to be hallmarks of American literature itself.

American individualism evokes the myth of the solitary white male hero, exemplified in literary texts that pre-date and surround Wharton’s writing. Readers may think, for example, of the opening line: “Call me Ishmael,” in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851); of the bardic yelp: “I sing and celebrate myself,” in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855); and of Huckleberry Finn’s solitary plan “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Contemporary with Newland Archer’s yearning for Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence is Jay Gatsby’s hopeless reach toward Daisy Buchanan and the green light on Long Island Sound in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Also in conversation with Wharton’s figure of a deflated hero is Hemingway’s wounded protagonist in The Sun Also Rises (1926), who resigns himself to making do with the materials at hand. Indeed, a grasp toward elusive ideals frames Wharton’s work, even as her engagement with literary naturalism, in many ways the antithesis of heroic American individualism, directs attention away from it. Wharton’s 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of failed aspiration and a thwarted relationship owes as much to this romantic tradition as to a naturalistic one. Indeed, Newland Archer’s very name—“new land”—signals his immersion in the myth of the American Adam, codified by R. W. B. Lewis in a book by that name.¹

This essay explores the cultural myths of American individualism in The Age of Innocence. It proceeds with awareness that doing so not only runs the risk of presuming a monolithic ideology to describe “American” literature but also positions Wharton in a tradition dominated by white male writers who were largely at liberty to take for granted the social, political, and geographic mobility that was often denied to women; and it acknowledges that, for Wharton, who enjoyed the privileges of wealth and class, such freedoms were nonetheless hard-won. Indeed, the achievement of autonomy associated with individualism is as important for the author of The Age of Innocence as it is for its protagonist. Although one might cautiously argue for biographical connections in the novel, the correspondence between author and protagonist Archer is significant. Wharton was 57 when she wrote the novel, the same age as Archer when he sits on a park bench outside Ellen’s Parisian apartment and decides whether or not to see her. Archer’s trajectory parallels Wharton’s journey as she left New York, first for Paris, and then for the south of France, and as she reflected, through the construction of the novel, upon the old New York society that had nurtured her but from which she needed to flee in order to pursue her passions: writing, art, travel, and friendships.

The differences between Wharton and her hero are also significant. Wharton, unlike Archer, who marries and settles into family life, seized the chance for romance, engaging in an extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton in 1908 and divorcing her husband of twenty-eight years, Edward (Teddy) Wharton, in 1913. Wharton associates the embrace of European culture not with Archer, but with Ellen, in whom she inscribes many attributes typically associated with male individualism, including retreat from the encumbrances of society, a motif that dates to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales of the early 1800s. Wharton’s old New York represents cultural restriction and the blind following of convention; Europe, in contrast, offers privacy and artistic expression. In this respect, Wharton reverses the usual pattern of westward expansion found in American literature and follows in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, at the end of The Scarlet Letter (1850), portrays Hester Prynne leaving Puritan strictures in Salem for relative freedom in Europe. Ellen, the reader infers, lives a more fulfilled life by returning to Europe than she would have lived in New York. Wharton thus inserts herself both in the form of Archer’s quest for romantic fulfillment within society’s confines and in the form of Ellen’s more reasoned choice to flee these constrictions.

When analyzed with awareness that the traits of American individualism are distributed between Archer and Ellen, Archer’s failure to attain these ideals becomes evident. Lacking initiative and averse to risk, he often hesitates, misses opportunity, and suffers the consequences of indecision. Life seems to happen to him rather than the reverse, as Archer himself realizes at the end of the novel: “Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.”² He can only assess his life with ambivalence: “there was good in the old ways” (347) and “there was good in the new order too” (349). Circumstances and the organized will of others run counter to his gestures toward creative freedom, such that he becomes a master of compromise, a portrait of benign resignation. One can view Archer’s lackluster achievement as exemplary of Wharton’s recurrent fictional theme of conflict between the individual and society, inflected by her deterministic outlook; however, his situation involves more than the workings of literary naturalism. Archer’s dilemmas take place within a cultural discourse about the changing definitions of the individual, one that complicates and challenges notions of autonomous selfhood that previous writers of the nineteenth century took for granted. The Age of Innocence reflects a social movement at the turn of the twentieth century in which individualism, while touted, was also channeled and constrained. Viewing Archer in this light reveals Wharton to be an astute realist with a keen sense of cultural context.

I.

The literary history of American individualism dates to the mid-twentieth century, when a profusion of critics celebrated the strength of the American character, touted democracy, and expressed an optimism born of the post-World War II era and ensuing Cold War against the Soviet Union and communism. Sacvan Bercovitch, observing that among these critics’ achievements was their ability to conflate notions of American history with those of American literature, points as one example to Robert Spiller et al.’s Literary History of the United States (1948).³ Spiller’s influential volume, Bercovitch notes, proceeds teleologically from sections entitled “The Colonies” through “The Democracy” and “Expansion” to “A World Literature.” As the editors write in the opening “Address to the Reader”: “increasing power and vitality are extraordinarily characteristic of [our nation].… Never has nature been so rapidly and so extensively altered by the efforts of man in so brief a time. Never has conquest resulted in a more vigorous development of initiative, individualism, self-reliance, and demands for freedom.”⁴

Spiller proceeds to connect these heroic qualities to the literature produced by major American authors. Ours has been a literature “profoundly influenced by ideals and by practices developed in democratic living. It has been intensely conscious of the needs of the common man, and equally conscious of the aspirations of the individual.… It has been humanitarian. It has been, on the whole an optimistic literature, made virile by criticism of the actual in comparison with the ideal.”⁵ Also voicing this sentiment was F. O. Matthiessen’s landmark American Renaissance (1941), which identified five writers from the period 1850–1855 who, in “an extraordinarily concentrated moment of literary expression,” helped to form a national identity and a literature equal in quality, as Matthiessen’s title suggests, to the work produced by writers of the European Renaissance.⁶ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville are the writers Matthiessen celebrates for exhibiting robust ideals that further American democracy and spur a national exploration of its geographic and political potential.

More studies of American individualism, which can be said to originate with Matthiessen’s formalist approach, were published into the 1950s. R. W. B. Lewis, who would go on to write a prize-winning biography of Wharton in 1975, posited the myth of the American Adam (1955), advancing an over-arching concept that Richard Chase’s study of the “American romance-novel” in The American Novel and Its Tradition had anticipated (1933).⁷ This myth-and-symbol school of criticism continued with Richard Poirier’s description, in A World Elsewhere (1985), of the “American obsession with inventing environments that permit unhampered freedom of consciousness.”⁸ Poirier’s hero, reflecting Matthiessen’s and Lewis’s focus on an idealized, aesthetically contained figure, is comfortably located beyond space and time. This work was complicated, however, by a temporally grounded study by Carolyn Porter that identified the figure of the “participant observer.” In her 1981 historicized analysis, Seeing and Being, Porter moves the timeline of American writers forward to the end of the nineteenth century by addressing Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) and by situating the narrative action of the novel within the context of capitalistic expansion and its ensuing commodification of others in service to self-gain. Porter does not mention Wharton in her book, but even a cursory reading of The Age of Innocence reveals connections with her thesis. Wharton, keenly sensitive to social context, presents in her portrait of Newland Archer a man who is as immersed in his world as he fancies himself detached from it. Porter’s aim, to “reconnect Emerson to the society he manifestly did not transcend” because “no writer transcends his or her historical and social context,”⁹ also speaks to Wharton’s project: to present a “dilettante” (4) who samples life but cannot immerse himself fully in it.

Using these mid-twentieth-century myth-making critics as a touchstone, readers can appreciate from the first chapter of The Age of Innocence that Archer is a poor candidate for the kind of American self-sufficiency and individualism that Matthiessen and others tout. By many measures, he fails to achieve the sought-after independence associated with this myth, as Wharton makes clear in her rehearsal of his shortcomings throughout the novel. A slave to convention, he predictably performs social roles. He arrives at the opera fashionably late, habitually displays a gardenia in his lapel, and grooms his hair with not one but two brushes. As Wharton writes: “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” (4). He repeatedly conforms to others’ expectations, neglecting his own desires.

Nor do Archer’s material circumstances lend themselves to originality or innovation. The principle of American individualism has always been tied to economic mobility. As former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke has phrased it: “A bedrock American principle is the idea that all individuals should have the opportunity to succeed on the basis of their own effort, skill, and ingenuity.”¹⁰ Similarly, John Cawelti, writing about the early nineteenth century, notes that “faith in America made it commonplace that a man could become rich if he worked at it.”¹¹ Archer’s comfortable class and family position would seem to obviate the need for assumption of risk that usually accompanies an individual’s bid for a more rewarding and lucrative life. Already wealthy, he has little motivation to rise on his own merits or to negotiate his identity in relation to mobility—qualities fundamental to the formation of American character since Benjamin Franklin. Archer’s class privilege does come at a cost, however. Membership in an American aristocracy allows the individual to be part of the group but implicitly forbids his departure from it in quest of goals of his own choosing. It conceives of steps taken away as detrimental to the individual as well as to the community. Archer’s membership in old New York society thus forms a stasis from which he cannot move.

II.

The romantic pursuit of individualism has its basis in nineteenth-century American literature, as Matthiessen and others point out. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays serve as a touchstone for Wharton’s novel, with his ideas informing Archer’s successes as well as his failures. Emerson’s writings make it clear that being a member of the upper class does not preclude striving for individualistic ideals. On the contrary, as Emerson observes in “Manners”: one can be a gentleman in society and also possess originality and courage, values essential to American individualism. In this essay Emerson writes that the word “gentleman” is useful to describe “the heroic character”; however, he distinguishes “gentleman” from the word “fashion,” which has “a narrow and often sinister meaning.” “The gentleman,” Emerson continues, “is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.… [P]ersonal force never goes out of fashion.”¹² Rather than meet these Emersonian standards, Archer lets fashion and habit dictate the terms of his New York life.

It would be overreaching to call Wharton an Emersonian romantic. A realist, she resisted unwarranted claims of optimism found in her time, such as those espoused by proponents of New Thought, who held that, as Richard Weiss explains, mere “states of mind can affect objective reality.”¹³ She subjects her characters to the forces of social law and seldom allows them to reach their goals merely by wishing for success. Throughout the novel, Archer is given to wishful thinking and romantic flights of fantasy. His desire to escape with Ellen to a land where society’s rules do not apply to them epitomizes this kind of idle dreaming, as does his being uncontrollably moved by the ribbon scene in the production of the sentimental play, The Shaughraun, and his mistaking the pink parasol belonging to the Blenker girl for Ellen’s umbrella. Still, Wharton endows Archer with agency and the ability to imagine his future and take steps toward it. This potential for self-fulfillment is reflected in Emerson’s notion that “in the moving crowd of good society, the men of valor and reality are known, and rise to their natural place.”¹⁴

Archer forgoes the chance for personal happiness with Ellen, but Wharton gives him the opportunity to rise, as Emerson writes, to his “natural place” “in the moving crowd of good society” through public service. Enmeshed in conventional family life, he is thrilled when the governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt, urges him to run for office with the rousing words: “You’re the kind of man the country wants, Archer. If the stable’s ever to be cleaned out, men like you have got to lend a hand in the cleaning” (346). Archer “eagerly” answers “the call” and wins the election, but he serves only one term in the State Assembly. He loses reelection and wonders, before sinking “back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work,” whether “men like himself were what his country needed” (346). He reviews his brief career in public service with ambivalence, as he does most everything in his life: “He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante.… He had been, in short, what people were beginning to call ‘a good citizen’.… His days were full, and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all a man ought to ask” (346–347). Emerson makes it clear that one should indeed ask for more. In “Manners,” he reinterprets traditional displays of heroic valor, such as those found in strife-ridden medieval days, to the realities of the modern age. He writes that today “the competition is transferred from war to politics and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in these new arenas.”¹⁵ Although Archer fulfills his role of “good citizen” by serving on boards and charities, he lacks the “personal force” that Emerson advocates. His record is one of accommodation rather than achievement, let alone transcendence.

Using Emerson as a touchstone, one can chart a path that Archer might have taken. His choices contrast with those of a minor character, Emerson Sillerton, whose name pays homage to the transcendentalist. Through her depiction of Sillerton,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Contributor Biographies
• Introduction: “Each Time You Happen to Me All Over Again”
• 1 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, and American Individualism
• 2 Edith Wharton’s Prose Spectacle in the Age of Cinema
• 3 “You Must Tell Me Just What to Do”: Action and Characterization in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
• 4 “Isn’t That French?”: Edith Wharton Revisits the “International Theme”
• 5 Newland Archer’s Doubled Consciousness: Wharton, Psychology, and Narrational Form
• 6 “Trying It On” Again as Affect: Rethinking Feeling in The Age of Innocence
• 7 Innocence and Scandal in Edith Wharton’s Old New York
• 8 The Age of Dissonance
• Notes
• Critical Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint