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Summary
Summary
Complementing the complete text of Wharton's landmark novel, this extensive volume also includes a wealth of contextual material. "Background Readings" explores the culture of 1870s New York, as depicted in the novel, as well as views on marriage and divorce at that time. In "Other Writings by Edith Wharton," the author discusses fiction writing, old New York, women, and her winning of the Pulitzer Prize. The "Critical Readings" section features essays on the novel from a wide variety of perspectives.
Author Notes
Edith Wharton was a woman of extreme contrasts; brought up to be a leisured aristocrat, she was also dedicated to her career as a writer. She wrote novels of manners about the old New York society from which she came, but her attitude was consistently critical. Her irony and her satiric touches, as well as her insight into human character, continue to appeal to readers today.
As a child, Wharton found refuge from the demands of her mother's social world in her father's library and in making up stories. Her marriage at age 23 to Edward ("Teddy") Wharton seemed to confirm her place in the conventional role of wealthy society woman, but she became increasingly dissatisfied with the "mundanities" of her marriage and turned to writing, which drew her into an intellectual community and strengthened her sense of self. After publishing two collections of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), she wrote her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), a long, historical romance set in eighteenth-century Italy. Her next work, the immensely popular The House of Mirth (1905), was a scathing criticism of her own "frivolous" New York society and its capacity to destroy her heroine, the beautiful Lily Bart.
As Wharton became more established as a successful writer, Teddy's mental health declined and their marriage deteriorated. In 1907 she left America altogether and settled in Paris, where she wrote some of her most memorable stories of harsh New England rural life---Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917)---as well as The Reef (1912), which is set in France. All describe characters forced to make moral choices in which the rights of individuals are pitted against their responsibilities to others. She also completed her most biting satire, The Custom of the Country (1913), the story of Undine Spragg's climb, marriage by marriage, from a midwestern town to New York to a French chateau. During World War I, Wharton dedicated herself to the war effort and was honored by the French government for her work with Belgian refugees.
After the war, the world Wharton had known was gone. Even her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), a story set in old New York, could not recapture the former time. Although the new age welcomed her---Wharton was both a critical and popular success, honored by Yale University and elected to The National Institute of Arts and Letters---her later novels show her struggling to come to terms with a new era. In The Writing of Fiction (1925), Wharton acknowledged her debt to her friend Henry James, whose writings share with hers the descriptions of fine distinctions within a social class and the individual's burdens of making proper moral decisions.
R.W.B. Lewis's biography of Wharton, published in 1975, along with a wealth of new biographical material, inspired an extensive reevaluation of Wharton. Feminist readings and reactions to them have focused renewed attention on her as a woman and as an artist. Although many of her books have recently been reprinted, there is still no complete collected edition of her work.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-By Edith Wharton. This tragi-comedy won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
The novelist who is faced with a simple problem of personal renunciation conceived as the theme of a tale has several anxious choices to make. But of these there are only two which seriously matter. They consist in the alternatives of intensive and expansive treatment. To separate the dominant issue from external circumstances and so to heighten it by this elimination of all that might come between the essential and the reader is one alternative; to build around the problem a fabric which shall give it a definite place in time and society is the other. Mrs Wharton has tried both methods. In Ethan Frome she presented a poignant theme in the most poignant manner possible to her. In The Age of Innocence she has essayed to give us two things, the personal problem and a picture of the New York social life of the 70s. Her hero is engaged to a lovely but unimaginative girl when he meets a woman, already married, who represents for him all that is beautiful and absorbing. Offered his freedom, he does not accept it. Married, and desperate with desire for the woman whom he loves and who loves him, he is on the point of sacrificing her to his love when the woman to whom he is married discovers herself to be enceinte . The planned dishonour is abandoned, and the tale is finished. Convention rather than humanity has conquered impulse. Mrs Wharton tries her best to make the story moving, but she is dealing with dead stuff and dead people. They lived in New York in the 70s and nothing she can do will make them come alive again. They interest us as old letters, old newspapers interest us. Had the theme been treated intensively we cannot know what might have been the effect. We only know that in great novels we have no pervading sense of time, but only of the reality of the emotions about which we are reading. And when one of Mrs Wharton's characters says to his father "you date" we know that he is only speaking the truth, and a more damning truth than he has any idea of. Because if characters date in a bad sense it means that they have been dead characters; and that is precisely what Newland Archer and his wife and his mistress have been. The book is careful, studied, temperate, but it is dull with detail which does not create illusion. There is no illusion. The picture does not compose, and these three hearts do not stir us because they do not beat. They are puppets set in a period. This article is drawn from the archive at the Newsroom, an archive and visitor centre for the Guardian, the Observer and Guardian Unlimited at 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA, telephone 020 7886 9898 email: newsroom@guardian.co.uk. The Newsroom includes an exhibition space, lecture theatre, education facility, public study centre and cafe open Mon-Fri, 10-5 website: www.guardian.co.uk/ newsroom Caption: article-age of innocence.1 When one of Mrs [Edith Wharton]'s characters says to his father "you date" we know that he is only speaking the truth, and a more damning truth than he has any idea of. Because if characters date in a bad sense it means that they have been dead characters; and that is precisely what Newland Archer and his wife and his mistress have been. This article is drawn from the archive at the Newsroom, an archive and visitor centre for the Guardian, the Observer and Guardian Unlimited at 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA, telephone 020 7886 9898 email: newsroom@guardian.co.uk. The Newsroom includes an exhibition space, lecture theatre, education facility, public study centre and cafe open Mon-Fri, 10-5 website: www.guardian.co.uk/ newsroom
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Maureen Howard's Introduction to The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's most romantic novel, yet our expectations for her lovers, Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, are disappointed at every turn. Wharton's genius lies in offering the pleasure of a romance, then engaging the reader in a stunning exploration of boundaries between the demands of society and personal freedom, illicit passion and moral responsibility. In this novel of bold design, we are the innocents unaware of the more demanding rewards to come, just as the readers of the Pictorial Review were as the monthly installments appeared in 1920. Luring us with the high comic tone of the opening chapters, Wharton admits us to Newland Archer's dreamy certainty about love and marriage, all that lies ahead in an ordered universe, his little world of fashionable New York in the 1870s. The strict rules of that society are rendered in detail-the moments when talk is allowed during the opera, the prescribed hours for afternoon visits, the lilies of the valley that must be sent to May Welland, the untainted girl who is about to become Newland's fiancée. In the opening scenes there are two observers, Wharton and Newland. The novelist is full of historical information about the city of her childhood and the customs of her privileged class. New York, constructed out of memory and verified by research, is not a discarded back-lot affair of an old Hollywood studio, but a place that must come alive for the writer as well as her readers. This lost world, lavish with particulars of dress, food, wine, manners, is weighted with an abundance of reality, all the furnishings of excessively indulged, overly secure lives. But as the writer calls up her New York of fifty years earlier, Newland Archer also instructs us in the mores of the best of families and the questionable behavior of flashy intruders on the rise. This dual perspective is playful: the novelist assessing her man, placing him in a rarefied world that he too finds narrow and amusing, though all the while he is a player in it. Wharton's education of the reader continues as each character comes on stage. Newland is a self-declared dilettante, May an innocent thing, Countess Olenska an expatriate with a problematic past. Julius Beaufort, a freewheeling climber, may be the scoundrel of the piece. The novelist is knowingly leading us into melodrama, the dominant mode of the popular theater of the age she recreates, a theater of plays in which good and evil were clearly sorted out, not tainted by moral ambiguity or shaded feelings. As we read what has so often been praised as an historical novel, we must bear in mind the year it was composed, 1919. The Age of Innocence calls upon history to inform the present, and Wharton portrays a cast of clueless characters who could not conceive the slaughter of World War I or President Wilson's ill-fated proposal for the League of Nations. Turning back to the untroubled era of her childhood, she entertains with a predictable old form that is a lure, even a joke, but not on the reader. We are drawn by the broad humor at the outset of the novel to the discovery of a darker story without the simple solutions of melodrama. Edith Wharton had a gift for comedy that has often been obscured by a reverence for the elegant lady novelist or probing for feminist concerns in her work. The opening chapters of The Age of Innocence are given to caricature and sweeping mockery. In fact, Wharton mentions Dickens and Thackeray, whose comic exaggerations she must have had in mind. Newland Archer, superior and instructional, is foolish in the romantic projections of his marriage to May: "'We'll read Faust together . . . by the Italian lakes . . .' he thought, somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honeymoon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride." An understanding of Faust, the most popular opera of the nineteenth century, with its unbridled passion and soul-selling contract, will presumably improve May: "He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton." Meanwhile, Nilsson, the great diva, sings gloriously in the tacky garden scenery of the opera house. Early on, we suspect there will be no paradise and little innocence as the next months' installments of the novel unfold. May, corseted in virginal white with a "modest tulle tucker" over her bosom, is too good to be true. It may be difficult for a contemporary reader to find Ellen Olenska, fated to be May's rival, shocking in that revealing Empire dress, "like a nightgown," according to Newland's sister. Excerpted from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| About This Series | p. ix |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| A Note on the Text | p. 10 |
| Part 1 The Age of Innocence | p. 11 |
| Part 2 Background Readings | p. 287 |
| Questions of Culture | p. 289 |
| From "The Metropolitan Gentry: Culture against Politics" | p. 289 |
| From "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" | p. 294 |
| From "Democratic Vistas" | p. 300 |
| From "Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art" | p. 303 |
| "The Location and Decoration of Houses in The Age of Innocence" | p. 318 |
| From How the Other Half Lives | p. 332 |
| Marriage and Divorce | p. 338 |
| From Domestic Revolutions | p. 338 |
| From "For the Wedding Night" | p. 345 |
| Travel and Sport | p. 348 |
| From the Introduction to American Travel Writers, 1850-1915 | p. 349 |
| From "Americans Abroad" | p. 355 |
| From "Newport" | p. 357 |
| From "The Lawn Set" | p. 359 |
| Anthropology | p. 364 |
| From Violence and the Sacred | p. 364 |
| From Primitive Culture | p. 366 |
| Part 3 Other Writings | p. 369 |
| Writing The Age of Innocence | p. 371 |
| The Ways of Old New York | p. 372 |
| The Childishness of American Women | p. 378 |
| "The Valley of Childish Things" | p. 380 |
| Winning the Pulitizer Prize | p. 381 |
| Part 4 Critical Readings | p. 385 |
| From "The Composition of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence" | p. 387 |
| From "Cool Diana and the Blood-Red Muse: Edith Wharton on Innocence and Art" | p. 393 |
| From "Becoming the Mask: Edith Wharton's Ingenues" | p. 404 |
| From "Angel of Devastation: Edith Wharton on the Arts of the Enslaved" | p. 408 |
| From "The Age of Innocence and the Bohemian Peril" | p. 411 |
| From "Edith Wharton: The Archeological Motive" | p. 414 |
| From "'Hunting for the Real': Wharton and the Science of Manners" | p. 418 |
| From "A Note on Wharton's Use of Faust" | p. 430 |
| From "The Mind in Chains: Public Plots and Personal Fables" | p. 432 |
| From "American Naturalism in Its 'Perfected' State: The Age of Innocence and An American Tragedy" | p. 434 |
| From "The Scorses Interview: On Filming The Age of Innocence" | p. 441 |
| "Of Writers and Class: In Praise of Edith Wharton" | p. 448 |
| Works Cited | p. 454 |
| For Further Reading | p. 455 |
