The Age of Innocence

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent. World War I came to an end, and the preparations for peace began. Yet despite the Allied nations’ sense of relief and gratitude, even happiness had its melancholy aspect. Old orders had fallen in this first “world” war: dreams had been demolished; the world had been irrevocably changed; and no artist understood the contradictions and complexities of the war and its “tragic victory” more keenly or comprehensively than the great American novelist, Edith Wharton. She recorded her vivid reaction in Fighting France (1915): “It is one of the most detestable things about war,” she wrote, “that everything connected with it, except the death and ruin that result, is such a heightening of life, so visually stimulating and absorbing. ‘It was gay and terrible,’ is the phrase forever recurring in [Tolstoy’s novel] ‘War and Peace.’ ”

Edith Wharton began drafting The Age of Innocence almost as soon as the gunfire had finished, and the narrative assumed its final form only fourteen months later. In many ways, this was Wharton’s “war novel”: it was a salute to the new age and a memorial to the age departed; but most of all, it was a study of the complex, intimate connections between social cohesion and individual growth, and its insights were saddened, deepened, and enriched by Edith Wharton’s own recent acquaintance with conflict and devastation.

Never tainted by sentiment, most of Wharton’s narratives explore the uncertain terrain between two opposite dangers. At one extreme there is anarchy, the eradication of all systems of order. Wharton’s first novel, The Valley of Decision, a saga of Napoleonic uprisings in Italy, had depicted the chaotic results: “Man was free at last—freer than his would-be liberators had ever dreamed of making him—and he used his freedom like a beast!” At the other extreme there is stifling, suffocating repression; well-known masterpieces like The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome depict the potentially fatal consequences. Yet if both of these extremes are lethal, the territory between them is filled with uncertainty, and it can never offer more than partial answers to our human problems and mortal woes. Edith Wharton consistently held that the notion of “perfect” happiness—like that of “perfect” freedom—is nothing but an alluring phantom that leads us to inevitable destruction; and virtually all of her prewar fictions center upon the individual dilemma of discovering and accepting some form of partial (and necessarily imperfect ) happiness.

The new dimension introduced by the First World War was a concern for the survival not merely of individual men and women, but of a culture—an entire society. Just before the war began—and throughout its duration—Wharton educated herself in the fields of archaeology and anthropology. She learned about ancient and primitive cultures; but perhaps most important, she also realized with new clarity that cultures can die, become “ex tinct,” like species who have failed the test of evolution. Unlike any other experience in her life, the war demonstrated what happens when an entire society and its traditions are subjected to unrelenting assault. The war’s conclusion had revealed France’s heroic ability to withstand this assault—to endure and even to grow stronger. Yet it had disclosed very little about the fortitude of Edith Wharton’s native land, the United States, which had refused to enter the war until shortly before its conclusion. What might be America’s sources of strength? What elements of American culture could provide not merely real happiness for individuals, but enduring strength for this still-unproven nation?

Wharton’s experiences during the war changed her forever; and it is no accident that The Age of Innocence is a post-Civil War novel, set in the 1870s, but designed to discover those cultural strengths that might enable America to survive the postwar years of the 1920s.

Wharton, who resided in Europe permanently after her divorce in 1913, had taken up residence in Paris; for the already renowned author, these war years were not a time of artistic creativity. Instead, she turned her energies to working for the Allied cause, and in this, as in so many things, she was prodigiously energetic and exceptionally successful. Indeed, her achievements were so remarkable that in 1916 she was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, probably the most notable award for her work, but only one of many. Throughout the conflict, Edith Wharton played an extraordinary role in providing help and support for civilians and soldiers alike.

Shortly after war broke out, Wharton became head of the American Hostels for Refugees. Always astute in her own professional matters, but without any prior experience in the general world of business, she was now the chief executive officer of a large international organization. The hostels ministered to the many thousands of displaced persons who poured into Paris weekly—providing them with housing, food, medical care, jobs (or, when necessary, job training), child care, eventually even a hospital specifically for tubercular patients. As the director of this organization for four years, Wharton worked to exhaustion, often imperiling her own health. During this time she put her novel-writing career almost entirely aside, publishing only one full-length work, Summer (1917). However, she did not stop writing altogether, for in addition to administering this immense network of patriotic charities and raising the money to support them, she became an excellent war correspondent.

In Fighting France, the descriptions of Paris—a city that was sometimes giddy with the unique urgency of men preparing for the front, but often engulfed in leaden melancholy—enable us to understand the passionate sensitivity that had propelled Wharton into such remarkable activity:

Wherever one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy confident strongly-stepping Parisians one sees these other people, dazed and slowly moving—men and women with sordid bundles on their backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed against their shoulders: the great army of the Refugees. Their faces are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that stare of dumb bewilderment—or that other look of concentrated horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins—can shake off the obsession of the Refugees.

Many things were exceptional about Wharton’s exertions during the war, but one thread runs throughout. She was in no sense of the word a society “do-gooder”: for Edith Wharton, these Allied soldiers and refugees were complex people whose joys and horrors she felt as keenly as her own. In No Gifts from Chance (Scribner’s, 1994), one of Wharton’s biographers, Shari Benstock, has recorded an unforgettable tale.

A woman, “Mme Marguerite M.,” had spent fourteen months in a straw kennel in a German prison with some five thousand civilian prisoners. During that time, she received the news that her husband, a soldier, had died in a military prison camp. She watched her seven-year-old daughter die before her eyes. She heard the screams of her sister, lodged in an adjoining kennel, as she was raped by German officers in front of her two children. The sister died; her children were taken away and never seen again. “Mme Marguerite M.” fell ill with grief and, thinking her insane, the guards released her. Discovered in a Paris railway station by a policeman, she was sent to one of the hostels’ rest homes. “She had been there for several weeks when I first saw her,” Edith wrote, “but even then I could not wonder that her gaolers thought her mad. Today, she is quiet and has recovered her self-control; but she remains an irreparable wreck, a wasted life. . . . I could tell of many others like her.

Few learned more immediately and circumstantially than Edith Wharton that the battle lines of war do not begin and end somewhere “out there,” somewhere “far away,” in some archetypal field where heroic young men vie with each other for “honor.” War is “gay”; but it is also “terrible”: it disrupts our fundamental harmonies; and if war can produce exhilaration, energy, and a sense of purpose, it can also threaten all of us with despair and madness.

Having seen the “reflection of flames and ruins” in the faces of her refugees, Wharton determined to witness combat firsthand. During 1915, she made several trips to the front, walked the lines, spoke with the soldiers, and meditated upon the fragility of that always uncertain balance between coherence and chaos. Often, she had a specific mission to fulfill, such as delivering supplies to hospitals and inspecting the conditions in them. Sometimes, the plight of orphaned children commanded her attention, as another of her biographers, R. W. B. Lewis, attests:

Like the older refugees, they arrived sick with privation and filth, and stupid with terror: one child had been rescued from a farm where she had been left alone without food for five days; two other girls were lifted from the arms of their dead father. They were bathed, clothed and fed, and turned out into the garden to play. The [hastily assembled accommodations were] so successful that the Belgian government asked if Mme. Wharton could take in another six hundred. [Soon] the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee . . . was running an organization almost as large as that of the American Hostels.

What these sojourns along the front revealed in addition was a larger horror—wholesale, systematic destruction: villages lev eled as part of a scorched-earth policy; the helpless—women, the elderly, children—brutalized “for fun.” These were calculated steps in the campaign to annihilate a nation’s civilization, and thereby to destroy its will to resist.

As Wharton repeatedly asserted throughout Fighting France, the enemy’s ultimate intent was to eradicate the Allies’ sense of community. In village after village,

one had . . . most hauntingly, the vision of all the separate terrors, anguishes, uprootings and rendings apart involved in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. The photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the crucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered, all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and continuity to the present.

The houses are partly underground, connected by deep winding “bowels” over which light rustic bridges have been thrown, and so profoundly roofed with sod that as much of them as shows above ground is shell-proof. Yet they are real houses, with real doors and windows. . . . In other cheery catacombs we found neat rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires. Everywhere were endless ingenuities.

It seemed to Wharton that the impulse to establish community had become an indispensable component of sanity at the front. Thus as quickly as the enemy destroyed those trivial mementos which, when taken together, had created a “past,” new connections and new mementos were assembled to take their place. What she observed and reported, then, was the soldiers’ resolute determination to establish a network of relationships and home like spaces—society’s most primitive response to the threat of extermination.

Edith Wharton was fifty-three when she witnessed the panorama of violence and brutality that had given rise to this domesticity in the trenches. The bold concern that had led her to the front lines and the vigorous ingenuity with which she had taken charge of Allied charities would have been unusual for anyone; for a woman—and especially for a woman of Wharton’s age and circumstances—they were extraordinary. Not only had her background failed to prepare her for it; everything in the world of her childhood had explicitly forbidden any such bold and resourceful behavior.

If any Americans can be said to have aristocratic origins, Edith Wharton would have a plausible claim to such lineage: her great-grandfather, Ebenezer Stevens, had participated in the Boston Tea Party. Later, as an officer in the Revolutionary War, he took part in the victories of Saratoga and Yorktown, and his ingenious maneuvers were said to have been responsible for foiling the British blockade at Annapolis. Although he settled in New York and pursued a very profitable career as an East Indies merchant after the war, he continued to act upon his sense of civic duty. Thus even while in business, he also distinguished himself in numerous areas of public service: he went on confidential missions for both the French and American governments and served on innumerable committees for the city of New York. Edith Wharton admired General Stevens for his cunning, his success, and his high sense of honor. She commemorated him by naming her home in Lenox “The Mount”—the same name that Great-Grandfather Stevens had given to his own country home; and in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, she described her illustrious ancestor at great length, explaining:

If I have dwelt too long on the career of this model citizen it is because of a secret partiality for him. . . . I like above all the abounding energy, the swift adaptability and the joie de vivre which hurried him from one adventure to another, with war, commerce and domesticity (he had two wives and fourteen children). . . . But perhaps I feel nearest to him when I look at my eagle andirons, and think of the exquisite polychrome mantels that he found the time to bring all the way from Italy, to keep company with the orange-trees on his terrace.

Wharton took deep pleasure in her distant kinsman’s aesthetic sensibility; she respected his ability to combine militant energy and business acumen with familial devotion and peacetime public service; indeed, to some extent her emulation of him, even her identification with him in her own active adult life, seems to have gone well beyond merely the naming of her home after his.

Yet if General Ebenezer Stevens provided inspiration for his great-granddaughter (and perhaps especially so during and after the tumultuous years of World War I), he was a distant and indistinct role model. The more immediate influences in Wharton’s life had been her parents and their friends; and the Old New York of Edith Jones Wharton’s youth was a society that had generally fallen away from its era of bold vigor and active virtue. True, a few of its members still attempted to live as vitally as Ebenezer Stevens had lived, and contributed in large and small ways to the honor and betterment of their community. In Wharton’s estimation, Theodore Roosevelt, a deeply respected personal friend, exemplified the best of such citizens. Yet far too many in this privileged class had become enervated and complacent—narrow and rigid and sometimes pointlessly punitive. By the time Edith Jones was born, the once-vibrant little world of Old New York provided a generally stifling environment, even for men; and for women, its mores had become suffocating.

The author’s father, George Frederic Jones, received an abundant allowance until his father died; then he inherited a substantial fortune. By all accounts he was a kind and generous man; his talented daughter was devoted to him. Yet his life betrayed no force or direction. He never worked for a living, and he occupied his time with the leisurely hobbies of his set—“sea-fishing, boat-racing and wild-fowl shooting.” Insofar as he had faults, they were sins of omission: indifference and the propensity to be dominated by the strong will of his wife.

Although the author’s mother, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, could boast a distinguished heritage, she had been reared in comparatively straitened circumstances: her father had died at the age of thirty, leaving his young widow and their four children dependent upon the generosity of the family. Lucretia was a great beauty in her youth, and when she married George Jones, she could finally afford to indulge that beauty. The couple took an extended European vacation for their honeymoon, and Edith Wharton later recorded the tales she had been told of their early married life and especially of their initial trip to Paris:

[Mother’s] sloping shoulders and slim waist were becomingly set off by the wonderful gowns brought home from that first visit to the capital of fashion. All this happened years before I was born; but the tradition of elegance was never abandoned, and . . . [eventually] I shared the excitement caused by the annual arrival of the “trunk from Paris,” and the enchantment of seeing one resplendent dress after another shaken out of its tissue-paper. Once, when I was a small child, my mother’s younger sister, my beautiful and serious-minded Aunt Mary Newbold, asked me, with edifying interest: “What would you like to be when you grow up?” and on my replying in all good faith, and with a dutiful air: “The best-dressed woman in New York,” she uttered the horrified cry: “Oh, don’t say that, darling!” to which I could only rejoin in wonder: “But, Auntie, you know Mamma is.”

Lucretia and George Jones were gregarious; they very much enjoyed entertaining; and it is rumored that the expression “Keeping up with the Joneses” was coined to describe the splendid social enthusiasm of Edith Jones Wharton’s parents!

The home of such parents would seem to offer a daughter at least the promise of lighthearted, social-butterfly fun. Yet the reality was far from fun for the daughter of the Jones household. Lucretia’s two older children, both boys, had been born thirteen and fifteen years earlier than their sister, and Edith appears to have been an unplanned and largely unwelcome addition to the family. Mother made no secret of the fact that she preferred her sons.

Toward her daughter, Lucretia was disapproving and distant; she was inclined to ridicule everything from the child’s red hair and supposedly “big feet” to her serious nature. When the little girl’s literary talents emerged (as they did at a very young age), Lucretia’s reaction was one of fascinated horror. And when her daughter actually began to write tentative fiction, Lucretia’s response was to stifle the impulse as sternly as possible:

It was not thought necessary to feed my literary ambitions with foolscap, and for lack of paper I was driven to begging for the wrappings of the parcels delivered at the house. After a while these were regarded as belonging to me, and I always kept a stack in my room. It never occurred to me to fold and cut the big brown sheets, and I used to spread them on the floor and travel over them on my hands and knees.

Thus while Edith Wharton ultimately voiced admiration for her mother’s beauty and sense of taste and for her fastidious attention to the elegance of precise language, she had few other positive recollections of “Mamma”; indeed, the adult author consistently described Mamma’s manner with images of icy coldness, as indifferent at best and at worst contemptuous. A mother with Lucretia’s hostile habits would have been difficult under any circumstances; in the atmosphere of Old New York, her attitude reinforced the effect of an environment already infected with pernicious elements.

All of Wharton’s childhood memories, then, acknowledge a peculiar mixture of strengths and deficiencies in the society into which she had been born.

On the one hand, many of the ancient values remained: the honor, loyalty, and devotion to family that had characterized Ebenezer Stevens’s life could still be discerned in the lives of his descendants. Old New York’s merits, Wharton would assert,

lay in upholding two standards of importance in any community, that of education and good manners, and of scrupulous probity in business and private affairs. New York has always been a commercial community, and in my infancy the merits and defects of its citizens were those of a mercantile middle class. The first duty of such a class was to maintain a strict standard of uprightness in affairs; and the gentlemen of my father’s day did maintain it, whether in the law, in banking, shipping, or wholesale commercial enterprises. . . . I should say that the qualities justifying the existence of our old society were social amenity and financial incorruptibility.

A little world so well-ordered and well-to-do does not often produce either eagles or fanatics, and both seem to have been conspicuously absent from the circle in which my forebears moved. . . . Conformity is the bane of middle-class communities. . . . Looking back at that little world, and remembering the “hoard of petty maxims” with which its elders preached down every sort of initiative, I have often wondered at such lassitude in the descendants of the men who first cleared a place for themselves in a new world. What had become of the spirit of the . . . revolutionaries?

Her parents and their friends were not interested in music or the visual arts; they regarded authors as potentially dangerous, “bohemian” individuals—people to be excluded from polite circles. Paradoxically, Old New Yorkers had a deep reverence for beauty; however, they fixed their veneration almost entirely upon the appearance of their children—and especially, of course, upon their daughters.

In that simple society there was an almost pagan worship of physical beauty, and the first question asked about any youthful new-comer on the social scene was invariably: “Is she pretty?” or: “Is he handsome?”—for good looks were as much prized in young men as in maidens. . . . Most vivid is my memory of the picturesque archery club meetings. . . . And a pretty sight the meeting was, with parents and elders seated in a semicircle on the turf behind the lovely archeresses in floating silks or muslins, with their wide leghorn hats, and heavy veils flung back only at the moment of aiming. These veils are associated with all the summer festivities of my childhood. . . . No grace was rated as high as “a complexion.” . . . Beauty was unthinkable without “a complexion,” and to defend that treasure against sun and wind and the arch-enemy sea air, veils as thick as curtains . . . were habitually worn.

Young couples often acquired elaborately framed oil copies of the “old masters” while on their European honeymoon; young matrons sometimes collected china or old lace; and when newlyweds settled down, they generally lived in houses whose interiors were so uncomfortable and formal that the very rooms themselves seemed to have been upholstered. Such were their notions of culture and taste.

In this environment, young women had a specific and ruthlessly prescribed relationship to beauty: they were meant to become, themselves, supremely beautiful objects. Thus the veiling that protected young archeresses can be taken to represent a more general practice of confinement and prohibition. Young women were intended to be beautiful. Creating beauty—becoming an artist—writing novels! (For money!) These would have been unsavory pursuits even in a man; in a woman, they were utterly unthinkable!

Thus in the world of Edith Jones Wharton’s girlhood—that is, the world in which she set her great novel The Age of Innocence—the acceptable course for a young woman’s life was as rigid as her corsets (which could stand by themselves); the expectations and prospects in life of a proper young man were almost equally limited; and the result was mutilating—potentially lethal—to the spirit of both men and women.

Perhaps it is not surprising that at the beginning of her writing career, it was the deficiencies of Old New York—and particularly the scarcity of options for talented and vigorous women in these circumstances—that dominated Edith Wharton’s imagination. As I have elsewhere written: “The little girl had spent years watching in rapt wonder as Mother’s annual box of dresses from Paris was opened. She had a hunger for beauty in all its forms and must have been unnaturally susceptible to an image of the woman as a beautiful work of art.” Little by little, however, Wharton became “confident that ‘doing’ was a source of strength, while ‘being’ merely diminished individual resources. Yes, there were objective problems that confronted the woman who chose to create beauty; but on balance, writing offered no intrinsic obstacle to emotional intimacy . . . , and it offered strengths that could be found nowhere else.”

Early short stories like “The Muse’s Tragedy” and “The Valley of Childish Things and Other Emblems” explore the tragic consequences of the injunction to “be” rather than the encouragement to “do”; in this early fiction, Wharton often paid particular attention to the relationship between women and beauty or art, even as she was becoming more and more determined to realize her own full potential as an active and successful artist. The most magnificent and complex exploration of this tragic “feminine” heritage is Wharton’s first New York novel (and one of her finest pieces of fiction), The House of Mirth (1905); its heroine, Lily Bart, suffers the ruinous consequences of a tradition that has allowed its females only one responsibility, that of becoming the embodiment of beauty and artistic perfection, and only one “career,” that of marrying well.

Yet this account of Wharton’s indictment of the world from which she had come is in some ways misleading. She always had an abhorrence of glib “solutions” to difficult problems; thus her condemnation of Old New York’s narrowness was consistently balanced by her appreciation of the difficulties encountered in any attempt to discover practical alternatives. She had little interest in flamboyant acts of individual daring: she never admired defiance for its own sake, nor did she believe that any person could find “fulfillment” entirely free from the burden of social constraints.

In Wharton’s judgment, the relationship between self and society was intrinsic and inescapable; to become a mature “self”—a fulfilled and happy adult—everyone (both male and female) must have rewarding and viable social roles to play. Moreover, she believed that an individual’s failure to find some genuinely meaningful place in a vital and admirable community would ultimately have fatal consequences: exclusion from the society of significant others was tantamount to some form of death. Thus the seductive desires for “absolute personal fulfillment” or “ut ter freedom” could never be more than alluring, lethal phantoms; and anyone who pursued such illusions would find only catastrophe.

Insofar as Wharton’s novels have “happy endings,” the happiness is circumscribed because (as she often observed) in real life, joy always is limited. The real challenge that confronts each man and woman, then, can never be that of finding perfect happiness; rather, it must be that of creating some form of possible happiness—achieving self-respect and the partial realization of one’s hopes and aspirations. In this life, no one can expect more.

Wharton’s understanding of the human condition, always balanced and sober, was deeply affected by her experiences during World War I. The American novelists whom we usually associate with the mood of disillusionment following the war were younger than Wharton because it was generally only the young, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, who had witnessed its carnage firsthand. Edith Wharton was unique: she could remember the “old ways” of the post-Civil War world that had comprised her childhood in New York; yet she could understand the “new ways” too. She could share the “lost generation” ’s disenchantment and even understand their sense of betrayal during the 1920’s; yet perhaps as a consequence of her maturity, this confrontation with the melancholy realities of destruction led not to despair, but rather to a more complex understanding of the human condition and a more fully developed sense of compassion.

While Edith Wharton watched the French continue to fight despite the privation and devastation they had suffered, she mar veled at their resilience and strength as a nation. “In great trials a race is tested by its values,” she wrote, “and the war has shown the world what are the real values of France.” She wondered how had it been possible for the people of this embattled country to survive, to be strong, to endure; and she concluded that it was because they had preserved their sense of “larger meanings”: “They have understood life to be made up of many things past and to come, of renunciation as well as satisfaction, of traditions as well as experiments, of dying as much as of living.”

France had triumphed over war because of its honesty, its realistic sense of values, and its devotion to a coherent set of traditions. “The whole civilian part of the nation seems merged in one symbolic figure,” Wharton observed in Fighting France, “carrying help and hope to the fighters or passionately bent above the wounded. The devotion, the self-denial seem instinctive; but they are really based on a reasoned knowledge of the situation and on an unflinching estimate of values. All France knows today that real ‘life’ consists in the things that make it worth living.”

In the end, Wharton’s experiences during World War I affirmed a powerful but paradoxical truth. There must always be a balance between “renunciation” and “satisfaction”: personal happiness depends upon the survival of the community; yet the survival of the community depends upon the willingness of each individual to surrender some portion of his or her own personal gratification to the general good. Without this balance, both individual rights and civilized communal existence will be lost.

Thus while the young American novelists of the postwar generation danced into the hectic frenzy of the jazz age, with its “free” love and its endless, giddy quest for pleasure, Edith Wharton embraced maturity. In a short, postwar book entitled French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), she recollected a conversation with William Dean Howells that had occurred in 1906:

We had been talking of that strange exigency of the American public which compels the dramatist (if he wishes to be played) to wind up his play, whatever its point of departure, with the “happy-ever-after” of the fairy-tales. . . .

“Yes,” said Mr. Howells; “what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending. . . .”

“A tragedy with a happy ending” is exactly what the child wants before he goes to sleep . . . , but as long as he needs it he remains a child, and the world he lives in is a nursery-world. Things are not always and everywhere well with the world, and each man has to find it out as he grows up. It is the finding out that makes him grow, and until he has faced the fact and digested the lesson he is not grown up. . . .

The same thing is true of countries and peoples. The “sheltered life,” whether of the individual or of the nation, must either have a violent and tragic awakening—or never wake up at all.

In the early postwar years, she was optimistic about America’s future. “We are growing up at last; and it is only in maturity that a man glances back along the past, and sees the use of the constraints that irritated his impatient youth. So with races and nations; and America has reached the very moment in her development when she may best understand what has kept older races and riper civilizations sound.” Thus Edith Wharton’s best and most subtle “war novel” was neither a brutal battlefield tragedy nor an apocalyptic jazz-age satire. It was a glance “back along the past” to examine the “constraints” that had bedeviled her own “impatient youth.” By now, Wharton had the advantage of age and perspective; and her “war novel” was as singular as her own active, middle-aged American presence in Paris throughout the conflict. Perhaps her most personal novel, perhaps her most American novel, perhaps even her greatest novel: The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s unique postwar narrative.

Critics who have seen The Age of Innocence as a sentimental return to her youth miss this point. One might do well, for example, to note every time the words real and realistic are used, especially toward the novel’s conclusion; for if it is nothing else, this piece of fiction is an urgent, encouraging appeal for its readers to abandon unrealizable fantasies for the actual, deep pleasures that “real life” can afford. Newland Archer is Wharton’s quintessentially American hero, recalling, perhaps, Christopher Newman in Henry James’s novel The American. Like many of James’s heroes, Newland Archer can learn about himself and his native land only after an encounter with the perversions of ancient European civilizations—an encounter that is provided in The Age of Innocence not by a journey abroad, but by a series of negotiations with a foreign visitor, Ellen, wife of the depraved Count Olenska.

If Edith Wharton had the example of her dear friend Henry James in mind when she wrote this novel, she was also mindful of other novelists, particularly Tolstoy. The phrase “it was gay and terrible” from War and Peace had echoed in her mind throughout the years of combat; now, in these postwar years, the echoes of another of Tolstoy’s masterpieces captured her imagination: Anna Karenina. The latter novel explores the very tensions about which Wharton herself wrote so often—the conflict between the claims of tradition and those of individual freedom. At this point in her career, she was so intent upon capturing the tension between these antitheses in a precise and powerful way that she experimented with several different narrative possibilities before she settled upon the final version of The Age of Innocence.

In the Edith Wharton archives of the Beinecke Library at Yale University, there are two fully developed alternative plot plans for the novel. In the first, Archer is engaged when he meets Mme. Olenska and falls in love with her; he marries his fiancée, settles down in New York, and finds that his passion remains unabated. He runs away for a passionate tryst in Florida with Mme. Olenska and intends to break with everything else. Yet gradually he realizes that he is profoundly uncomfortable trying to live outside of the society he has always known. On her part, Mme. Olenska quickly becomes bored with Archer. Eventually, both realize that in reality, they have nothing in common. They return to New York without anyone’s knowing of their romantic adventure, and shortly thereafter, Mme. Olenska returns forever to Europe.

In the second version, May releases Newland from his engagement; she marries another man, and he marries Mme. Olenska. Newland and Ellen have a rapturous honeymoon, but when they return to New York, the radical differences in their personalities and interests become apparent. Archer is happy only in the world that has shaped him; Ellen is miserably bored outside of the sophisticated, cultured world of Europe. The couple agrees upon a formal separation: Ellen takes up permanent residency abroad, and Newland returns home to live the rest of his life with his mother and sister.

Of course, what both of these alternate plots sketch is the inevitable failure of the purely romantic vision, a story very much along the lines of Anna Karenina (but perhaps even more dreary because it lacks the crisp conclusion of a suicide). The first of the two is deeply poignant; the second might have been profoundly, dismally tragic.

What Wharton could see, with charity and utter clarity, is that Newland and Ellen both perceive the other primarily in terms of some romanticized personal need. Thus, although Ellen Olenska may indeed seem the fulfillment of Newland Archer’s dreams—representing “freedom,” mystery, and the unknown world of art and intellect—she is an actual woman with whom he has little or nothing in common. Similarly, although Ellen, in her vulnerable and weakened situation, is drawn to Newland—who represents safety, order, and protection—it is the security and honor he seems to embody that she “loves,” and not the particularities of his personality. (Actually, Ellen consistently finds Beaufort’s sophisticated companionship more engaging than Newland Archer’s.)

The core of the novel is Newland’s quest for real happiness, a quest that coincides with the pursuit of maturity. One uncompromising fact constrains this quest: the deepest and most indelible components of Newland Archer’s nature have been formed and nourished within the narrow confinements of the very world against whose strictures he frets. He may be capable of improvement, of growth—even of achieving wisdom and contentment. However, he will never be capable of some fundamental transformation. Insofar as he can find happiness, the nature of his satisfactions will always, necessarily, be limited by the kind of person he is.

Because of Newland’s shortcomings, it is important to realize how much of the story is told from his point of view. It is even more important to recognize how often his judgment is seriously mistaken, especially throughout the opening portions of the novel. When we first encounter him, Newland is decent and honorable enough—so long as these virtues require very little beyond good manners. The most appalling possibility presented by the novel is that Newland might never grow beyond this smug, limited understanding of his duties in the world and his relationships within it, that he might become a kind of carbon copy of Larry Lefferts and his friends. The opening chapter hints clearly at such a possibility. Wharton’s rendering of the young man’s inventorial appreciation of his young fiancée and his plans for her future—“He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the ‘younger set’ ”—captures nothing so forcefully as the potential fatuousness of the young man’s personality. Such opinions are anything but an informed or reliable index to the moral and emotional possibilities of actual situations; a wary reader must be mindful of the severe limitations of the romantic, self-serving, visionary tendencies that becloud Newland’s perceptions of his world.

By contrast, May and Ellen are both uncompromising realists; ironically, at every point in the novel, they may both know more than Newland does about what is “actually” happening. Wharton’s study of The Golden Bough just before she wrote The Age of Innocence had taught her about the ruthless power of the Cult of Diana—a force used to protect mothers and children—and May, who becomes an “Archer” when she marries, embodies the single-minded vigor that is represented by this protector of the domestic realm. In order to call her readers’ attention to this suggestion, Wharton fills her narrative both with allusions to ancient cultures and classical mythology, and with references to the various forms of combat that might be associated with this militant goddess and her Olympian peers. May is far from ignorant, a fact that she attempts to disclose to Newland without success. (Indeed, it is an interesting exercise to peruse the novel and take note, at each crucial moment, of what May probably knows—despite Newland’s consistent belief in her ignorance and “innocence.”) Moreover, she can be capable of great generosity; even after the engagement, she knows that Newland has become emotionally involved with some other woman, and she offers him his freedom when he appears to want it. Yet once she and Newland have entered into a binding commitment, she becomes as fierce in her protection of home and hearth as the goddess Diana herself. May has no knowledge of the dark, depraved world in which Ellen has suffered and from which she has recently escaped; yet she does understand many of Newland Archer’s limitations, and she agrees with Ellen about life’s necessities—particularly those pertaining to loyalty and honor.

Paradoxically, then, May and Ellen often voice similar sentiments. When Newland rashly proposes an elopement, May sensibly punctures his romantic scheme: “We can’t behave like people in novels.” Much later in the novel, when Newland proposes to Ellen that they escape to a place where they can be perfectly free, she dismisses his scheme with weary skepticism: “Where is that country?”

Moreover, Ellen is, in her own way, surely as “innocent” as May; throughout much of her visit to America, Ellen allows herself to suppose that in New York she can find a world where people are uncomplicated and, in some simple way, merely “kind” and “generous.” Despite the dark initiation of her marriage, she has evidently failed to acknowledge two intractable facts; that dangerous, primitive passions are everywhere because they lurk at the core of humanity itself, and that it is principally the rituals that have been designed to control and contain the violent expression of these feelings which vary from culture to culture. What Ellen does appreciate, even to the center of her being, is that everyone—everywhere—needs the security that only a structured society can offer. In the end, part of May’s generosity (and a signal indication of Old New York’s “kind ness”) is the family’s willingness to offer Ellen precisely the “tribal” protection and support that she will require if she is to have a contented and relatively free existence once she returns to Europe.

Wharton was far from blind to the limitations of the world she had depicted in this novel: she understood that its brutality was merely discreetly clothed in the genteel customs of cordiality. On the other hand, she also recognized not only that this world had its positive components, but also that it was caught in a process of inevitable change. New families were invading the realm of Old New York; stale customs and restrictions were gradually yielding to innovations and improvements. Change was slow, painfully slow. Nonetheless, there was a distinct possibility that this steady process of evolution would ultimately produce a new kind of society, one that retained the admirable qualities of Old New York and combined them with more enlightened practices. Most important, there was hope that this commingling of moral rectitude with more generous freedoms would create a stronger community and a culture whose values could endure.

The Age of Innocence, then, is a patient, compassionate novel. It never argues that Old New York was an idyll to which hectic modern society should return (instead, it lays bare the flaws of Old New York with ruthless precision). However, neither does the novel suggest that the world of the inheritors is ideal. Instead it offers growth and balance and tolerance. And in the case of Newland Archer, it presents the unforeseeable, incomparable gift of middle-aged self-respect: “There was good in the old ways. . . . There was good in the new order too.”

Finally, as much of the novel is designed to suggest, few people—even “way back then”—were as “innocent” as we moderns may ingenuously suppose. Edith Wharton has wrapped her novel in a gentle joke to make this point. The Age of Innocence is the title of a well-known painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. It depicts a little girl, perhaps four or five years old. This is the only real “age of innocence,” Wharton slyly suggests. Beware of supposing an intricate social system to be innocent; if you do, you will almost certainly be ensnared by its subtle complexities.