Review: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

I first encountered the Age of Innocence as a nineteen year old university student, when it was a set text for one of my English Lit classes. At the time, many of the nuances that appear in the novel passed me by and--until I reached the final chapters--it appeared to be the straightforward story of a pompous man who gets engaged to one woman, promptly falls in love with her cousin and marries the first one just so that he and both of the women in his life can suffer. It wasn't until I got to the end, and I saw that May was just as bad as her husband, that I realised what the book was about. 

Archer Newland is a young man in a position of privilege in New York in 1870. He comes from old money, has a respectable job as a lawyer and has recently become engaged to May, a girl from the same social circles as his own. On the surface, it is a good match. They both come from similar wealthy families. While Newland has enjoyed the kind of bachelorhood offered to men in his position, where he has discreetly indulged in affairs with married women, May has lived a sheltered life. And then May's unconventional cousin Ellen comes to town ...

More that a story of a privileged male caught between two women, this is a story of how the expectations of others can lead not only to personal unhappiness, but how it can harm the lives of those around them. Initially an innocent, May becomes scheming and underhand as her marriage progresses, Ellen does the right thing by everyone and suffers the most and Archer Newland gets stuck with a marriage that is based on duty, rather than love. There is some optimism toward the end, suggesting that the conventions in New York are becoming less and less restrictive but as for Newland ... well, he's so stuck in the past that he travels to Europe and stays outside while his son goes upstairs to visit poor Ellen.

Although technically well written and a worthy winner of the Pulitzer Prize, I cannot say that this was a favourite of mine, or that I enjoyed reading it more the second time around. It has its story, it tells it well and doesn't have quite enough impact for me to love it or to loathe it. It is what it is.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more