The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [7]
Less swift, indeed dwelt on at length, is the overabundance of delicacies served at the dinners in The Age of Innocence. They are gluttonous, costly, but price tags are seldom in evidence—Archers, Wellands, Lefferts, Chiverses, well aware of who wears last year’s gown, who lives on the incorrect street, have a convenient amnesia about the source of their money. What we might read as the Beaufort plot is integral to Wharton’s themes of false innocence and the false security of old New York. The financial system, built on credit, was fragile. In an era without market regulations, Beaufort was dealing with borrowed money. He’s a speculator, not a crook; but when he fails the whole market is sold down, bringing with it the holdings of the Mingotts and the Sillertons, all of the establishment. Their presumption—that they are above risk, not connected with the commercial interests of an outsider like Beaufort—is ill founded.
The real outsider is Ned Winsett, a journalist—and when fi nances permit, a serious writer—whom Wharton uses to develop the theme of the value of work. Newland, always the voyeur, looks on with envy at Ned’s world of working artists and writers, a bohemian set that seems to him free of the duties that bind him. Edith Wharton, dedicated to her writing life, kept strict account of her earnings. Amazingly prolific, she was always conscious of how far she had traveled from her beginnings as a proper little girl whose mother disapproved of her storytelling. The imprint of what she was supposed to become, as a woman of her class, can be detected in May, but that was too easy. In Newland she drew the portrait of the dilettante she feared she might become. Unlike the novelist, he never buckles down, never cuts free. In a poignant scene that takes place in Newport, the summer resort of these very rich New Yorkers, he breaks away to see Ellen Olenska, who is staying in a simple cottage. When he finds her standing alone at the end of a pier, he simply looks on from a distance. He is audience to Winsett’s dedication to work and to Ellen’s fight for independence, only occasionally finding a role for himself in their stories.
The tone of the novel has become more somber with Beaufort’s failure, with Ellen’s intricate divorce proceedings, with the Archers settling into the misfit of their marriage. Wharton goes back to the opera, to a repeat performance of Gounod’s Faust, no doubt having in mind the dramatic announcement of the heroine, Marguerite, that she is to bear a child. All references in The Age of Innocence are constructed with exacting care; all details are relevant, enriching each scene, each progress of the story. Reading it today we need not know that Faust will run off when given the news that he is about to become a father, but many of Wharton’s readers in 1920 would have seen the cruel wit of May announcing she was about to have their first child just as her husband was to declare his love for her rival. Newland Archer is no Faust. His romantic nature, crippled by honor, dictates that he cannot spend one illicit night with Ellen, never mind sell his soul to the devil. As the curtain comes down on his prospect of freedom, May’s eyes are “wet with victory.”
The story is not over: In a masterful final chapter the tone modulates once again, from the drama of entrapment to sympathetic reverie, from then to now. Many years later, Newland Archer reviews his life. Here Wharton’s voice works in close to Newland‘s, becomes one with a self-assessment that is both personal and historical. In an age-old storyteller’s device, she reveals the afterlife, what happened to her characters. Do they live on in the present? In a sympathetic portrait, May, dead after many years of marriage, is memorialized by her husband as energetic mother and devoted wife. Newland has found work as a useful minor player in public life, accepting his nature as “a contemplative and a dilettante.” Now Wharton asks her readers to consider Newland as a survivor, suggesting that there is something near heroic in his accommodation to the inescapable facts of his life, to living out the duties and pleasures. He treasures his love of Countess Olenska, knowing she is most fully realized in memory. The false rhetoric of freedom, the hackneyed phrases of that romance no longer come to mind. He speaks to himself as he always has when he is most truthful, most self-revealing. The show is not quite over; there is one more scene, elegiac and surprisingly dramatic. Newland Archer frames his view as he has from that first night at the opera. He stands apart as he did that day in Newport when Ellen appeared at a distance on the pier. He is fifty-seven years old as he looks up at her window in Paris, treasuring the past, possessing their love in imagination. His perspective is no longer innocent. He remains a dreamer, but a dreamer self-aware.