Book Review: The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

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Reading a book that was actually written in the period the characters are living always adds a sense of drama for me. Obviously it’s much easier for the writer to catch the small details that transformed lives in the period, but it’s easier for me to also understand the differences and similarities, often unexpected. The The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton is set in the late 1800’s and was written by Wharton in 1920, so she had a pretty good idea of the morals and daily events that took place in drawing rooms across New York City at the time.

I fell in love with The Age of Innocence by simply envisioning myself dressing for dinner, attending the opera at least once a week, and being able to act like a lady without looking like a pompous idiot like I sometimes fear in my current life. Imagine not only walking down 5th Avenue in NYC, but being one of the elite families that founded NYC and contributed to the mecca of westernization it is today. Ah, but back to the story…

Wharton tackles the transgressions of marriage and infidelity in The Age of Innocence through Newland Archer, a young attorney, his lovely wife, or so it seems, May Welland, and May’s cousin Countess Olenska who has returned from Europe after a demeaning marriage to a Count, the details of which are implied but never revealed. Unlike many novels, Wharton knows when to hold back and leave your imagination to fill in the blanks.

Archer’s thoughts on marriage open a line of thought that many are afraid to face:

…with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interest held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

Archer falls in love with the Countess after his wedding to May and we are taken through a love affair that is tested by the constraints of a moral system that is against divorce, and two characters that want to remain loyal to their obligations while understanding they can’t be apart.

Wharton goes on to reveal a knowledge of social double standards that still exist today as she reveals a short love affair Archer had during his youth:

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed – and pitied. In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts, and other elderly female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer’s belief that when “such things happened” it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman.

It’s shocking how far we’ve come, and yet how far we have to go in our belief systems. The Age of Innocence surprises the reader with the depth of character and unexpected events that come from May Welland. All in all a great read, and with an author that uses words like dilettantism, milieu, untrammelled, and embonpoint, Wharton has stolen my heart.

The Naked Review: