The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s 8h novel (out of 15), and my second read, after her House of Mirth. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, making Edith the first woman recipient of this prestige.
It's divided into 2 books, forming 3 life periods of main character Newland Archer, starting in the 1870's, in New York High Society, and lasting a total of about 3 decades.
Newland, a lawyer, is engages to May Welland, described beautiful and conventional.
May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe to her family, having escaped from an abusive and cheating husband, a Polish Count. She's also described beautiful, but unconventional, free-spirited, and so far in approach as to treat her maid as an equal (very shocking in High Society / Upper Class NYC).
In marrying into this family, he may be swept by social disapproval of his fiancé's cousin's reputation - separated, yet still married, in a Society that dreads scandal more than disease, and attached to its traditional views of marriage (meaning that divorce is an absolute taboo), and gender roles expected of each - including double standards applied to men and women.
Newland Archer's inner dialogues as well as exchanges with other characters conveys the struggles between traditional, old views, and a modernizing society, where the telephone is still rather brand new ; and reflects cultural, unconventional views, especially once Newland explains and shocks himself, that 'women are ought to be as free as we are'.
The Age of Innocence had been initially serialized in 4 parts in Pictorial Review (an American women's magazine from 1899-1939), and then published as a novel bu D. Appleton & Company. Edith Wharton was 58 upon this release, and Newland Archer's age at the end of book 2 is 57 - I wonder if it's a personal reflection into this character.
At the end of chapter 18, the last of book I, a mention of Easter being in the first week of April helped me (after checking the information) to presuppose the novel starts in 1874. If it lasts about 30 years, it ends in 1914, and I think that I'm right in this assumption.
Indeed, In her autobiography, Wharton wrote that this novel had allowed her to find "a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914."
Since scholars and readers alike agree that The Age of Innocence is a story about this societal shift, we can also see how Newland's ideals in his late 20's, which he thought rather shockingly advanced, that by the end, he feels as old fashioned as his views on his family's traditions had been. A sort of return to his source, perhaps.
Edith Wharton's prose and metaphors are exquisite, once more, just like House of Mirth ; despite some forms of turmoil, desire and betrayals, this present novel (Age of) is deemed a softer and gentler work that her earlier, aforementioned novel.
This prose creates many quotable, delicious phrases - and after I recommended this novel in LucieBulle's stream and community by posting a couple of them, I searched and found that the French translation omits whole paragraphs and the phrases that are adapted all tend to reduce the novel's feminist yearnings and scopes. How odd that a translation would be so different!
Let me share just a few, with these two examples of double standards :
since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?
Living together? Well, why not? Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t? I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots.
Here's the first passage I noticed totally missing in the French edition :
Never, if we won’t let them, I suppose,” he mused, and recalled his mad outburst to Mr. Sillerton Jackson: “Women ought to be as free as we are—” It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?
And one example of delicious metaphor
No—to be sure; more’s the pity. And now it’s too late; her life is finished. She spoke with the cold-blooded complacency of the aged throwing earth into the grave of young hopes.
Another great read, January's getting filled with new favorite books, and yet another with a blue cover, though I hadn't even planned any of it.
I fill LucieBulle's challenges Incognito (no character on the cover) and Babel (not Francophone), and already 3rd book finished for the month!
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