Plot spoilers below.
Title: The Age of Innocence
Author: Edith Wharton
Number of Pages: 293
Original Published Date: 1920
Pulitzer Prize Winner (Novel): 1921
Favorite Sentence(s): “Now as he reviewed his past, he saw what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else”
“The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t. Only, I wonder-the thing one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as wildly?”
Introduction
Although I’m still very early in my Pulitzer Prize reading journey, The Age of Innocence is the earliest winner in which the title of the novel was already known to me and it’s also the first time a woman had won the prize. Unlike the first two winners, His Family and The Magnificent Ambersons, The Age of Innocence has done well to stay in the culture as a classic American novel, as evidenced by the almost 200K more reviews on Goodreads compared to its predecessors. I’m sure its popularity is greatly helped by the fact that Martin Scorsese beautifully directed The Age of Innocence film in 1993, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder. After reading the novel, I can state without any exaggeration that it’s one of the few films I’ve seen where one could skip the novel and not miss any important details. It’s an extremely faithful adaptation. The Age of Innocence is not the typical Scorsese movie so if one is thinking this is anything like The Departed or Taxi Driver, they’d be in for a surprise.
The Age of Innocence is also the first time that I had previously seen the movie adaptation (and more than once) prior to reading the novel so I was familiar with the plot, themes, and characters prior to opening the first page, which is a different experience from going in blindly. If memory serves me correctly, this is the only time I have ever seen a movie before reading the novel. This will not be the last time though, as I know Gone With the Wind, and The Color Purple are on the Pulitzer winner’s list and I have already seen both of those movies.
Plot and Themes
The story centers around Newland Archer, a societal man from a well-to-do family in New York City. He is newly engaged to May, a young and proper woman, who is the ideal wife for a man in Archer’s world. Archer’s life is predictable, measured, and arranged the way all nice society men lived during the 1870s. He is surrounded by familiarity and the expectations of a life already planned for him and has a favorable acceptance of it.
Shortly after their engagement, Archer is re-introduced to May’s cousin Ellen, the Countess Olenska, who has recently escaped from her European husband and is searching for reacceptance into the society and family she knew in her youth. The Countess Olenska, because she has left her husband, is shunned by much of New York society until Archer intervenes to encourage her acceptance, which is successful. Although Archer assists with the countess’ re-inclusion into society, he initially does this to protect May’s family from gossip, and less so for Ellen’s benefit.
While spending time with Ellen and being exposed to her independence and “different” way of living, Archer begins to question the life he had planned and the person to whom he is to share it with. He becomes torn between what he believes to be his duty, against a new aspiration to toss expectations aside and live for his own desires. After falling in love with Ellen, he wants to end his engagement with May, but Ellen tells him to go through with it even though she shares the same feelings. She understands that going against society and choosing personal freedom over convention comes with its own sacrifices and doesn’t want Archer to have to live that way. Archer and May soon marry and settle into the life Archer expected. They will always live in the same house, always have the same friends, and always attend the same social events. This is the way it will always be and Archer resents it.
“Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.”
Ellen soon moves out of New York City to make their forced separation easier on them both, but Archer searches for ways to see her whenever a possible situation will allow it. They steal small moments and a few hours together, with months between those encounters. It’s unsatisfying to them both, but there is no way for them to be together in the present circumstances, an understanding that Ellen has, but Archer doesn’t yet share since he continues to hold out hope for some future opportunity that will permit them to be together.
‘I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that [mistress] -categories like that -won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.’
She drew a deep sign that ended in another laugh. ‘Oh, my dear – where is that country? Have you ever been there?…I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations…and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.’
When Archer discovers that Ellen intends to move back to Europe, Archer makes a decision to follow her. During a farewell dinner for Ellen hosted by May, Archer realizes that the guests believe him and Ellen to be having an affair. Society has rallied around May and sought to have Ellen sent away. After the farewell dinner, Archer tells May that he is going to travel and will be gone for a while, but May tells him it’s not possible since she is pregnant, a bit of news that she had previously shared with Ellen two weeks earlier before May was certain of its truth.
Archer stays and raises his family with May. Decades pass, the children grow, and May eventually passes away. Then one day, from the same room where May told Archer about her pregnancy, he looks out his window and doesn’t recognize the city anymore. The horses and carriages have transitioned to automobiles, and letters sent by carrier have been replaced by the telephone. Progress has been happening all around him and it’s most evident by the woman his son chooses to marry, as the woman is the daughter of a disgraced man Archer once knew, a pairing that wouldn’t have been able to happen in Archer’s youth. Archer is happy for his son’s union and sees the progress society has made, a progress that Archer was not allowed to participate in during his generation.
Archer’s son convinces him to take a trip to Paris for one last father-son outing. While in Paris, Archer is surprised to find out a meeting between him and Ellen has been planned. He learns that Ellen never remarried nor returned to her husband. When the hour has arrived for him to finally reconnect with Ellen, instead of going up to meet her, he stays outside and imagines what may be going on behind her apartment window. Perhaps he wants to preserve his image of Ellen, or maybe he’s still too old-fashioned or he doesn’t believe that happiness can find him after a life spent without. He has gone this long without true love, that possibly he imagines that tasting it now would only make him more regretful of the decisions he made in his past. Or maybe it’s a little of everything. Archer doesn’t say definitively so the reader can infer or devise their own interpretation. I believe Archer has carried the heavy burden of regret for allowing his life to be dictated by others and that refusing to see Ellen is self-punishment. I also think there’s a part of him that’s angry at Ellen for “forcing” him to marry May because if he had wanted, he could have immediately sought out Ellen shortly after May’s passing, but he didn’t.
Let’s Talk About May
Although her time and presence in the book played third character to Archer and Ellen, I found the character of May Archer to be the most compelling. She’s not an antagonist in the story, since she is the betrayed wife and has done nothing to deserve Archer’s indifference to her, but she is the folly that keeps Archer and Ellen apart.
After Archer has fallen for Ellen but before he accepts that truth and the realization that he wants to escape his planned-out life, he goes to May to ask her to hasten their engagement so they can marry quickly. In that ensuing conversation, she suspects there may be another reason for his desire to rush and directly asks him if there is another he loves. She doesn’t suspect this potential “other” to be Ellen, but she will agree to release him from the engagement if that’s what he wants. He denies it and instead insists she’s mistaken and pushes for a quick wedding. Shortly after, May convinces her family to move up their wedding date but by that time Archer wants to call it off to be with Ellen. Archer is his own worst enemy. I understand he’s torn between two lives and only one can be lived, but his courage to be truthful seems to falter when it’s most needed and it will be his biggest regret.
I wonder if it wouldn’t have been less cruel of Archer and Ellen to have allowed the engagement to be cancelled rather than permit a young woman to blindly marry a man who doesn’t love her. May seemed to have enjoyed her sterile, predictable life but it still could have been more loving and fulfilling if she had shared it someone who appreciated her, and wanted her and their life together. May deserved a better man. They shouldn’t have married and I’m sure all three would have been happier had the engagement been halted.
The reader is supposed to believe that Archer and Ellen sacrificed their love so others could be happy, but instead they made those others live a lie within their own life, without their approval or knowledge. May was a victim of Archer and Ellen’s love affair. Although it wasn’t intentional at the beginning, they continued to victimize May throughout the story until she finally manipulated the situation to her benefit. I understand each character’s motivations and do believe they were all trying to make the best of the situation, but I no longer root for characters who cheat. At least in this story, there is no happy ending for the would-be lovers.
I expect Wharton wanted the reader to sympathize with Archer and Ellen and their ill-fated lover affair that society (the true antagonist) prevented, and I did to an extent; it would be an unhappy life to be required to sacrifice for inane societal rules, but May is a victim in this story. She didn’t force this life on him and instead offered him a way out but he was too weak to take it. He hates May for what he did to himself and actually fantasizes about her possible death as a way to set him free.
“Catch my death!’ he echoed; and he felt like adding: ‘But I’ve caught it already. I am dead-I’ve been dead for months and months.’
And suddenly the play of the word flashed up a wild suggestion. What if it were she who was dead! The sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and overmastering, that its enormity did not immediatley strike him. He simply felt that chance had given him a new possibliity to which his sick soul might cling.”
Although I describe May as compelling, that doesn’t mean I liked her character. Her faux innocence, a fact that Archer alludes to early on when he suspects her niceness may not be naivety and instead guile but ignores to his detriment, irritated me. I pitied May for being married to a man who doesn’t love or want her, but she was manipulative (rightly so) and I found her annoyingly dull, a trait I assume was intentional by Wharton. The reader is supposed to reject the world these characters live in since it’s a charade, performative, and an illusion to the truth and May represents that world. She loved the rules and expectations of their society and pressed them upon Archer.
“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs…”
“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May’s only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.”
Conclusion
Wharton wrote an intriguing novel with complex characters and an even more complex world, but I just find little hope in this novel. There is societal change at the end of the story that creates freedom for some, but the main characters lives have all been lived by that point and time cannot by reversed.
Although we have progressed much in society, since we have far more freedom in our own personal choices, most of us still have external expectations put upon us that we either accept and embrace, or through off. The consequences are often not nearly as severe as they were a hundred-plus years ago, but most big decisions in life come with tradeoffs; tradeoffs we often can’t calculate the magnitude of until it’s miles down the road of our past.
The Age of Innocence is a novel about a man discovering he detests the society he lives in and desperately wants a way out, but feels burdened to remain in its trap. It’s the story of choice, expectations, and a life unfulfilled. I do wish it had a happier ending, but I suppose the ending makes it much more like real life.
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