“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
The title of Edith Wharton’s most famous novel The Age of Innocence was most likely derived from a popular painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The painting was created sometime between 1785-1788 (see above). Note the child’s bare feet, her bonnet, and the way the wind ruffles through her hair. She sits casually in a pasture, with a vast open countryside behind her. Both hands are cupped loosely over her heart. She seems pensive as her gaze focuses off into the blurry distance. She is clothed in a billowy white dress caught by a particular light. We know very little about the painting –who is the main character? Why did Sir Reynolds’s decide to paint over his original Strawberry Girl with this work? The mystery of the painting persists. Sir Reynolds did not actually title the painting, the name “The Age of Innocence” was merely given to the work after the artist died. It was first presented to the public at the National Gallery in 1847, and then at the Tate in 1951 where it remains today. “The Age of Innocence” was an immensely popular painting in its day, reproduced numerous times over.
In her magnum opus, The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton captures a certain degree of mystery and complexity as evidenced in the painting. She presents a complex glimpse of the past: one that is neither glamorous nor nostalgic, yet one that is also not embittered or tragic. Wharton simply presents an epoch for our consideration, an aristocratic age which was later destroyed by the “Great War” and the passing of the Gilded Age generation. This was the era in which Wharton was raised. She was a child of immense privilege, preferring to spend much of her time studying and touring Europe. In adulthood, she lived the lavish life of a socialite, being ensconced in the milieu of the most influential figures of her day (she apparently much preferred the company of men to the idle chatter of women). She was fiercely conservative and a defender of the European way of doing things, which was different from the prideful upper-crust of Manhattan. She was erudite, witty, and always curious. It has been said of Edith Wharton that her only downfall was simply that she was not a pretty woman. She was married once, into a less than happy partnership, and the marriage eventually crumbled. It was even called a “sexless” marriage, an accusation which Wharton did not deny but which she blamed on her mother’s rigid code of morality foisted upon her as a child. Wharton took one additional lover after her failed marriage, but otherwise she lived an independent life. Her one lover was a famed bachelor, Walter Berry. No one knows the extent of their relationship because after his death Edith Wharton burned most their correspondences. However, what remains of their communication reveals a passionate love affair. Today, Edith Wharton and Walter Berry are buried beside one another at Versailles in France.
Published in 1920 after the death of Wharton’s close friend, Theodore Roosevelt, and amid the fresh scars of World War I, The Age of Innocence takes place in the 1870s during the Gilded Age of old New York City –a city ruled by a cohort of elite families and their Victorian aristocratic values. It was the culture in which Edith Wharton, herself, was raised. Wharton writes the novel in the twilight of her life, as a reflection upon her upbringing. In a curious way, Wharton longs for the virtues of the old order, the way things were before the Great War. However, she does not truly wish to return to the Gilded Age of her youth as she is not merely a whimsically nostalgic writer. Instead, she endeavors to paint a literary portrait of this bygone age now that it has passed. Her novel is an exploration, not a polemic.
In the novel, we see Edith Wharton reflected partly in the role of the Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman seeking a divorce from her European husband. Olenska lives an independent life, which brazenly flaunts the customs of old New York. She represents a new shift –a woman liberated from the confines of marriage. In some ways, Edith Wharton splits herself between this new woman, the Countess Olenska, and the main character, Newland Archer, a man who longs to transcend his stale social status in the hopes of finding a vibrant world alive and full of color again. Both characters seek to push beyond their moral penitentiaries, however only Ellen succeeds in this respect, while Newland becomes entrapped in his own social duties and entanglements. Newland is compelled to choose a different path, one of familial duty, convention, obligation, safety and security instead of a fanciful burgeoning love for Ellen that would, no doubt, have caused great turmoil and public scandal. In this way, The Age of Innocence presents the tale of an ‘almost affair,’ a love story that never was.
Newland Archer, the complicated protagonist of the novel, is an upper-crust New York attorney, soon to be engaged to the pretty but predictable May Welland. However, upon the entrance of Ellen Olenska, Archer is immediately enamored. All throughout the book, he attempts to balance his dutiful public courtship of May Welland with his untamed amorous passion for the new and independent woman, Ellen Olenska. In the end, his commitment to the old world wins. He marries May Welland, while still captivated by Ellen Olenska. He hopes that his marriage will close the door on his yearning for Ellen. However, what ultimately forces him to commit fully to his wife is her unexpected pregnancy. From this moment on, Newland Archer never sees Ellen Olenska again. We are given vague glimpses of his banal and boring marriage as he slowly loses all interest in his wife, May Welland, even though she was once clearly the proper choice according to the moral standards of those around him. The last chapter of the book is perhaps the most significant. It takes place many years later. Newland Archer’s wife, May, has since passed away from an infection that developed into pneumonia and Newland is now in his 50s. His son is engaged to a daughter of the Beaufort family –Julius Beaufort was, at one time, one of the more disreputable people courting Ellen Olenska. Since Newland and his son are now together in Paris, Ellen Olenska receives them both to bestow congratulations on the young Archer’s pending nuptials. However, when they arrive at her flat in Paris, Newland Archer decides not to go upstairs and visit Ellen Olenska. Instead he sits on a bench outside. “It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he tells himself. He prefers to keep the fantasy of Ellen Olenska alive in his head –only the memory of his love for her and their bygone era will remain in his mind. He sits on the bench for a while and then walks back home. Perhaps he once loved nothing more than the idea of Ellen Olenska all those many years ago. After leading us deep into the political strife and conflicts of the old New York aristocracy, many years later, we see things soberly as the Gilded Age has ended along with all of its parties, proprieties, and paramours, and we are left with a sacred feeling of melancholy. The Age of Innocence concludes on a somber and reflective note as the flame of an old generation has been snuffed out, never to be reignited again.
A great deal of effort has been spent parsing the particular virtues and vices of old New York, and to some extent this was Edith Wharton’s intent. Early chapters in the book are painstakingly long and filled with absurd trivialities about social faux pas and endless gossip between well-to-do families. Every piece of minutia, no matter how insignificant, is noticed and analyzed by someone else. The modern reader longs for transcendence from this Gilded Age –if only the era would allow people to authentically confront their hopes and fears directly with one another, then perhaps Newland and May’s marriage would have been a greater success, rather than another “stay together for the children” situation. If only they could have transparently discussed Newland’s worries about boredom and his infatuation with Ellen Olenska, rather than speaking in vague references which only serve to mask the true conflict –anything to avoid an alarming and confrontational scene. We begin to sense this carefully disguised tension buckling with the coming of the world war, even as, throughout the old aristocracy, all things are designed to appear perfect at all times. And when things fall apart, we look for someone to blame. Is it Newland’s fault? The Countess Olenska? May Welland and her family? Rather than putting the values of an entire age on trial, it can be convenient to search for a villain in the novel –the story of an ‘almost affair’ that never actually unfolds. We conveniently look to blame someone in the story for wrong-doing –and perhaps the only culprit is Newland, himself, the man who marries a woman for political purposes while at the same time burying his attraction to a more adventurous woman– though, in truth, The Age of Innocence is not a mere novel of manners or morals. The only real offender here is the age itself and its invisible yet impenetrable customs which hold sway. Perhaps the aptly named “The Age of Innocence” was not exactly as innocent as we might have been led to initially believe.
The 1921 Pulitzer Prize Controversy
The first major Pulitzer Prize scandal dogged the 1921 award for The Age of Innocence. It was only the third book to ever receive the prize, with Edith Wharton being the first female winner, but in 1921, the Pulitzer Prize Jury had actually favored Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, a satire of American provincial life. The jury was composed of: Hamlin Garland (a literary hero of Sinclair Lewis’s who also led the Drama Jury that same year), Stuart Pratt Sherman, and Robert Morss Lovett of the University of Chicago. Despite Hamlin Garland –himself an elder sage by this point– denouncing Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street as “vicious and vengeful” for “belittling the descendants of the old frontier” and for “taking it out on the small Midwestern town,” the other two jury members, Sherman and Lovett, managed to persuade him to vote in favor of Main Street for the Pulitzer Prize. But the Pulitzer Advisory Board, spurred on by Nicholas Murray Butler (who may or may not have spoken with Garland about the selection), unanimously overturned the decision in a coup which accused Main Street of being insufficiently “wholesome” to the American experience –the tension between selecting a novel that captured the “whole” American experience versus Nicholas Murray Butler’s revision to the “wholesome” American experience was nowhere more apparent than in the deliberations over Sinclair Lewis’s novels. An irate Sinclair Lewis nevertheless wrote to Edith Wharton and congratulated her on the victory. In response she wrote the following message:
“When I discovered that I was being rewarded — by one of our leading Universities — for uplifting American morals, I confess I did despair. Subsequently, when I found the prize should really have been yours, but was withdrawn because your book (I quote from memory) had ‘offended a number of prominent persons in the Middle West,’ disgust was added to despair.”
The Columbia University trustees praised The Age of Innocence while the two leading Pulitzer Jury members who pushed for Main Street, Sherman and Lovett protested the decision in strongly worded articles published in The New Republic. In the wake of the controversy, Wharton invited Sinclair Lewis to her home and they developed a budding friendship. So much so, in fact, that Lewis dedicated his next book Babbit to Edith Wharton (feel free to read my review of Babbit here). It, too, would be nominated by the Pulitzer Jury, but again overturned by the board of trustees. In 1926, Lewis finally won the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (read my reflections on the novel here), a convoluted satire of American medicine, but he declined the prize, noting his distaste for the Pulitzer Board’s employment of the word ‘wholesome.’ Wharton and Lewis continued to correspond, but eventually their relationship soured in future years.
The Age of Innocence was made into a memorable film in 1993 directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder. To read my review of the film click here.
Notably, less than ten years after winning the Pulitzer Prize, Edith Wharton would mock the award as the “Pulsifer Prize” in her 1928 novel, Hudson River Bracketed. Both then and now, satire and mockery of sacred, prestigious institutions remains a time-honored tradition in American culture.
The 1921 Novel Jury members included:
- Chair: Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic, served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.
- Stuart Pratt Sherman (1881-1926) was a prominent literary critic. Distantly related to William Tecumseh Sherman, he was born in Anita, Iowa, studied at Williams College and received his PhD from Harvard University. He taught at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois before becoming a literary figure in New York City –he gained fame for a public feud with H.L. Mencken. He became literary editor of the New York Herald Tribe (a pro-Republican paper that ran from 1924-1966). He was initially a defender of Nativism and a critic of Theodore Dreiser, but later refined his opinions. Tragically, Mr. Sherman died at the age of 44 in 1926 –while on vacation at Lake Michigan his canoe suddenly flipped over and he suffered a heart attack. He was survived by his wife, Ruth Bartlett Mears, and only daughter. Upon Sherman’s death, Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia, praised the legacy of Stuart P. Sherman. Interestingly enough, Mr. Sherman was succeeded at the New York Herald Tribe by Irita Van Doren, a renowned literary figure in American life (she later served as a Pulitzer Fiction Juror in the 1960s).
- Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) was a fiction writer primarily focused on the stories of Midwestern farmers. He was named after Hannibal Hamlin, Vice President of the United States under Abraham Lincoln. He was a proponent of Henry George’s “Single Tax” movement and, in addition to numerous short stories and novels, he published a serialized biography of Ulysses S. Grant in McClure’s Magazine as well as a bestselling multi-volume autobiography, the second installment of which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. After living all over the United States, Garland settled in Hollywood, Los Angeles where he became fascinated with odd psychic phenomena and providing the legitimacy of psychic mediums. He died at the age of 79 in 1940.
Amazingly, even after the row over Main Street in 1921, Stuart Pratt Sherman was asked to return again and chair the Novel Jury the following year. But first, he turned to the reassurances of Frank Fackenthal (de facto Administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes) that the Board would not again unilaterally overturn the jury’s decision. To this, Fackenthal calmly responded that the snub of Sinclair Lewis was not actually the Board’s fault, leading many (including John Hohenberg) to speculate that it was, in fact, Nicholas Murray Butler who strong-armed the Pulitzer Advisory Board into denying Sinclair Lewis the Prize (perhaps even with the assistance of jury member Hamlin Garland).
Per John Hohenberg in his book The Pulitzer Prizes: “In retrospect, The Age of Innocence has outlasted. the vogue of Main Street. Mrs. Wharton’s book is still recognized as a classic, while Lewis’s is sadly dated in an era when the Gopher Prairies of America are bound by television to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. Curiously, both novels reflected accurately in their day the decline of a particular part of American society –the know-nothing small towners that Lewis portrayed and the snobbish aristocrats of Old New York whom Mrs. Wharton knew so well. True, The Age of Innocence has proved to be the better book but that was not the point the judges made. And because the point was ignored, the arguments over the prizes increased.”
I close with a passage from the final chapter of The Age of Innocence:
“…His days were full, and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all a man ought to ask.
Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in his lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too decidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed. That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him from thinking of other women. He had been what was called a faithful husband; and when May had suddenly died – carried off by the infectious pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child – he had honestly mourned her. Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.” (Book II, Chapter 34).
Who Is Edith Wharton?
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born “Edith Newbold Jones” on January 24, 1862 into a prominent Old New York, Gilded Age family who primarily built their wealth in real estate. They belonged to a class of elites who set the tone and manners for the upper echelon. Holding true to the customs of Society (with a capital “S”), they intermingled with families like the Pendletons, Schermerhorns, Ledyards, Rhinelanders, Stevenses, Gallatins, and Joneses. In fact, the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” is said to refer to Wharton’s extended family. Edith Wharton could trace her lineage back to the original land grants of the Dutch colony known as “New Netherland” prior to the British acquisition of Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the Joneses lived in a lavish three-story brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street in the fashionable Madison Square neighborhood of New York City. The Fifth Avenue Opera House sat a mere block away, and the palatial Shakespearean Booth’s Theatre opened just around the corner on Sixth Avenue. In Edith’s day, this was a cultural hub for high-class New Yorkers, but the family later vacated this stately brownstone in the 1870s. Over a century later, it has since been transformed into a string of retail chains. Today, a Starbucks Coffeeshop sits on the ground floor of Edith Wharton’s childhood home.
In her youth, Edith was educated by a string of tutors and governesses. She led a well-cultured life, spending summers in France or Italy, befriending well-known socialites, and learning several different languages. However, her mother forbade young Edith from reading novels until she was much older and married. Nevertheless, she proceeded to write short stories and poetry. She was a keen observer of New York social customs and presented herself publicly as a debutante in 1879. She was then engaged to Henry Leyden Stevens, but her family did not approve, so the marriage was called off and instead Edith married a Bostonian gentleman named Edward “Teddy” Robbins Wharton. They bought a house dubbed “Land’s End” in Newport and a home at 884 Park Avenue. However, Teddy soon suffered from severe, crippling depression which forced them to relocate to their vast estate which was designed by Edith dubbed “The Mount” in Lenox, Massachusetts. The estate has since become a public landmark in the United States.
Around this time, Edith Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, an author and foreign correspondent for The Times of London. In addition to publishing her well-celebrated novels, Edith Wharton was regarded as a respected guide for dignified taste at the time, particularly with regard to interior design, art, fashion, and gardening. In her later years, following her divorce from Teddy, Edith relocated to Paris where she rubbed shoulders with notable writers like Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Indeed, Henry James was in some ways her literary idol –Wharton often echoed James in their mutual exploration of contrasts between Americans and Europeans. When World War I broke out, Edith refused to flee the city of Paris and remained an ardent supporter of French imperial efforts. She was celebrated as a French war hero for her efforts. It was here in France that she wrote The Age of Innocence in 1920. She returned to the United States only once after the war to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1923, and in addition to her Pulitzer Prize in 1921, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times in 1927, 1928, and 1930.
In 1937, she collapsed due to a heart attack at the age of 75 at her home in France. Throughout her prolific writing career, Edith Wharton’s bibliography was rife with great novels like The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), as well as classic short stories and novellas like Ethan Frome (1911). She wrote extensively about home, garden, and fashion trends and she even published a notable collection of poetry and ghost stories. She never again married and had no children.
Film Adaptation:
- The Age of Innocence (1993)
- Director: Martin Scorsese
- Studio: Columbia Pictures
- Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder
Click here to read my review of the film The Age of Innocence (1993).
Further Reading:
- The House of Mirth (1905)
- Ethan Frome (1911)
- The Custom of the Country (1913)
Publisher’s Note:
D. Appleton & Company was founded by Daniel Appleton in 1825, publishing its first book in 1831. It became a prominent publisher of medical and scientific books throughout the 19th century. It officially ceased operations in 1973.
Literary Context in 1920-1921:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1920): awarded to Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) “for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil.”
- According to Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestselling novel in the United States in 1920 was The Man of the Forest by Zane Grey.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel This Side of Paradise was published, which quickly made him a celebrity. He also married Zelda in April of 1920.
- Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was first published in the United States.
- D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love was published in a limited capacity in the United States.
- Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos was published.
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
In my view, The Age of Innocence stands as one of the best selections the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction ever made. It was a rare moment in which a celebrated American author was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for her greatest novel. If forced to choose a runner-up, I would likely select F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.
Wharton, Edith. Three Novels of New York: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence. Penguin Classics; Deluxe, Anniversary edition, February 29, 2012 (originally published in 1920).
Note: Remarkable efforts have been made to digitize Edith Wharton’s private library at “The Mount,” her home in Eastern Massachusetts: http://sheilaliming.com/ewl/home.html
Click here to read my review of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.
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