Age of Innocence
By the time the bloody chaos of the First World War finally came to an end on November 11, 1918, the American novelist Edith Wharton had already been living as an expatriate in Paris for five years. During that time, she had essentially ceased to write fiction and had turned her energies instead to the Allied effort by providing war relief for soldiers and refugees. Her devotion and enthusiasm for her work was, in fact, enough to win her the French Legion of Honor. By the end of the war, however, Wharton found herself disturbed by what she saw as the profound social disruptions that had been brought on by the war. In the months after the armistice, she again picked up her pen to write what many critics consider to be her war novel.
One would be hard pressed, however, to find any elements within The Age of Innocence that even remotely address the disruption and the bloodshed of the First World War.
Set in 1870's New York, Wharton's novel depicts a society that is in many ways the antithesis of war-devastated Europe. Old New York, Wharton's term to describe this wealthy and elite class at the top of the developing city's social hierarchy, was a society utterly intent on maintaining its own rigid stability. To Wharton, Old New York imposed on its members set rules and expectations for practically everything: manners, fashions, behaviors, and even conversations. Those who breached the social code were punished, with exquisite politeness, by the other members.
The differences between the fractured society following the First World War and the Old New York of The Age of Innocence are without a doubt dramatic. However, there is more of a connection between them than may first appear. Edith Wharton herself was born...
Age of Innocence
You give some interesting information with regard to Edith Wharton's novel of social mores among New York's upper class during the gilded age. During an age of marked excess, many were envious of the wealthy but failed to realize that the lives of the rich and famous might be every bit as circumscribed by strictly enforced standards of behavior as their own lives were limited by a lack of money. It was easier for individuals such as Archer to go along with societal norms than pursue what he really wanted. His wife, May, is one of literature's more underestimated heroine's who kept her husband through tact. The scene toward the end of the novel in which Archer walks away rather than meet the Countess is one of the more heartrending depictions of lost opportunities in fiction. Your report was perceptive and engrossing. Fine effort!
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