The picture of Innocence has a conspicuous face. She is round-cheeked with youth, and guilelessly alert, her limpid eyes awaiting anything and suspecting nothing. She might wear white. She likely is white. She could bear a resemblance to the subject of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s late 18th-century painting, The Age of Innocence, the supposed titular inspiration for Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel by the same name.
Yet, in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, published 100 years ago this June, innocence assumes less fragile and impressionable visages. Moreover, its invocation is arch, and a little bit melancholy. Wharton sets the novel in 1870s New York City, a milieu her contemporary readers would have regarded as far-flung and antique, sundered by dozens of years and, most acutely, by the psychological chasm of The Great War. For Wharton’s characters, travel to London or Paris is an expected luxury, unfettered by political unrest. Gentlemen wear gardenias in their buttonholes and, once engaged, they take daily strolls to the florist, where they order decadent floral arrangements for their fiancées (this was expected gallantry). The telephone, invented in 1876, abides as a topic of speculation rather than a realized item of convenience; in fact, it seems a contraption better suited to the fantastical devisings of Edgar Allen Poe or Jules Verne.
From the perch of post-war modernity, one could receive Victorian manners and frames of reference as quaint, dare I say, innocent. However, Wharton harbors no interest in a glossy, rose-hued history of gentility. The world she renders is chilly, sleek, and stridently solipsistic: it is as devoted to its own aggrandizement as it is to its rigorous self-surveillance. But if everybody is watching each other, their undergirding motivations are frivolous and sly. After all, the well-to-do’s most corrupt machinations are attentively greased and diligently ignored—until, of course, someone’s trespass makes the morning papers. New York society knows precisely how to tilt its head so that its gaze excludes any inconvenient contradictions.
Wharton’s narrative unfolds amid this paranoid and laboriously urbane atmosphere, and it centers upon one of its finest byproducts. Protagonist Newland Archer is a wealthy young man whose material advantages nourish his coddled and dilettante lifestyle, not to mention his overconfident ego. At the novel’s start, he is newly engaged to May Welland, a naive and impeccably bred socialite who Newland is eager to cultivate according to his specifications (“We’ll read Faust together,” he daydreams). Of course, Newland’s smug satisfaction demands an impediment, and Wharton promptly delivers: On the night of the couple’s betrothal, May introduces Newland to her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, a glamorously unorthodox expatriate who has fled her husband and whose return to New York has scandalized its gossip-ravenous aristocrats. What follows is not surprising: Newland and Ellen fall in love and, over the course of the novel, must grapple with the simultaneous, insistent tugs of desire and duty.