Essay on Age of Innocence
According to The Norton
Anthology of American Literature, the turn of the twentieth century in America
is called the transformational era (1-29). It is called such because between the
end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I, America was completely
transformed. Before the Civil War, America had been basically a rural, agrarian,
isolated republic made up of idealistic, confident, and self-reliant
inhabitants; by the time the United States entered World War I as a world power,
it was an industrialized, urbanized, continental nation whose people had come to
conditions with Darwin's Theory of Evolution, as well as with profound changes
in its social institutions and cultural morals. The major feature of the period,
which resulted in the various social and cultural changes, was nation-wide
industrialization.
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This industrial
revolution produced a group of men known variously as buccaneers, captains of
industry, self-made men, who, attracted by the exclusiveness of elite society,
tried to buy their way into it with the aid of their new money and social
ambition. Therefore high society governed by the old conventions started to
witness an inner incoherence: there remained the old conservative aristocracy,
to which was added the young aristocracy who were rich and somewhat vulgar
pleasure seekers, and then appeared the nouveaux rich who squeezed in through
business success and challenged the narrowness of the well established groups.
Against this stood the ancient European aristocracy and its age-old traditions
of powerful scholar currents, sensibilities, and life-style. Edith Wharton’s The
Age of Innocence was written against this background.
William Dean Howells as the truthful treatment of material has defined realism.
According to his theory,
realists are believers in democracy in that they describe the common, the
average, the everyday life in their fiction; they are also supporter in
pragmatism for they concentrate their writing on the present time and place
instead of seeking something more remote or supernatural; the truth they search
for and express is a relative truth "associated with discernible consequences
and verifiable by experience" (Holman 397). Realistic writing tends to be
experimental, for realists are everlastingly experimenting to create the proper
means for the proper ends. According to Howells, the democratic attitudes of
realists prompt them to attach great significance to the individual and to give
priority to characterization in the novel, for the realists think the feeling of
fidelity to life stems from individualization and particularization of
individual figures. The social side of these individual figures, which is the
most visible, the most comprehensible, and the most varied, provides the best
vehicle in lieu of the period the realists live in and want to convey in their
fiction. In formulating their analysis of society and providing criticism of it,
the realists select and reproduce the things "affecting the lives of the
greatest number, which happen often in the realm of instincts, desires, and
passions" (Cady, 31).
The Age of Innocence was published in 1920, but it was set in the time of Old
New York in the 1870s and 1880s. Wharton centered her story around the society
she was most recognizable with New York upper class, which was wealthy enough to
care about leisure, yet was strict in its decorum and narrow in its conventions.
As Edith Wharton remarked in The Age of Innocence, "what was or was not 'the
thing' played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the
inscrutable totems that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of
years ago" (4). In this novel, Wharton offers a realistic and comprehensive
picture of a society where manners, morals and codes of conduct are a key to the
understanding of the way in which people behave. Using such details as fashion
and dress, the things people ate, the books they read, the places they went for
entertainment, the way they talked, the things they said and the things they did
not say, Wharton is talented to reveal her desire for change and the
consequences of the failure to change in both personal and social terms.
Wharton's characters are also created out of her memory of the several
individuals "who thronged her parents' drawing room or whom she encountered at
the dinner parties and the great balls" (Lewis 430). There is, as her biographer
remarks, "a procession of living and recognizable ghosts" (430) walking behind
her characters' life in her imaginary world. By presenting the realistic details
and individuals, Wharton has revivified her Old New York, which she both
abhorred and was drawn to. It was this world that persisted in holding its
"form," but was impinge upon by transform initiated by commercialism.
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