chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡'s Reviews > The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is one of those books that have been teetering on my to-read pile for months while I attended to life’s copious demands. Once I started it, however, there seemed to be nothing else in the world worth reading—or doing. I was utterly absorbed.

The novel centers on the microcosm of 1870s New York’s elite society and uses it as a lens to scrutinize not only the nuanced spectacle of the leisured class, but also that of the human soul. In The Age of Innocence, Wharton casts a visceral spotlight on the messy and volatile instabilities permeating the seemingly stable narratives of privileged polite society. More specifically, the novel portrays the subtle choreography of mannered social etiquette as, in large part, a masquerade.

From childhood on, Newland Archer was taught the pantomimic language of this social performance, indoctrinated into Old New York’s cult of silence, which finds strength in legacy and reputation and uses its substantial power to impose a false, all-encompassing “all rightness” in untenable circumstances in order to protect itself. As such, Newland is expected to marry the innocent, naïve, and “artless” May Welland who, unencumbered by dreams of subversion, would make a “blameless” wife incapable of surprising him. Yet, Newland cannot bear thoughts of that future, stretching away in safe, dull years on the other side of the gulf separating him from the object of his truest desires: the untouchable Countess Oleska. May’s disgraced cousin.

I loved this book. Wharton explores, with both ingenuity and a poisonous bite, the angst of agency and individuality and its unsettling struggle for power in the act of attempting to escape the societal structures in which we are embedded. The novel’s subject, after all, is the journey of repositioning one’s self in relation to the tradition and culture we grew up in, and the difficulty of continuing to live in the complexity and clarity of that learned wisdom. Newland, for much of the novel, luxuriates in the seductive premise of living an unmoored life, outside the narrow parameters of his privileged slice of New York, which formed him but which he feels he has now completely outgrown. He is eager to go, to cast off the dreadful moorage that is his engagement to May Welland and seize what he can of the world for himself.

Newland, above all, wants Ellen. Seeing Ellen again, for so many years, has brought his world to a proper perspective, and their shared resistance to being taxonomized by the stale societal scripts they were born into brought them closer together. Newland throws himself at Ellen with the sort of carelessness and abandon that befits his youth and station. Despite the powerful tides tugging them apart, he is determined to weather the risks that love and desire necessitate. Yet, of course, the central irony here is that no matter how far Newland’s fall from grace would be, Ellen’s would still be from greater a height. Their clannish society’s customs dictate that such dissent (and descent) from the universal script of propriety must be severely punished. And as these scripts usually go, Ellen (who’s still reeling from her own marital scandal) is set to bear the cost.

While reading this book, the question of who is in the luxurious position of being able to transgress lied like a needle in the back of my mind. Newland’s battle for coherence and self-agency is predicated on the interdependent working of class, race, and gender. Newland flirts with the idea of surpassing the limitations of his social reality, but his desire struck me as yet another masquerade. It is subversive, certainly, but it cannot genuinely harm him—like a defanged serpent. The potential loss and fracture of Newland’s bachelor dreams lead him to disillusionment, but not to any real rebuilding. At the end, Newland cannot truly escape the world that formed him because he is incapable of seeing it clearly in the first place. Newland therefore becomes the prisoner and eventually the victim—if he is a victim at all—of his own misperceptions.

Ultimately, what comes forcefully in The Age of Innocence is the cost of negating the reality of the world we live in and the people we love and are responsible for to uphold the incomplete fictions of our illusions. The ending twisted my heart into sadness and pity, but I can’t conceive of a more apt conclusion for this novel.