The Wit And Wisdom Of Edith Wharton
Why first woman to win a Pulitzer for fiction was one of our great novelists of tribalism
It’s a cliché to say that a new “tribalism” has infected American life. Pop-up analysts can’t stop using the word to explain why people, especially on the political right, vote against their interests.
But tribalism isn’t new in America, and few novelists have understood it better than Edith Wharton, born in the age of the hoop skirt. The idea underlies all of her work, especially her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
One of Wharton’s supreme achievements was to show how hard it can be for people to resist the pull of their tribe, even when they have money, education, and social standing. Perhaps none of her characters makes this clearer than Newland Archer, the gentleman lawyer at the center of The Age of Innocence.
Newland Archer, a born dilettante, tends to find more satisfaction in thinking about his pleasures—love among them—than in their fulfillment. This trait threatens his well-ordered life when the alluring Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York on the eve of his engagement to the placid May Welland.
But Wharton doesn’t condemn her protagonist for his inability to resist either the newcomer’s allure or the dependable comforts offered by his fiancée, who belongs to his tribe. She shows how others conspire to keep Newland in line with their reverence for the “invisible deity” who blesses their opera boxes, ballrooms, and dinner tables adorned with women in towering ostrich feathers and men in patent-leather pumps.
Wharton’s post–Civil War New Yorkers call their god “Good Form,” the outward expression of their taste. Others might identify their deity as an overdeveloped sense of tribal propriety.
The great theme of The Age of Innocence is the power of social custom to thwart the individual desires of both sexes.
Ellen arrives New York seeking the freedom missing in her marriage to a callow Polish nobleman, but her free-spiritedness and impenetrable past quickly begin to shut doors to her. Newland has too much loyalty to his tribe to take the decisive action required by their attraction to each other, and his ambivalence requires her to make her own decision about whether to stay or return to Europe.
The elegance of The Age of Innocence lies partly in Wharton’s refusal to cast Newland as a coward or a fool. He is rather a product of a society that has its own appeal for him. And he’s too intelligent not to see the injustices and contradictions its mores involve.
At first Newland has hazy fantasies of awakening in May the intellectual curiosity she lacks, perhaps by reading the Faust story to her beside Italian lakes. He eventually concedes defeat with a droll awareness of his limits and hers.
“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May’s only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of wifely adoration.”
The Age of Innocence brims with such wry observations that help to justify its frequent billing as “a comedy of manners and morals.”
Like all of the best comic novelists, Wharton knows that the finest wit comes not from topical one-liners but from ludicrous, incongruous, or absurd situations that reflect enduring human needs or wishes.
Unlike Henry James, to whom she is so often compared, she is never windy or opaque but writes as clearly and economically as she constructs her plots.
No one would say of Wharton that she was “incapable of offering a thought without pinning a flower in its button-hole,” as the biographer Leon Edel said of James’s letter-writing.
Her instinct for clarity helps to explain the effectiveness of her wit. As in Jane Austen’s novels, you always know who is being tweaked.
In a defining scene of The Age of Innocence, retained in the 1993 film version, Newland and May visit an exhibit of Early Bronze Age and other antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There they see glass shelves crowded with items labeled “Use Unknown,” a symbol the pointless customs of their circle.
The ritualized expectations of upper-middle-class New Yorkers don’t lead to tragedy as in Wharton’s The House of Mirth, in which Lily Bart is unable to save herself from the consequences of her failure to marry.
The customs instead inspire a banquet of observations that include Newland’s on his fiancée: “What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a ‘decent’ fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?”
Jan is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of a large newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle.
This book I didn't know but sounds fascinating. Your introduction about tribes voting against their interests reminded me of a British or maybe Irish book I'm certain you know called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressel. Anyway, your superb review has encouraged me to see it out at my local library. I'm going through a phase of discovering and rediscovering old classics so this how grabbed my attention as we all have these tribal dilemmas thank you.