Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
Reviewers: “Puzzling–and prehistoric” ; “The slow petrifaction of generous ardours”
One hundred years ago today … Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence appeared.
Courtesy AbeBooks.com.
Wharton had finished the novel on April 5; the magazine Pictorial Review began serializing it, “flanked by advertisements for soap flakes and ‘Sani-flush’ for cleaning toilet bowls” in their July issue(Lewis, 428). On October 20, D. Appleton and Co. put it out as a single volume. The New York publisher situated Wharton–“America’s foremost woman novelist”–at the top of US fiction writers, while situating the book at the top of its catalogue.
New York Tribune, 17 October 1920, p. 82. Chronicling America.
The NYC papers gave due attention to The Age of Innocence. One of the more engaging reviews appeared in the Evening World, written by Marguerite Mooers Marshall, herself in the early stages of a successful career as a novelist. Marshall writes,
What Mrs. Wharton, with literary artistry and the “inside stuff” assured by her own unnassailable social position, did for modern anxiety in House of Mirth, she has now done for society’s grandmothers…. And how tongues will wag among the knowing.
And adds the kicker:
“It’s all exceedingly puzzling–and prehistoric.”
Evening World, 19 October 1920, p. 21. Chronicling America.
The New York Times ran a more extensive article, making The Age of Innocence the lead story of its “Autumn Books” feature, out of 200 titles. William Lyon Phelps, who would go on to play a major role in the creation of modern literature as an academic field, writes in an enthusiastic review:
New York society and customs of the ‘seventies are described with an accuracy that is almost uncanny: to read these pages is to live again. The absolute imprisonment with which her characters stagnate, their artificial and false standards, the desperate monotony of trivial routine, the slow petrifaction of generous ardours, the paralysis of emotion, the accumulation of ice around the heart, the total loss of life in upholstered existence–are depicted with a high excellence that never falters.
New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 17 October 1920, p. 1. Chronicling America.
The novel sold well throughout 1920-1921-1922, earning its author “nearly $70,000” (Lewis, 430), and in 1921 won the Pulitzer Prize, making Wharton the first woman winner.
Clearly, Wharton’s anthropological survey of the NYC of 50 years before struck a chord with the 1920 public, as The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s, uses its backwards glance to navigate its own moment. There is a disturbing wistfulness in its picture of an NYC that includes virtually no immigrants, while its characters live in dread of foreignness–a frequently invoked term. Candice Wald writes of the “fear of foreign contamination that shapes” the novel, and cites the work of the Lusk Committee (which NY1920 has reported on repeatedly) as a crucial context (Wharton, 310). The novel depicts the gradual fissuring of NYC high society ambivalently, mixing objectivity with mourning and occasional relief.
References/Further reading:
Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. 1920. Edited by Candice Wald. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, OCTOBER 20, 2020.
TAGS: literature, novels, fiction, modernism, women writers, high society, publishing, foreignness, magazines, reviews, journalism