So, I read this Edith Wharton book, and, in it, the two main characters were conflicted. They were torn between their love for one another and their sense of duty to a society that they simultaneously despised and admired. They couldn’t decide whether they should act on their personal understanding of integrity or the appearance of propriety. Their actions fluctuated between impulsive choices erupting from deeply-rooted feelings and calculated decisions mandated by their turn of the century-influenced egos. Their language, at times, was shrewdly cryptic, decorated with the ornaments of manners; at other times, it was inadequate and bare. Okay, that’s every Edith Wharton book I’ve read. But somehow every Edith Wharton book I read, despite its similarities to others, comes to life in its own unique way, with the vitality of its heroine echoing through its sterilized gilded halls. Such was the way with Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

I want to be best friends with Edith Wharton, but I’m a little scared of what she’ll say behind my back. In a single phrase, she can strip away the artifice of the privileged, and, in a novel, she can demolish the facades of elite society, so that the reader is left peering onto the teetering scaffolding that’s threatening to crush them all. Yet somehow she manages, like her lead characters, to critique the society as an outsider with ruthless, cutting eyes, and as an insider, with emotional attachment and empathy. From her minute descriptions of the pressures and pleasures of a wedding day to her constant, dynamic foiling of the budding, virginal May and the worldly, questioning Ellen, which recognizes the weaknesses, strengths, innocence, and impurities of both (and the relationships between their personalities, society's standards, and male expectations in terms of the characters' development and reception), Wharton brings a keen eye and slightly broken, but still hopeful, heart to her treatment of the elite New York society. It's so crushingly human.

Edith Wharton speaks to me. I believe her characters; I feel their anxieties, triumphs, and pains. I will definitely continue working my way through her books, however similar they seem to be.

“Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”

“The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”