The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

what was or was not “the thing” played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.

he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.

He drew a breath of satisfied vanity

And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.

the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride.

He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the “younger set,”

it was the recognised custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it.

How this miracle of fire and ice was to be created, and to sustain itself in a harsh world, he had never taken the time to think out; but he was content to hold his view without analysing it, since he knew it was that of all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated, button-hole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him,

Singly they betrayed their inferiority; but grouped together they represented “New York,” and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral. He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome—and also rather bad form—to strike out for himself.

married two of her daughters to “foreigners” (an Italian marquis and an English banker),

an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.

beauty—a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

Few things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against “Taste,” that far-off divinity of whom “Form” was the mere visible representative and vicegerent. Madame Olenska’s pale and serious face appealed to his fancy as suited to the occasion and to her unhappy situation; but the way her dress (which had no tucker) sloped away from her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him. He hated to think of May Welland’s being exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless of the dictates of Taste.

The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies,

Nothing could be in worse taste than misplaced flippancy;

Mrs. Archer, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms, had once said: “We all have our pet common people—” and though the phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an exclusive bosom.

New York’s business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral standard—he

The long habit of living together in mutually dependent intimacy had given them the same vocabulary,

he thought it a good thing for a man to have his authority respected in his own house, even if his sense of humour sometimes made him question the force of his mandate.

her hair’s intensely black, you know—the Egyptian style.

young men are so foolish and incalculable—and some women so ensnaring and unscrupulous—that it was nothing short of a miracle to see one’s only son safe past the Siren Isle and in the haven of a blameless domesticity.

because on the whole he was a tender and indulgent master—that

She had behaved beautifully—and in beautiful behaviour she was unsurpassed—during

it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts,

What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out ball?”

“Ah—don’t I remember her in it!” said Mr. Jackson;

while enjoying th...

“Why shouldn’t she be conspicuous if she chooses? Why should she slink about as if it were she who had disgraced herself? She’s ‘poor Ellen’ certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage; but I don’t see that that’s a reason for hiding her head as if she were the culprit.”

Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life: that doesn’t make her an outcast.”

Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t? I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots.” He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. “Women ought to be free—as free as we are,” he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland’s familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

“Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.

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?

What if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other?

He reviewed his friends’ marriages—the supposedly happy ones—and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship wh...

He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and soc...

he had formed a wife so completely to his own convenience that, in the most conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men’s wives, she went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that “Lawrence was so frightfully strict”; and had been known to blush indignantly, and avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the fact that Julius Beaufort (as became a “foreigner” of doubtful origin) had what was known in New York as “another establishment.”

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs;

Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter’s engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that people of advanced culture were beginning

to read, the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from ...

The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than th...