Status Updates From The Age of Innocence: The O...

Money is the tentacle for all of them. Newland plods at his law office to appease the moneyholders in his family. Ellen depends on the Polish count. Old money was cherished and new money was despised. One of the mysteries is how Julius Beaufort got his money. Because of that, people don’t quite trust him. Old money has to invent aristocracy for themselves going back to Europe.

Newland is unable to communicate with May as well. He is trapped because he can’t get away from May because she is too clever for him and the countess looks at him as a simpleton. He feels like he is the living dead and it’s his own fault. Too stay respectable, he represses his anger and quietly seethes. Like British gentlemen of this time, he has no calling. So he has no outlet during the day.

Howard makes an interesting point and I will have to read the novel to see if it is true. There seems to be a contest of wills and it is May who is able to outmaneuver the more sophisticated pair. Wait? Is this a tripartite soul? Hmmm. He does not realize that her desire to keep him and stay respectable is stronger than his ability to stray. I love that in his pride he fails to assess May properly.

She forces him to see the fool that he was when watching Faust and thinking of May. He learns to hate himself for his simplistic thinking for it is not enough for the countess. They are also trapped for there is no society that will accept them and is worth living in. May is the example of honor and society but the countess is the example of freedom and complexity. He wants both but knows that is impossible.

The book explores the kind of people that she came from who looked at Europe as a place to buy gowns and great art, a tourist destination, and a crow’s nest to watch fallen morality. Maureen Howard alleges that the novel explores allegience and identity. I wonder how that will stack up with Lit Life? LOL While Newland looks at May as a simpleton, the countess looks at him as a simpleton.

This novel won the Pulitzer in 1921. She won a legion medal for her work with refugees. Living in Europe during the war was hard and close friends died in combat. Her mentor Henry James renounced his American citizenship and then died in 1914. Readers had lost interest in WWI stories so Wharton chose to look at an innocent time for America, but she thinks innocence was lost before the war began.

Mrs. Mingott is a whale of a woman, living as a recluse in her enormous mansion. She does not really care what society thinks and she is generous of spirit. The countess moves in and they clearly are opposites. She left scandal in Europe. The countess is seen as foreign even though she is related to May because she is lived abroad. Some of Wharton’s unorthodox thinking is in Mrs. Mingott and failed marriage in Ellen.

Newland does not want a simple goose for a wife so he plans to mold her through Art to make her sophisticated. It is clear that he is envisioning a false paradise and I wonder if there is a duessa (who looks like she is wearing a nightgown at a society event) to bring about a great fall. Some of the opening chapters is devoted to gossip to help us see how Newland and May see their set as well as society.

The characters include the bachelor Newland Archer who woos the innocent May Welland but he falls in love with an ex-pat countess with a checkered past. A potential scoundrel also adds to the drama. Looking back from 1919 when the novel was written to 1870, the age seemed innocent: a clear understanding of good and evil and no idea of the slaughter of WWI to come. It sounds like Jane Austen with Dickensian humor.

Note by Maureen Howard - I’m going to see if she’s a nutter. LOL The book offers the joy of romantic love (not Romance). The boundaries are explored because of society’s restrictions on personal freedom and moral responsibilty, which sometimes leads to temptation. The ordered universe in 1870 New York was suffocating. I’m wondering if this is a novel of the manners as that time and place is recalled.

Edith's maiden name is Jones; her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." She was well-educated and well-travelled, and by age 18, already published. After a failed engagement, she had a failed marriage, which inspired books about failed marriages. She was friends with the writers of her day. In her early fifties, she divorced and moved to Paris. She wrote and reported from the WWI frontline.