The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics) PDF
Preview The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics)
’ THE AGE OF INNOCENCE E W was born into Old New York Society in , with impeccable social credentials and financial security. Her early years alternated between houses in Newport and Manhattan (its geographical boundaries demarcated by Washington Square and Central Park, its social spine formed by Fifth Avenue). Although Wharton started writing verses and stories as a child, her first attempts at professional authorship were delayed until . A further decade passed before she broke into the literary scene with a collection of short stories in and the appearance in of The Valley of Decision. It took The House of Mirth to make Wharton’s fame upon its publication in . Until her death in , Wharton published on an annual basis novels, novellas, poetry, essays, and travel literature. Besides The House of Mirth, her best-known novels areEthan Frome (),The Reef (),The Custom of the Country (),Summer (), and The Age of Innocence () for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. In she married Edward (‘Teddy’) Wharton, a childless union that rapidly proved unsuit- able, though they did not divorce until . After years of residing in Newport, New York, and ‘The Mount’ in Lenox, Massachusetts, Wharton moved permanently to France in . During the First World War Wharton was active in refugee work; this era is reflected in several novels, stories, and essays. She died in and is buried in Versailles. S O is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Human- ities at Stanford University. His most recent books are Imagining Shakespeare (), The Authentic Shakespeare (), and Imper- sonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (). His editions include Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Milton’s Paradise Lost (with Jonathan Goldberg) for Oxford World’s Classics, Marlowe’s poems and translations, Ben Jonson’s masques, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in the Oxford Shake- speare, and Macbeth,King Lear,Pericles,The Taming of the Shrew, and The Sonnets in the New Pelican Shakespeare, of which he is general editor. ’ For over years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over titles––from the ,-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS EDITH WHARTON The Age of Innocence Edited with an Introduction and Notes by STEPHEN ORGEL 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in OxfordNew York AucklandCape Town Dar es SalaamHong KongKarachi Kuala LumpurMadridMelbourneMexico City Nairobi New DelhiShanghaiTaipeiToronto With offices in ArgentinaAustriaBrazilChileCzech RepublicFranceGreece GuatemalaHungaryItaly JapanPolandPortugalSingapore South KoreaSwitzerland ThailandTurkey UkraineVietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Introduction, Explanatory Notes © Stephen Orgel 2006 Chronology © Martha Banta 1994 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd., St. Ives plc ISBN 0–19–280662–9 978–0–19–280662–8 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction vii Note on the Text xx Select Bibliography xxi A Chronology of Edith Wharton xxiii THE AGE OF INNOCENCE Explanatory Notes ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Michael Wyatt for information, for a series of energetic conversations about Wharton, and for providing the ideal setting, Florence, where this edition was completed. Villa I Tatti, where Wharton paid many visits to her dear friend Bernard Berenson, was as warmly welcoming to me as it had been to her, and I thank Joseph Connors, the director, for his hospitality, and the librarian and staff for their manifold kindnesses. Leonard Barkan gave me the benefit of his expertise to illuminate a viticultural point. Judith Luna has once again been the ideal editor. INTRODUCTION The Age of Innocence was Edith Wharton’s first novel after the end of the First World War. Settled in Paris since , she had been intensely active in war work throughout the conflict, and her admir- ation for her adopted country was immense and unqualified. But with victory came the growing realization that the war had changed her own world for good. The Paris she had loved, that had served her as a refuge from the materialism of her own country and the miseries of her marriage, a culture rich in emotional, spiritual, and sensual satisfactions, she now found transformed beyond recognition. It was, she wrote to her friend Bernard Berenson in ,‘simply awful––a kind of continuous earthquake of motors, busses, trams, lorries, taxis and other howling and swooping and colliding engines, with hun- dreds of thousands of U.S. citizens rushing about in them and tum- bling out at one’s door’.1 The fact that the chief agent of change in this account is ‘U.S. citizens’ gives her sense of her own place in the events of the past five years a particular poignancy––in working to save France from the barbarians she has helped to Americanize it. She had determined, even before the war’s end, to leave Paris and find a place in the country. The house, in the village of Saint-Brice- sous-Forêt in the northern suburbs of Paris, required much restor- ation, and finally became her principal home in . In moving there she was escaping from herself as much as from her unwelcome compatriots; and it is not coincidental that her imagination turned to the reconstruction of a past that was uniquely her own and gave her an opportunity not to remake her history, but to contemplate how she came to be herself. The novel is set in the s, and gives a detailed anatomy of the narrow segment of old New York society in which Wharton grew up. Several of the characters are recognizably members of Wharton’s own family, and the social topography of New York and Newport, where the group spent the summers, is precise and specific. New York, for this society, is still centred on Washington Square, though the the more affluent are beginning to move further north–– 1 Cited in R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (New York, ),–. viii Introduction Madison Square, where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue at rd Street, had recently become fashionable; Central Park had been cre- ated, and defined the upper precincts of social distinction, on its east side from Fifth to Fourth Avenue, which was, in two decades, after the building of Grand Central Station, to be renamed, and to become the most fashionable of the streets, Park Avenue. The new districts were quickly colonized by a different sort of aristocracy, the far richer industrialists, railroad magnates, bankers––men like Henry Clay Frick, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan–– who were remaking New York on a much grander scale, and whose new money afforded them a degree of luxury and conspicuous dis- play that old New York both contemned and envied; but also viewed, correctly, as an omen of its own obsolescence. At the time of the novel, only the eccentric matriarch Mrs Manson Mingott builds herself a mansion ‘in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park’. Wharton herself was born in a house on rd Street just west of Fifth Avenue, a socially impeccable neighbourhood; but living fashionably put enough strain on the family’s budget that they moved to Europe, where life was less expensive, from to –– the novel’s world is the one Wharton returned to at the age of , not a world she was familiar with, but one she observed and discovered on the verge of adolescence. Wharton took particular care with her allusions to cultural events––who sang Faust at the old Academy of Music in ; whom Newland Archer would have seen playing Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun, and at what theatre; what one saw at the new Metro- politan Museum of Art; what new books Archer, with his taste for the latest in literature and social theory, would have received from his London bookseller in . These are, with a very few exceptions, accurately imagined (there is, indeed, a subversive pleasure to be experienced in finding the small number of anachronisms, which are indicated in the glosses to this edition): Wharton had a researcher checking such references at the Yale and New York Public Libraries, and they give the novel a very precise time scheme, which locates, and thereby contributes significantly to the pathos of, Archer’s repeatedly missed opportunities. As the novel’s central figure, Archer is a thorough product of this society, charming, tactful, enlightened; and though he accepts its standards and abides by its rules he is intelligent and independent Introduction ix enough to recognize its limitations. For the first half of the novel, indeed, he regards his social world with a good deal of ironic detachment. The novel opens with his engagement to May Welland, ostensibly the perfect wife for him: socially impeccable, beautiful, responsive, charming, the epitome of womanhood as conceived by his world. The attractions and defects of the epitome are recognized even by Archer. He watches his fiancée at the opera during Faust’s seduction of Marguerite: ‘The darling!’ thought Newland Archer ... ‘She doesn’t even guess what it’s all about.’ 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. (p. ) That ‘abysmal purity’ is his to transform; but his ambitions for it are thoroughly conventional: 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,’ in which it was the recognised custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it.... Wharton continues, ‘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.’ His view of his future wife is simply the view of all the young men of his social circle. In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old New York gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world, than any other man of the number. 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. (p. ) The avoidance of the ‘troublesome’ and the profound distaste for ‘bad form’ are ironically invoked here, but they are to be among the most powerful motivations in the novel. But Archer’s social circle is not entirely closed. May’s cousin Ellen Olenska has just entered––or re-entered––it. The Countess
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