The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 30 April 2014
by Edith Wharton
"Ah, no, he (Archer) did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!"
Marcel Proust famously condemned friendship and love as mere habit. It was habit that made us grow attached to things, to places, to the people in our lives. In this novel, contemporary with Proust's massive work, Edith Wharton also condemns the habits of social behavior. She wrote in the early 20th century, but wrote of New York City in the 1870s, and among its most elite citizens. It is a rigid social labyrinth in which men and women follow what they think are centuries of social rules and which are, of course, layers of theater laid over a foundation of hipocrisy. Wharton experienced this sort of thing in her own life, and here lays it out brilliantly. Newland Archer and May Welland are young and engaged. They live among the old families for whom innovation is obscured by facades of innocence. Archer has had his dalliances, but May, of course, is supposed to be utterly unsullied. The novel opens, however, with the entrance of the Countess Olenska, a woman who left her noble European husband to return to the families of her youth in New York. The countess is beautiful and brings with her a cold breath of unconventionality. It isn't long before Archer is taken with her air of adventure, becomes her partisan, and begins to reflect on the strictures of the staid married life that lies ahead of him. New York's "society", though, isn't about to let one of their finest young men go astray. It is a rigid structure, with little room for individual aspirations. You obey or become an outcast. The Countess Olenska learns this, and even May has an undercurrent of understanding, despite the innocence enforced upon her (as quoted from the book, above). Archer is also passive in the face of his desire. He knows the comfort and security he would leave behind, along with all of his family and most of his friends. He wants to Live, but wants also, like all of us, to be comfortable and secure. The countess offers him little help. She wants a divorce, but cannot live in society as a divorced woman. She can become Archer's mistress, but cannot betray May in so direct and brutal a manner, despite how often just such betrayals occur unacknowledged among the society men. As an author, Wharton is a brilliant interior decorator. The rooms of her New York mansions are lavishly described and laid out with flowers and fine trinkets. The women are equally well-adorned. And the city itself very selectively described, circumscribed by the society she describes. We see only Fifth Avenue and a few glimpses of the Village and Central Park. But it is still a familiar New York. The Old families are still around, no doubt enforcing their own views on how their young might meet and marry, to preserve the Old ways, and, of course, the money. The reader might expect this to end tragically, but it doesn't. Wharton knew of the comforts of the rules of society, the security in knowing just how to do things and how to avoid the messy chaos of real life. But it doesn't mean the story isn't tragic. For centuries, our literature is strewn with the stories of men and women who yearn to breathe free of social strictures. And what are social strictures in the end? Just rules made up by children, hoping to act like adults, to be acted out on a stage for the benefit of other children. How fragile it all seems, especially when, like Wharton, you watch it all change as time passes to the next generation.
(For this novel, Edith Wharton was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1921.)
Also by Wharton: [Summer] [Ethan Frome] [The House of Mirth]
See Also: [Edith Wharton by Louis Auchincloss]