The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
my past as a femcel, Ferdinand de Saussure, and a lil doom & gloom
Hi y’all,
It’s short book summer1 wedding season2 finally fall literally 2025 and 6 months after I actually wrote this blog post here at Book Notes! I’m publishing it now in lieu of writing about the other books I read in 2024. The first half is mostly about the book, the second is mostly about my feelings (ngl I get a little maudlin), and I’m not offended if only one of those things interests you.
It felt like everyone in New York read Edith Wharton this summer. The novel of manners is back! The people want gossip, romance, and a trust fund! The people want silk gowns, sealskin coats, rigid social hierarchies, and the sinking sense that you’ve made a mistake that your reputation may never recover from! I think this had a bit to do with Bratmania, with Trump back on the ballot, with the trendiness of candlelit dinner parties, and with how much money we’re all paying for cheaply made things.
Two years ago, I loved The Custom of the Country. Undine Spragg is a deliciously nasty protagonist. She’s glamorous, shameless, terrifying, and very very modern. Custom was instantly an all time fave. But it took me until now to read The Age of Innocence, Wharton’s most famous novel and the first book by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
The Age of Innocence is a love triangle set in 1870’s New York among the elite of the elite. Newland Archer and his fiancé May Welland are both from a tiny circle of insular and nearly incestuously intermarried old money families, who spend their time going to the opera, hosting dinner parties, and strictly enforcing the rigid social norms of their caste. May’s cousin Ellen returns from Europe, leaving behind her philandering husband, the Count Olenska. Ellen is everything May is not—she’s witty, cultured, bohemian, and a bit of a rebel. New York’s rigid upperclass is initially scandalized by Ellen’s desertion of her husband, so Newland takes it upon himself to protect her from the judgmental eyes of high society.
But in doing so, Newland—who considers himself a bit of an intellectual and professes to be sick of the trite conventions of his social milieu—falls in love with the very unconventional Ellen.
Newland tries to keep his distance, but finds he can’t. He begins to consider May totally unimaginative and incapable of growth and starts to dread their marriage, which seems like it will inherit all the terrible hypocritical conventions of their social class. Ellen, meanwhile, represents possibility, sophistication, culture, intellect, and breaking with tradition. And so, as he marries May, he also begins an affair with Ellen.
Newland’s a gentleman, a dilettante, a trust fund kid with progressive beliefs and “pretentious” reading material, who likes to slum it with artists after a long day of work at a white collar job. He believes himself superior to his peers in all “matters intellectual and artistic.” To him, there is nothing “more awful than an offense against ‘Taste.’” He finds the gossips and cheats of his society to be total hypocrites, tolerable only because, well, everyone else tolerates them.
Despite being a bit of a snob, Newland is mostly honorable and often very kind, and has “nothing mean or ungenerous in [his] heart.” You can’t totally hate him, but you don’t really like him.
Newland’s most annoying quality: he talks a big game about his desire to live an unconventional life but, at every turn, does his best to thwart his chances at having one. Newland instinctively follows the script laid out for young men of his milieu, in the language he uses,3 in his desires, in his beliefs of what is and isn’t possible. Wharton notes, “[Newland] passed for a young man who had not been afraid of risks.” He only “passes” for a rebel. He isn’t one. Even an affair he has with a married woman is “the kind that most young men of his age had been through.”
It’s this tension in Newland that really drives the plot of the novel: when he finds himself falling in love with Ellen, he does all in his power to stay far away from her, to hasten his marriage to her cousin, and to encourage her not to divorce her own husband.
Poor Newland, doomed to rebel predictably, to be aware of his own ordinariness, to resent it, but not to be brave enough to do anything meaningful to re-route the path he’s been placed on!
From one perspective, this is self-sabotage; from another, it’s self-protection. It’s fairly obvious that Newland isn’t actually interested in any meaningful non-conformity. As the girls on TikTok (RIP 🤞) would phrase it, “If he wanted to, he would.” Or, like, the gentleman doth protest too much.
Newland just likes to dream about rebelling. For Newland, “thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realization.” What he considers his “real life” occurs almost entirely in his own head, in day dreaming that is “more real” to him than truth. When it comes down to it, Newland prefers the safety and predictability of fantasy to action.
And what exactly is Newland “rebelling” against? Oh, everything and nothing. He hates the hypocrisy of his social set, he hates their superficiality, he hates that eccentricity of any sort is considered an affront to society. Most of all, he hates the indirect form of communication that his peers consider polite.
In Newland’s world, even the most important conversations are held obliquely. Words and phrases are almost entirely decoupled from their literal meaning. A sentence said by one character at the outset of the novel may have an entirely different meaning when they repeat it in a new context at the end of the novel.
This style of communication obviously leaves much up to interpretation, making it almost a genteel version of playacting, not unlike the operas they regularly attend. Ellen—ever the outsider—is the only character that seems to always speak straightforwardly, which charms Newland.4
Wharton’s narrator puts it succinctly:
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.
Uhh, will any semiotician on board please come to the front of the aircraft?
The Age of Innocence was published in 1920, four years after the publication of Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, which influenced all the French structuralists of the mid 20th century. The “arbitrariness of the sign” in relation to the signified is Saussure’s whole deal. Given that Wharton lived in France during this period, it’s not hard to imagine she was influenced by conversations about his work (or perhaps Charles Pierce’s, who was a friend of her friend Henry James) while writing The Age of Innocence.
Semiotics—and symbols more broadly—can be useful in understanding how Newland approaches the world. Newland believes he is excellent at decoding the signs of his social set, and is confident in any assumption he makes about another’s thoughts. At the same time, he believes his own motivations are totally inscrutable to others. He comes to view the people around him as symbols of a sort.
Ellen and May come to represent (for the reader and for Newland) specific life paths—freedom v.s. security, truth v.s. superficiality, transgression v.s. tradition, culture v.s. custom, dreams v.s. duty... the list could go on.
This is, of course, a pretty distorted way to see another person. Newland—with his head so full of hieroglyphs—is unable to fully understand either of these women.
Wharton doesn’t let this arrogance go unchecked: both Ellen and May constantly subvert his expectations, though he rarely incorporates this into his understanding of them. In this way, The Age of Innocence is a masterclass in dramatic irony: though the narrator hews closely to Newland’s limited perspective, we still catch glimpses of what is really going on, and who these women actually are.
What can I say? I didn’t love it. What made The Custom of the Country so fun was Undine’s shameless ambition, her ruthlessness, her unbridled self-absorption. Undine smashes through convention, through the old ways and into a disturbing new world. Newland is a relic of a dying society, who moans about the superficiality of his peers in order to absolve himself from the same sins. Which is to say: he’s annoying!!
I guess I don’t have much sympathy for Newland. Reading this novel made me feel like I was fifteen again. Back then, having just discovered feminism, I gave nearly every book with a male protagonist the same (literally sophomoric) reading: this man (derogatory) doesn’t understand or respect women, especially not this very cool woman who I understand and respect, this cool woman who, if not totally blameless, is definitely ultimately reasonable whenever she does something wrong. I gave this reading to every book—from High Fidelity to The Trial to Lolita to Revolutionary Road to Macbeth—regardless of whether or not it was supported by the text.
If I’m being real, I didn’t have sympathy for men in general when I was fifteen. How could I? I grew up so cloistered by religious education, for quite a long time, men seemed unknowably Other. Too distant (and different) to ever understand. I didn’t have any guy friends, nonetheless close ones. Between all-girls school, camp, and ballet, there straight-up weren’t any boys for me to know! Feminism as it might speak to any relationship between men and women was entirely hypothetical for me, though I’d’ve rather laid down in traffic than admit it. It was so, so deeply embarrassing not to know anything about boys. I knew that my ignorance (or, innocence) was in part thanks to the Catholic obsession with chastity, which I considered patriarchal oppression. So, I had two options as a teenage girl who had zero contact with men: worship ‘em or villainize ‘em. Both are obviously wrong, but I chose the option that seemed vaguely dignified. It also, conveniently, let me off the hook.
Ironically, this sort of innocence is also Newland’s problem, though he thinks it’s May’s. Sure, Newland’s had an affair and knows all the “facts of life,” but he doesn’t understand women, and, in his highly restrictive society, he’s not supposed to. He knows this on an intellectual level: he resents the “elaborate system of mystification… cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses” to ensure young women are “frank and innocent.” But he’s unwilling or unable to look beyond May’s socialized behaviors, even though he’s very aware that they are not “natural.” He believes fully in May’s worldly-innocence, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary! She even tells him outright: “You mustn’t think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine. One hears and notices—one has one’s own feelings and ideas.” Newland is shocked by this initially, but is unable to incorporate it into his understanding of May. It is his innocence and his conventionality—not hers—that drive the conflict of the novel.
Which brings me to the true source of my lack of sympathy for Newland: he’s unfortunately too relatable!!!!!!!!!
At some point or another, who hasn’t created an idea of themselves that they’re too afraid to actually live up to? Who hasn’t enjoyed a daydream so much that they let reality slip through their fingers? Who hasn’t discovered that they have terribly, even tragically, misunderstood someone else? Who hasn’t hurt someone who trusts them, in service of a selfish goal? Who doesn’t occasionally squash their own weirdness to enjoy the comforts of convention? Who doesn’t have regrets?
That shit is painful to read about! I find more and more that I dislike relatable books. It turns out that everyone was right, and that one day I’d turn thirty,5 and I’d feel like I closed more doors in my life than I’d opened. At the end of my endless potential, there’s just me, again, with all my flaws and fears, sucking my thumb. Getting in my own way.
Or at least, that’s how I think when I’m in the throes of PMS. When I’m not, like, blinded by hormones, I remember that this was also how I felt at age 15, back when I didn’t know any boys and was convinced I never would and so would never find love or a husband or even a first kiss.
So I was relieved by Wharton’s coda to The Age of Innocence, which flashes forward 26 years, to reveal that Newland has indeed settled down with May. Many readers seem to think it’s a sad ending, one that condemns Newland’s cowardice and inaction. I thought it was the happiest ending he could ask for.
What Wharton describes for Newland’s future is an ordinary life, well lived, with a small family and fine career. He’s a man who finally has come to terms with himself and his failings. He is still “a contemplative and a dilettante” but “he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in, and one great man’s friendship to be his strength and pride.” He writes for a magazine. He briefly held political office, something that he once considered impossible by the dictates of taste. He has three kids, who take him to vacation in Europe. He mourns the recent death of his wife May.
He does have some regrets, and even believes that he has missed “the flower of life,” which the reader might understand as a passionate, risky, and intellectually fulfilling life. In Europe, he similarly reflects:
Now that the spectacle [of Paris] was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being…
I suppose this is tragic. Tragic, as in, the flawed hero brought about his own fate. But it’s not sad. In fact, much like the hyperbolic spiraling I go through when I PMS6—it contradicts what we know about how his life has actually panned out. It’s the normal vanity of a dreamer.
It’s the same sort of thinking readers saw from him through so much of his youth. As we know: Newland is a man who prefers dreaming to action, who likes to distinguish himself from his peers by his thoughts rather than by his deeds. He’s a proto-hipster who desires individualism and status in equal measure, and so destined to a sort of conforming-contrarianism. He’s a man who’ll play both sides of the fence to ensure he maintains the position he likes best: that of the critic who still gets invited to the party.
He has achieved the life he really wanted, and I suspect that if he had run off with Ellen, they both would have been devastatingly unhappy. Like, Revolutionary Road level unhappy. The unhappiness of an unconventional woman who is trapped by a vain man who seeks the reputation of originality but the comforts of conformity. I imagine them stepping on a boat to Europe like Benjamin and Elaine boarded the bus in the ending scene from The Graduate.
Newland’s life is only as sad (or as tragic, for that matter) as you consider an ordinary life. This isn’t to say that Newland was wrong to dislike the hypocrisy, the superficiality, the rigidity, and the restrictions of his society. But most people are no match for cultural socialization and tradition—especially those of us born into comfort and privilege, no matter how unconventional we hope to be.
Let’s look back at Newland’s major concerns about marrying May: (1) that his marriage would become “a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other,” and (2) that he would become a “dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen,” and (3) that May would never surprise him. None of these things come to pass, though Newland, in seeking to consummate his affair with Ellen, does make a pass at bringing (1) into fruition and is often myopic enough to believe that (3) is true. I suppose (2) is relative.
In the end, May is Newland’s ideal wife: she’s happy to be totally misunderstood, and stands respectably as the perfect backdrop for Newland’s idle contrarianism. Newland isn’t the first man, nor will he be the last, to think his wife is kinda a drag. Some might call that a tradition.
And for what it’s worth, let me tell you about an oft-overlooked sad literary marriage. Towards the end of Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bennett advises Lizzie: “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are about.” He implies what the reader has long known: that he doesn’t respect Mrs. Bennett.
That line gives me chills whenever I read it. That’s sad. Can you imagine not respecting your partner? Or discovering that your partner does not respect you? Or worse yet, not recognizing this lack of respect for what it is? In his youth, Newland very obviously did not respect May, but Wharton indicates as they aged it was a relationship that held the “dignity of duty.” It is telling that in the epilogue, he now recognizes the “real things” of his life happened not in his head, as he once believed, but in his living room, with his wife and children.
In the coda, their son reveals that all along May knew that Newland loved Ellen, and she had trusted Newland because he was willing to give the affair up for their family. In the most beautiful line of the novel, Newland reflects that, “It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, some one had guessed and pitied.... And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably.” He discovers that his wife understood him more—and he understood her less—than he had realized. A final surprise from May Welland.
If there is anything tragic to the ending of The Age of Innocence, it is that Newland and May over the course of their marriage never spoke openly with each other. They would’ve had much to discuss.
Of course, maybe what’s really going on is that I’m socialized to find this ending a happy one! Growing up, my dad always told me that love is an action, not a feeling. It is something that you do in how you care for and treat one another. By this standard, Ellen loves May when she ends her affair with Newland. Newland loves May when he doesn’t follow Ellen to Europe. And May loves Newland in her appreciation of his sacrifice. I don’t think that’s a bad or superficial definition of love.
Further Reading
New York Art Worlds, 1870–1890
An exhibit at the Met that we’ve all just missed! Features all the artists Newland wanted to hang out with in New York.
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
If you came of age in the 00’s, this middle grade classic definitely made you cry! Like The Age of Innocence, Stargirl is also told from the perspective of a boy who falls in love with the strange girl who moves to his town. This girl breaks all the social conventions and rules at his high school, and she is first loved, then cast out for it. Like Newland, our protagonist also tries to make her conform to the social norms that he himself would like to break, with disastrous results.
Rhine Journey by Ann Schlee
In 1851, Charlotte, an unmarried middle aged woman, is on a vacation with her brother, sister-in-law, and niece. Half way through the trip, Charlotte spots the man she had once been in love with and who her brother had not permitted her to marry. Her world shifts and she considers, for the first time, her regrets and her repression. It’s beautiful and also, in many ways, an answer to The Age of Innocence.
Metropolitan (1990)
Wharton could have written this movie, if she lived through NYC in the 80s. It follows a group of wealthy college students attending debutante season parties in NYC, and their urbane after-party discussions about life, class politics, art, and the social rules of the “Urban Haute Bourgeoisie,” as they call themselves. (Also: lead actress Audrey Rouget plays Newland’s sister in the Age of Innocence movie!)
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adele Waldman
A modern novel of manners set in Brooklyn’s hipster heyday, narrated by a man who’s dating his way through it. It’s been a long time since I’ve read this one, but from what I remember, Nathan doesn’t understand (or respect) the women he dates, but readers are still able to catch glimpses of who the women truly are through the crack in the door of Nathan’s perspective.
“Age of Wild Spirits” by Caddywhompus
One of my favorite songs when I was a sad 15 year old virgin. Honestly, it still kinda hits.
Haley Larsen’s Closely Reading Substack
Haley did a fabulous close reading of The Age of Innocence on her Substack! Her reading is super fascinating and very well informed.
Brat by Charli XCX
I’M SORRY, okay? OKAY? Brat as a
novelalbum of manners.Brat is a self-consciously referential album that speaks to the tastes and norms of a specific group of young(ish) people who “live” on the internet. The whole album is obsessed with status (through bravado and insecurity), from “Von dutch” to “I might say something stupid” to “Mean girls” to “Rewind.” “Sympathy is a knife” and “Girl, so confusing” are both about complicated, unspoken interpersonal dynamics between women that are magnified by the social environments these women live in. “Talk talk” is also a song about social dynamics of flirting. And Charli name drops constantly in the album, populating her world with cool girls from a very specific (very online) subculture—literally, like in “360” and “Club classics,” but also more subtly, like in “Mean girls.” “I think about it all the time” is, in some ways, a song about what it would mean to step outside the rules of the social group that the other songs on the album describe.
The original NYT review of The Age of Innocence
“After reading so many slipshod diaries called ‘novels,’ what a pleasure it is to turn the pages of this consummate work of art.” — Glad to know that critics’ complaints about contemporary literature will always stay the same, no matter the century!
A few months after I wrote all this, I read Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and am pleased to report that (1) I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed The Custom of the Country and (2) it’s a fascinating companion to Innocence in terms of it’s handling of regret and the attempt to escape fate.
Anyway, I’m trying to get my friends together for a table read of Hamlet. George says I’m trying to re-live AP English Lit, to which I say, uhhh, actually I read Hamlet in eighth grade. That’s a joke, I’ve actually never read Hamlet, or Othello, or King Lear, or The Tempest, or like most of them, so I think it’s time I start.
beep beep,
Book Notes
Short book summer didn’t die, I just didn’t write about any of the books I read for it. Oops!
Literally went to three weddings and a funeral in August 2024.
I especially enjoyed the little ways that Newland reflexively—almost unwillingly—bows to custom. Hasn’t everyone been on an awkward first date that felt a little like this:
[He was] alive to the flatness of [his] words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire to be simple and striking.
Or:
His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make—even to the point of calling him original.
It’s such a cutting and clever way of describing a person.
By the end of the novel, she has learned to speak in codes. Newland tells her he will see her soon in Paris. Her response: “If you and May could come—!” … i.e. you’re not visiting me without your wife, this affair is over and you better not follow me to Europe.
aka, hideously ancient, or at least that’s what 15 year old me would have thought
lol sorry dad. This is the last mention of my period, I promise.
I remember really liking it. Didn’t recall the details though. I just like period pieces and am fascinated by the travails of the wealthy of that time period. It seems like when you have it all you have a lot to lose. They still have to cope with death and try to make the most of their youth and love is still heartbreaking.
The Age of Innocence is one of my favorites, and this is a great, comprehensive review of it! The point about semiotics was especially interesting and not a connection I made previously. I must say that I also find Newland very relatable. He embodies the struggle of the idealist: having all of these ideas of the way the world should be and hating the way it is... yet in the end being too comfortable in the current world to do anything about it.