The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Age of Innocence in 1921, becoming the first woman to receive the award. The prize recognized a novel about 1870s New York society that operated as a kind of double portrait: a loving reconstruction of a world Wharton had been born into and a precise analysis of the mechanisms by which that world destroyed the people it most wanted to protect. It is one of the great American novels, and one of the most efficient: every scene advances both the plot and the argument.

What Happens in The Age of Innocence

Newland Archer is a young lawyer, a member of old New York society, engaged to May Welland, who is everything his world requires: beautiful, proper, predictable, and surrounded by the right families. When May’s cousin Ellen Olenska returns from Europe – having left a dissolute Polish count and seeking a divorce that New York society finds scandalous – Archer is asked by the Welland family to discourage Ellen from pursuing the divorce, to protect the family’s reputation.

Instead, Archer falls in love with Ellen. She is everything May is not: unconventional, ironic, alive to the world’s complexity, having lived in Europe in ways that have given her a perspective on New York that Archer cannot find within himself. The novel follows Archer across the next year as he becomes increasingly trapped between what he wants and what his society will permit.

Old New York, as Wharton depicts it, is a machine for producing conformity. It operates through dinner invitations and calling cards, through knowing who is received and who is not, through the collective withdrawal of approval as a tool of social control. Its members believe they are civilized; Wharton shows them as tribal, and their civilization as a form of organized repression.

Newland Archer

Archer is a more complicated character than he first appears. He believes himself to be a person of sophistication and independent judgment, someone who sees the absurdities of his world clearly. He is also entirely unable to act on this clarity. He chooses, repeatedly, to stay within the boundaries his society draws, not simply because the penalties for transgression are real but because part of him wants to belong to his world and cannot conceive of himself outside it.

This is Wharton’s most interesting psychological move: Archer is not simply a victim of social pressure. He is a participant in his own confinement. His suffering is real, and his loss is real, but the novel asks whether he could have chosen differently and concludes that he could, and that he chose not to.

The Final Chapter

The novel’s last chapter is set twenty-six years after the main action and is one of the most devastating endings in American fiction. Archer has an opportunity to see Ellen again, and what he does with it is both entirely in character and entirely heartbreaking. Wharton does not editorialize; she lets the reader feel what the choice means.

Who This Book Is For

Readers who want social comedy that cuts to the bone, who are interested in the specific forms that American conformity takes, or who want a novel in which the prose itself is a pleasure will find The Age of Innocence one of the great reading experiences in American literature. It is a social comedy that is also a tragedy, and Wharton handles both registers simultaneously without strain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Age of Innocence autobiographical?

Wharton was born into old New York society and spent years understanding and escaping it. The world she depicts is one she knew from inside, and her ambivalence about it – the love and the contempt – are both visible in the novel.

Is there a film adaptation?

Martin Scorsese directed a film in 1993 starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Archer, Michelle Pfeiffer as Ellen, and Winona Ryder as May. It is one of the more faithful and successful literary adaptations of the decade.

What does the title mean?

The age of innocence refers to the 1870s New York society Wharton depicts, which prided itself on its moral purity and social order. The title is ironic: the society’s innocence is maintained by systematic repression of everything that might disturb it.

Is May Welland a villain?

May is more interesting than a villain. She is entirely a product of her society’s construction of what a woman should be, and she is also, within those limits, more perceptive and more strategic than Archer credits. The novel’s late revelation about May’s knowledge is one of its most quietly devastating moments.

How does The Age of Innocence compare to Wharton’s other novels?

The House of Mirth is darker and more tragic, following a woman who cannot successfully navigate the society that The Age of Innocence satirizes. Both are essential Wharton. The Age of Innocence is the most elegiac.

Does Archer ever truly rebel?

He comes close to rebelling multiple times and does not. This is the novel’s point rather than its flaw. Wharton is interested in how social pressure internalizes itself, how people become their own jailers, and Archer is her fullest portrait of this process.

What is the significance of the opera opening?

The novel begins at a performance of Gounod’s Faust at the Academy of Music. Being seen at the right production is a social act. The opening immediately establishes the society’s relationship to art as primarily social rather than aesthetic, setting up the novel’s central irony about a world that mistakes convention for civilization.