A review by jodar
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Nooooooooo! How can the story end like this? But it makes sense; yes, it does make sense. When I calm down and consider all the personal history and emotions that came before it, it ends well. It does end well. And throughout it is such an amazing novel, well-written and emotionally unrelenting!

So, from the start: The protagonist is Newland Archer, a young man who enjoys a secure membership in the fashionable, staid and rather shallow society of upper-class 1870s’ New York. Going against largely unspoken conventions of this society, however, can cast a member out of its ranks irrevocably. So a bitter dilemma faces Newland when he falls into a passionate, deep-felt love for a childhood friend, Ellen Olenska.

Ellen has returned from Europe estranged from her foreign husband. Although the cause of her estrangement is left unspoken – to do otherwise would be unseemly – and the fault probably lies with her husband, nonetheless Ellen is under increasing pressure to be reconciled. Marriage is a sacred institution, and upholding it is vital to society’s welfare.

Newland and Ellen face mounting temptation to start an intimate relationship and thus throw aside convention and their position in society. To do so would involve social ostracism and self-exile. During this period, while Newland is forced to distance himself from Ellen, he becomes psychologically alienated:
Outside [his internal mental ‘sanctuary’], in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absentminded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent⁠—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there. (Chapter 26)

Towards the end of the novel we move forward 30 years, when Newland looks back at his life and considers the consequences of the choices he made. He takes great joy, satisfaction and meaning from how his life has played out. Things may have turned out differently now, he realises, as social conventions have changed; yet the new ways and the old ways each have their merits and disadvantages. With a jolt, too, he comprehends that he had underestimated an intimate’s kindly perceptiveness all along:
[The revelation] seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guessed and pitied.... And that it should have been [her] moved him indescribably. ... To [some], no doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces. But was it really no more? For a long time Archer sat on a bench ... while the stream of life rolled by.... (Chapter 34)

That there are no facile answers either to life’s dilemmas of heart and duty or to the demands of the individual and of society; and that current conventions are not necessarily universally superior to those of the past – to me, these are what gives the novel a timeless greatness.
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