Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence continues to invite a wide range of analyses. The novel examines the triangle between Ellen Olenska, her cousin May Welland, and May’s husband, Newland Archer, against the background of upper-class society in 1870s New York. It considers not only the nature of love and the emotions of its central characters but also the late 19th-century social conditions and rigid conventions that operate so powerfully in their private lives.
The 1921 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel starts with May’s engagement to the eligible Newland Archer and with Ellen’s return to her childhood environment in order to begin divorce proceedings against her European husband, Count Olenska. Although the Welland and Archer families ostensibly support Ellen’s decision to be independent, they strongly advise her against an embarrassing and financially unwise divorce.
Ellen endears herself to the nonconformists in her family such as Granny Mingott and Aunt Medora, but polite New York society disapproves of her. Her childhood playmate, Newland, becomes her legal adviser and admirer; he falls in love with her, but the inexorable pressure of convention compels him to follow through on his promise to marry May. When Newland considers leaving his young wife, May tells Ellen that she is pregnant, and Ellen arranges to return to Europe so that Newland will no longer be tempted by her.
Many years later, Newland’s adult son persuades his father, now widowed, to go to Paris with him. When they arrive for a meeting with Ellen, Newland chooses to remain on a park bench gazing up at her apartment window. Wharton thus closes the novel by projecting Ellen as the powerful eternal woman, a vision that appears above the dreaming, immovable man.
Wharton’s contemporaneous critics judged the novel outstanding for its characterization, setting, and treatment of cultural innocence. Carl Van Doren recognized the conventions that bind Ellen, May, and Newland and concluded that “the unimaginative not only miss the flower of life themselves but they shut others from it as well.” William Lyon Phelps pointed to the “absolute imprisonment” in which the characters stagnate. Henry Seidel Canby praised the portrayal of society and declared that Wharton “lets us formulate inductively the code of America.”
Later formalist assumptions of the New Criticism disconnected The Age of Innocence from its historical precedents and analyzed its structure and form as a well-made novel. Charles Clay Doyle traced the novel’s floral motifs; Elizabeth Evans explored the musical allusions; Viola Hopkins analyzed the syntax, diction, and imagery.
More recent scholars explore societal influences and biographical links. R. W. B. Lewis surmises that Wharton was disturbed by postwar America and therefore “went in search, imaginatively, of the America that was gone.” Cynthia Griffin Woolf calls the novel “a nostalgic act,” while Elizabeth Ammons sees it as a novel of “fear,” arguing that Newland and others are “so afraid of Ellen Olenska… that they end up literally banishing her from New York.”
Feminist critics examine Wharton’s narrative strategy. Carol Singley notes the tension between traditional New Yorkers and Ellen’s dynamic life. Shari Benstock views the novel as “perhaps the most brilliant portrait of expatriated womanhood.” Susan Goodman considers May the novel’s true heroine, while Carol Wershoven calls her “the child-bride, a product of an economic system become secret religion.”
The novel also reflects Wharton’s engagement with intellectual history and scientific thought. It examines individual will and cultural determinism, portraying how economic and political structures shaped women’s roles and reinforced social conformity.
Set in the 1870s, when Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man still stirred debate, the novel challenges gender hierarchies. Ellen’s return to New York results in her alienation, while Newland, though captivated by Ellen’s independence, ultimately conforms to societal expectations. Ellen disrupts the patriarchal order and is cast as a case to be judged—an aberration to be contained.
By projecting a tale of Old New York through a post–World War I consciousness, Wharton challenges the supposed morality of the past, revealing its conflicts and discontent.
Sources
Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.
Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance. New York: Scribner, 1994.
Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends & Rivals. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990.
Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Lauer, Kristin O., and Margaret P. Murray. Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990.
Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1975.
Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Tuttleton, James W., Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray. Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Wershoven, Carol. The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Appleton, 1920; Reprint, New York: Scribner, 1970.
Woolf, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
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