Review: “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton

🥂I was on bit of a classics kick last year and thought I’d conduct an experiment. Would I enjoy it as much as I did in high school? 

I wasn’t starry eyed over it, and my favorite character was different (see my blog if you want to know who!). I appreciate the sentiment of form versus family among the NY upper crust, but it felt like it dragged on an age. 

🥂All that restraint—and for what? Wharton writes exquisitely of the “gilded cage” in which the rich, beautiful people are enmeshed by their highly restrictive social norms. 

While it’s undoubted that Wharton captures Newland’s melancholy imbued with a sense of a life half-lived and choices unmade, I felt frustration that the point had been double and triple underlined. Perhaps that is EW’s point? He’s spinning in circles. 

🥂Mrs. Mingott, the formidable Queen

Mrs. Manson Mingott was by far my favorite humorous character. Having gained independent control over her wealth (key!), she DGAF and lived how she damn well pleased. She’s a counterpoint to Newland-Ellen.

She’s one of the most powerful social figures in old New York despite living on the “wrong” side of Fifth Avenue (a rebellion in itself) and commands enormous respect and influence. She is one of few who gives Countess Olenska genuine support and it doesn’t cost her any social capital. 

🥂 My (new) favorite character: May Welland

The biggest revelation with my reread is that my sympathies lay more with May Welland than Ellen-Newland. I could see she was trying to build a family and keep them together. From the beginning, May was simply trying to cultivate her ideal of a marriage based on what was modeled for her. I now believe she did truly love Archer and did her best by him. 

May did exactly what she’d been raised and equipped to do, and she did it with genuine love and dedication. She didn’t invent the cage; she just lived inside it faithfully. There’s something quietly heartbreaking about that when you see it clearly — she wins her husband but never really has him, and she knows it. Yet she keeps building the home, raising the children, hosting the dinners. That’s not weakness, that’s a kind of fierce, dignified devotion.

🥂Do something, Newland. For God’s sake.

The last few chapters with Newland stewing in the social norms that feel at once stifling and immutable felt interminable to me reading as an adult. It’s page after page of Newland simmering but unwilling to act. 

I thought the dinner party where he realizes that everyone knows though no one would breathe a word, and this dinner was his and Ellen’s strongest rebuke, was a startling scene. 

I enjoyed the epilogue quite a bit. It offers his view from the other side after a generation of change has passed by easily for his son. Newland himself is still caught in the old ways. 

🥂 If you appreciate the theme of restrictive social conventions in TAI, these books tread the same territory. Wodehouse ofc is a light-hearted spin.