The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future, until the arrival of May's cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies. - Back cover.
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What Hacker News says
- Yes, there's a lot of similar stuff going on in the US. However, the new money / old money distinction in the US seems to not have the teeth that it does in the UK, at least, from the mid 20th century onwards.
The thing about old money having old cars and appliances applies to the UK too. If you're upper-class in the UK, you might wear Wellington boots and go hunting with your dogs in your Subaru hatchback. At a glance, it might look indistinguishable from something you might find someone doing in rural Montana.
The Gilded Age in the US is absolutely fascinating... it seems like at that point in history, the US was trying its hardest to ape European conventions for class, and simultaneously, there was a ton of economic growth fueling the noveau riche. That's when we got people like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. It's the time when Wharton's The Age of Innocence was set (highly recommend this book). Old money went to the opera at the Academy of Music Opera House, and new money went to the Metropolitan Opera House. (Guess which one is still around.)
- Must read?
1984 and Animal Farm.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It.
Emma and Pride and Prejudice.
Iliad, Odyssey and first half of the Aeneid.
A Room With A View and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The Great Gatsby, Call of the Wild and Age of Innocence.
War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Don Quixote.
- Brett Easton Ellis recommended Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, so I read it, just finished it -- devoured it, really -- and fully agree w/ his assessment [1].
[1] I just finished reading The House of Mirth, which I had tried reading as an eighteen- year-old college boy and just didn’t get. Now at fifty-four, it’s crushing. Absolutely crushing. And the writing is just stupendous. I also love Age of Innocence and The Custom of the County. Just going to Edith Wharton every morning was fantastic and blew away any television or movie that I could find online. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/bret-easton-ellis-...
- I think of a passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence:
""" The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. """
- When last were weddings sacred, in the sense of not open to public comment? In Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence the mother of the bride is horrified at the notion that reporters might take a picture of her daughter and put it in the newspapers; and surely they would have. There is the folk tradition of the "shivaree".
Second, "Our wedding was the antithesis of the technology-infested world we live in; a world that I have played a role in creating." No, not really, any more than Marie Antoinette was a milkmaid. In a world insufficiently infested with technology, rich people don't get married in the woods. In fact, apart from the men going there to hunt, they don't spend much time in the woods.
