Social Conformity as Refuge: The Age of Innocence

Like The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence is a novel of sexual inhibition that has long been read as a novel of manners. It was published in 1920, about a decade after the Fullerton affair. In it Wharton depicts a New York society of inflexible rules and rituals, an inhibitor of the instinctive life, yet a source of civilizing decencies. Like a good operatic overture, the opening scene introduces the novel's motifs, which emanate from the central question of the ambivalence of love, memorably proclaimed by Marguerite's aria, "M'ama ... non m'ama ... M'ama." Within Newland Archer's range of vision at this moment are representatives of his entire world—completely conventional people like the Wellands, the power networks of cousinship, social arbiters, successful challengers of the rules, arrivistes, spotless maidens, men frankly enjoying the double standard, and, above all, indicators of imminent change. The scene plunges us into a critical moment in old New York society, which was cresting just before its downward turn, a moment that is also the turning point of Archer's life.

Archer, about to end a comfortable bachelorhood in which he had never questioned the values of his class, contemplates his artfully innocent fiancée and his erotic hopes for a mar-

riage that will miraculously reconcile "fire and ice." Almost simultaneously he receives his first impression of wider possibilities as embodied in the europeanized person of Ellen Olenska.

All this wonderfully compact exposition falls within the realm of Edith Wharton's recognized gift for social observation and satire. But the opening scene also introduces the dynamic tensions warring below the surface of this superbly constructed novel. At the same time that old New York society was defending itself against "new people," it was also yielding to innovation. Change continually challenges the stable old ways, and society manages to absorb it. Even the social arbiters who are shocked to see in the Mingott opera box a woman who has left her husband eventually invite Ellen Olenska to dinner. The illegitimate daughter of the disgraced Julius Beaufort eventually marries the Archers' son. Society's capacity for accommodation is prefigured by the quiet notation that even the gentry now find it convenient to attend the opera in public conveyances instead of private carriages. Social tolerance of individualistic behavior is best exemplified in old Catherine Mingott, daughter of a scapegrace, who loves racy conversation, lives in an unfashionable part of the city, and sleeps in a bedroom visible from the parlor—all violations of the strict code but none sufficient to diminish her social power.

Wharton's protagonists feel themselves constrained by inflexible social boundaries despite manifold examples of social change and accommodation all around them. Fundamentally conservative, Newland Archer thinks himself daring when he leaps into rash but misplaced gallantry. So exquisitely does Wharton satirize the inhibitory forces of society that we are lulled, like the characters, into accepting these forces as invincible. The inhibitory power of society is exaggerated by individuals who are afraid of their own passions.

On the verge of committing himself to what he sees as the standard destiny of a New York gentleman, Archer witnesses at the performance of Faust a drama of the human spirit chal-

lenging limitations, daring penalties for the privilege of enlarged experience. The legendary Faust risks damnation to look on the face of Helen. Perversely inspired by this, Newland Archer turns out to be the ultimate anti-Faust, a veritable Prufrock in disguise. He will try to break out of his limitations by reaching for what seems to be his Helen of Troy (Ellen), but he is quickly brought to heel by his own weakness and by the conjoined forces of the tribe. Indeed, the mere sight of provocative Ellen seated next to his virginal fiancée in the family opera box prompts our anti-Faust to banish temptation, to foreclose his options by announcing his engagement prematurely that very evening. His way of daring conventions (precipitate announcement, hastened wedding) serves only to put himself irreversibly within the protection of the conventions. Responsive to all that Ellen represents (vitality, sensual sophistication, "European" or bohemian values), he flies to the refuge of tradition, which he interprets as rigidly as possible. Thinking he was protecting May from contamination, he was actually protecting himself from the risks of passion.

The aria from Faust that he hears at this moment, "M'ama ... non m'ama," speaks to Newland's doubts about marrying May Welland and to his ambivalence about committing himself to a thoroughly prescribed and predictable life. But finally, "m'ama"—he banishes these doubts by hastening to seal the marriage. However, by investing in the figure of the now-lost Ellen all that is desirable in woman, he can see May only as Ellen's opposite—invincibly virginal, even boyish, and thoroughly immune to culture.

Cherishing his image of the banished Ellen, he never allows himself to love May; he fails to bring out or develop the latent woman in her. One could think of May as a victim, a sleeping beauty whom Newland Archer declines to awaken because he is too attached to the image of her opposite. Archer is a splitter of internal images—if Ellen signifies all that is richly female and sexually desirable, May becomes to him a static icon of permanent inviolability, a Diana-figure which he visualizes as an adolescent boy. With such polarized imagery, he

places desire outside the social pale and embraces renunciation. In order to retain psychic fidelity to his beloved Ellen, he renders his marriage as perfunctory, as dessicated, as possible. And when, after May's death, Newland has an opportunity to renew his relationship to Ellen, who lives a single life in Paris, he abstains even from visiting her. He cannot test his internalized Ellen against reality.

Newland's psychological conservatism is like that of Edith Wharton who, amidst all the ferment of Paris in the early twenties, chose to live in the staid Faubourg Saint-Germain and to associate, not with the people of the future such as Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Natalie Barney, but with the most conservative avatars of outmoded gentility. As Shari Benstock observes, "She dared not risk exposure to a rebellious and often risqué modernity; she needed the protection of just those social and intellectual traditions on which Proust and other moderns cast such a jaundiced eye."^[19]

The aria from Faust addresses the paradox of marriage as Edith Wharton experienced it. For her, marriage and fidelity to the social code meant entrapment—not securing love but foreclosing the possibility of it . Her fiction plays endless variations on the theme of marital entrapment—enduring it, making the best of it, the social cost of evading it. Only rarely did she depict the freedom of joyfully escaping it.

Observing this conjunction of Faustian desire for unlimited experience and timid rejection of even the most available human pleasures, we marvel at the forces that bound the healthy, sensuous young Edith Wharton into a life of selfdenial and, except for a brief interlude, celibacy.