Love in a Time of Brutality

The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton. 1920.

It’s difficult to write about a book that’s probably rated exactly where it ought to be. So few are. This novel was popular and acclaimed when it was published, about a century ago, it’s never been out of print, and it’s still popular and acclaimed now. The Age of Innocence isn’t my favorite Wharton; that’s The House of Mirth, possibly the most gloriously depressing book ever written. What’s interesting to me is that The Age of Innocence doesn’t really feel like a downer to me, despite the fact that love doesn’t triumph. I think that ambiguity - is it a tragedy, or isn’t it - is key to the novel’s enduring power. I don’t believe it is one, exactly. It’s too ironic for that: someone does triumph, just not the people we might want.

Because this novel is, at its core, a story about solidarity between women, a hidden solidarity that confounds men and takes them by surprise. I’m not saying that solidarity leads anywhere good, it manifestly doesn’t, but it does lead somewhere. It has the power to upend lives and preserve them, to destroy ways of life and keep a way of life running. One thing you learn when you work in activist spaces is that there’s never been a successful political movement in this country - maybe anywhere - without women, and I’m not talking about feminism. Women were key to the success of the temperance movement, to the successes of both civil rights and massive resistance. Women do the work that goes unnoticed that society can’t live without, for better and often for worse.

Newland Archer has no idea of any of this until it’s too late for him. Throughout the novel, until the penultimate chapter, he is convinced of the vapidity of May and her mother and his own mother and the women like them. He isn’t wrong about their vapidity, exactly. They do care about things that don’t matter. But Newland misjudges the ferocity with which women like that will guard their territory, as meaningless as that territory looks to men. The fact that what’s at stake is trivial makes these women more ferocious, not less. When people have very little, the little they have is everything, and that goes for power too. Newland is so used to thinking of May as stupid that her ruthlessness and determination to keep him shocks him; he always thought their marriage was his to remain in or not. Her pity shocks him, too, but it shouldn’t have. Pity is always only given from a position of strength, and May was always stronger than Newland thought.

Ellen was stronger as well, and Newland’s failure to understand her reflects his failure to understand May. He loves Ellen for her kindness and for her sense of honor that takes precedence over whatever desires she might have, but he never realized what that really meant. Ellen has a relationship with May as well as with Newland, and regardless of the fact that May manipulates her (regardless of the fact that Ellen surely realizes that), Ellen won’t hurt May. Ironic, then, that May ends her life attributing a noble self-sacrifice to her husband - it was Ellen who, when May asked her, gave up what she wanted most. Newland is controlled by women’s choices, and can only assent or not; he doesn’t realize it until he’s trapped. Ellen always understood the terms of whatever deal she made.

Martin Scorsese directed the best adaptation of The Age of Innocence, and called it the most violent film he ever made. I can see what he means. The women of this world are brutal - Hobbesian. Their brutality is all the more terrible because the stakes are so low.