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The Age of Innocence: Introduction by Peter Washington (Everyman's Library Classics Series) - Hardcover

Wharton, Edith

 
9780307268204: The Age of Innocence: Introduction by Peter Washington (Everyman's Library Classics Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307268209 ISBN 13: 9780307268204
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

One of Wharton’s most renowned novels—and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize—exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibility through the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York. • With an introduction by Peter Washington

The novel follows Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyer engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. When May’s disgraced cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her marriage to a Polish Count, her worldly, independent nature intrigues Archer, who soon falls in love with her. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with Ellen, Archer finds himself torn between possibility and duty.

Wharton’s profound understanding of her characters’ lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen come to life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at the ways in which love and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of high society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton's finest, most illuminative works.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edith Wharton was born into a privileged New York family in 1862 and died in France in 1937. In addition to her works as a novelist, most famously The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, and Ethan Frome, she also was a renowned interior designer, and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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INTRODUCTION

When The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, Edith Wharton was naturally pleased, though by no means overwhelmed. The first woman to be so honoured, she was then aged fifty-eight and at the height of her powers. Rich, famous and the author of several hugely successful best-sellers, she could reasonably regard the Pulitzer as no more than official recognition of her status as the leading American novelist of her day.

Pleasure soon gave way to distaste when Wharton discovered from the prize citation that she was being rewarded for writing 'the American novel which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood'. Nauseated by the priggishness of this twaddle and baffled by its grotesque inaptitude as a description of her book, she wrote ironically to friends about the absurd idea of uplifting American morals when she had done little but satirize them for more than thirty years. But her irony turned to fury when it was further revealed that the Pulitzer jury had originally selected Sinclair Lewis's Main Street for the prize, only to find the judgment overturned in favour of Wharton by the craven prize trustees, who were alarmed by the offence Lewis's satire on small-town life was causing among their wealthy benefactors. For Wharton this was the final insult: The Age of Innocence had been chosen, not for its quality, but because it was safe. What had started out as a coronation was becoming a fiasco.

Wharton was embarrassed on her own behalf and angry for Lewis, one of the few living American novelists she respected. She was also justifiably puzzled by the behaviour of the trustees, for her study of aristocratic manners is, in the end, a far more disturbing book than Lewis's amiable and often sentimental satire on Mid-Western prejudices, and she knew it. One can only miss this fact-and the ironic force of the book's title-if one reads the novel in one's own age of innocence. Though written in a grand manner far from the engaging colloquialism of Main Street, and set largely in the past, Wharton's novel paints a bleak portrait of contemporary marriage which might have shocked the keepers of the nation's moral conscience if only they had bothered to read it with any care.

Of course, one can see why the Columbia University grandees who spurned the prize committee preferred The Age of Innocence. A tale of the familiar conflict between domestic duty and sexual desire which manages to combine an apparently happy ending with the triumph of conventional morality is no mean feat. One can also see why they might have preferred Wharton to Lewis in general. Everything about her, from the upper-class New York background to the equally upper-class literary style, made her more acceptable to an American academy which was just as timorous and conformist then as it is now. She was also elderly, safely out of the way in Europe, and therefore unlikely to cause trouble: in a sense already a writer of the past. And although worryingly diverse, her novels could eventually be slotted into a variety of traditional moulds-always reassuring when one is setting up statues to living heroes.

Lewis, by contrast, was a raw provincial, and too close to home, too vulgar and too unpredictable to be turned into an instant monument of Great American Literature-or so it seemed in 1921. The women and the lower orders in his books are apt to get out of hand, and while Wharton apparently restricts her satire to the narrow world of the American aristocracy which was, on her own account, anyway moribund, Lewis attacks powerful contemporary targets with fierce relish. He was an especially trenchant critic of the incorrigible American tendency to Political Correctness, whether of Left or Right, and the substance of Main Street is an amusing and often deadly account of one young woman's struggle with the idols of the contemporary bourgeois tribe-in this case good housekeeping, male superiority, intellectual nullity and the Grand Old Republican Party.

Ironically, Lewis won his own Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1923, the year after he published Babbitt, a ferocious attack on American business ethics (or lack of them) which might be thought to have disqualified him even further. But by then, of course, Main Street had made him rich and famous, selling more than half a million copies throughout the world, and Lewis himself was 'big business'. No doubt this made him acceptable to both the Columbia trustees and the university's benefactors. It must also have added savour to the moment when Lewis refused the 1923 prize.

Despite their differences, there are many points of resemblance between Main Street and The Age of Innocence. Both are dark comedies of manners which feature cultivated, charming and self-satisfied protagonists who see themselves as rebelling heroically against philistine environments. Both examine the pains of marriage and the extent to which the sexes should enjoy equal rights and pleasures. And one might even claim that Political Correctness is a theme in both. Lewis's Carol Kennicott struggles hopelessly with the well-meaning bigotry of small-town Minnesota, while in Edith Wharton's novel the hero and his would-be mistress are kept apart by the rigid code of conduct which governed every aspect of upper-class New York life in the 1870s.

Both dramas are also deeply and crucially rooted in local conditions. Even the treatment of the plot in The Age of Innocence draws attention to this point. Though based on the familiar wife/husband/mistress triangle, Wharton takes the greatest pains to show how it is distinguished by the peculiar character of old New York society. The outline of this plot is commonplace. Newland Archer, a rich, handsome and admittedly rather spoilt young patrician of no great distinction but immaculate manners and background, becomes engaged to May Welland, a rich, beautiful and rather spoilt young woman of equal perfection, while at the same time managing to fall in love with her exotic, beautiful and rather less perfect married cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who returns Archer's passion, though already unhappily married to a foreign nobleman. The Countess considers divorce but is persuaded against it by Archer, on behalf of her family. May offers to renounce Archer to her cousin but he refuses the offer and marries his fiancée. Meeting Ellen after the wedding, he realizes that he was wrong to advise her against the divorce. He decides to elope with her after all and face the consequences, but nothing comes of the decision. Instead, he settles down with May to a conventional and reasonably happy existence in New York, the Countess goes away to live alone in Paris, and life goes on as before.

Such a bald summary emphasizes the similarities between The Age of Innocence and other novels. Only attentive reading brings out the differences. These begin with the tone: a cool, level voice which is very much Wharton's own. They continue with the choice of detail. As with so much of Wharton's best writing, this study of human bondage is a sharply and exquisitely observed picture of the life she knew so well from her own experience. She delighted in the quidditas of things and her novels draw energy from concrete instances: when she loosens her grasp on particulars the prose wobbles and the narrative sags. Though the scenery is always subordinate to a larger artistic purpose, we sense that Wharton enjoyed describing the clothes her characters wear, the rooms they lived in, the food they ate, for their own sake. She relished her sensuous pleasures in literature as in life. Always scrupulous about detail, for this novel she commissioned research into a period which was just within the scope of her own childhood memories....

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307268209
ISBN 13 
9780307268204
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland

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