SOCIAL CLASS & WEALTH
SOCIAL FORMS & CONVENTIONS
Freedom of the Individual
Role of Women
Bildungsroman
wealth, privilege
, multiple marriag
es, society snobs,
exclusion and
elitism, scandals
and affairs, of fads
and fashions,
and above
all, ‘looking pretty’.
“There is a tyranny in large cities of what is known as
the ‘fashionable set’, formed of people willing to spend money; who make a
sort of alliance, offensive and defensive; who have
give balls and parties and keep certain people out,”
Mrs John Sherwood, Manners and Social Usages (1903)
Julius Beaufort & Mrs Lemuel
Struthers infiltrate the
social circles of the Mingotts and van der Luydens.
‘Old Money’ vs.‘Nouveaux Riches’
society of ‘precise and inflexible rituals’
principles of ‘social amenity’ &‘financial incorruptibility’
SocialForm
“Every one (including Mr. Sillerton Jackson) was agreed that old Catherine had never had beauty—a gift which, in the eyes of New York,
justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.”
(Ch 2, 11)
The subject was avoided as though it were a kind of family disgrace, which might be condoned but not forgotten.
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
Her ‘intellectually unimaginative husband and
their predictable, possibly sexless married life began to
drain her spirits’ (Penguin).
‘The affair dazzled and tormented her, as the elusive Fullerton drifted off, between
his other complicated liaisons.’ (Knights)
Her fiction would later reflect a concern with the
survival of an entire community (Wolff). Wharton
saw writing Age as a ‘retreat to childish
memories of a long-vanished America’.
Wharton’s title implies a lost pre-war world. It also suggests a
connection between the America of fifty years ago and the America of [1920], which
she so often complains about for its infantilism, naive
optimism, and parochialism.
Hermione Lee, ‘The Age of Innocence’, Edith Wharton
The novel’s protagonist, Newland Archer, embodies Wharton’s origins: he is an
isolated misfit.
The object of Newland’s grand passion, Ellen
Olenska, is the person Wharton became: the self-
sufficient exile, the survivor of a disastrous
and disillusioning marriage, the New York-
born European free spirit.