The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

SOCIAL CLASS & WEALTH SOCIAL FORMS & CONVENTIONS Freedom of the Individual Role of Women Bildungsroman

wealth, privilege, multiple marriages, 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 ‘precis e and inflexibl e rituals’ principles of ‘social amenity’ & ‘financial incorruptibil ity’ Social Form

“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.