1 - The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence

Summary

“Everything may be labelled - but everybody is not.”

In 1921, excited by news of a plan to stage The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton responded immediately with proprietarial advice about getting the 1870s right - the moustaches (”not tooth brush ones, but curved & slightly twisted at the ends”), the clothes and the buttonhole flowers (violets by day, gardenias by night), the manners and the language (no slang, no Americanisms - “English was then the language spoken by American ladies & gentlemen”). Since she had insisted that she did not want the novel taken as a “costume piece” (Letters, 433), this punctiliousness might seem surprising. But in The Age of Innocence, social details matter: “As Mrs. Archer remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference: not in itself but by its manifold implications” (1276). Reconstructing knowledge of half a century earlier, Wharton writes as if she has forgotten nothing. Social forms, her letters explain, are imprinted young and are impossible to erase. Her story, she tells one friend, was about “two people trying to live up to something . . . still 'felt in the blood'” (Letters, 433); anxious about the dramatization, she exclaims, “I could do every stick of furniture & every rag of clothing myself, for every detail of that far-off scene was indelibly stamped on my infant brain” (Letters, 439).