8 - New York and the novel of manners

Summary

At the conclusion of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), the gentlemen of the Welland-Mingott clan gather in Newland Archer's library, and their talk turns to the social disintegration implied in the rise of that “foreign upstart,” Julius Beaufort. Lawrence Lefferts, the perennial (and hypocritical) defender of “society,” thunders: “If things go on at this pace . . . we shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers' houses, and marrying Beaufort's bastards.” Only a chapter (and twenty-six years) later, Lefferts's quintessential articulation of Old New York embattlement is driven home by the revelation that Newland Archer's eldest son plans to do just that. For The Age of Innocence, “Beaufort's bastards” come to stand for illegitimacy legitimized by the passage of time: more specifically, they speak to a struggle over manners staged through generational change. Like many New York novels of the turn of the twentieth century, Wharton's novel frames the rapid social change of the era in generational terms: cultural conflict comes off as family squabble. As the discussion of Beaufort's bastards suggests, generational change stages intimate clashes between what is and is not culturally acceptable, all while troubling existing divisions between what is “family” and what is “foreign,” what is private and what is public. “Manners,” in this sense, become the battleground through which turn-of-the-century New York writers bring cultural difference home; in particular, New York novels of manners reckon with such cultural difference by recognizing it as an inescapable force of historical change.