Age of Innocence: Summary
This is a novel that makes life among the swells in Gilded Age New York seem about as appealing to the modern reader as being locked up in your room for the afternoon with nothing to read but the dictionary does to a nine-year old.
Newland Archer is our man. He’s a lawyer at conservative firm for the sake of having something to fill his days, and spends his nights as an adornment to the very select, very closed, very small Society that is old-money (old-ish, anyway) New York in the 1870s. As the novel opens he’s about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a nice young girl of “his set.”
A wrinkle in his smooth little life plan arrives in the form of the Countess Olenska, a first cousin of May’s who’s on the run from a husband back in Europe who is believed to be a mildly nasty piece of work — drinks, gambles, openly cheats on his wife — but then on the other hand it’s rumored that the Countess had some—male—help in getting away herself. Such rumors are enough to send a little frisson of scandal up the backs of the very proper society matrons who rule Newland’s little world—so much so that it looks as if they might cut the Countess dead, thus spattering May with a little disgrace herself. And so Newland is forced to get involved in the Countess’s affairs, advising her about how to navigate through the jewel-spangled piranha tank where he’s swum his whole life. But getting to know the bohemian Countess forces him to confront, and chafe against, the strictures of his familiar Society.
When he realizes he’s fallen in love with the Countess, he is forced to choose whether to follow his heart, break May’s and make himself a pariah, or obey the dictates of duty and custom, and lose his only chance at love. In fact, he’s forced to make that choice several times…
Three needs drive the actions of both Newland and the Countess:
— To be a decent and honorable by their own personal codes, that is, not to betray or to hurt the people who depend upon them and care for them;
—- To follow the customs of the larger society, in order not to make themselves, and more importantly, their families, an object of ridicule and censure;
—-To follow their hearts and their heads, to pursue their own happiness and peace.
The cleverness of Wharton is that she succeeds in the book in braiding all three strands of desire together, twisting the novel plot point by plot point so that just as you think one need will compel the characters to a given action, another takes precedence, and binds them tightly to another course.
