The Age of Innocence: Bringing Sexy Back (What?)
I was amazed at how much The Age of Innocence surprised me, especially for a book without much plot. All of the action in this story is what doesn’t happen, how events could unfold but never do. Wharton continually subverted my expectations; I kept waiting for someone’s resolve to crack into some passionate love-making (in the nineteenth-century sense) but the characters only falter, never fall into the abyss. It’s pretty incredible that Wharton’s sense of imminent sexual danger was able to come through to a modern reader who doesn’t inhabit the same stringent codes of morality.
There’s the other thing about Age o’ Inn.: these characters don’t seem to be people who think that sex is any fun. The most sensual image that I can recall is the line about “something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room,” which is probably the least sexy thing I can imagine (and rather pungent). There are more sensuous descriptions of drawing-room furniture and floral bouquets than the human body. You don’t get any sense that Countess Olenska committed her past adultery out of a sense of hedonism so much as resignation. Newland seems tormented by his attraction to Ellen from the first. There is so little notion of a sexual relationship between Newland and May that when she announces her pregnancy, you have to wonder how they got around to sleeping together at all.
So Wharton takes this claustrophobia of desire and spins it out into a story in which the slightest action or thought outside of social norms becomes extremely dangerous. Whole monologues and dialogues are contained within gestures, Wharton acting as the interpreter for the reader, subtitling a look or a tilt of the head. For example:
After he had leaned out into the darkness for a few minutes he heard her say: “Newland! Do shut the window. You’ll catch your death.”
He pulled the sash down and turned back. “Catch my death!” he echoed; and he felt like adding: “But I’ve caught it already. I am dead—I’ve been dead for months and months.”
And suddenly the play of the word flashed up a wild suggestion. What if it were she who was dead! If she were going to die—to die soon—and leave him free! The sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and overmastering, that its enormity did not immediately strike him. He simply felt that chance had given him a new possibility to which his sick soul might cling. Yes, May might die—people did: young people, healthy people like herself: she might die, and set him suddenly free.
She glanced up, and he saw by her widening eyes that there must be something strange in his own.
At this moment in the narrative, even though Newland had taken no other grand steps to further his affair with Ellen, I genuinely feared for May, that Newland had reached his breaking point and we were about to be plunged into a very different book. Maybe I’m just a gullible sucker, but I’d like to think that Wharton’s just that good.
April 7, 2008 at 2:41 pm
No, it was the same with me, which I give Wharton all the credit for. I think I was so slow to get into it at first because I felt at the beginning that one knew exactly what was going to happen — that Newland would fall in love with the Countess but be too much of a wuss to pursue her and would end up trapped in a loveless marriage with May instead. And that’s pretty much what does happen, with some caveats and nuances — but several times during the novel Wharton genuinely had me on tenterhooks anyway; the more I got to know the characters the realer they seemed and the more depth they had, so that they did seem capable of betraying their natures, of choosing otherwise.
April 11, 2008 at 3:42 pm
[...] This is rather delicious— all through the book we have (as Newland does) been inclined to see May as rather dim, and here she reveals herself to be a good deal sharp enough to protect her interests— but it’s also bloody ridiculous. No reader could possibly infer from the dialogue all that Wharton lays out in her exposition of the subtext. And yet that moment is extraordinary; far more of the book is like the engagement scene than like this moment, with hints given and relationships sketched out but vast reams of subtextual meaning left as an exercise for the reader. It’s a rare thing for Wharton to cut in like this and providing color commentary, but such exposition does become more frequent and explicit as the book picks up the pace and heads for the climax. (Like the moment Penny points to in her post.) [...]
September 30, 2009 at 4:55 am
Hi, I’m back (months behind you still) now having finished this book, which I absolutely loved for the reasons you describe. I’m glad you pointed out specifically the utter lack of sexuality in the book–I hadn’t been conscious of it at all. The tension you describe is even more surprising now that I’m aware of the book’s lack of sex–I think it really is that Wharton is just that good at bringing us into the characters’ heads and making their anxieties and passions real. I wonder if this was intentional on Wharton’s part, though–Austen couldn’t write sex into her books, of course, but was Wharton equally hemmed in by a sense of “propriety”? Or did she have more freedom, and intentionally limit the scope of “passion” in her book because it served her purposes as an author? I’ve never read her work before (though now I definitely intend to) and don’t know if this is a traditional approach for her or not.
March 25, 2010 at 3:06 am
[...] find stuff like that interesting. Awkward. Let me rephrase – I mean, kind of in the sense we touched on way back when we talked about the Age of Innocence – because media from back then never [...]