Comments on: The Age of Innocence: Bringing Sexy Back (What?)

By: The Store: Third Chat « We Came Along with a Hammer

The Store: Third Chat « We Came Along with a Hammer — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:06:14 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: jwrosenzweig

jwrosenzweig — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:55:12 +0000

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.

By: The Age of Innocence: In response to DP’s comment below « We Came Along with a Hammer

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:42:28 +0000

[...] 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.) [...]

By: Diablevert

Diablevert — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:41:03 +0000

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.