We Came Along with a Hammer

It’s been lonely, this wending our way through the wilds of the Pulitzer cannon, but things have been looking up a bit lately we’ve been joined on our pilgrimage by fellow bloggers, such as the estimable JW Rosenzweig of Following Pulitzer. (He had some kind words for us, too.) It’s been great fun to read along as someone else suffers throughenjoys some of these rare early winners.

But it was a recent post of his on a better known Pulitzer book, the classic Age of Innocence, that prompted me to post today. Rosenzweig writes that in Edith Wharton’s paper were notes on alternate endings for the Age of Innocence, with two possibilities mentioned — 1) Newland and May break it off, and he marries the Countess, but they grow apart and eventually seperate as she longs for the freedoms of Europe and he’s too stuck in New York society to ever live abroad, and 2) Newland marries May but eventually decides he can’t bear to be without the Countess, runs of to Florida with her for a desperate fling, but he comes to regret his rash action and the Countess comes to realize how boring he is, and again they go their seperate ways.

These alternate ending struck me as really interesting — playing them out in my mind gave me a better sense of how Wharton imagined these characters. Reading the Age that we have, one is left feeling that Newland’s great flaw is cowardice, that he won’t risk his and his family’s reputation even for his one shot at love. But in Wharton’s alternate versions, Newland risks, but ends up unhappy anyway, because love or no love, he’s still the same Newland, product of the same airless Society, still overridden with their concerns, still holding their values — in a word, boring, even as a giddy adulterer, a lover on the run.

And that makes sense to me. It suggests that Wharton considered his failure to bust out of the trap a symptom of his essential flaw, and not its essence, and in a way it makes the ending she went with the happiest possible, for it allows both Newland and the Countess the illusion that but for outside constraints they might have found in each other perfect comity. It reminds me of the character of Stephen in Years of Grace (of which more soon). He is happier than Newland, because he’s less sensitive, less perceptive, less full of yearning. But other than that they’re the same guy, content to spend summer vacation at the same resort they went to with their parents when they were kids, entering the same damn boat race every August. Because their essential question about any activity is “would stopping this tradition disappoint others?” not “do I enjoy doing this?” Contrast that attitude with that of the Countess, whose very entrance into the novel is a declaration that she cares far more for her own happiness than society’s censure, and that she’s willing to risk poverty and ridicule and scandal to obtain art, conversation, and most of all freedom. Newland and the Countess love the same things—and each other—but they value them quite differently, and I think Wharton’s probably right that that difference would always have been an obstacle between them, no matter what form their relationship took if they’d continued it.

This entry was posted on November 10, 2009 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.