Edith Wharton

 

Edith Wharton

 

(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro.

                                    All Rights Reserved.     

Many events have shown how difficult transatlantic communication can become and how deep a divide can exist between American and European values, attitudes, heritages, and experiences.  Henry James explored this territory in many novels and stories—such as The American, The Europeans, “Daisy Miller,” and The Portrait of a Lady.  His friend Edith Wharton likewise returned often to this topic, as the several volumes devoted to Wharton in the Library of America testify.  Like James, Wharton seemed especially fascinated by Americans who have become Europeanized.

Two such Europeanized Americans appear in Wharton’s  novel The Age of Innocence (1920) and her novella Madame de Treymes (1906).  Both women have married European men whose flagrant adultery has broken the marriages.   Disillusioned by their European lives and now attracted to American lovers, both women seek safety and security in American values and relationships, which they idealize.  Each considers the choice of divorce, which both European society and American society discourage.

Fanny’s and Ellen’s predicaments cause their American lovers to experience to the depths the powerful differences and similarities between European and American points of view.  Ellen’s lover Newland Archer, in advocating for her not to return to her Polish husband, also realizes the entrenched resistance of American society to the dissolution of Ellen’s wretched marriage and its deep disapproval of his own adulterous feelings for her. 

In portraying Archer’s passion for Ellen and Durham’s for Fanny,  as well as the eventual fate of both these women, Wharton outlined both differing and similar societal attitudes towards sexual irregularities, marriage as a passionate relationship between lovers, marriage as the bedrock of family life, and women as sexual beings, wives, and mothers.  

The Age of Innocence in particular dwells on the tension between the desire for a passionate life (and its attendant disgrace) and the pull towards the assumption of one’s duty to parents, spouses, and children (and its attendant denial of one’s deepest self).  It presents in a remarkably complex way both the dullness of duty and its moral superiority, both the fascination and depth of passion and its selfishness.