Kata's Progress -- Newly Read 1920's

Slowly I am making my way through the Pulitzer Prize winners. Two themes keep on popping up. The first is that the characters are living in a time of change. The second is that what is near and dear to one generation is often less important or even rejected by the next generation. Below is what I have read from the 1920'a since I posted here in November. My reactions to the books are on my blog.

• 1921 The Age of Innocence
• 1922 Alice Adams
• 1923 One of Ours
• 1925 So Big
• 1926 Arrowsmith
• 1928 The Bridge of San Luis Rey
• 1929 Scarlet Sister Mary

The Age of Innocence (1921)

This is a story about love and duty, about the choices we make and the way we let others make choices for us, about the life we have and the life we could have, if only we’d reach out and take it.  It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and well worth a read.

Newland Archer is a young man in the prime of his life.  He’s a member of the upper echelon of New York society and he’s about to be married to May, the most beautiful and sought-after girl of the season.  On the same night that their betrothal is announced, he meets her cousin, Ellen Olenska.  And so it begins.

The Archers and all the other families in New York society live by strict codes.  Nothing is said outright, but they all understand each other: everything they say has a hidden meaning and everyone follows their codes so religiously that the hidden meanings are clear.  But some things can never even be hinted at – anything too unpleasant must be put aside.  As the narrator describes early in the book during a conversation between Archer and his mother: “it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts.”  Archer’s betrothed, May, follows these codes completely – she is the “perfect” woman.  But he begins to see that there may not be anything else at all underneath her perfect exterior.

Archer feels different from his fellow men, and he wants to push back against these strict rules of behavior.  As his relationship with Ellen develops, he feels both more desirous of breaking free and more hemmed in and unable to escape than ever before.  His life is inevitable and he feels unable to act according to his own free will.  His feeble attempts continue to fall short.

Archer and Ellen meet in society and catch spare moments alone in hallways or Opera boxes.  They fall in love in an innocent way and neither sees it happening.  But to the reader it feels so real.  In one scene, when they are seeing each other after a separation, Archer is struck anew by everything that Ellen is.  He says to her “Each time you happen to me all over again.”  This is what love feels like.  To capture that in a novel is what makes reading such a pleasure.  And this novel is a pleasure, indeed.

Review: The Age of Innocence

Title: The Age of Innocence
Author:  Edith WHarton
Published: 1920, D. Appleton & Company
Genre:  Classic
Accolades:  1921 Putlitzer (first Pultizer given to a woman), Modern Library List: 100 Best Books of the Century, Radcliff Publishing Course:  100 Best Novels of the Century and on and on...

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, but I was wonderfully surprised at the depth of Wharton's wit and her satirical analyze of the society in which she belonged.  With the introduction of our protagonist Newland Archer we are given a "fly on the wall" perspective of what it was like to live and circumvent the twists and turns of high society in New York City during the Gilded Age.  Archer is very much a product of his society and it's rules and is happy to live by them because he understands what happens to those who try to go against the norms of his world.  When Archer meets his fiancee's cousin Ellen Olenska, a woman who is escaping a scandalous marriage, he knows that this women is capable of changing his world for better or worse, but like a moth drawn to the flame - he can't resist.

I found myself thinking about what it would have been like to live in that tightly guarded circle of society and how difficult it was to become a part of it or to escape it.  You would almost have to be born into it to understand the nuances of what is expected - lessons that took a lifetime to learn.  The society wasn't about money because they frowned upon the new money and crassness of the Carnegie's, Frick's, and Rockefeller's. Even those captains of industry could not buy themselves memberships into this elite group.

Wharton's development of her characters is artfully crafted as you realize that the characters that appeared to be weakest and shallow are the strongest and most manipulative. What one would do to preserve appearances due to the code is tragic and heart-felt.  Love is not the number one priority - it is your placement in society.

My Rating: 5 out of 5
Note: I read the 2008 Oxford World's Classic edition

The Age of Innocence (1921) - Reviewed By Monique

Rating: 4 out of 5 Books
Pages: 270
Genre: Adult (Classic)
Series: No
Publication Date: 1920

Synopsis (From Back of Cover):

Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends. yet he prided himself that in the tender and impressionable May Welland he had found the companion of his needs. The engagement was announced discreetly, but all of New York society was soon privy to this most prefect match, a union of families and circumstance cemented by affection.

Enter Countess Olenska, a woman not afraid to flount convention and determined to find freedom in divorce. Newland, though drawn to the socially ostracized Ellen Olenska, knows that in sweet-tempered May he can expect stability and the steadying comfort of duty. But what new worlds could he discover with Ellen? Written with elegance and wry precision, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a tragic love story and a powerful homily about the perils of a prefect marriage.

Review:

After reading The Age of Innocence I can understand why it is considered a classic. The writing is excellent. It is elegant. But since this book was written of 80 years ago, it makes it harder to read. In fact it was slow going. It wasn't that Wharton used words unfamiliar to me but the style made me slow down and absorb what was being written and going on.

I am going to say that this is a character based novel. While not as in depth John Steinbeck's East of Eden, the characters (mainly Archer and Olenska) take center stage. I would love to say that I really felt in touch with the characters and that I loved them but I was rather indifferent to them. Maybe because this is a story about old New York society and it's inhabitants and I just couldn't wait. But Wharton does put a lot of emphasis of making sure the reader knows and understands the characters and there actions.

The plot of the books was familiar but excellently done. Basically it is a story about "forbidden love" and the chooses people make in their lives and how those chooses affect them later. I am not going to give the story way but I did enjoy getting to take a glimpse into the varies rules of old New York and how they dictates ones actions and decisions.

Pros: Writing, Characters, Plot, History

Cons: Slow read

Overall Recommendation:

I want to give this novel a great write up but I don't know how to express who much I enjoyed the book. I enjoyed it more for the writing than anything else. For you want to read a well written story than this is it. But if you are looking for action or drama, than skip it.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Warton 1921

Edith Wharton’s 1921 Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence, carefully illustrates the social stigmas prevalent in 1870s New York. I loved Wharton’s ability to draw me in to the internal battles the main characters faced, and I empathized with their desires to find belonging. While today’s social stigmas differ, the emotions remain the same.

In the beginning of the novel, Newland Archer ponders his upcoming engagement to May Welland, idealistic about his ability to influence her life and help her become a “free” woman, simply by being an engaging and caring husband.

Newland Archer’s idealistic world is shaken, however, first when May’s cousin and his old beau (Ellen Mingott Olenska) returns to New York, shamed and disgraced after leaving her cruel and abusive husband. Newland must reconsider his notions of women’s social position. When Madame Olenska begins to seek a divorce, the New York society is shocked. Such a situation would bring shame to all of Ellen’s family, including Newland’s wife-to-be. Newland must determine if his own exclamation “women should be free—as free as we are”(Vol. 1, Chap. 6) is realistic for “poor Ellen Olenska.”

In the process, Newland Archer realizes that he is not as free in his relationships as he had imagined. His developing relationship with Madame Olenska complicates the matter, and he realizes that his marriage will not be as he had envisioned.

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. … There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free…. (Vol. 2, Chap. 2)

Ultimately, The Age of Innocence is the story of a man coming to terms with the 1870s social constraints on the most intimate of relationships, love and marriage. Newland Archer finds that the social stigmas prevalent in society distance people: “There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart” (Vol. 2, Chap. 6). In the end, he must decide whether or not he will live within the socially unacceptable dreams he has or if he will look “not at visions, but at realities” (Volume 2, Chapter 11).

I highly recommend this novel.

Originally posted here.

1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

The early Pulitzer Prize winners were concerned with documenting and commenting on the effects that rapid social and technological changes had on “society”, whether that of a Midwestern town evolving into a large industrial city or of “old” New York. The most sharply observant, critical, and personal is The Age of Innocence, in which Wharton describes a set of mores governing behavior for the wealthiest families so stultifying that even reading it 85 years later produces claustrophobia and a sense of being unable to breathe.

The protagonist of the book, Newland Archer, is one of the more conscious of his set. At the beginning of the book, as a young man in the early 1870’s, Archer is quite taken up with his own class and wholeheartedly subscribes to “form”, that unwritten code of what is allowed and far more important, NOT allowed in Old New York society. He realizes that these constitute constraints on his actions but accepts them as de rigueur and necessary to the survival of his way of life.

However, he meets an alien who has suddenly appeared in the midst of this hierarchical, rigid society—the beautiful Countess Olenska, a member of one of the most prominent families whom Archer knew as a child, who married a Polish count, and moved to Europe. After an unspecified number of years, she has left her husband and moved back to New York under mysterious and even scandalous circumstances. Being a member of a distinguished family and somehow “foreign”, the Countess Olenska’s behavior baffles society; they alternately rally around and shy away from her depending on which by-law of the social code she has most recently “transgressed”—usually unwittingly.

Archer, engaged and then married to May Welland, one of the most beautiful as well as most unimaginative and uncreative daughters of an Old New York family, falls under the Countess’ spell. She evokes within him a vaguely intuited, dormant but not yet fully suppressed streak of independence and rebellion, a dread of living out the rest of his life in the sterile, iron-clad environment of High Society.

The story centers around Archer’s feeble and ineffectual attempts to transcend the rules and mores of his class and strike out for a life in which he can grow. In one of the more telling quotes:

His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever going to happen.

At each critical moment, in which he seems poised to break out, Fate, in the person of May, presents him with a choice between personal freedom and a shot at happiness and duty. Duty, in the form of his refusal to grasp at his own happiness at the expense of others’ pain—and May—win each time. Archer spends the rest of his life conforming to the code of behavior expected of a man of his class; the Countess Olenska moves to Paris. The scenes are underwritten, but in the most chilling prose.

The end of the book is poignant, even heart-rending.

The prose style is quite sharp, even unforgiving, as Wharton, at times in great detail, presents a way of life that worships Form and correct behavior; it is clear that she despises this life. It is a life that is inconceivable to us today, but through near-perfect writing, she makes it real for us, a staggering achievement.

Highly recommended.

The Age of Innocence

Newland Archer and May Welland are two wealthy young people living in New York in the late 1800's. Engaged to be married and looking forward to a respectable if somewhat dull life they were unprepared to meet May’s cousin, the Countess Olenska. Ellen has just arrived from Europe after perpetrating a harrowing escape from her debauched husband and her family greets her as if she just returned from a long vacation.

Traumatized by the experience and baffled by her family’s indifference to it, Ellen seeks some frank advice from Newland and as he is also lonely among the smiling facades, is drawn to her openness and falls in love. Because scandal of any sort is to be avoided at any cost, Newland went ahead and married May while still pining for Ellen. Having been persuaded to not divorce, Ellen finds she has been sacrificed to the god of respectability and her place in society grows dubious as remarriage is impossible.

It is easy in this day and age to misunderstand this superb novel and cast it aside as a simple satire on Victorian manners and repression. It is so much more. We all know about sexual repression of that time but that was only part of the severe restrictions placed on every aspect of what are considered normal relationships. A husband and wife could go through their lives wearing masks of pleasant affability and never show true feelings and express honest opinions.

Think about it. With her attorneys in particular, most everyone understood why the Countess Olenska left her depraved husband but a divorce was still unthinkable. The women who were shocked had no inkling of what she had been through and were kept carefully in the dark as if the knowledge itself would somehow taint them. No one could talk openly to anyone, not even to one’s own husband or wife. Not ever. With full knowledge and a heart full of pain May went to her grave without sharing with Newland his feelings about Ellen and how it affected her as a result. She hinted on her deathbed to her son but still disclosed no details. Hooray for the cult of the family.

Edith Wharton is very candid with Victorian domestic problems and tackles an entire social structure based on appearances. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and I feel it is well earned.