Between the Covers: A Peek into Classic Books | Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937), an American novelist and designer, was best known for her keen and witty observations of the Gilded Age upper-class society. She was born into an upper-class New York family. With her privileged upbringing, she traveled in Europe and was fluent in multiple languages.

Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel, “The Age of Innocence,” is a pointed critique of New York’s upper class in the late 1800s. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making her the first woman to receive the award. The main character, Newland Archer, is a well-bred lawyer engaged to the conventional May Welland. However, he falls for Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s free-spirited cousin, which upends his world.

In the quote below, Wharton’s writing style is on full display. Mdm. Christine Nilsson, a Swedish soprano, is singing Gounod’s “Faust” at New York City’s Academy of Music in the 1870s. Wharton sees the inflexible social rules of the affluent as similar to the “totem terrors” of previous cultures. Arriving at the opera on time was not done. It could diminish their visibility and status, which was everything and not to be lost. Similarly, the text for the opera, originally a German play, translated into French, then sung in Italian by a Swedish singer for an English-speaking audience. Italian was the “language of opera,” so singing it in English or even the original French was improper for the elite.

Quote from Edith Wharton's “The Age of Innocence”

… But, in the first place, New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was “not the thing” to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not “the thing” played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.

… (Nilsson) sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded…