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  • Revaluation:The Age of Innocence and the Electronic Revolution
  • John W. Crowley (bio)

I recently wrecked the ibm-xt I had used to write everything since 1987. Writers once clung to talismanic Underwoods. I was no less bonded to my primitive pc, the first with a hard drive, because it perfected the typewriter, making composition and revision incredibly easy. My productivity doubled; my writing improved apace.

The xt worked more slowly than the innumerable new-and-improved models that supplanted it. But none really surpassed it on the level of sheer practicality. The xt required simple software (WordPerfect 2.0) with none of the superfluous and confounding options—an infinity of useless choices— that were to come with (opaque) Windows, and it met every reasonable need.

Of course, my machine was merely a harbinger of what would close the book on the Gutenberg age. The Electronic Revolution, indeed, may qualify as one of Michel Foucault's epistemic shifts—at least for anyone grieving the death of literature, which Alvin Kernan elegantly eulogized during the nineties, and, what's worse, for anyone reassessing the value of a career devoted to the increasingly obsolescent practice of reading and writing about books once deemed worth the effort.

At the turbulent turn of the twentieth century, innovative technology also wrought convulsive changes, though less extreme than ours, perhaps. Our forebears' bewilderment still resonates in their work. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), for example, provides salutary consolation as well as survival tactics for the culturally beleaguered both then and now.

Seared by the Great War, which Wharton reported on from the front, gaining more experience of combat than all the Lost Generation, she dreaded the annihilation of civilization as she knew it (see French Ways and Their Meaning [1919]) and threw herself into the battle for its defense. After converting her chateau into a field hospital, Wharton published several war-related books and tirelessly raised relief funds.

In The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton jumped the abyss between expiring Victorianism and incipient modernism—though naysayers deny she made it across. For instance in Sight Readings (1998), Elizabeth Hardwick deplores Wharton's "intensely hermetic" imagination and dismisses the "great claim" for her as a social historian. Hardwick opines that having [End Page 427] "experienced the threat of displacement in the clamorous, avant-garde elation of the 1920s," Wharton has lived on in an "upholstered exile" that effectively attached her "to intransigence in the arts, against the uprooted impertinence of modernism."

Certainly Wharton eschewed the formal innovations of modernism, for which she had little taste or tolerance. The Waste Land underwhelmed her; Ulysses comprised "school boy drivel." Since modernism, however impertinently, permeated the literary atmosphere, Wharton inevitably acquired an ear for it as a second language, so to speak. And, although her first language embodied Victorian indirection, she also absorbed the proto-modernist psychology of Henry James. The language of The Age of Innocence both reflects the veneer of Old New York and tracks the interiority of the protagonist's consciousness by means of free indirect discourse. The knowing sardonic voice of the narrator's commentary undercuts the prevailing rules of conduct and also Newland Archer's rebellious pretensions. His limited self-awareness, in fact, fosters delusions that serve to thwart the fulfillment of his desire for Ellen Olenska, who has returned home to Old New York to take shelter from a malign European husband. The price of protection is her own submission to the power of convention.

By 1920 Wharton had gained the perspective implicit in her title—The Age of Innocence. Steeped in the nascent discipline of anthropology, she had accepted that, however oppressive Old New York had been, its extinction was nevertheless unfortunate. Some of its values seemed worth conserving—at least in retrospect. The end of the innocence therefore occasioned a complex amalgam of emotions for Wharton: satisfaction, regret, and— because Old New York was spared from knowing what would follow it—an odd measure of envy.

The relevance of The Age of Innocence for our time comes into focus at the end. Suppose Wharton had closed the novel with its penultimate chapter, in which Archer is stunned by the...

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