Innocence and the Arena: Wharton, Roosevelt, and Good Citizenship

A clenched fist banged on a table, a gnashed pair of eyeglasses, and an irresistible summons to political action: like the grin of the Cheshire Cat or the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, Theodore Roosevelt suddenly appears in fragmented and metonymic form in the final chapter of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920). Introduced obliquely as "the Governor of New York" and only named two paragraphs later, Roosevelt nevertheless casts a long shadow over the novel's close, and over the lives of both its protagonist and its author. For the fifty-seven-year-old Newland Archer, Roosevelt's example inspires a brief foray into state politics and a life of "good citizenship" and his friendship remains Newland's "strength and pride." A year of political service with Roosevelt in Albany might seem a poor substitute for a life of romance with Ellen Olenska in Paris, yet Newland ultimately places this experience "above all" the other "real things of his life," even marriage and fatherhood.¹

Roosevelt's friendship and example were equally cherished by Edith Wharton. When the ex-President died in 1919, Wharton composed an elegy, "With the Tide," to express her "heart-wrenching sorrow," and wrote in a letter to Roosevelt's sister, "No one will ever know what his example and his influence were to me."² More importantly, Wharton also wrote The Age of Innocence that year and surely had the late Roosevelt on her mind throughout the novel's composition; she, too, was fifty-seven years old and in a retrospective mood, like Newland Archer at the end of the novel. Wharton's novel memorializes the upper-class New York milieu in which she and Roosevelt, roughly the same age and related distantly by marriage, had grown up.³ Both Wharton and Roosevelt had fled the narrow confines of that world and found success in political and literary vocations deemed off-limits to a gentleman or a lady. After they were reacquainted at a party in Newport in 1902, their friendship had grown closer, and for the remainder of Roosevelt's life they exchanged visits (including at the White House) and letters on subjects both literary and political.

Moreover, friends and acquaintances portrayed Wharton and Roosevelt in similar terms as the very incarnations of the nascent twentieth century, filled with inexhaustible stores of energy and life. Henry Adams famously wrote that Roosevelt had "the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God—he was pure act."⁴ In her 1934 memoir A Backward Glance, Wharton similarly described Roosevelt as a human dynamo, "so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed, that each of [our] encounters glows in me like a tiny morsel of radium."⁵ Wharton herself, with her affinity for modern technology (especially cars) and insatiable appetite for social conquest, struck a bemused Henry James as an "Angel of Devastation" worthy of her own Undine Spragg, an elemental force driven by "deranging and desolating, ravaging, burning and destroying energy" as she motored across England in her "chariot of fire": "She rode the whirlwind, she played with the storm, she laid waste whatever of the land the other raging elements had spared, she consumed in 15 days what would serve to support an ordinary Christian community … for about ten years."⁶

These quintessentially modern qualities stand in stark contrast to the stolid conservatism of the world in which Wharton and Roosevelt were reared and in which The Age of Innocence is set. As Wharton (describing the dilettantish Ralph Marvell) suggests in The Custom of the Country (1913), "cultivated inaction" and "desultory dabbling with life" were the norm in old New York, and "gentlemanliness" was in turn synonymous "with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish between private and 'business' honour."⁷ In The Age...