Artifice of Love in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence (1920) represents love not as a pure emotion but an artifact by narrating Newland Archer's marriage to May Welland and his affair with May's cousin Countess Ellen Olenska vis-à-vis the artistic space of the 1870s New York—the Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Museum—as well as Newland's favorite European art and literature. The novel portrays the politics of love as the successful lawyer Newland's marriage to a beautiful but simple-minded maiden from his class maintains the social hierarchy and traditional gender roles. Imprisoned by Old New York's rigid codes of sexual conduct, he escapes into European art, which paradoxically stands for both cultural refinement and moral corruption, due to its common theme of adultery. An art-connoisseur, he falls for an art lover from Paris, who represents the exciting art scene he misses in his stiff circle. However, his forbidden love for the artistic, self-confident, and bilingual Ellen is not more "innocent" than his sham marriage but artistically inspired. The novel prevents the readers from being pulled into Newland and Ellen's passionate affair by self-reflexively drawing attention to its status as a discursive construct inspired by his reading of Victorian literature. The love triangle in the novel is intertextual as he, like George Eliot's protagonist in Middlemarch (1872), falls for his wife's cousin, and is torn between his duty for his wife and his love for a married woman. Indeed, the narrative structure that begins and ends with the French composer Charles François Gounod's opera based on Faust lays bare the fictionality of the text, erasing differences between the love performed on stage and the one narrated in the novel. The theme of aesthetically constructed love shows how artifice lies at the heart of an upper-class New York that pretends as if its strict moral values are sacred and universal. Art then is not confined to the Academy of Music, Metropolitan Art Museum, and Newland's library; the whole city itself is an artistic space where characters perform virtue and wealth. The Old New York conventions also seem as immortal artifacts that haunt the post-World War I era: although Newland and May's son Dallas marries out of love, he chooses a mate within his wealthy circle.

The repetition of the word "form"¹ in the first chapter set at the Academy of Music suggests that the fin de siècle is not the age of innocence but of style and aesthetics. Oscar Wilde writes that "every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century,"² suggesting that the rigid conventions are socially and historically constructed. Friedrich Nietzsche also argues that individuals are experts in the "art of dissimulation," "deception," "keeping up appearances," "wearing masks," "play-acting" and "their eyes merely glide across the surface of things and see 'forms.'"³ He believes that individuals perform honesty as they pretend that "forms"—ideals of decorum, propriety, and fashion—are natural rather than invented. A New Yorker herself, Wharton also displays the art of hypocrisy in the city where "all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world" governed by "arbitrary signs" (29); she anticipates structuralism by suggesting that there is no intrinsic connection between words and their referents. The Statue of Liberty, for example, is an arbitrary sign: New York is not the city of "peace and freedom" (110) that Ellen once imagined but one that molds its residents into accepted forms of physical appearance and social manners. Indeed, the first chapter repeats the word "form" four times to highlight the power of social structures and the God-like treatment of Lawrence Lefferts, "the foremost authority on 'form'" (6), who often scrutinizes New Yorkers' dress and style. Ironically, Lawrence's fame as the supreme judge of morality and taste itself is arbitrary as he turns out to be an unfaithful husband who wears "good clothes so carelessly" (6). The novel dissolves differences between the artistic venues—museums and theaters—and commonplace reality by depicting New...