New York in The Age of Innocence
Author: Edith Wharton
Recommended Reading: The Age of Innocence
“To come to the Opera in a Brown coupé was almost as honorable a way of arriving as in one’s own carriage.” (The Age of Innocence, 4). Imagine a New York without cars, the noise reduced to human chatter, the sound of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels. It is the evening and the opera is just letting out. The carriages form a line outside of the Academy of Music, an old venue that only has around 30 private boxes dominated by old New York families who can trace their ancestry back to Dutch and British settlers. Soon the Gilded-Age Elite, industrial tycoons who cannot force their way into the insular old theater will build a new Opera house, this time with enough private boxes to completely reshape New York’s elite society. There are, as Wharton’s novels explore, many levels to New York belonging, some defined purely by wealth while others are defined by ancestry, can you trace your lineage back to aristocracy, to a Dutch patroon, or were your ancestors merchant capitalists. Relatively, everyone in this society is new money, but the concept of new and old is used to weed and exclude even if the difference between new and old is only a century or so.
What I am trying to say is that The Age of Innocence is a New York not only of a particular time and place, but of a particular class. There is much that disappears in Wharton’s novel and when reading Wharton we should be careful to remember how small and limited the world she represents is. This is Edith Wharton’s New York, and a large part of her success as a novelist relied on people’s interest or curiosity about the rarified world of the New York society scene. So, for example, Wharton, herself belonged to a family she could trace back to British merchants. She was a debutante, though an unsuccessful one perhaps in the sense that her family did not throw a debutante ball for her, she simply came out at another party. Before she was a novelist she was a tastemaker, writing decoration bibles like The Decoration of Houses and Italian Villas and their Gardens. When people went out to buy her first New York novel The House of Mirth it was with the promise of what today we might call lifestyle porn, though Wharton used the medium to question much about the status and limitations of women in society.
While I want to do a post specifically about class structures and how we can use Wharton to gain a better grasp of class systems and how it is vital to understand the role of class in sorting characters and plot lines in Wharton’s and many other novels, today I want to write a little bit about the New York represented.
Writing from 1919, just post World War I in a period referred to as the interwar years, the New York of Wharton’s childhood must have seemed like a forgotten provincial past, but in the 1870s as she was growing up the 1870s marked a peak in an urbanization boom that had been underway since the 1840s. It is hard to imagine now, when our numbered streets stretch up to 268th street, but in the 1840s the area we now know as Bryant Park was largely rural, with some development, while much of Wharton’s society grouped around fashionable Washington Square Park. Fifth Avenue and the East side were still a fashionable place to be, but the Upper East Side had yet to exist (which is hard to imagine when shows like The Real Housewives of New York and Gossip Girl make the UES seem like the timeless haunt of New York’s upper echelons but that area is barely a century old.
So, in the 1870s when main character Newland Archer and future wife May Welland are preparing to move into their house in the 30s, in Wharton’s Backward Glance it must seem provincial, but in the imagined moment it is the height of urbanity to be moving into the new developments uptown. At the same time, Wharton represents the area around Central Park as still farmland, with Mrs. Manson Mingott, based on her own Aunt Mary Mason Jones, building her French style chateau on fifth avenue all the way up in the 50s where no one can imagine urbanization ever extending.
This New York has no skyscrapers, the elevator only having recently been invented. The Gilded-Age elite will soon be building block sized mansions Parkside along Fifth Avenue, homes that will be torn down within less than a century because density and the expensiveness of real-estate requires the bulldozing and transformation of these mansions into the high-rises that still house some of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families. Wharton characterizes this period, architecturally, by its brownstone townhouses, which Wharton famously disapproved of as ugly, suggesting they look covered in chocolate sauce and lack architectural style. She will, in strong contrast to the attempt to create an American style of architecture, suggest U.S. citizens should build homes in the French and Italian style but Archer and his wife are moving into their own ugly, though not brown, townhouse.
This is not a vertical, but a horizontal New York, representing the way that cities often grow horizontally prior to running out of space and growing vertically. It is a provincial New York, but it is also the height of a specific phase of urbanization, one that Archer will recognize is disappearing at the close of the novel 30 years later, when, by 1900 a new phase of development was occurring. The iconic Empire State Building won’t go up until 1929-1931, the last skyscraper before the crash and by virtue of the crash the longstanding tallest structure in New York, but, that New York does not exist by the time Wharton writes her novel. Still, it’s interesting to consider how, from 1840 to 1930 New York transformed, and transformed, and transformed again, each time with the same excitement and sense of advancement that one could perhaps look back on as Wharton does with nostalgia and a bemused realization of how provincial advancement appears in retrospect.
While Wharton represents New York, I also like to think about how this work fits into a broader global conception of world cities and advancement. For example, can we compare her work to Proust and his representation of the bygone Belle Epoque, itself a period that represents a historical phase of Parisian urban modernity? Or, it is equally interesting to think about The Age of Innocence in relation to another novel of provincial capitals, Lucio Vicente Lopez’s naturalista classic La gran aldea (The Large Town) another novel about urban provinciality on the cusp of urban modernity, and ask, what are some of the commonalities that many of these texts share in terms of how they represent urbanism? This blog post is already growing quite long, so I don’t want to embark on answering that question, and I’m not sure I have an answer to why exactly urban provinciality seems to be such a prominent theme in texts of this period, but I like the paradox of those two concepts together that is represented in works like The Age of Innocence and La gran aldea.
Can you think of any other works from any culture that represent provincial urban settings? Or shall we call it urban provincial, as though it were a style? Let me know in the comments or, of course, feel free to express any other thoughts you might have about this post, as well.
I’m sort of an a New York novels written and/or published in the 1920s kick, and, insofar as this could almost be a syllabus beginning to form before your eyes I also like to group The Age of Innocence with my other two recommendations so far, The Great Gatsby and Passing, stay tuned to see how this reading list of 1920s novels continues to evolve, or go check out those previous posts if you’re yearning for more reading.
For more of The Age of Innocence on the blog.