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Whenever I return to The Age of Innocence, I’m reminded once again of the simultaneous significance and smallness of the trials and joys of my life. That is, I’m forced to see the seeming momentousness of each personal milestone, (usually lit by the buttery glow of self-importance), illuminated instead by the bright, harsh truth that whatever I do, it will still just be one life among many carved out by all the generations gone before.
I’m reminded that my individual existence, all my delusions of free will and originality, will amount to no more than a light wind rippling across a field, quickly past, leaving no trace, if even noticed. Yet this knowledge is, to me, a comfort, even a pleasure and is the same feeling I get from looking at the stars: I’m a nothing, unspeakably insignificant yet here I am right now, vibrantly alive.
The Age of Innocence makes me aware of all this because it is, in the end, the perfect novel. It reflects back to its reader, through astoundingly astute descriptions of one society’s machinations – in this case Edith Wharton’s own upper-class New York milieu of the late 1800s – the age-old patterns of humanity.
By revealing so thoroughly the peculiarities of this set of wealthy families, the novel creates a synecdochical picture of the world and shows us that its subjects belong to an age that, beneath a surface of gentility and kindness, proves no more innocent than any other.
Of course it’s also fantastically romantic. But not romantic in the traditional sense, where the sweet-if-moderately-feisty-gal bags the stand-offish-yet-rich-and-actually-oh-so-charming Lord Landowner III. There are no saccharine happy endings here and our heroine is not the sweetly proper May Welland but the fascinatingly improper Countess Olenska (played irresistibly by Michelle Pfeiffer in Scorsese’s equally perfect adaptation).
Rather, this is proto-feminism at its finest and beneath Wharton’s wry humour and blistering intelligence there seethes a rage so palpable as to be, one imagines, sweat-inducing to the average casual misogynist of her age (or ours, for that matter).
This is the last of the year-long series of old favourites by Lucy Sweeney Byrne, author of Paris Syndrome (Banshee Press).