New York's Leisure Class in the 19th Century. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence.

Abstract

In this thesis I will address and analyse the novel The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton and its movie adaptation by Martin Scorsese (1993). Set in New York’s elitist leisure class post-Civil war (1870s), it is not only a novel of manners. The love triangle between Newland Archer, a lawyer, scion of New York’s society, May Welland, his betrothed - the perfect average high-society daughter, and Countess Ellen Olenska (May’s cousin), who has just returned from Europe with a different mentality and a ‘provocative’ lifestyle, gives way to a detailed description of the leisure class and New York’s high society at the end of the nineteenth century and to an analysis of human nature. It was an environment Wharton knew pretty well because it's the society she had been born and raised into, and that is why I am focusing on her biography in the first chapter, as there are many references to her real-life experiences in the book. Moving on to a consideration, through secondary literature and close readings from the novel, on the everyday life of the leisure class, and the clash between old and new money, as the protagonists’ families come from a traditional leisure class background, with aristocratic origins, and have to deal with many unwelcome changes after the Civil War. New York's society was a very restricted circle, with a very strict code of rules and traditions to follow, mostly to defend themselves from the so-called “New Money”, people who had become rich thanks to business and were pathetically trying to imitate the “Old Money” families, with their innate aristocratic elegance that no one can learn. Obviously the focus is on the love triangle as well, as the male protagonist, Newland Archer, is betrothed to May Welland, one of his own kind, but falls in love with May's cousin Ellen, who has come back to New York to escape her unhappy marriage after spending years in Europe and now is seriously contemplating a divorce petition. He is fascinated by her, but he is engaged and New York's society does not accept her: the two would-be lovers are torn between yielding to their passion or answering their social obligations – also giving way to a consideration on women’s rights regarding divorce. The two female protagonists are obviously put in contrast, but both May and Ellen turn out to be completely different from what they appear at first glance, and this also gives its readers a chance to reflect on the never-ending clash of Europe vs America, something Wharton knew very well, as she was born in America and is generally regarded as an American writer, but spent years in Europe, going back and forth throughout all her life - she spent the last years of her life in Europe, where she eventually died.