In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the narrator is witty and funny and is most definitely not boring. The reader is entertained by the writing style, which features details with description, the use of irony, humor, rhetorical devices and imagery. For example, a clever observation that is also a metaphor (with lots of imagery) is, “Packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep to another, and Archer, when the afternoon’s round was over, parted from his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped”. The novel opens with a dramatic scene in which everyone is dressed in their finest clothes for the opera. Wharton writes with lots of detail, for example, “There was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at seven, alone with his mother and sister, and had lingered afterward over a cigar in the Gothic library with glazed black-walnut bookcases and finial-topped chairs which was the only room in the house where Mrs. Archer allowed smoking.” Wharton also generally writes in longer sentences and shorter paragraphs. In addition, irony is easily seem in the novel. Of course, the telegram from May arrives agreeing to make the wedding sooner only shortly after Archer confesses his feelings for the Countess Olenska. And to top it all off at the end, Archer is a free man after 26 years and can go to Olenska, but despite all that has ensued and his intense love for her, he chooses not to.
Claudia Roth Pierpont writes about Edith Wharton in the first chapter of her book American Rhapsody. While I definitely was not as entertained reading this as I was reading The Age of Innocence, I noticed that Pierpont also employs the use of rhetorical devices and imagery. For example, she uses similes: “But Lily, Wharton’s most profound and subtle portrait of a lady, is as repulsed by her slavish tactics as she is dependent on their results.” (page 19); “The first is a character portrait, as startlingly fresh as a Sargent watercolor.” (page 17) She, like Wharton, writes with humor (and imagery), “Still, might there be something more to those dead husbands and claustrophobic wives?”
Wharton and Pierpont both write maturely and eloquently, with sentences and paragraphs that flow.
