Pierpont’s perspective on Edith Wharton’s writing style

The Age of Innocence is written in third-person perspective, but it is easy to forget that it is third-person. The thoughts and attitudes of Edith Wharton are felt throughout the initial chapters of The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton is clearly someone who pays very close attention to social structures. For example, in the first chapter Newland Archer appears to be a rogue from the social norm. He enters the opera fashionably late, for reasons that even the narrator has trouble justifying. He can be described as cosmopolitan, being aware “that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences”, rather than being a “chosen [specimen] of old New York gentility.” But, as soon as Newland Archer begins talking about his future fiancee, “he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.” His immediate reaction is to return to the old New York gentility narrative on marriage, by treating his future wife like an object that must be presented before everyone else. This is just from the first chapter of her novel. In the following chapters, Edith Wharton goes on to discuss more and more social structures, especially within the confines of a marriage. Having read another novel by Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, I am aware of Wharton’s ability and tendency to describe the subtleties of societal structures within a marriage. In Ethan Frome, the main plot line was between the strained marriage of Zeena and Ethan Frome, as well as Ethan’s desire to return to normalcy, which lead him to fall in love with Zeena’s cousin, Mattie. As Wharton writes, her emotion is palpable and distinctishable, so much so that it is easy to assume that these stories are very personal to her.

I do believe that Claudia Roth Pierpont did accurately identify Edith Wharton’s writing style. Pierpont argues that Wharton’s style of writing was heavily influenced by her past. Wharton was born and grew up in a very aristocratic family in New York, where at least appearing to societal norms was mandatory. But one thing that Edith Wharton did that defied societal norms was her marriage, which she blamed her mother for. Wharton claimed that her marriage was an “‘inconceivable thing’” and lived in celibacy (14). It is easy to see how her marriage has influenced her writing. For example, in The Age of Innocence, Wharton focuses on the Newland Archer’s relationship with May Welland, but also highlights that Archer’s decision to marry is conformity to the New York gentility that he claims that he is not part of. Wharton wrote Ethan Frome because of a “fear of being buried alive, in the snows of massachusetts, with a husband to whom her only remaining emotional tie was pity and whose behavior was increasingly unbalanced”(28). Pierpont also argues that Wharton tends to analyze the undertones of society. Pierpont states that “readers are apt to be struck with the exposure of far-more-everyday varieties of horror” (14). In Edith Wharton’s short story “Beatrice Palmato”, Pierpont recognizes that some of the horrors that are exposed are “moral cowardice; being unloved or unloving; making rational compromises in order to live and discovering that one has reasoned one’s life away; and enduring unendurable loneliness”(14). Overall Pierpont is able to accurately identify and describe Edith Wharton’s writing style.