In American Rhapsody, Claudia Roth Pierpont accurately describes Edith Wharton’s writing style in the Age of Innocence. Pierpont’s analysis of Wharton’s style includes the fact that Wharton was very heavily influenced by her past, that she wrote with a “complex mixture of warmth and loathing,” and that Wharton’s style was considered old fashioned by the early 20th Century (aka. the movement towards modernity). Edith Wharton grew up in a wealthy family in New York City during the late 1800s. She lived in a world where traditions and social acceptance and approval were very important, like the world that The Age of Innocence takes place in. Just as the protagonist, Newland Archer, Wharton was not happy in her marriage and actually lived with her husband for 28 years in celibacy. Also, like Archer, Wharton found comfort in the arms of another who she was not wed to, Morton Fullerton.
Wharton also wrote with a “complex mixture of warmth and loathing” in that she had a “negative hero” as the protagonist in the novel. For her, “novels were about character,” which is obvious in the way she wrote about the constant longing and emotional struggle of Newland Archer in his love for a woman he was not married to. This makes readers sympathize for Archer to some degree, however many would also dislike him for his lying and adulterous ways. Pierpont also mentions that Wharton wrote in an old fashioned manner and certainly rejected the modern style of writing – which included more self-reflection and exposed mental processes. Wharton clearly does have a more blunt and ironic writing style that Pierpont claims kept her from “becoming the great writer she could have been,” however I do not believe that makes her any less fantastic as a writer.
