Status Updates From L'età dell'innocenza

Newland gives a “bless her heart” comment about May. Now wouldn’t it be funny if she is far more knowing than he is and he is the true simpleton. He has some sort of wishdream that she is a Pygmalian that he can transform into the cosmopolitan woman of his making. A blank slate. An oyster. What is intriguing is that we have no idea of what she thinks yet, except that she is enjoying the play and she said yes.

Many symbols of innocence surround May: dropped eyes, lily of the valley in her lap, white gloves, a stage that looks like the Garden of Eden. Archer is vain about her purity. She is like one of the flowers. However, the roses have thorns. Is that a caution? Is he supposed to be her prince or is he a usurper like Faust? Yup, right there, it says it’s an enchanted garden. Are we to see Gretchan as May?

I wonder if they are doubles for May and Newland. He looks from his box to Mrs. Mason Mingott who is morbidly obese and can’t get out anymore. On fashionable nights, it always has someone out of her generosity. In the box are her daughter-in-law, Lovell Mingott, her daughter, Mrs. Welland, and, behind them, May Welland. She is the picture of innocence like the daisy picker.

He understood the social forms and he could be fashionably late. It wasn’t the cigar that made him dawdled. It was thinking about his betrothed, the picture of innocence. Conventions like the German text of a French opera, translated into Italian, for English-speaking audiences dominates his life. He does not mind following them. He sees the innocent pure maiden singing about the villian who is trying to look pure.

The audience is New York’s most brilliant. They come in the most respectable carriages. The brown coupe (lower status) only was accepted for its speed. Newland Archer (what a name) arrives late, during the garden scene in which the singer pulls petals off a daisy while singing “He loves me, he loves me not!” What timing! He was late because he was enjoying a cigar. He enjoyed the little pleasures.

Ch. 1 The book opens with an opera held in an aging opera house. I wonder if this story is an opera with a love triangle. Old money treasured it in spite of some of its shabbiness because it was small enough to shut out new money, its historical and sentimental associations, and its acoustic excellence. The timing is a slushy, snowy day. It’s the singer’s debut for this opera season.

The end of the novel shows the end of their life as Newland reflects how he lived and the choices he made. Life has not killed the dreamer in him nor the memories that he treasures. It sounds a bit like Downton Abbey, describing the end of an era in New York high society. Even though it is set before the war, the issues are similar so it can stand alongside the books of her peers.

In the story is a journalist who represents the world of real work and freedom. He must work and he is less bound by the rules of society. He is not free from work because he has to earn money. As the novel starts to mirror Faust, the Archers go back to the opera and what is happening in their life is mirrored in the scene described in Faust. Does Newland run away like the father of the child or does he follow duty?

The irony is that they recognize last year’s gown and passe dinners but have amnesia about the source of their money. In the cast of characters include many questionable characters that offer an out for Newland and the countess at the cost of respectability. It turns out that Beaufort’s fortune is built on credit, highly risky in a time where there were no regulations. They ignore that he could bring them down too.

Money is the tentacle for all of them. Newland plods at his law office to appease the moneyholders in his family. Ellen depends on the Polish count. Old money was cherished and new money was despised. One of the mysteries is how Julius Beaufort got his money. Because of that, people don’t quite trust him. Old money has to invent aristocracy for themselves going back to Europe.

Newland is unable to communicate with May as well. He is trapped because he can’t get away from May because she is too clever for him and the countess looks at him as a simpleton. He feels like he is the living dead and it’s his own fault. Too stay respectable, he represses his anger and quietly seethes. Like British gentlemen of this time, he has no calling. So he has no outlet during the day.

Howard makes an interesting point and I will have to read the novel to see if it is true. There seems to be a contest of wills and it is May who is able to outmaneuver the more sophisticated pair. Wait? Is this a tripartite soul? Hmmm. He does not realize that her desire to keep him and stay respectable is stronger than his ability to stray. I love that in his pride he fails to assess May properly.

She forces him to see the fool that he was when watching Faust and thinking of May. He learns to hate himself for his simplistic thinking for it is not enough for the countess. They are also trapped for there is no society that will accept them and is worth living in. May is the example of honor and society but the countess is the example of freedom and complexity. He wants both but knows that is impossible.

The book explores the kind of people that she came from who looked at Europe as a place to buy gowns and great art, a tourist destination, and a crow’s nest to watch fallen morality. Maureen Howard alleges that the novel explores allegience and identity. I wonder how that will stack up with Lit Life? LOL While Newland looks at May as a simpleton, the countess looks at him as a simpleton.

This novel won the Pulitzer in 1921. She won a legion medal for her work with refugees. Living in Europe during the war was hard and close friends died in combat. Her mentor Henry James renounced his American citizenship and then died in 1914. Readers had lost interest in WWI stories so Wharton chose to look at an innocent time for America, but she thinks innocence was lost before the war began.

Mrs. Mingott is a whale of a woman, living as a recluse in her enormous mansion. She does not really care what society thinks and she is generous of spirit. The countess moves in and they clearly are opposites. She left scandal in Europe. The countess is seen as foreign even though she is related to May because she is lived abroad. Some of Wharton’s unorthodox thinking is in Mrs. Mingott and failed marriage in Ellen.