A Hieroglyphic World: Social Rules in Wharton's Novel of Manners (The Age of Innocence, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, we welcome editor Sheila Liming to discuss the author's friendship with Henry James, a culture of elitism in New York, and the ironic meaning of "innocence" in the novel. 

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and creator of the web database EdithWhartonsLibrary.org. Her other books include Office (2020), published through Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, and a scholarly edition of Wharton's novel Twilight Sleep (forthcoming through Oxford University Press). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Lapham's Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and The Chronicle Review.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Age of Innocence, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393870770.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Edith Wharton's novel, The Age of Innocence, as we interview its editor, Sheila Liming. In Part One, we discuss Wharton's upbringing and education and her writing career. We explore The Age of Innocence, its themes, Wharton's sometimes subtle commentary, what innocence even means in this novel, the idea of a “novel of manners,” and some of the novel's characters, including the three that form this famous love triangle. Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books, and creator of the web database edithwhartonslibrary.org. Her other writing includes a scholarly edition of Wharton's novel, Twilight Sleep. It is so great to have her with us today. Sheila Liming, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Sheila:] Hi, thank you for having me.

[Mark:] Thank you for joining, and it's such a pleasure to have you to discuss Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, your wonderful new Norton Library Edition. Sheila, maybe we can start as we always like to, by talking about the author. What is it about Edith Wharton that we should know as we approach this novel?

[Sheila:] Well, Edith Wharton was born in the United States in the midst of the Civil War, but she was raised primarily in France and then returned to the United States really about the age of ten or so. And this had a kind of interesting effect on her childhood and her outlook on American culture. It is often said that The Age of Innocence takes almost like an anthropological look at both the United States and especially, uh, the culture of elitism in the United States, uh, especially within New York. And I think that has to do with the way that she had been exposed to those different kinds of viewpoints and cultures even from a very young age. Her parents left the United States, we think, for primarily financial reasons, um, during the Civil War, um, which was a period during which the currency was fluctuating a lot but also income taxes were introduced. And it seems like her parents, who were very wealthy, fled the U.S. so that they could kind of shelter their wealth during that time period, and then returned only afterwards. So, it's clear from those facts and that information that she was raised in a very high society, in a very privileged position, and that even though she grew to understand that, um, as being in some way normal for her, she was also interested in figuring out how it worked and in documenting the mannerisms and the practices of the culture that she was raised in.

[Mark:] So, along with this fantastic wealth of her family, did it also come with an education and Edith Wharton's instinct to write and to create and to develop her own artistic, uh, impulses?

[Sheila:] Certainly. Um, Edith Wharton was primarily privately educated, uh, which means that she was educated at home. And this was in keeping with her class status and also her gender. Uh, young girls during that time period of the upper classes were really sort of kept away from the public eye as much as possible. And that meant that while their brothers were sometimes sent away to fancy boarding schools, they would often be educated in the home, usually by private governesses. And that was the education and training that she had as well. She was never really formally educated, which is ironic considering that she later received an honorary degree from Yale University, um, for her writing accomplishments. But that, you know, gave her a lot of exposure to a certain kind of tradition of education. She was effectively reared in what we can kind of think of as like a “great books” style of education, where she read a lot of classic literature, um, both from antiquity and also, uh, literature from Germany, France, uh, parts of Europe as well. And she was also educated to read and speak in a variety of languages. Uh, she spoke French, Italian, German, um, and some Latin as well. So, she was very well educated but not in a way that might make sense to us, um, from the way that we view education today.

[Mark:] Do we know anything about her temperament as a young person? An adolescent? Did she respond well to this kind of education and upbringing?

[Sheila:] Well, we know that she was precocious, um, and that she also had a flare for imagination, that she liked to quote-unquote, “make things up,” as she calls it in one of her two memoirs, um, the book, A Backward Glance. And she would talk about making up stories and effectively trying to write them like she was an author, even before she really knew how to write. So, she was very precociously interested in the world of ideas and in storytelling and in writing, even before she sort of had the formal training to be able to actually do those things.

[Mark:] Before we get into her writing, it's probably also worth noting her own history with marriage.

[Sheila:] Right.

[Mark:] And only because we see how that might affect the way she treats it in her fiction, what can you tell us about her romantic history?

[Sheila:] Absolutely. So, she was debuted to society, which was a process that was very common for young girls of her economic class. Um, she came out, as it was called, or debuted at the age of 18, which was pretty standard, and she spent about five seasons on the marriage market. That means basically five years where you would go through this process of attending balls and attending parties and basically making yourself known as marriageable material, until the point where you got a suitable, uh, proposal of marriage. She eventually married, um, at the age of 23 to a man who her family had largely selected for her. Uh, he was a distant friend of her older brothers, and he was about 12 years older than her. So, even from the very beginning of their marriage, uh, they weren't the most logical pairing, uh, and they weren't exactly happy as the result of that.

[Mark:] When does her career as a writer begin to take off and establish itself?

[Sheila:] Really, it starts in the 1890s. So, by this point, uh, she was married, and her first published work was actually a interior design manual, a book called The Decoration of Houses, which she co-authored with an architect friend of hers. And The Decoration of Houses was really just sort of like a design guide for members of the upper classes on how to arrange pleasing interiors of their houses. So, it was very kind of in keeping with her genteel status and her class and everything else. Um, but that was also her sort of foray into the world of letters, into publishing, and to being involved in, you know, producing text that people would consume publicly. And after that, she followed up with a number of stories that were published in some magazines, and then a few collections of stories that were published in the late 1890s. So, that was her start, and she really didn't start to really gather steam in her authorial career until 1905. That's when she published her novel The House of Mirth. It was her first novel that, like The Age of Innocence, really takes place in New York City, and also tries to focus in on and skewer, uh, the mannerisms of upper-class New York wealthy elites. And it sold very well. Um, it was a breakaway success for her because people were sort of entranced by the somewhat gossipy angle of it.

[Mark:] So, you say, The House of Mirth (1905), The Age of Innocence (1920): where do you place her in the spectrum of American literary history? Do you view her in – because 1920 is on the cusp of modernism, 1905, you know, is she a Gilded Age writer? Where do you, where do you place her?

[Sheila:] She was certainly in dialogue with modernism, um, as a kind of nascent literary movement, but she was not a modernist, and I don't think would have really been appreciated of that label if people had called her a modernist. Um, she had a lot of choice words about modernist writing and really viewed herself as coming from the 19th century novelistic tradition—both the American tradition, um, you know influenced by writers like Henry James, but also the European tradition too, uh, influenced by writers like Flaubert, and some of the English, uh, big house novels of the 1800s as well. So, she kind of viewed her career as looking backwards towards that golden age of the novel and was very interested in realism and in realistic plot scenarios. Uh, so, that differentiated her a bit from what was going on in modernism at least at the level of style, because she was more interested in producing, you know, those big stories, uh, that people wanted to consume successively, um, uh, by the fire, you know, for, during long winter nights.

[Mark:] You mentioned Henry James and it's almost inescapable in a discussion of Edith Wharton, it seems like Henry James is always brought up. And I know that they were – there was actually a relationship between the two of them. Is too much made of that, or do you think that is a logical comparison?

[Sheila:] My answer to that is both. Uh, we both make too much of it, and it makes total sense at the same time. For one, Henry James is one of the foremost representatives of that novelistic tradition that I was just talking about within the United States. So, of course it makes sense to compare Edith Wharton to him. And then in addition to that, there's the fact that they were very friendly with each other. They were very close friends, especially towards the end of Henry James' life. But Henry James was also about a generation older than her. He was 20 years older than her, and that meant that they saw the world a little bit differently. You know, they had been raised under different circumstances, lived through different times, and, of course, Edith Wharton was very specifically interested in representing women's psychology and women's consciousness in her novels. Henry James certainly was doing that as well, but she just had a different vantage point to it. And then the other thing, I think, that distinguishes them is that Edith Wharton really remained quite focused on the United States, and particularly New York City, um, in her novels, and we see that in The Age of Innocence. Um, and whereas Henry James, you know, he emigrated to England and sort of shifted his focus eventually towards, uh, Europe and towards representing European plots and European, uh, economic class structures, um, while Wharton really remained focused on trying to diagnose what she had seen at home in the U.S.

[Mark:] And if you think of the two of them as stylists, something like The Golden Bowl versus The House of Mirth, which are only, what, a year or so apart –

[Sheila:] Right.

[Mark:] – are wildly different, wouldn't you say?

[Sheila:] They are, they are wildly different. I agree. Edith Wharton was trying to write plots and stories that the public would on some level, I think, enjoy consuming. And for that reason, she was often dismissed during her own time period for being too much of a popular author, for sort of courting those sales numbers, and also, you know, courting maybe a readership that wasn't as highly educated as the types of people who might have been reading The Golden Bowl at the time.

[Mark:] Well, to talk a little bit about the world of The Age of Innocence you're mentioning. So, it's published in 1920, takes place in the 1870s, and it was spectacularly successful, and won the Pulitzer Prize. Was there something about American readership in the 1920s or, let's say, in 1920/1921 that would have been hungry to revisit the 1870s in high society of New York?

[Sheila:] Well, Edith Wharton was writing this novel, as we can really think of it, during the winddown of World War I. And so, she had, you know, witnessed—because by that point she was living in Europe as well—she had witnessed the horrors of World War I firsthand, and I think it made her think back to the conditions of her own childhood and the Civil War as well, but also the period that came afterwards. So, in her mind, I think she was envisioning what was coming ahead on the horizon in the 1920s as being sort of like the 1870s and that period that followed after World War, um, or after the Civil War. That, of course, became the Gilded Age. That was the period during which we saw the speculation and the commodity fluctuation that happened during, uh, the Civil War really kind of ramp up and then just go crazy, with the result being that we had, like, unprecedented levels of wealth and also inequality in the United States. So, she was thinking about those economic concerns, certainly, but I think she was also thinking about this feeling of like cyclicality, um, occurring. That we go through these big, Earth-shattering, violent episodes. And then what comes after is this period of, like, reassessment—of trying to figure out who we are and where we're going. So, she was looking to the past to try to answer those questions about what was happening in the 1920s.

[Mark:] Earlier, you used the word skewering. Does – do you feel like the novel is a critique of this society? Is it a satire? Is it you – or you – you just said explore, or, you know, to try to figure out what was happening? Is – is she objective in certain areas? Where does she - where does she cast her lot?

[Sheila:] It's not quite a satire, although there are satirical elements. And the reason that it's not quite a satire is because she does enjoy maintaining this position of what at least appears on the surface to be objectivity, and leading her readers to their own conclusions about the information that she's presenting to them and the actions that she's showing of her characters. So, she's very interested in critiquing, uh, New York high society, where her characters sort of roam around and interact, but she's also sympathetic towards certain people within that society, people who feel like they don't have a lot of agency or choice, and people who are pressed into rather unfortunate circumstances as the result of the, um, rules that silently or tacitly govern that society—rules that nobody ever really wants to spell out but nonetheless, um, exert a really big influence on what happens to people.

[Mark:] So, do those rules that govern that kind of society ensnare women and men alike?

[Sheila:] At points, yes, but one of the arguments that she builds sort of in the background of The Age of Innocence is that women are more pro – prey to them than men are, um, and that women, in particular, are subject to something of a double standard. Where men can sometimes break or bend the rules, uh, depending on their positions of privilege, uh, women are not able to have the same kind of freedom and agency.

[Mark:] Is it reductive to call Edith Wharton a feminist?

[Sheila:] I don't think it's reductive at all. She certainly would have rejected the label, but I think that also had to do with her own sensibilities, her class upbringing, her own political allegiances during her time period. The Age of Innocence, you know, comes out on the heels of the, uh, Women's Emancipation Movement and the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States. And it presents a vision—although a historical vision—of a woman who is really encumbered, um, who doesn't have the ability to fight for herself as the result of not being able to own property, for example, um, and losing everything that she owns in a divorce that she goes through. So, it shows us the consequences of what happens when women are not given the same rights as men, and I think in that sense, um, it is entirely appropriate to label Edith Wharton a feminist.

[Mark:] How does it help her feminist vision in this novel to have the protagonist be a male?

[Sheila:] Yes, it's interesting, isn't it, because, uh, we largely gain access to the thoughts of her character Newland Archer, who is, you know, really her protagonist. He's the one who we follow in his movements forward. Um, but that is sort of strategic on her part, because in granting us access to Newland's thoughts and, really, nobody else's, she also shows that double bind that I've been talking about. She shows how women are sort of hampered and curtailed in their own freedom of thought, um, by, uh, showing us how little they are able to speak up for themselves and how little they are able to move around and make their own decisions. Newland is the best character to focus on because he actually has agency. He often chooses not to use it, but he has it. Um, whereas if she was focusing on one of the female characters that we see in the novel, we wouldn't see that same amount of freedom.

[Mark:] So, we've always heard the term “novel of manners.” Does this novel qualify as one?

[Sheila:] I think so, yes. I think we can define the “novel of manners” as a novel that takes an almost anthropological interest in social customs, um, in laws that are not exactly spelled out or written down, as I was saying earlier, but nonetheless exert a huge influence and have quite a lot of power over people. And novels of manners, uh, usually sort of center on someone who has discovered the boundaries of those, uh, mannerisms. So, nobody, really, is going to spell it out for them and tell them like, “You've done something wrong,” but through their own actions, they kind of brush up against social censure or they brush up against the problem they've created in, uh, really going beyond those boundaries.

[Mark:] And these characters seem so conscious of those limitations, and form what is expected, what is proper. And almost on every page of this novel, we get a reminder that there are expectations for behavior and speech, ritual, habit. It's almost oppressive that this is the privileged society that they live in.

[Sheila:] Yeah absolutely, um, I think they do come across as being hyperaware of the manners that they live with and that sort of structure that they live under, because, um, it does have such a big impact on the outcomes of their social lives. Uh, so, they're forced to negotiate them on an almost daily basis. Uh, what's interesting is that, you know, Edith Wharton, in focusing on Newland as a character who's a man, he, uh, doesn't always have to have the same kind of consciousness about those things as some of the women who are around them, but the women are always there to remind him that these things exist.

[Mark:] There's a phrase that Wharton uses in this novel, earlier – early in the novel: “It's a hieroglyphic world.” So, it's almost like there's a whole set of codes and so forth that you either know or you don't know, you either obey or you don't obey. It's – it's a really fascinating, uh, presentation.

[Sheila:] Exactly. And with such a hieroglyphic or symbolic way of representing that world, um, you know, she really gives for us an interpretive feast. There's so much to unpack and so much to read into in that novel, that it makes it quite a joy to return to over and over again.

[Mark:] How about the title itself: Age of Innocence. The word “innocence,” I think, might have a bunch of meanings here. What do you take that title to imply?

[Sheila:] Well, it's an ironic title, because really nobody in this book is innocent. [Laughter] As I say in the, uh, opening to my introduction, you know, nobody in this book is innocent, but especially those who pretend hardest to be. They're the ones you really got to watch out for.

[Mark:] Well, do you mean innocent in the sense of opposite of guilt, or innocent in opposite of experience?

[Sheila:] Um, both, but with regards to the latter, I'm particularly thinking about the idea of what characters know versus what they pretend to not know or to be in the dark about, right? So, a good examples is the character of May. One of the guiding questions of the book is whether or not May knows what's going on, um, between her fiancé, Newland Archer, and between her cousin, um, the Countess Ellen Olenska. And Edith Wharton, you know, does a very subtle job of portraying May as a character, so that we don't ever really get firm answers along those lines until it's too late. And we do sort of, um, realize that May has probably known for quite a long time, and she's been feigning the situation of innocence, um, for the sake of the society that she exists in, but especially for the sake of her husband.

[Mark:] So, innocence could be the opposite of awareness?

[Sheila:] Right, exactly.

[Mark:] And again, as you said, it could be ironic, or it could – it could not be ironic. So, does Edith Wharton leave that—what you were just describing about May's innocence or lack of innocence—ambiguous, or is it pretty clear by the end what kind of a character May is?

[Sheila:] It's ambiguous for the great majority of the novel, which is part of what makes it so fun, is that you are tempted to ask that question over and over again of how much May exactly knows. And by the time you're able to answer it with any certainty—which is the same point that Newland Archer is able to answer it with any certainty—it's pretty much too late for all of the characters involved.

[Mark:] Well, why don't we talk about some of the characters. We've – we've mentioned their names, and I'd love to hear just a little capsule about some of these our listeners will encounter. And maybe we can start with Newland Archer. Um, what kind of a protagonist is he? What is his situation, uh, given this setting?

[Sheila:] So, Newland Archer is a young man who is descended from an upper-class family in New York City, and when the novel opens, he is newly engaged. And he's engaged to a woman named May – May Welland. And the novel opens, um, with a scene that takes place at the Opera. And the two are engaged, but they haven't announced it publicly yet, so they're sort of working up to that public announcement, which would have been a big deal within that particular society. And, in the meantime, because they haven't announced it publicly, he's sitting in the Opera in one place, and his fiancé is sitting across the room in another place. And he's looking at her, and he's thinking about her, and he's comparing her to what he's seeing on stage, because they're watching the opera, Faust, by Charles Gounod, and, um, that, of course, is about a man who makes a deal with the devil, quite literally, so that he can do – seduce a young innocent woman who he is in love with. So, he's kind of comparing May to that innocent young woman character that he sees on stage. And what we see is a lot of hubris from Newland in that scene. But, immediately, a very big wrench is thrown into it with the arrival of another woman at the Opera who's going to form the sort of third part of the love triangle. And that is Ellen Olenska. Ellen Olenska is May's cousin, and she has recently returned from Europe amidst a sort of, like, cloud of controversy and scan – and scandal. So, Newland is drawn to her. He's interested in her. He's intrigued. But at the same time, he just has kind of finalized this situation with his fiancé, and his life is moving in a different direction where he won't be able to make those kinds of decisions anymore.

[Mark:] Does the reader root for Newland to be with May or to be with Ellen Olenska? Is Wharton guiding us in one direction or the other?

[Sheila:] Uh, Wharton portrays May as a rather two-dimensional character throughout, at least, the first half of the novel. And for that reason, I think Wharton does gently guide us towards thinking that Newland would be a lot happier with Ellen Olenska, and, you know, prompting us to sort of root for that relationship because, to us, it looks sincere, it looks authentic, it looks emotional, and it looks exciting. And so, since we're able to kind of glimpse that excitement from his view, I think our sympathies initially end up resting in that scenario, and we kind of want him to get what he wants, which is, you know, the case that it normally works.

[Mark:] Even if that's the quote: “Wrong thing to want for?”

[Sheila:] Exactly, yes. And, um, Newland is really great at creating internal excuses for himself and coming up with, um, all forms of plausible deniability that make this scenario make sense to him, that make his pursuit of Ellen make sense to him and also to us as readers.

[Mark:] You – you said that Wharton makes May a two-dimensional character. Normally, that would be insult for a writer, but I'm guessing you believe that that's intentional.

[Sheila:] It's quite intentional, yeah. And it also, um, reflects Newland Archer's outlook. Uh, he views her as a two-dimensional character, and that's one of the reasons that we are prompted to see her that way as well. It's also, um, Wharton's way of showing us the flaws in his personality: that he takes a lot for granted and doesn't always allow himself to see the truth of what is right there in front of him.

[Mark:] Two-dimensional in the sense that she sort of unthinkingly goes through the rituals of this society, almost without an individual impulse? Is that – is that what you take from May?

[Sheila:] Yes, May embodies the standards and manners of her society, and she does so without much, uh, protest, um, or any kind of, like, conflict or disagreement. She is a type, and the type that she's presented to us, at least at the beginning of the novel, is that she is unfailingly sweet, she's very constant, she's very loyal, and we are given the impression that she will cause no trouble for Newland Archer in their relationship and in their marriage.

[Mark:] You mentioned that Ellen Olenska appears, but that there's some sort of scandal in her background that has sullied her reputation. What ever happened in her past?

[Sheila:] Well, when Ellen arrives in New York in that first scene in the novel, she has recently fled her marriage to a Polish count, and she has been living in Europe. But it is suggested that her husband has not been faithful to her and has also been indulging in some other very unsavory activities that have forced her into this situation where she has left him. And she's arrived in New York because she's hoping to seek a formal divorce from him, which would have been a very, very complicated thing to do during this time period, but she's hoping that she will find more support for that decision in New York than she would in Europe, where she would be surrounded by his friends and his associates and his family members. 

[Mark:] But that really would have been such a reputation-harming decision to make? What Ellen Olenska is doing?

[Sheila:] Yes, um, because at the time—and keep in mind that this is the 1870s, this is a historical novel—at the time, there were a lot of, uh, structures in place that were meant to uphold the sanctity of both marriage and family arrangements. Some of those structures were legal: like a woman could not file for divorce at this time period. Um, a man could, but a woman could not. But some of the structures were more social: such as more the idea that after a woman has married a man and has, you know, expressed that she is going to be loyal to him, she's expected to uphold that side of the bargain, really, no matter what happens. And if she doesn't, it is seen as a stain on her and her family.

[Mark:] What does Newland like about Ellen Olenska?

[Sheila:] I think he likes her iconoclastic personality. He likes her rebellious streak and her flaunting of societal conventions. He likes these things because he can’t do them himself: he’s too much of a coward, he’s too by the book, and he’s too much the product of the society that has raised him. So, when he starts interacting with Ellen and he sees her do these things, he's initially really sort of scandalized and caught off guard, and then he's entranced. He's pulled in by them.

[Mark:] Sheila, I want to throw a very quick description of Ellen Olenska from Chapter Eight of your edition of The Age of Innocence. I'll read very briefly and maybe see what your impression is. This is of Ellen Olenska: “But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, of sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which without being in the least theatrical, struck his as highly trained and full of a conscious power. At the same time, she was simpler in manner than most of the ladies present and many people, as he heard afterward from Janie, were disappointed that her appearance was not more stylish—for stylishness was what New York most valued.” What is Wharton setting up there?

[Sheila:] Well, Wharton is setting up this sort of contrast, or we could say conflict, between the way that Ellen appears and acts, and the way that the women around her in upper-class New York society are encouraged to appear and to act. And, you know, one of the things that she does is she takes social convention very loosely, and she often is willing to question it, you know, to say: “Why do we do this?” or “Why is this our practice?” Whereas no one else around her does. But the reference there to her dress is also very significant. Um, in the opening scene at the Opera, when Ellen first appears publicly in New York society after a long period of being away in Europe, she's wearing a dress that is seen as very old-fashioned, and yet also somewhat scandalous. And it's a dress that really hearkens back to the fashions of the Napoleonic era and Napoleon's, uh, wife, Queen Josephine, who popularized a style of dress that was later known as empire—um, where it had a very sort of high waist that gathered the bust about it. Um, what's dramatic about it is that this dress does not need to be worn with a corset, and it is suggested that Ellen herself is probably not wearing a corset. So thus, she is both old-fashioned and somewhat conservative looking, and also completely scandalous at the same time.

[Mark:] Excellent. Uh, as we end our first episode, there are a couple other side characters I'd like to ask you about, and the first one is Beaufort.

[Sheila:] So, Julius Beaufort is effectively the new-money interloper in the New York social scene. And Edith Wharton always has to have at least one of these characters in her novels because they showcase the contrast between the old moneyed wealthy people and the new money upstarts who were coming in and threatening to rewrite the conventions of that old society and trample all over their ideas and their traditions and their manners. And this is what Julius Beaufort does, but nobody can say no to him because he's so stinking rich. So, that's the power that he holds, at least in the opening half of the novel, is that, um, he causes people to kind of reflect critically on their own traditions because he doesn't really care that much about them.

[Mark:] And the last character I want to ask you about is Lefferts.

[Sheila:] Ah, Lawrence Lefferts. [Laughter]

[Mark:] Yeah, what role does he play in the – in the novel?

[Sheila:] So, Lawrence Lefferts is kind of, like, the peanut gallery. He is on the sidelines, um, making comments in a way that an upstanding character like Newland Archer cannot possibly bring himself to do, because it would be perceived as unseemly or not mannered. But Lawrence Lefferts, um, he's a bit more of a sideline character, and so he has a little bit more freedom in the way he's able to speak. And he ends up kind of bringing out these parts of Newland’s, uh, consciousness, such as when he comments openly on Ellen Olenska’s body and her figure when they see her at the Opera.

[Mark:] Sheila Liming thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Thanks Sheila.

[Sheila:] Thanks very much.

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, edited by Sheila Liming, is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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