Tell Your Students about Edith Wharton! (The Age of Innocence, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, editor Sheila Liming returns to discuss challenges for first-time readers, the correlation between fluctuations in Wharton's reputation and historical literary (and political) trends, and whether or not The Age of Innocence is truly a love story. 

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

[Music]

[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 second of our two episodes devoted to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, as we interview its editor, Sheila Liming. In Part One, we discussed Wharton's life and career and how this novel allowed her to skewer the conventions of the Gilded Age and aristocratic New York. In this second episode, we learn more about Sheila Liming's own history with Edith Wharton: when she first encountered her work, her Age of Innocence playlist, her favorite line in this novel, her hot take, and much more. 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 back to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Sheila:] Thanks, it's a delight to be back.

[Mark:] Good to see you again, and we will continue our conversation about your Norton Library Edition of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. And Sheila, maybe the best place to start is with the book itself, the edition that you have published. Can you tell me a little bit about the cover and the color scheme?

[Sheila:] Yeah, you know I didn't get a firsthand look at the color scheme, uh, before it went to press, but then once I saw it I thought it was absolutely perfect, because to me, the color scheme—it's got this wonderful deep plum and then this very vibrant, sort of like aquamarine color on top of it—it reminds me of some of the colors that you see in really ostentatious Victorian architecture. Like, you could imagine a Painted Lady house in San Francisco or something like that [Laughter] with this color scheme. In fact, I am the owner of a Victorian house, and I have threatened to repaint it in these colors, which maybe I'll do. [Laughter]

[Mark:] You wouldn't think tho – those two colors would be so striking together. They're fantastic.

[Sheila:] I know, I like them very much too. [Laughter]

[Mark:] It's great. Do you remember when you first read Edith Wharton?

[Sheila:] Uh, yes, I do. I didn't read Edith Wharton until I was 28 years old. I was in graduate school, um, and I was in a class, uh, one of the last classes I took as part of my coursework for my PhD, and it was on American Literary Realism. And I remember that I read The House of Mirth in that class, and I became very angry that nobody had told me about Edith Wharton earlier. Like, here I had been studying, you know, English and American literature for about 10 years, you know, undergrad and graduate school, and I was like: I can't believe nobody has brought this to my attention until now. Because not only was I really sort of entranced by the plot of the House of Mirth and drawn in by the literary style of it, but it also seemed so, um, timely to so many political concerns that I was interested in as well, and I was like: Where has this been hiding, you know, basically all my career? So, from there I started on, you know, a course of reading as much Edith Wharton as I possibly could, and it kind of turned into a central piece of my dissertation as well, so that gave me an excuse to keep doing that.

[Mark:] It's kind of surprising to hear you say that because do you think that Edith Wharton is underrated generally?

[Sheila:] I think sometimes she can be. Um, and I think there are some stereotypes that have kind of grown up around her. Like, at one point in time her novella, Ethan Frome, which was published in 1911, was required reading in American high schools. There were whole generations of people who read this book and, I think, largely suffered through it.

[Mark:] Because it's short, right?

[Sheila:] It is short. [Laughter] It is short but it's brutal, right? I just taught it last week in a class, and I'm not sure that anybody under the age of 18 is really ready to sympathize with what happens in that book. Like, it's – it's really, um, it's very mature and it's a book about disappointment, so it's hard to teach to, you know, 15-year-olds. I don't think she's, um, taught in high school curricula, certainly as much as she used to be in that way, in fact, probably not at all. But I also think that she has a few stereotypes that became attached to her over time. A lot of people came to see her as sort of, like, the American Jane Austen, you know, that she's a woman who writes essentially marriage plots and is therefore writing to a largely female audience and, well, you can guess how all her books end. But I don't think that's true at all. Um, for instance, in The Age of Innocence, if this were a Jane Austen novel it would end with a wedding, but we get a wedding about halfway through, and, actually, the wedding is the thing that causes all the problems that come afterwards. [Laughter] So, it's a very different structure from Jane Austen.

[Mark:] Do you think that The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920) are companion novels? Do you think that there's a gap either in attitude or style in those 15 years, or you think that if you like one, you're apt to like the other?

[Sheila:] I think you can view them as part of a suite of novels that Edith Wharton wrote concerning New York City in particular, and centering on New York City as a location and a setting. They are quite different. Um, one reason being that The House of Mirth, published in 1905, is contemporary to the time of its writing, um, its setting is really taking place right around that time period, whereas The Age of Innocence is a historical novel, it's looking backwards and it's almost seeking to historicize the setting that we see in The House of Mirth. So, there are certainly things that the two novels have in common, as her other New York novels do too, but they're also quite different in their tone.

 [Mark:] Sheila, can you describe how – how you went from being introduced to Edith Wharton at age 28, and then incorporating her into your scholarship?

[Sheila:] Um, well at the time when I read my first Edith Wharton novel, I was getting ready to write a dissertation that I knew was going to be on American women authors, um, really around the late 19th century/early 20th century, that's the period I was focusing on. Um, and I was focusing on the period that worked up to the moment of Women's Emancipation – Emancipation and, uh, Suffrage in the United States, which was gained in 1919 and 1920. So, I was kind of tracking that movement politically, uh, when I became interested in her work. And she ended up forming a chapter of my dissertation—um, you know, a small part at the time—because I was thinking about the arguments that these women literary authors had been using, uh, to their own political advantage that came from evolutionary science, where they were thinking about and reading and, really, um, interacting with evolutionary science. So, that became a kind of sub-focus of the argument that I was building in my dissertation, and then when I got my first job and became a professor and started to write a book, I decided that I wanted to go all in on Edith Wharton. She had become a special topic of fascination for me, and I decided to kind of take that one chapter and expand it into a larger book, um, looking at her in particular.

[Mark:] You sort of touched on this a little bit earlier when you said that there is a common stereotype of Edith Wharton as being of a – of a certain disposition or maybe even old-fashioned. What are the common challenges for new readers to The Age of Innocence?

[Sheila:] One challenge, I think, is the diction, meaning the vocabulary that she uses. Even though at the time her vocabulary would have been seen as somewhat pedestrian, um, and accessible to an average reader, it is old-fashioned to us. And that has to do a lot with the specific vocabulary that relates to, like, the style and the trends of her period as well. So, one of the things, um, I work to do in my footnotes in my Norton Library Edition is unpack a lot of that very specialized vocabulary so that modern readers can figure out what it is that she's getting at. Um, a lot of it has to do with things like fashion and style or transportation, like styles of carriages and things like that, that we just wouldn't know, um, how to interpret now, but it's actually just relevant to the historical setting of her time period, and that's why she's including such detail along those lines. So, the vocabulary is one challenge. I think the second challenge is the pacing of the book, is that the book does not open with a kind of dramatic bang or anything like that, it warms up to its subject, and it warms up to this love triangle that we see brewing between Ellen, May, and Newland. But it does so slowly: by giving you insight into each of these characters and, you know, what their backgrounds are and what they're thinking and feeling, especially Newland; and by showing us that – that trouble's on the horizon, but it's going to take us a while to arrive at it. Um, so, she does this kind of slow build towards the central conflict in her novel, and it takes a while for us to get there.

[Mark:] That's really interesting. In fact, and you mentioned this a couple of times, including the – our earlier episode, where you say that the opening scene is just at an opera, and it's kind of like the – the various players are looking at one another to see, sort of establish, what's going on. It's kind of a curious opening scene, wouldn't you say?

[Sheila:] It is, yes. The initial opera scene: it takes place in January. It would have been right after the New Year, and there's this whole sense of newness in that scene, that we're, like, starting fresh. So, Newland Archer is newly engaged, the ball season has just started in New York society, which was the, um, time period in which there were a lot of indoor gatherings, um, after the holidays and things like that, but it was also, usually, the start of the marriage market season. So, this is when young women would often be debuted—like Edith Wharton herself was—and where they would sort of start that process of getting ready to find a suitable husband for themselves. So, she gets her characters into position and into costume, and she puts them in this opera. Um, and the opera is just the entertainment that sort of comes before the main deal of what's happening later that night. And it's a way of getting the ball rolling, but in a seemingly very low stakes way that ends up having much bigger stakes, as we see later down the line. 

[Mark:] Well, Sheila, here's my definitely – my most unfair question of this interview, [Laughter] and that is: do you have a favorite line in The Age of Innocence, of all of the lines?

[Sheila:] Oh my goodness, a favorite line? There are many. You know, Edith Wharton has a very kind of snide sort of style sometimes. She can be very subtle in the way that she presents things, but one of my favorite lines in the novel occurs with the way she narrates the action in a scene that occurs about, mmm, a third of the way through, and this is the first scene where Ellen and Newland come close to talking about the status of their relationship. They don't quite open up about it, but, um, this is a scene that takes place in a small cottage of a vacation estate located in upstate New York. Ellen has run away for the weekend, basically to get away from Julius Beaufort who's been, uh, pursuing her, and it's hinted maybe Newland as well. And then Newland chases her there. He shows up, they're in this little cottage together on the vacation estate, and it's snowing outside. And Newland envisions Ellen, quote, “Stealing up behind him and throwing her light arms about his neck.” [Laughter] And this is the first scene where he basically openly admits to his desire. But notice the way she narrates the action: that he imagines her coming on to him, not the other way around. And I just love the way Edith Wharton does that. That in his mind, all he has to do is stand still and she will just come to him. He won't have to do anything.

 [Mark:] Tells you a lot about the character, doesn't it?

[Sheila:] It does, yes.

[Mark:] Yeah, that's great. [Laughter] I am going to do something equally unfair, [Laughter] and that is to throw a line that really stood out to me. And that is the line: “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend.”

[Sheila:] Mmm.

[Mark:] So, that's Ellen Olenska’s description of what it’s like to be here in New York.

[Sheila:] Right.

[Mark:] Uh, what does that say to you, "the real loneliness?” And they – she calls the people kind, also.

[Sheila:] It's searing, right, because what she's saying is that there is this outward performance of kindness without an inward or emotional follow through and commitment to it. Uh, remember that Ellen has come to New York seeking freedom. She's tried to get away from her husband who she has left, and she is sort of hoping to seek out a divorce in the United States that will really free her from him. But when she gets there, what she finds is largely opposition, including from Newland himself, who originally tells her that, like: well, if you divorce him, you are going to bring scandal upon your family, and I am entering your family because I'm marrying your cousin, so for my own sake, I don't want you to do this. And what she realizes is that everyone is really out for themselves, and they are not concerned for her, her situation, or her well-being. So, on the surface they're very kind to her, they're very sympathetic, but underneath that kindness is this, you know, ulterior motive that really just says, like, don't do anything to damage my prospects.

[Mark:] Yeah, and maybe one other moment of Wharton's writing, Sheila, that I could ask you to – to talk about, and you hinted at this in your fa – favorite line. So, there's this moment when Newland Archer sees Ellen Olenska as a figure against the horizon. And he almost – he sees her alone, and he's alone, and he just sees her in the distance and kind of describes her and then describes what's going through himself. It's a very – kind of an iconic moment. What's your – what are your remarks about that moment?

[Sheila:] Well, Newland is always seeing Ellen from a distance, right. Um, that is his way of interacting with her. First, because of the – the rules that govern social manners. Like, he really can't get that close to her while still, um, maintaining this air of propriety about his own relationship with her cousin and his marriage to be and everything like that. But second, I actually don't think he wants to get that close to her all the time because he's afraid of finding out who she really is. He likes his vision of her that he's created in his head. He likes that fantasy even more than, I think, he's going to like the real person when he gets up close and gets to know her. And so, for that reason, he's often kind of, like, viewing her from a distance.

[Mark:] Do you teach this book frequently?

[Sheila:] I teach it occasionally, not as frequently as I would like to.

[Mark:] How do you tend to present this to students, and are there techniques that tend to be successful?

[Sheila:] Well, I often present it in terms of a love triangle story, because it is. Um, and a lot of Edith Wharton’s novels depend on some kind of, like triangular arrangements. There's a lot of great juicy conflict to be found in a triangle setup, because you know that something has to be eliminated when you run into a triangle: something's got to give, and someone's going to have to be taken out of that scenario. So, I present it to them in that way, but I also try to present it to them as, um you know, a novel that is very, like, concerned about the timeliness of its particular moment. In this case, I'm talking about two moments. I’m talking about the 1870s as the historical period, and I'm also talking about the late 1910s or 1920 when it's actually published. It is definitely participating in conversations that were going on during that later time period, even as it's reflecting on that earlier one as well. So, I try to talk to students about how historical fiction really encodes the desires, the anxieties, the conflicts of the present moment in which it's written. And I think that's something that, you know, a lot of us as literary scholars, we know, but The Age of Innocence really maps that very clearly in showing us how it's thinking about both of those things simultaneously.

[Mark:] Excellent point, that's really interesting. Sheila Liming, do you have a hot take on The Age of Innocence, something counterintuitive where you're swimming against the stream from prevailing wisdom?

[Sheila:] For decades, The Age of Innocence has been perceived as a love story, and my argument is that it isn't, not really, um, because we really only see one of the players in that love story clearly. The other player who's involved in it does not have the freedom or agency to show us how she feels about the romance, and we never really know for sure the depth of her involvement in it. Is she just being nice? Is she just playing the game because she feels like she doesn't have another option? We don't know. So, my hot take is that this is not the love story that people for generations made it out to be, um, that it's much more complicated than that, in fact.

[Mark:] So, if it's not a love story, is it, what, a societal examination?

[Sheila:] Yes, I think it's a novel of manners and I think it's an anthropological investigation of a particular moment in time. And it is, um, told with great detail and also with a fair amount of cynicism, prompting you to think very critically about some of the plot elements that it shows you, including that love story which is only made possible because of the social conditions of that moment.

[Mark:] Well, that's amazing if it's an anthropological investigation disguised as this kind of spicy love triangle with – with all of these other elements that's – that makes the novel even more genius to – to think about.

[Sheila:] I agree.

[Mark:] Since 1920, how has this book been adapted or repurposed, represented to readers in ways other than the novel itself?

[Sheila:] Well Edith Wharton, um, died in 1937 and when she did die, even though she had continued to write, uh, more novels basically up until the point of her death, her reputation was a little bit in decline. Um, that was partially due to the ascendance of literary modernism and some other movements that made her style of writing look just a little bit old-fashioned. And for the immediate generation that pe – that followed in the 1940s and the 1950s, she really was not held in very high regard. Her reputation was resuscitated, uh, really beginning in the 1980s. That's when a lot of feminist scholars started to come back to her work and think about it in the light of feminist politics and gender and other considerations that weren't really, um, spotlighted back in the 1940s and ’50s after her death. And people came back to novels like The Age of Innocence. And then in the 1990s, we got a very high-profile movie adaptation that was made by the film director Martin Scorsese, and that really launched her name back into orbit. After that, there was more interest in her other novels as well because suddenly, we were seeing her novel come to life and also seeing what kind of a legacy she had left behind. Um, Scorsese's vision for his film adaptation is really lush and it's very beautiful and it really brings that moment of 1870s New York to life for us in a way that, I think, a lot of people could, you know, get into, really sink their teeth into. And that really helped her literary reputation, um, from that point on, I think.

[Mark:] As somebody who has worked with The Age of Innocence and obviously means a lot to you, does Scorsese's movie do it justice and do you recommend it?

[Sheila:] Well, yes and no. Um, I think it does the plot a lot of justice and it certainly does, um, takes great care where the conflict is concerned. Uh, I saw an interview with Scorsese once where he called The Age of Innocence his most violent film that he'd ever made, and this is the guy who made Gangs of New York. [Laughter] So, it is kind of funny to think about that, because we don't see any outward violence, of course, in that film. We just see all that, you know, internal, like scheming and backbiting and things like that. Um, but I do have one small complaint with the movie, and that's the way that the costumes are rendered. Fashion is so important as a symbolic system for communication in The Age of Innocence, and certain parts of the fashion in the film version are misrepresented to the point where those symbolic meanings are lost. And that, I think, is the only, uh, sort of drawback to that movie is that, you know, it just doesn't have that eye for the detailed fashion that Wharton had when she was writing the book.

[Mark:] Do you find that Scorsese is sympathetic and sensitive to the female viewpoint, either May’s or Ellen's or both of them?

[Sheila:] I think he certainly tries. Um, and one of the things we get in that film are the voiceover narrations from the characters when they're writing to each other. This was like a really important, you know, communication system, of course in the 1870s historically speaking, but it was also, like, one of the few ways that people could kind of interact with each other in an intimate way if they weren't directly family members or if they weren't married. So, we do see this kind of like intimate portrayal of – of female characters’ consciousness through their voiceover narrations in the letters they write, um, to Newland and things like that, where they're kind of like, um, explaining their own viewpoints. I think the film wouldn't be the same without that. So, even though that is sometimes, like, a controversial method—you know those voiceover narrations can really divide a movie-going public—I think they provide some of that interiority that Wharton tried to give us in her book too.

[Mark:] You mentioned that we start the novel with an opera. Does the novel inspire you to conceive of a playlist or other aspects of music that go along with The Age of Innocence?

[Sheila:] Well, there's certainly a lot of music in the book. You know, there's the Gounod opera in the opening scene, um, and there's multiple references to especially classical music, uh, music that would have been heard in public or at certain kinds of celebrations. For example, there's a lot of discussion about the march that's going to be played at May and Newland’s wedding, um, which would have been the traditional Wagner, um, you know, uh, Wedding March. And as, uh, Newland is getting closer and closer to that date, the book mentions that he can hear that march in his head, which is symbolically kind of, you know, showing for us the way that he's, uh, sort of fearing what's going to lay ahead for him too. So, if I was going to update this and, you know, think about a playlist that I would lend to the book, I would try to think about popular songs of the day that are used to mark occasions. Um, and I don't know if I have any particular coming to mind, but you know these kind of like – like that first dance at a wedding type of song, like the kind of pressure that goes into planning for those kinds of things and thinking about the competing interests of the bride and the groom in that moment, which showcases some of the tension that we see in The Age of Innocence.

[Mark:] Excellent. Sheila, you were mentioning a little bit earlier the endnotes to your volume in the Norton Library and how – what your strategy was in providing them. One of the endnotes that I found particularly interesting was—yes, I know I'm the type of person who reads all the endnotes—you mentioned Herbert Spencer. And earlier you were talking about your interest in Social Darwinism and Wharton's engagement in that, and I wonder if you can expand on that just a little bit?

[Sheila:] I’ve discovered the link between Wharton and Herbert Spencer from spending time in Wharton's library, uh, because Wharton herself owned a lot of books from evolutionary psychology and evolutionary science. Uh, she was reading up on these topics through her own kind of ad hoc, you know um, private education that she enjoyed when she was younger, and she was interested in theories of human evolution, especially on a psychological level: like how we progress and move forward as a psychological thinking species. So, I included some of the footnotes in there that make references to these texts that she was reading, because I think we see them show up in places in The Age of Innocence, where she's thinking about this, uh, very cutthroat society that we see among upper-class people in New York. Almost on the level of like survival of the fittest, where they are trying to weed out unfit elements so as to secure a very, like um, successful future for their own kind. And that is effectively what happens to Ellen in the plot. She is deemed to be unfit due to her social foibles and her inability to pay attention to manners and things like that and her iconoclasm, and that's one of the reasons why she is, um, effectively eliminated from it.

[Mark:] So, Social Darwinism refers to economics or society or both?

[Sheila:] Both. Both, effectively, right? Yeah, to both, um, ensuring economic resources and ensuring the people who are in control of them, while also, um, thinking that the people who are on the top deserve to be there, because they are more socially fit and have more resilience and more skills than other people.

[Mark:] Is there an element that the characters in this novel have to either adapt to the prevailing way that con – you know, the conventions of society or they get killed off? Is that also an element of Social Darwinism or am I misunderstanding it?

[Sheila:] No it absolutely is, yeah. And, um, Newland Archer's character is somebody who we see kind of balanced on the brink. Um, in the opening he's basically flirting with fantasies of what happens if he refuses to adapt, if he goes a different route, if he becomes an iconoclast like Ellen. And then he eventually realizes that that will just bring a lot of inconvenience for him, um, and he does sort of adjust to a life that is within keeping of the standards of his society. So, he does adapt, and towards the end of the book, we see him having some doubts or some feelings of reluctance about the choices that he's made.

[Mark:] There's another reference that may be along the lines of what you're talking about or it may only be tangentially related, but I'm going to take a chance and you can let me know, cause this was something else that one of your endnotes cleared up. And in Chapter 10 there's a reference to a Kentucky Cave Fish. [Laughter] Maybe I'm just saying this cause I'm close to Kentucky where I speak right now, but do you remember that – that example, and if we can tie it into this notion of Social Darwinism?

[Sheila:] Right this is the – the fish that was blind, right?

[Mark:] Yes.

[Sheila:] Because it was, like, reared in the dark and so it didn't have, um, really the necessity of sight in the first place, so it hadn't evolved to be able to see. And, like, Newland Archer is using it as a kind of metaphor, um, where he refers to it in the novel as basically thinking, like, that, um, if you're reared in certain circumstances, you become blind to the realities of those circumstances if there isn't, like, an evolutionary or a need for you to actually understand the truth of them. And he's using that as, I think, kind of an excuse for himself as well.

[Mark:] Is it, and is it possible, like, someone like May who has lived a sheltered existence, or we think has lived a sheltered existence, may not have had an evolutionary need to become a fully evolved, individuated woman?

[Sheila:] It's possible, at least in Newland Archer's vision of May, right. Um, and that is very much how he sees her, as he – as someone for whom, um, innocence is actually like the credo of her being. That's actually what draws him to her, is that he sees her as very innocent and unaware of the kind of politics and the, like, mechanisms that really, you know, subtend this whole society and create all these, uh, these structures. But of course, what we learn as the novel goes on is that May is not innocent, she is not stupid, she knows what's going on, she's smarter than she lets on but she has to pretend to be kind of dumb on the surface, um, and that she really sees a lot more than she allows Newland to understand she sees.

[Mark:] The narrator says, through Newland’s perspective, "What if when he had bidden May Welland to open hers [her eyes], they could only look out blankly at blankness?" And this is going to be his wife...

[Sheila:] Right.

[Mark:] ...so it's such an, it's such an incredible moment. Sheila, you mentioned that Wharton has this knack of capturing in this historical novel both the 1870s and also the 1920s, or what's about to become the 1920s. And as we read this 100 years later, I wonder what this novel says to readers in the 21st century. What's the contemporary relevance of The Age of Innocence?

[Sheila:] Well, I think it contributes to a lot of modern discussions about gender, um, about female agency, um, about social politics occurring on a variety of levels, of course, economic class as well. I do think it's very significant that the book was published in 1920, right around the time period in which the 19th Amendment was passed and gave women the right to vote, and I also think that there are ways that we can kind of see Ellen Olenska’s character as sort of mapping onto the renegade female figures of the 1920s. And I'm thinking here about, like, the flappers. Um, you can imagine this novel being set in a contemporary period—being written in the late 1910s and then published in 1920—and being about a flapper-like character embodied by Ellen, because she has some of that same spirit of iconoclasm. Um, so I think Wharton was definitely thinking about those concerns, and those concerns, of course, continue to speak to the world that we live in today. I often think of the fact that it wasn't even until 1974 that a woman in America could apply for a credit card in her own name, and the novel really revolves around the conflict that comes from Ellen Olenska’s inability to own property, which would have made her divorce so much simpler. Um, it's not a big deal for her to get divorced if she can retain some of her own property that she's put into it, but because she can't, it's huge. Getting divorced will effectively make her penniless. So, that's one of the conflicts that we see there, too, that continues to circulate in our culture today.

[Mark:] So, when we look at these rules (written and unwritten),social conventions, no-no's, taboos that Wharton is describing, is our 21st century culture – have we relaxed them? Are we more forgiving? Are we less forgiving? Where do we stand in comparison to the society that Wharton is dramatizing?

[Sheila:] Well, I think we continue to exist in a state of, um, conflict and ambiguity where a lot of these issues are concerned. We see that discourse all over the place these days, where we are having conversations about, um, you know what roles, uh, women can fulfill in public life, about whether or not people will vote for a female presidential candidate, um, or if really there ought to be this movement in getting women back to more traditional roles and fulfilling more kind of traditional, um you know uh, niches within the social structure. So, I don't think those conversations are over by any means. I think we continue to have them. We use new vocabulary sometimes when we talk about them, but they are ongoing as they have been since she wrote this book.

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

[Sheila:] Thanks so 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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