Dylan Perles
Edith Wharton was skeptical of modernism and rejected the movement’s formal experimentation. However, as Jennifer Haycock argues in Edith Wharton in Context, “modernism is not defined merely as an era; rather it encompasses, addresses, and provokes a number of issues, including subject choice, writing style, relationship to the marketplace, ideas about gender, sexuality, race, technology, and many more” (364). According to this broader definition of the movement, Wharton is a modernist because her fiction includes the type of social commentary that one would typically associate with modernist writers. One paradigm that exists throughout most of her fiction is her unyielding critique of gender roles and society’s treatment of women. The plight of women at the hands of a patriarchal society is at the center of many of her novels, including The Age of Innocence. Published in 1920, The Age of Innocence is a look back on the Old New York of Edith Wharton’s childhood and adolescence. However, the novel is less a nostalgic trip down memory lane and more of, as Wharton scholar Elizabeth Ammons argues, an “autopsy” (Ammons 435). Wharton reserves her harshest social commentary for Old New York’s treatment of women. Much scholarship has been dedicated to the gendered hardships that force the free-spirited Ellen Olenska out of New York’s high society. However, this paper concerns The Age of Innocence’s less-discussed heroine: May Welland.
In 1896, more than 20 years before Wharton created May, she published a parable titled “The Valley of Childish Things.” Wharton tells the story of a young girl who grows tired of simply playing with the other children in the Valley. Eager to learn more about the world, the child leaves her companions and begins the difficult climb out of the Valley. She becomes educated through her experiences in the real world and, in the process, becomes a woman. After spending a long time on the surface, the woman returns to the Valley and shares what she has learned with her former playmates. On the journey back, she meets a man whom she soon recognizes as one of her childhood companions; he evidently also left the Valley and matured in the real world. The two decide to continue their journey together, and along the way they discuss all the ways that they could improve society. Upon returning to the Valley, the woman is stunned that none of her companions have aged and is hurt that none of them want to interact with her anymore. Frustrated by their treatment, the woman turns to the man for companionship because he is the only other grown person in the Valley. However, the story ends thus:
But he was on his knees before a dear little girl with blue eyes…The little girl was clapping her hands and crowing (she was too young to speak articulately); and when she who had grown to be a woman laid her hand on the man’s shoulder, and asked him if he did not want to set to work with her… he replied that at that particular moment he was too busy. And as she turned away, he added in the kindest possible way, “Really, my dear, you ought to have taken better care of your complexion.” (Wharton 285)
Wharton’s parable, which is a commentary about how a patriarchal society’s ideal woman is kept so uninformed that she is essentially still a child, anticipates May’s role in The Age of Innocence. This essay will argue that Wharton created May to critique high society’s obsession with infantilizing young women.
May is aesthetically and symbolically linked to purity and innocence from the first moment she is introduced. Readers catch their first glimpse of May in the novel’s opening scene when Newland spies the “young girl in white” sitting with her family at the opera:
a warm pink mounted to the girl’s cheek, mantled her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a single gardenia. She dropped her eyes to the immense bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee, and Newland Archer saw her white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly. (5)
Newland’s description of May includes many references to her being “white” or “fair,” a trend that will continue for the rest of the novel. In doing so, Wharton connects May with the pure and virginal iconography that one would typically associate with a young debutante. Wharton, with her keen eye for detail and the intricacies of Old New York trends, uses fashion and aesthetics to solidify her characterization. May is wearing a “tulle tucker,” a fashionable style worn by many young women, in which netting or lace is draped over the chest when wearing a low-cut bodice to preserve modesty (5). May is also wearing two flowers: lilies-of-the-valley and gardenias. The flowers’ link to purity extends beyond the color symbolism of their white petals. According to the language of flowers, gardenias mean “purity and gentleness,” and lilies-of-the-valley mean “return to happiness” and “humility” (Kirby 169, 171). Wharton, quite literally, adorns May in symbols and indicators of purity through aesthetics and color symbolism before readers even learn her name, indicating the importance of such a characterization.
A historical reading of The Age of Innocence reveals May’s purity and innocence as Old New York’s paragon of femininity. “It’s just my old-fashioned feeling,” says Mrs. Archer to her son after his engagement to May is announced, “dear May is my ideal” (Wharton 95). The “ideal” that Mrs. Archer describes can also be referred to as “True Womanhood,” a term that emerged in the 19th century to describe the demure housewife as opposed to the “New Woman” or “Gibson Girl” who flaunted her rejection of social mores. Barbara Welter explains that the attributes of True Womanhood could be divided into four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. “Put them all together,” Welter writes, “and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman” (152). Among these cardinal virtues, purity was perhaps the most significant because fallen women could never achieve the stability and protection that accompanied marriage. Many self-help books were published on the subject, and most young women with May’s upbringing would have been familiar with them. In The Young Lady’s Friend, an 19th century guide to etiquette, Mrs. Eliza Farrar expounds a number of methods to maintain innocence, including helpful suggestions such as not sitting with a man in a space that is too narrow, not reading from a book with a man, and never standing with one’s head in close proximity to a man (155). The late 19th century fear that women would lose their purity was so extreme that it was even reflected in the language of flowers– a dried white rose symbolized “death preferable to loss of innocence” (154).
Wharton is quick to point out that May’s innocence is socially constructed as opposed to innate. While ruminating on May, Newland describes her innocence as a “terrifying product of the social system” (Wharton 28). If May’s innocence and purity are “products” then the women in her family are the manufacturers. Newland continues, “Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent[…]And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses” (29-30). Here, we see Wharton criticizing not May but the culture that shaped her. The socially constructed innocence of young women at the hands of their older female relatives was enforced through Old New York’s coming out culture. Coming out was synonymous with entering society (and therefore the marriage market), so it was every family’s primary goal to cultivate a winning prize. A debutante’s frock, ribbons, hair, and flowers would have been regulated by her mother to create the “essential” image of “simple girlishness” (Knights 225). Maintaining a virginal and youthful aesthetic was not a mother’s only role. She and the other married women in the family, or “Married Maidens,” would have regulated the debutante’s behavior to ensure that she attracted a husband. Given Wharton’s critique of May’s upbringing, it is not surprising that Wharton miserably described her own coming out as a “long cold agony of shyness” (Lewis 272). Newland was correct that the practice he describes is oppressive, but he is wrong about who is being oppressed. To Wharton, it is the women trapped in the cycle of learned and enforced gender roles that deserve sympathy, not the men that are beguiled by their artificial charms. It is essential to note that May is not an outlier; she is merely one example of a broader trend. One needs to look no further for proof than the descriptions of all the “girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms” on Beaufort’s ballroom floor (Wharton 16). In describing all the young unmarried women with the same language used to describe May, Wharton alludes to the generational manufacturing of innocent, idyllic young women.
May’s artificially constructed and socially maintained innocence might make her Old New York’s ideal but certainly not Wharton’s. Instead, Wharton argues that the innocence prized in young women is actually just ignorance dressed up with muslin and flowers to look appealing. The ideal young woman is submissive, polite, hopefully pretty, and above all ignorant. Her ignorance is perhaps her most important attribute because it allows her to be controlled. Society was keenly aware of the danger that informed women posed to the social order established by the patriarchy. In order to keep young women trapped in their intellectual infancy, many publications were outspoken about the threat that reading posed to women’s constitutions, especially books that dared to question gender roles. A review of Harriet Martineau’s Society in America, a sociological study of American culture, argued that young women should not read it because their “gentle yielding natures” rendered them susceptible to the “the bold ravings of the hard-featured of their own sex” which could cause them to “throw the world back… into confusion” by straying from their “true stations” (Welter 166).
Wharton comments on May’s enforced ignorance through her descriptions of May’s eyes. The first time May’s eyes are introduced they are described as “distant” and “bent on some ineffable vision” (Wharton 16). Newland’s descriptions of May’s eyes is a motif throughout the rest of the novel. He, like most men in the late 19th century, believes that it is his duty as a husband to “lift the bandage” from his young wife’s eyes so that he can chivalrously introduce her to the broader world (Wharton 52). However, Newland wonders if her innocence and ignorance are so solidified that she will only ever be able to look “blankly at blankness” once her metaphorical bandage is removed. He even compares her to a species of Kentucky cavefish that does not have eyes at all because they do not need them in the darkness of their natural habitat (52). Her eyes are also described as “serious” (28), “light… almost pale” (88), “limp[id]” (91), “too-clear” (188), and “transparent” (94). If the old saying is true and the eyes are the window to the soul, then May’s void-like eyes reveal the deep ignorance that society prized and cultivated in respectable young women. My reading of May’s eyes is supported by Wharton herself when she writes that it is May’s “unawareness” that gave her eyes their “transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person” (115).
May’s innocence also extends to sexual ignorance. In the novel’s famous opening scene at the opera, May watches the performers while Newland watches her. As she watches the opera’s seduction scene, Newland marvels, “the darling!.. She doesn’t even guess what it’s all about” (5). May’s naïvity during the sexual scene in the opera anticipates the sexual ignorance that one comes to associate with May. Newland often turns to mythology to describe her. Young and (theoretically) in love, one would assume that Newland would compare his new bride to a Goddess of marriage or love or passion. Instead, Newland repeatedly compares May to Diana, the patron of young girls and the Goddess of virginity, to highlight her youthful and virginal behavior (42, 118, 184). For instance, he recalls her “Diana-like aloofness” after their unsatisfactory kiss the night they announced their engagement (128).
Most notably, Newland is unable to detect any sexual undertones from May the first moment they are alone after their wedding. He initially interprets her desire to compare detailed notes on the ceremony as an attempt to disguise an “inward tremor” (115). Wharton’s diction is significant because the word “tremor” could equally indicate fear or excitement for their wedding night. However, Newland soon determines that May does not appear to express either apprehension or arousal and is simply the oblivious “girl of yesterday” (115). May’s sexual ignorance would have been common for young women of her upbringing — something with which Wharton herself was painfully familiar. When reflecting on her own wedding, Wharton recalls that on the eve of the ceremony she begged her mother to tell her what she should expect, crying, “I’m afraid Mamma – I want to know what will happen to me,” but her mother refused to tell her (Lewis 272). Wharton credited her mother’s failure to educate her on what accompanied marriage with having “falsifi[ed] and misdirect[ed]” her whole life (272).
May Welland is pretty, cheerful, athletic, virginal, and innocent to the point of ignorance about the ways of the world – all attributes that make her an Old New York’s ideal young lady. They also make her sound like a child. The novel’s title references a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of a young girl in a white dress. The title also applies to May, who is trapped in eternal girlhood like the little girl in the painting. . May’s status as a child-woman is solidified towards the beginning of the novel when Newland remarks that he is grateful that men are allowed to have a more colorful past before marriage because if men were brought up the same way as women, he and May “would have been no more fit to find their way about than the Babes in the Wood” (Wharton 30). Here, we see the return of the critique that Wharton began in the “Valley of Childish Things.” Old New York’s preference for the virginal and innocent May over the sensual, free-thinking Ellen echoes the moment in the “Valley of Childish Things” when the grown man chooses the babbling child over the grown woman.
In her reflections on her life, essays, and other works of fiction, Wharton was particularly outspoken about America’s preference for child-women. In Wharton’s New Year’s Day, she refers to young women as simply being “passed from the nursery to marriage as if lifted from one rose-lined cradle into another” (Ammons 147). Her argument continues in her book French Ways and Their Meaning, in which she claims that, compared with the women of France, the average American woman is “still in the kindergarten” (Wharton 289). She justifies such a bold claim by elaborating that the function of kindergarten is to let children develop in a regulated bubble. Like a kindergartener, American women develop within the confines of a strict social sphere that monitors their every move. She writes that the average American woman never fully develops intellectually because she is “developing…in the void,” without the “checks, the stimulus, and the discipline” of the dominant masculine world because the society that she belongs to does not place an equal intellectual value on men and women (290).
Such a sentiment is supported in The Age of Innocence when Newland transitions from reading poetry to history in the evenings to thwart May’s attempts to offer her own opinions on the poems, something he finds “destructive” to the reading experience (Wharton 177). Newland rejects May’s attempt to converse with him about poetry because he does not believe her to be his intellectual equal. Scholar Gwendolyn Morgan argues that Newland cannot see May’s latent intelligence because he keeps May in a “doll house,” which is where society has taught him she belongs (Morgan 39). Here, Wharton solidifies May Welland’s status as a tragic heroine. The poetry incident is just one example of Newland underestimating May because of how she was raised; another occurs when May catches Newland lying about developments in a patent case so that he can visit Ellen. May is more aware than other characters, especially Newland, give her credit for. However, she is too enmeshed in the Old New York society to reach her full intellectual potential. To me, the truly tragic character in The Age of Innocence is not one of the star-crossed lovers, but the young woman who was set up to fail by her own family and her own society before the events of the book even began.
Wharton was likely so outspoken about the enforced infantilization of young women in order to offer a more realistic female perspective on the American Girl popularized in literature at the turn-of-the-century. Authors such as Henry James romanticized the young, unmarried American girl, a trend that would continue as the modernist movement progressed. “New Women” and “Gibson Girl” characters like Daisy Miller and Isabelle Archer were depicted as symbols of modernity because of their freedom (or,at the very least, their illusion of freedom) and their desire to challenge gender roles (Elaman-Garner 3). However, Wharton’s depictions of socially mandated feminine ignorance in The Age of Innocence reveal that the real American Girl was often a product of a system that had failed her. “In May,”Ammons writes, “Wharton takes selected virtues of the American girl: her innocence, her physical vigor, her cheerfulness and vivacity, her wholesomeness and self-confidence, and links them to a forever virginal goddess of death… May Welland is empty. She is, in addition, living the pinnacle of American society, America’s Dream Girl” (Ammons 438). Wharton attacks the social preference for May and women like May through her ruthless depiction of May’s manufactured innocence. To Wharton, the real American Girl is not independent, and she is certainly not free-thinking. She is, in reality, cultivated and manicured through social mores to be the ignorant child-woman that will make the ideal housewife.
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