Family Allegiance in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

Family Allegiance in Edit Wharton's The Age of Innocence

It is a cliché to say that a picture is worth a thousand words. But I will state it anyway: a picture can truly be worth a thousand words. Therefore, any frame that contains the picture and alters the interpretation or viewing of the picture also affects these thousand words. This analogy pertains to the wide world of literature, in which certain frames can affect our perceptions of women and gender-related roles within families, marriages, and cultures. Edith Wharton had the unique ability to see her New York culture in a different light than her contemporaries. As she reminisces about “Old” New York, Wharton can put her picture (in this case an analogy for her novel, The Age of Innocence) in the frame of family allegiances in order to show how this frame affected women’s relationships including marriage and families, and how these relationships were perceived by the culture of “Old” New York through the characters in her novel.

The plot of The Age of Innocence revolves around Countess Olenska, who while being raised in New York is considered an immigrant to the “Old” New York society because she married and moved to Europe. Upon separating from her husband who was very cruel to her, she reunites with her cousin May and her family, and May’s new husband Newland Archer (whose family she thereby also inherits). This is where the frame of family allegiance is initially encountered in the novel. May and Newland wanted to hold off announcing their engagement until the standard cultural time period passed, but decided to go ahead with it in order to put the full force of two families behind the Countess instead of only May’s family. This cultural frame shows how the society was limited; in order to confront the taboo of possible divorce, the character’s options were restricted. Edith Wharton does a nice job of highlighting the irony of this frame: by viewing the situation and responding through this cultural frame, the characters squelched another cultural norm (the customary waiting period). Viewing it through this frame, Countess Olenska seems meek because she needs the help of her family to pull her through the situation. She is powerless to fight off an entire society who frowns on divorce, even if it is in her best interests. But Wharton does not leave it at that, because she uses her irony within the context of this frame to show that her sufferings come from this intra-family allegiance that does not give her any options.