"The Age of Innocence" - Women's Struggle With Victorian Dogma

Unlike Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Kästner’s Fabian, Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Age of Innocence (1920) is not set after World War I. In fact, her work is set prior to it at the turn of the century. She describes Old New York from late 19th and early 20th century in great detail, “New York society and customs…are described with an accuracy that is almost uncanny: to read these pages is to live again.” She also looks at the upper class, instead of middle and lower class society with its dance halls of debauchery and improper solicitations. The threat of modernity after war and depression are not factors in her work. Yet, not all of the elements and motifs seen in Kästner and Fitzgerald are absent. Wharton pays particular attention to women and social change; especially in the context of Victorian virtues and expectations. To Wharton, Old New York forced its members to follow dogmatic rules and expectations for nearly ever course of actions including: mannerisms, popular fashion, and behaviors. Scorn and exile were reserved for those that violated the social codes. These virtues and social rules were the very same rules that Flappers and the New Woman specifically debased after World War I, “Mrs. Wharton is all for the new and against the old: here, at all events, her sympathies are warm. She would never … fear youth knocking at the door.”

Like her contemporaries, Wharton was a well established author by the time she wrote The Age of Innocence. Her “admirable career” claimed the titles of The House of Mirth, Edith Frome, and several others that captivated the American and European publics. The Age of Innocence, however, won her a Pulitzer Prize. She won it for the works “silver correspondences”, its ...

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...f Innocence, Wharton looks at women’s struggle with Victorian dogma and traditionalist values of high society. Old New York high society in Wharton’s work lives by these notions in which people were ruled by the social code. The world seems innocent and free from individual thought and strife. Members of this society continue to conform to hold the status quo. Going against the grain is seen as selfish, ignoble, and scandalous. The Countess Olenska, however, is a representation of the modern woman and the symbol of the new century. She goes against the grain of society. The Countess Ellen Olenska, Ellen Mingott lives an unconventional life. She is set apart from society and its stiff rules and expected behaviors. In this Old New York society, she is a source of scandal. The Countess Olenska is an individual. She thinks and feels beyond the limitations of the group.