she has been all along; she is the woman Newland fell in love with. After meeting Ellen, though, Newland begins to compare the two and finds May lacking.

Ellen knows this and tries to enlighten him in chapter 29, when he picks her up at the train station in the carriage. Newland tells Ellen he wants to run away with her to a place "where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter." She responds with a laugh and says, "Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?" She knows what he does not—that they can never be together the way he wants them to be.

Whether or not Newland might have followed through with his decision to pursue Ellen to Europe is a question little considered in criticism of the novel. A strong argument can be made that Newland would not have gone under any circumstances. Newland does follow Ellen to Skuytercliff and Boston, and these relatively nearby destinations represent the lengths he will go to in order to be with her. While these trips are somewhat thrilling in their clandestine nature, they also are quite safe for Newland. He can easily fabricate reasons for the trips. His home life carries on as usual while he sneaks off to see the woman he loves. On the other hand, actually following her to Europe would be a monumental act. Newland would be forced to wholly give up his safe and comfortable existence in New York, become an outcast, and bring shame on his entire family. He has seen firsthand what becomes of people who are evicted from "the clan," and, he would not really be able to put himself (and Ellen) in that terrible position.

Newland never tells Ellen he plans to leave May and go with her to Europe, which is another indication that he was not really prepared to go. It is exciting to think about and makes him feel alive, but if he were truly committed to taking action, surely he would have at least mentioned his intentions to Ellen.

He hints, as when he tells her goodbye and adds, "[B]ut I shall see you soon in Paris!" Ellen responds, "Oh, if you and May could come—!" Newland never tells Ellen of his plans for two reasons. First, he needs to keep available the option of backing out, and perhaps knows all along that when the moment comes, he will not go. Second, he realizes that if he tells Ellen, she will not react with the delight he hopes for, but rather with outright refusal. She may even tell him that she never wants to see him again because the arrangement they made was that they would never do anything to hurt May.

As an interesting aside, it should be noted that early drafts of the novel showed Newland running away with Ellen. Wharton was unable, however, to figure out a way to create happiness for the lovers. With so little in common, and so few shared tastes, Newland and Ellen would be unable to find enough common ground to have a meaningful and lasting relationship. This demonstrates how, once characters are created, even the author cannot force them to be happy and satisfied in ways that are inconsistent with who they are.

When May tells Newland she is pregnant, he makes his second major decision. He knows that he cannot abandon May and the baby while he follows his passion to Europe. Just as Newland realizes what May is telling him, Wharton writes, "There was a long pause, which the inner devils filled with strident laughter." Newland knows that his decision has essentially been made for him, that he has been drawn back into his inescapable destiny as a society man in New York. Although he could technically still go to Europe, his sense of propriety and responsibility prevents him from doing so.

Once Newland realizes he is fated to be a family man in New York, he resigns himself to it and makes a pleasant life for himself and his family, carrying through his decision to stay with May. Rather than live a life filled with bitterness and resentment, he enjoys family life and enters politics for a short while at the insistence of Theodore Roosevelt. Reflecting on his life, he muses, "His days were full, and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all a man ought to ask." Perhaps the pleasant quality of his life indicates that Newland was relieved that he did not have to make the choice between the life he actually led and the life he might have led if he had chased after Ellen. Had May not given him the news of her pregnancy, he would have been forced to either go to Europe or talk himself out of it by conjuring up a compelling reason to stay.

In the last chapter, Newland makes his third and final major decision. Now a mature man, he makes this decision not from a sense of fancy or obligation, but from wisdom. He and his son are in Paris, and they are about to meet with Ellen, whom Newland has not seen for twenty-six years. His decision not to see her—and, therefore, not to see if there is still something left of their mutual passion—is confusing for many readers. On thoughtful reading, however, his reasons become clear.

At the age of only fifty-seven, the widowed Newland is fully aware that he has time for another romance in his life, which leads many readers to expect that love will triumph for Newland and Ellen after all. He kept her memory alive even as he grew to love May. In Paris, he walks through the city, seeing it as a context for Ellen's life. He imagines her walking here and visiting people there. For these reasons, a happy and romantic ending seems inevitable. So, why does Newland decide not to see her?

Newland is much wiser than he was twenty-six years ago, and he knows that the reality of a relationship with Ellen will never approach his long-standing fantasy. He has lived enough to understand what Ellen understood years ago—that people must live in the world of reality, not in the world of dreams. Wise enough now to grasp the difference, he chooses to preserve his dreams from the harshness of reality. Sitting outside her building, Newland imagines his son going in and meeting her, and he thinks, "It's more real to me here than if I went up." His fantasy far outshines anything reality can offer him, and he chooses not to risk losing it. This is by far his most courageous decision because it is one that he makes for himself willingly and realistically.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

In the following overview of The Age of Innocence, Hynes explores Wharton's treatment of a changing society.

The Age of Innocence, a reminiscent but satiric account of the time, place, and society in which Edith Wharton grew up, won for the author a 1921 Pulitzer Prize and was a best-seller when it appeared. Wharton had earlier taken up the topic of the society of the old New York, in which her wealthy parents played important roles, in novels such as The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. But, written after Wharton had experienced the horror and destruction of World War I in a time during which old systems of beliefs and customs seemed to be collapsing, The Age of Innocence looks back to a time of apparent stability—a time in which the forms and conventions were understood, if sometimes repressive. The novel is typically read as a discussion of the conflict between the individual and society, and between the safety and order of old, familiar ways and the possible chaos and uncertainty of new ways. Thus the conflict is crystallized in Newland Archer's choice between May and Ellen, a choice that represents the split between the society of old New York in which his family holds a respectable place and that of the newly wealthy invaders of his society that were rising to prominence after the Civil War. Because The Age of Innocence subtly censures the values and actions of both respectable old New York society and the fashionable newcomers, it is generally considered among Wharton's finest works.

Although the title of the novel literally refers to a 1788 Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait of a little girl, the title can be interpreted in several ways. The innocent age might be the condition of New York society in 1872, the year in which most of the action of the novel takes place. This is a society that refuses to discuss any of the unpleasant facts of life, such as divorce, extramarital affairs among its members, or the possibility of marriages made for financial gain. At the same time, society insists upon the absolute innocence, purity, and ignorance of all sexual matters in its unmarried women.

Newland's spinster sister Janey is the monstrous outcome of this insistence—an adult who is perpetually forced to pretend a childish innocence. May Welland is another product of such an upbringing, and even her husband-to-be believes in her complete innocence; when observing his fiancée watching the seduction scene in the opera Faust, Newland boasts to himself that May "doesn't even guess what it's all about." But while May participates in presenting herself as an innocent maiden, she shows by her actions later in the novel that she understands the facts of life that motivate men and women—both in operas and in real life. Newland begins to suspect that his bride is not as shallow as he had suspected when he finds that she has lied to Ellen about being certain of her pregnancy in order to keep her marriage intact. Later, Newland finds that May has told their son on her deathbed that Newland gave up the thing he wanted most (Ellen) when May asked him to. "She never asked me," Newland recalls.

But the title The Age of an Innocence could also refer to Newland's own youthful belief that love between a man and a woman is all that is needed to secure their happiness. When he voices his desire to Ellen that they might live happily outside of all social constraints, Ellen replies that such a life is not possible since too many other people would be hurt by their actions. Newland's process of coming to terms with the realities of relationships is an education of irony. When he is called upon by his family to counsel Ellen not to seek a divorce, he states the case in terms of family responsibility: "The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest: people cling to any convention that keeps the family together—protects the children, if there are any.... It's my business, you know, to help you to see these things as the people who are fondest of you see them. The Mingotts, the Wellands, the van der Luydens, all your friends and relations: if I didn't show you honestly how they judge such questions, it wouldn't be fair of me, would it?" But, ironically, it is these same reasons that Ellen forces Newland to consider when he later urges her to leave the stifling New York society to live in a world where such ugly designations as mistress and adultery do not exist. "Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?" Ellen asks Newland, attempting to make him realize that his dream is impossible.

May and Ellen represent different types of women to Newland. Even before becoming involved with Ellen he becomes interested in "the case of the Countess Olenska" rather than in Ellen as an individual. Since he is unaware of the depth of May's mind, Newland sees his fiancée and Ellen as contrasts, with May representing all that is safe, secure, and known in his society and Ellen all that is unknown and exotic in European society. May and Ellen can be read as the traditional light and dark heroines of literature, since Wharton portrays May as a wholesome blonde and Ellen as a seductive brunette.

Newland thinks of May as representing "a Civic Virtue or a Greek Goddess"; her skill at archery reminds Newland of the goddess Diana. He notices May's eyes repeatedly as being transparent, serious, pale, limpid, and blue—all reminders of the extreme innocence he believes she possesses. In contrast, Ellen plays the role in Newland's mind as an exotic, European femme fatale who represents the threat of disorder that is descending upon old New York society. Her hands, described as being fragile and decorated with rings, are one of her most attractive attributes to Newland. The most sensual scene between Ellen and Newland is the one in which he takes off her glove in the carriage to kiss her hand. Newland learns few actual facts about Ellen's unhappy marriage and subsequent life, but is attracted by her mystery. Ellen is unconventional because of her desire to get a divorce from her cruel husband, her scandalous and shadowy past, her choice to live in a Bohemian section of New York, and her open friendships with men who are married or engaged. But while Newland mistakenly sees only the roles he ascribes to both May and Ellen, they are actually much more complex than these simple characterizations.

Although Wharton was perhaps more like Ellen than any other character in the novel (both are at once inside and outside of fashionable New York society, divorce their husbands, leave America to live in Paris, and greatly value stimulating conversation), the novel is more Newland's story. Newland becomes interested in anthropology and is able to view his own society as an outsider and think critically of its rules and values. Wharton describes in detail the tribal rites that go on prior to a marriage between old New York families; May and Newland's schedule of prenuptial visits to relatives and friends follows a specific pattern. Even the decision to move up their wedding date must be approved by the family matriarch, Granny Mingott. In the opening scene of the novel Wharton refers to both Lawrence Lefferts, old New York's authority on form, and Sillerton Jackson, old New York's authority on family. But we see the hypocrisy of society since even Lefferts, a crusader for morality, has extramarital affairs. As Newland takes up the study of anthropology and begins to see such incongruities in his own society, he feels the impulse to break free from what he sees as stifling and meaningless conventions. However, Ellen's actions to save her cousin's marriage, May's maneuvers to keep Newland with her, and Newland's own inertia keep him from acting against his family's traditions.

By the end of the novel, when Newland's respectable son is about to marry the illegitimate daughter of Julius Beaufort, it is obvious that time and the invaders of old New York society have caused changes. Although little is mentioned of the twenty-six years between Newland's engagement to May and the closing scenes of the novel, we understand that he and his family have benefited from his (forced) decision to give up Ellen. Wharton depicts both the good and the bad sides of renunciation; the family is made stronger although the individual suffers from wondering what might have been. But since society has changed in spite of Newland's actions to maintain the old standards, it is clear that the suffocating old ways could not last.

Source: Jennifer A. Hynes, "The Age of Innocence: Overview," in Reference Guide to American Literature, 3d ed., edited by Jim Kamp, St. James Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Walton explores Wharton's nostalgic treatment of "Old New York" in The Age of Innocence.

Although Walter Berry prophesied that nobody else except themselves would be interested in the New York of her childhood, The Age of Innocence, 1920, was serialized in The Pictorial Review and was, almost inevitably, awarded the Pulitzer Prize and has become one of Edith Wharton's most widely read and admired works. It has all the ingredients of a historical best-seller, a richly detailed period setting, an emotional situation that the modern reader can flatter himself, or more important, herself would work out more happily at the present day and, combined with the appeal to critical superiority, a pervasive nostalgia for the past. It is, with all its faults, manifestly the product of a distinguished creative mind, if in a consciously relaxed mood, and it does not suffer from the wholly untypical rawness and nerviness of feeling, the uncertainty of tone and attitude that characterize A Son at the Front, which was being planned at the same time. The Puritanical element in the New York tradition comes out in The Age of Innocence much more strongly than in any part of The Custom of the Country and, remembering that Edith Wharton there uses the name Marvell, one is reminded in this later novel of A Definition of Love. There is, of course, no ground for supposing that she consciously took her theme from that poem, but the relationship between Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska has an air of being

...begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility. Everything in the situation is against them, the whole weight of a social and moral tradition. Nevertheless, as with the situation in The Reef, one finds it pathetic—and sometimes absurd—rather than tragic, and the elaborate moral solution and the epilogue rather heavily sentimental. The social conflict, of the individual against the group, is comparable to that of Lily Bart with a later New York Society, but it is muted and muffled by the mass of period upholstery. It is not merely that the age enthroned "Taste," that far-off divinity of whom "Form" was the mere visible representative and vicegerent; the whole story on both sides is especially fully visualized in terms of clothes and interior decoration, and documented with accounts of manners, customs, and social history. As in the case of the fully historical Valley of Decision, Edith Wharton is, to put it simply, more concerned to recreate a past age than to say something she thinks important about life. There is a lack of emotional pressure and ironic tension; elegant as the writing undoubtedly is, it lacks the hard precision of the best earlier books. After all, the stimulus to such writing was not there in the chosen subject matter, except on one or two occasions.

The New York world is re-created in full and fascinating detail. This is the genuine old New York of the 70s, before the millionaires of The House of Mirth had built their mansions on Fifth Avenue. We are given illustrative examples to those early paragraphs in A Backward Glance. Book One brings before us the moral and emotional situation in relation to that wealthy but in every way thoroughly provincial and middle-class community, which is perhaps most strikingly and fantastically epitomized by the fact that women imported dresses in the latest fashion from Worth and then kept them for two years before wearing them. The pattern of this little "Society" had come to seem part of the order of nature, incredible as this may seem:

New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Archer-Newland-vander-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure. . . .

Edith Wharton's use of the words "clan" and "tribe" is deliberate and recurring. The people who actually wrote books and painted pictures did not belong to either group. They did not want to, and Society was never sure whether they were really "ladies" and "gentlemen." One moves on to note the finer distinction between the van der Luydens and two other families of aristocratic origin and the rest and, complicating the situation, the independent positions of old Mrs. Manson Mingott, a comic figure of monstrous obesity, and of Julius Beaufort, the rich financier, who is blatantly vulgar and openly disreputable. Two characters have a kind of choric function as representatives of the social spirit: they are Lawrence Lefferts who

. . . was, on the whole, the foremost authority on "form" in New York. He had probably devoted more time than anyone else to the study of this intricate and fascinating question; but study alone could not account for his complete and easy competence. One had only to look at him, from the slant of his bald forehead and the curve of his beautiful fair moustache to the long patent-leather feet at the other end of his lean and elegant person, to feel that the knowledge of "form" must be congenital in anyone who knew how to wear such good clothes so carelessly and carry such height with so much lounging grace. . . .

and old Mr. Sillerton Jackson, the authority on "family":

He knew all the ramifications of New York's cousinships, and could not only elucidate such complicated questions as that of the connection between the Mingotts (through the Thorleys) with the Dallases of South Carolina, and that of the relationship of the elder branch of Philadelphia Thorleys to the Albany Chiverse (on no account to be confused with the Manson Chiverses of University Place), but could also enumerate the leading characteristics of each family. . . .

It was an inflexible social pattern and it is very suitable that we should get our first panorama of it as Newland Archer, the hero, surveys the audience at the opera, an institution where all the traditional European social rituals were assiduously imitated. Ellen Olenska is conspicuous because her dress, though elegant, is not quite conventional.

The Archer family, although belonging to the more intellectual section of Society, are shown as weighed down with conventional habits, and the implications of Newland Archer's gestures of rebellion are not always fully understood even by himself; sometimes he sees his marriage "with a shiver of foreboding becoming what most of the other marriages about him [are]: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other."

But he is "sincerely but placidly in love" with the "frankness" and "freshness," based of course on utter ignorance, of his bride, May Welland, and looks forward to guiding her vague cultural gestures. One can see that they are in fact predestined to become a typical New York couple, if of slightly wider interests than the majority. Newland Archer is too gentlemanly, too committed to the regime of doing the right things, of avoiding unpleasantness of all kinds and, especially, of ignoring the loose living of many of his associates. Presumably, in order to make life viable at all for a relatively small, wealthy, and leisured community, the moral atmosphere had been allowed to settle down in this way; only dishonesty in business or flagrant sexual irregularity was condemned. Yvors Winters sums up The Age of Innocence by saying that it illustrates an ethical tradition more ancient than Calvinist Puritanism, though modified by it:

. . . the characters are living in a society cognate and coterminous with those principles; the society with its customs and usages, is the external form of the principles. Now the customs and usages may become unduly externalized, and when they appear so to become, Mrs. Wharton satirizes them; but in the main they represent the concrete aspect of the abstract principles of behavior.

He goes on to discuss the relationship of Archer and Ellen Olenska in terms of their having to abandon a way of life that they in fact find satisfying and admirable, if they decide to rebel openly against its moral principles. This indicates the situation in the long run.

In the short run everything possible is done to absorb the Countess Olenska into Society and neutralize her possibly disturbing influence. Even the aristocratic van der Luydens are moved to lend her their prestige. Ellen Olenska, though a cousin, is a foreign and, at least potentially, a revolutionary force. She settles in a street between the purlieus of Society and Bohemia, has unusual decorations and unwittingly compromises herself by entertaining doubtful company—old New York snobbery did not extend to an English duke for his rank alone. The charm of Ellen Olenska is made very real. She is beautiful, smart, intelligent, original in her taste, generous and guileless; she is not a mere "made-over" version of the Baroness Munster, though the general idea of the book is, of course, related to that of The Europeans. The contrast between her and May Welland is brought out again when May goes so far as to cut church to walk with Archer in the Park, but causes him to say:

"Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We're like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves, May?"

But Archer's subjection to convention comes out in his advice to Ellen to avoid a divorce with its risks of scandal, and one reaches the point at which he has let his engagement to May go forward because he is not quite sure of Ellen's innocence and Ellen feels, "I can't love you unless I give you up"; in other words, she feels that she must accept the conventions of New York because its narrow minded community has after all made her feel happy and, paradoxically, even free. Fate has crowded itself betwixt them in the double guise of social convention, with its whole lineage of moral principle, and of family solidarity and generosity which, if they take effect a little slowly and grudgingly, nevertheless manifest themselves in very solid and material forms. The worst and best of old New York are inseparable. Everyone is too "nice" for the heights and depths of passion to have scope. The mere humbugs and the absurder customs are satirized, but in the rest of the picture Edith Wharton is resurrecting the historical types and evoking the scenes she remembered without her customary play of irony. The central situation is presented in all solemnity without seeming tragic; from Edith Wharton one would have expected something analogous to the wit of Marvell's poem.

Newland Archer's two relationships now develop rapidly. The fashionable wedding is described with much detail of dress and behavior, and, after this, his disappointing honeymoon in Europe, which shows up May as scarcely more cultivated than Undine Spragg is shown to be in similar circumstances, followed by a Newport season with all its archaic ritual. It is therefore inevitable that Archer should drift back toward Ellen. A curious relationship is established depending on

. . . the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquilized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over, and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt her. . . .

This relationship, with all the magnanimity it implies—it is a kind of "magnanimous despair" leading to a love of "divine" ideality—is offered for our unqualified admiration. May's conventionality and unsuitability as a wife for Archer are made painfully obvious; his throwing open a window on a cold evening symbolizes his feeling of claustration. Ellen's moral superiority to everyone around her becomes equally obvious in her demonstrative kindness to Mrs. Beaufort after the bank failure—old New York's human worst side was plainer than its commercial best on such occasions. Her clear-sightedness sees the frequent dinginess of the lives of unmarried couples where Archer has only his own sort of conventional romantic visions. But the alternative she offers of love in separation—"in reach and yet out of reach" or, at the most, "Shall I—once come to you; and then go home?"—lacks, for all the gratitude and generosity towards the feelings of her friends underlying it, a certain fundamental humanity. It is not in the context tantalizing and coy, as might appear in quotation, but very idealized. Her fineness has some of the rarefied quality of Anna Leath's, though none of the meanness, and she certainly does not suffer from Lily Bart’s vein of frivolousness.

Despite her past experience, she will not or cannot face the consequences of a break with social conventions. As Winters says, a formal social order, with all its restrictions, seems to her to provide a more satisfactory way of life than freedom in isolation. The situation is wound up with the most meticulous regard for old New York conventions. Ellen Olenska has decided to return to Europe—we learn afterwards that May has precipitated this by a piece of deceit; the Archers give the farewell dinner, and the hypocrisy is an occasion for some magnificent satiric conclusions in Edith Wharton's most trenchant manner—here the writing really comes to life:

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. There was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe was ensured.

It was the old New York way of talking life "without effusion of blood"; the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them. . . .

Archer is made conscious of all the irony and the suspicions and of his helplessness in the grip of the genteel tradition, and we are shown a bitterly satiric picture of the victory of the two petty tyrants of Form and Family.

Nevertheless, the final solution can only be taken as a sentimental endorsement of the tribal code. Archer settles down as a model husband—he and May "compromise" by ignoring awkward realities to the end. In the epilogue he reemerges as a public-spirited citizen who has worked with Theodore Roosevelt, but he refuses the chance of a reunion with Ellen when it comes thirty years later. Though Archer has become a more active representative of old New York than Selden or Marvell, one is asked to reverence the persistence of tradition rather than admire its flexibility.

The possible pointer toward the later chapters of The Buccaneers is not sufficiently followed up to make it truly significant. Edith Wharton apparently endorses both old New York and Ellen Olenska's and Archer's renunciation of each other, which indeed, in its idealism, also belongs to old New York; Ellen Olenska is not completely foreign after all. This is a rather sugary version of the kind of conflict that leads to Lily Bart's tragedy. To compare it with the brilliantly conic interplay of values and foibles that James creates in The Europeans, where the Baroness after doing so much to aerate the atmosphere of New England lets herself down with a fib, is to realize how leisurely and lacking in vitality The Age of Innocence is as a whole. One cannot help also realizing, however, that its nostalgic escapism, which she admits to in A Backward Glance, is also personal to the author in other ways.

One recalls, in connection with Ellen Olenska's attitude, Mrs. Wharton's exclamation quoted by Percy Lubbock, "Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!" These words, dating from about 1912, the year of her separation, and about two years after the end of her affair with Morton Fullerton, might have been spoken in the novel and one feels that, in creating Ellen Olenska and giving her human vitality and definition in a world of wax works, Edith Wharton may have been projecting an idealized vision of herself into the Society of her youth, where one knows she was in fact a rather colorless participant.

Now that we know how far Mrs. Wharton in fact differed from Ellen Olenska, we see both the pathos and the irony of such an idealization. Anna Leath and, later, Rose Sellars are comparable, though older, types of elegant austerity; but they are more austere and also much more critically presented. Edith Wharton is surely in all three, partly idealizing and partly criticizing, in various combinations, her own complex nature, her refined puritanism, inherited and temperamental, and her sometimes concealed, sometimes repressed, capacity for human warmth and passion. It would be impertinent to speculate any further until more documentary evidence is available, but one also feels that the identification is supported by her creation of comparable types of elegant austerity in Anna Leath and, later, Rose Sellars. It is difficult to say how far this represents a vein of Puritan tradition and how far a temperamental compulsion, insofar as these could in any case be separated.

In the Old New York stories 1922 to 1924, Edith Wharton goes back into reported history, beginning with the forties; their chief interest is social. False Dawn demonstrates how very middle class indeed the manners of the top layer of New York Society had been within the lifetime of Edith Wharton's older contemporaries, and New Year's Day gives us a very seamy picture of The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton presents a situation of considerable pathos and implies a further and even more damning criticism of the pettier conventions of the time. The series brings to an end Mrs. Wharton's concern with the uneasy position of the individual in a closely integrated and exclusive social group where ordered and polished appearances are the expression of moral ideals and principles and the divergencies of errant reality may be not only ridiculous but also shocking.

Source: Geoffrey Walton, "Old New York," in Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970, pp. 137–46.