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Today marks the anniversary of Edith Wharton’s death, so it feels like the right moment to sit with two of her biggest works and see what they say to each other and about the world Wharton experienced while writing each! The House of Mirth (published in 1905) and The Age of Innocence (published in 1920) sit fifteen years apart, and between their publications Wharton lived through a world war, a divorce and a permanent move abroad. All of which you can feel in how differently she handles nearly the same material… the second time around.
Both The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence watch their characters get slowly and quietly crushed by unwritten rules of old New York society, but the angle of attack actually changes quite a lot. The House of Mirth follows Lily Bart, a woman with (basically) no real power in her world, just trying to marry well enough to survive. The book is relentless about it too, almost claustrophobic – tightening around her chapter by chapter until there’s nowhere left for her to go. The Age of Innocence flips that setup. It centers on Newland Archer, a man who actually does hold both power and status, and yet still manages to talk himself into choosing the safe expected path over the woman he loves. The tone is cooler when describing Archer’s choices, more melancholic than the desperateness of Lily Bart’s search. Wharton wasn’t watching someone drown this time… instead it felt as though she was watching someone quietly shut a door on his own life and then spend decades wondering about it.
That shift in stakes truly changes the moral of each story, too. House of Mirth reads almost like a classical tragedy – Lily gets unraveled by a society that offers women almost no legitimate way to exist outside of marriage, and the novel comes across as a pretty direct attack on that system with very little room for hope. The Age of Innocence feels different because Wharton wrote it after watching that same world start to erode. It plays more like an elegy than an attack, almost mourning the same inflexibility it’s simultaneously critiquing. Fifteen years on and Wharton hadn’t softened her view and critiques of “society”. She’d just grown more interested in what it costs on both sides, what it destroys… and what it somehow, even imperfectly, holds together. On a day like today (the 89th anniversary of her death), it feels like a fitting way to remember her as not just a narrator of a vanished world, but as a writer who never stopped asking what our worlds actually cost the people living in them.
