A review by magicraft
The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
4.0
I'm just as frustrated today as I was reading this in college. I've always been annoyed with the expectations of society in our own time...so this book makes one wonder how people managed to get through the drudgery of daily life in 1870's New York. The ridiculousness of propriety that kept people gasping if a woman decided not to marry or to seek a divorce and the scandal it would have caused is cringe-worthy today.
Also, the idea that your world and future was laid out before depending upon what family you were born into, or what your occupation was is frightening. Wharton has made this frustration very clear:
"Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts. His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen."
Terrifying.
That said, obviously this was a wonderful book in its own time and the writing is fantastic. One of my favorite paragraphs:
"He was reminded of this by trying to picture the society in which the Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also-perhaps-tasted mysterious joys. He remembered with what amusement she had told him that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands objected to her living in a 'Bohemian' quarter given over to 'people who wrote'. It was not the peril but the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade escaped her, and she supposed they considered literature compromising."
Imagining that writers and journalists were terrible and poor professions is interesting in light of our modern world. At any rate, the end of this book left me annoyed, but the book itself certainly has carried through time and will continue to be a fascinating commentary.
Also, the idea that your world and future was laid out before depending upon what family you were born into, or what your occupation was is frightening. Wharton has made this frustration very clear:
"Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts. His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen."
Terrifying.
That said, obviously this was a wonderful book in its own time and the writing is fantastic. One of my favorite paragraphs:
"He was reminded of this by trying to picture the society in which the Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also-perhaps-tasted mysterious joys. He remembered with what amusement she had told him that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands objected to her living in a 'Bohemian' quarter given over to 'people who wrote'. It was not the peril but the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade escaped her, and she supposed they considered literature compromising."
Imagining that writers and journalists were terrible and poor professions is interesting in light of our modern world. At any rate, the end of this book left me annoyed, but the book itself certainly has carried through time and will continue to be a fascinating commentary.