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A review by raygersh
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
4.0
It has been quite some time since I have experienced such a thorough gut punching as I received by the purported age of innocence. What begins as a charming and quaint tale of life and love in late 19th century New York, quickly hardens into a gilded cage with suffocating restraints. Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Age of Innocence is a beautiful and heart-wrenching story that pulls you on a journey through the loveliest highs and the ugliest lows of our own making. I could feel the intensity of the pining in this book on a physical level.
Wharton was a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald and there is definitely no shortage of comparisons to be drawn between The Age of Innocence and The Great Gatsby. All throughout my reading of The Age of Innocence, I was continuously reminded of the line spoken by Baz Luhrmann’s Daisy, “I wish I had done everything on earth with you.” The rawness of the pain of missed connections and the confines we find ourselves within are so poignant in both stories. I found myself loving Wharton’s version more than the oft-lauded Fitzgerald and wish I had studied this novel in school instead of Gatsby, but I know I would never have appreciated it at the time. The language is so beyond our modern grip on English that it can be a bit of a slog to get through even though it is exceptionally beautiful.
I think The Age of Innocence is brilliant in a lot of ways but one of the most genius things Wharton did was to dub it just that, an age of innocence. She pulls away the beautiful sheen of a pure age of history to let the reader in on the ugliness of the society at the time. The self-inflicted rules and structures of the time period allow our characters to don some attractive masks. With Wharton’s keen perception and cutting insight, she acts as our Dante to the true hell to be found in the gilded time period. It is absolutely masterful.
Overall: At parts it was nearly inaccessible but the final pages were so utterly wrecking that this borders 5 stars
Wharton was a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald and there is definitely no shortage of comparisons to be drawn between The Age of Innocence and The Great Gatsby. All throughout my reading of The Age of Innocence, I was continuously reminded of the line spoken by Baz Luhrmann’s Daisy, “I wish I had done everything on earth with you.” The rawness of the pain of missed connections and the confines we find ourselves within are so poignant in both stories. I found myself loving Wharton’s version more than the oft-lauded Fitzgerald and wish I had studied this novel in school instead of Gatsby, but I know I would never have appreciated it at the time. The language is so beyond our modern grip on English that it can be a bit of a slog to get through even though it is exceptionally beautiful.
I think The Age of Innocence is brilliant in a lot of ways but one of the most genius things Wharton did was to dub it just that, an age of innocence. She pulls away the beautiful sheen of a pure age of history to let the reader in on the ugliness of the society at the time. The self-inflicted rules and structures of the time period allow our characters to don some attractive masks. With Wharton’s keen perception and cutting insight, she acts as our Dante to the true hell to be found in the gilded time period. It is absolutely masterful.
Overall: At parts it was nearly inaccessible but the final pages were so utterly wrecking that this borders 5 stars