In my long-ago days as an English major, I may have been equipped to discuss Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence
in a manner that would do it justice. I fear that the words I have at my disposal this days are likely insufficient. Nonetheless, The Age of Innocence must be praised, even if insufficiently.
The French have a phrase, "esprit de l'escalier" (literally "the wit of the staircase"), that describes the feeling of thinking of exactly the correct response when it is only just too late to make it. I've loved this phrase since I first encountered it years ago, and always despaired that English doesn't quite have a phrase to match. Obviously I had never read The Age of Innocence, because Wharton closes Chapter 12 with what may now be may favorite phrase: "bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate." English does not have the match of esprit de l'escalier, it has its better.
The entire second half of Chapter 32 contains an extended metaphor, by which Wharton beautifully juxtaposes the dirtying and tearing of May's wedding dress with Newland's long-delayed realization that she is not the complete innocent for whom he took her.
In the final chapter Wharton contrasts Newland's reticence with the freedom enjoyed by his son, Dallas. It is by watching and listening to Dallas, and examining the lives the two of them have created for themselves and the choices they have made that Newland realizes how unprepared he was, even in his youth, to allow himself what he wanted.
Wharton writes that Newland "had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime." Perhaps that notion of the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate life is what made The Age of Innocence sing to me. Before the notion is named in the final chapter, the reader has watched the Newland miss the opportunities he regrets, seen the occasions whose memory Newland stifles.
I'm drawn the literature of regret, the literature of missed opportunity, of reticence. Where J. Alfred Prufrock does not think the mermaids will sing to him, two mermaids sing to Newland Archer, one whose song he will not allow himself to hear and another whose song he would rather not hear. I'm not certain Newland or Prufrock is the better off.
in a manner that would do it justice. I fear that the words I have at my disposal this days are likely insufficient. Nonetheless, The Age of Innocence must be praised, even if insufficiently. The French have a phrase, "esprit de l'escalier" (literally "the wit of the staircase"), that describes the feeling of thinking of exactly the correct response when it is only just too late to make it. I've loved this phrase since I first encountered it years ago, and always despaired that English doesn't quite have a phrase to match. Obviously I had never read The Age of Innocence, because Wharton closes Chapter 12 with what may now be may favorite phrase: "bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate." English does not have the match of esprit de l'escalier, it has its better.
The entire second half of Chapter 32 contains an extended metaphor, by which Wharton beautifully juxtaposes the dirtying and tearing of May's wedding dress with Newland's long-delayed realization that she is not the complete innocent for whom he took her.
In the final chapter Wharton contrasts Newland's reticence with the freedom enjoyed by his son, Dallas. It is by watching and listening to Dallas, and examining the lives the two of them have created for themselves and the choices they have made that Newland realizes how unprepared he was, even in his youth, to allow himself what he wanted.
Wharton writes that Newland "had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime." Perhaps that notion of the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate life is what made The Age of Innocence sing to me. Before the notion is named in the final chapter, the reader has watched the Newland miss the opportunities he regrets, seen the occasions whose memory Newland stifles.
I'm drawn the literature of regret, the literature of missed opportunity, of reticence. Where J. Alfred Prufrock does not think the mermaids will sing to him, two mermaids sing to Newland Archer, one whose song he will not allow himself to hear and another whose song he would rather not hear. I'm not certain Newland or Prufrock is the better off.
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