Edith Wharton published The Age of Innocence in 1920, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 , the first woman to receive it. The novel is set in the 1870s in the closed world of upper-class New York society, which Wharton knew from inside, having been born into it and spent much of her adult life escaping it. Newland Archer, a lawyer of good family, is engaged to May Welland, a young woman of impeccable social position and studied conventional charm, when Ellen Olenska, May's cousin, returns from Europe after a disastrous marriage to a Polish count. Archer finds himself in love with Ellen, whose frank disregard for Old New York's unspoken codes makes her simultaneously attractive and threatening to the society she has returned to.
Wharton's account of New York tribal society is more anthropological than satirical. She describes the system of unspoken rules by which Archer's circle enforces conformity, the meaningful silences, the strategic inclusion and exclusion, the use of social occasion as surveillance, with the detached precision of someone who has studied her material from both inside and outside. May Welland is one of Wharton's most complex creations: apparently passive and entirely conventional, she is revealed in the novel's final movement to have understood her situation with complete accuracy and managed it with more precision than anyone around her recognized.
The novel's title is the final irony: the "age of innocence" is anything but. Wharton's 1870s New York is a world of finely calibrated social violence, where deviation from consensus behavior is punished through exclusion rather than confrontation. The last scene, Archer sitting on a bench outside the building where Ellen lives in Paris, declining to go up, is one of the most carefully constructed non-events in American fiction. Its resignation is not self-pity; it is the product of a man who has spent his life understanding the system that formed him and lacks the capacity to believe that stepping outside it would lead anywhere he could recognize as home.
The Age of Innocence made Edith Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1921.
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