Betsy
Klimasmith
Salvaging History:
Modern Philosophies of Memory and
Time in The Age of Innocence
A
t the end of The Age of Innocence, Newland
Archer looks back on the technological and social changes that have
transformed New York from a provincial outpost of the 1870s to the
internationally networked metropolis it has become by 1902. Having
returned from a celebration honoring the opening of new galleries
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Newland muses on the physical
spaces that have helped construct his past. The museum, like the
man, stands as a relic of an older world that has “fallen into pieces and
rebuilt itself.”1 Innovations such as electric lights, long-distance telephone calls, and five-day Atlantic voyages have caused Old New York
to “reel on its foundations” (360). At the novel’s conclusion, such technological changes displace the geographic landmarks that organize
the earlier portions of the novel, inviting us to measure the “distance
the world has traveled” (368). An apparently mappable New York has
become a place where time and space have so collapsed that Newland
may ask: “[O]f what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?”
(368). Edith Wharton represents an innocent age so skillfully—and
so deceptively precisely—that it is easy to forget that she wrote The
Age of Innocence in 1920, when her world, like Newland Archer’s, had
“fallen into pieces.”
Reeling from the devastation of war and grappling with new theories of time and space, Wharton and her contemporaries wondered
whether and how their world could ever rebuild itself. Today, World
War I stands as the major moment of historical rupture in the modern
era; it is a critical commonplace that this breakdown was both repreAmerican Literature, Volume 80, Number 3, September 2008
DOI 10.1215/00029831-2008-022 © 2008 by Duke University Press
556 American Literature
sented and constructed in modernist literature.2 For many writers and
critics, the rupture of war helped to constitute literary modernism’s
key feature as a split with the past.3 Literary critics have been especially prone, Rita Felski argues, to constitute the modern as precisely
(if simplistically) new: “To be modern is to reject the dead weight
of tradition, to respond to the siren call of the new and the now. It
is to see oneself as the creature of contingency and flux, no longer
beholden to the scripts of the past.”4 In literary terms, this rupture,
as T. S. Eliot understood it, meant that only new forms could make
meaning. Praising Ulysses, Eliot wrote in 1923: “The novel is a form
which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a
form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently
lost all form to feel the need of something stricter.”5 In a newly formless world, Eliot argued, old literary modes were no longer adequately
expressive.6
By Eliot’s definition, The Age of Innocence, a novel laden with
scrupulous accounts of the rituals and traditions that had shaped
Old New York, could not possibly qualify as an expression of the new
era. Indeed, although Wharton’s biographers consistently identify
the First World War and “the emergence of the modern” as the two
historical events that most deeply affected Wharton, Shari Benstock
notes that “to theorize Edith Wharton” and, by extension, her writing
“as modern is a direct challenge to those who make and shape American literary history.”7 Perhaps because it is set in the 1870s, The Age
of Innocence is rarely read as a response to war, and certainly not as
a modernist text.8 Immediately following the war, Wharton wrote to
Bernard Berenson that “the historical novel with all its vices [would]
be the only possible form for fiction.”9 The Age of Innocence is usually
read in this way, as an anachronistic throwback to an earlier, simpler
time. Its smooth narrative line seems diametrically opposed to the
fragmented turn to the past taken in other postwar texts. But Wharton
conceived of the relation between historical rupture and literary form
quite differently than Eliot. Her novel’s form is deceptive: it covers
even as it reflects the revolutionary conceptions of time articulated
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by philosopher
Henri Bergson and physicist Albert Einstein. An avid reader of philosophy and science, Wharton brought these stunning new theories
of memory and time, which now stand as hallmarks of modernity and
modernism, to The Age of Innocence, where she explores multiple
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 557
modes of experiencing the past and the present. Wharton’s ostensibly
historical novel thus anticipates later modernist work by enacting one
of modernity’s distinctive hallmarks: what Felski labels the “hybrid
temporality of the modern” (DT, 70).10
Seeing the war and the literature that followed it primarily as ruptures with the past dangerously obscures their powerful connections
to the scientific and literary modernisms that preceded the war. Intellectual historian Stephen Kern argues provocatively that the First
World War, while certainly a world-altering event, in fact capped the
disruptive, productive modernity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Kern, and, as I will argue, for Wharton, new philosophical and scientific conceptions of time, particularly the notions
of simultaneity and relativity, prefigured and produced a new era just
as surely as the war did (CTS). In light of these developments, Wharton used the accessible form of the historical novel to construct and
make readable a version of modern consciousness in which behavior
and emotion, public time and private time, tradition and inspiration all
coexist. Subtly dismantling progressive notions of the stable past and
the predictable future in three key settings—the opera, Ellen Olenska’s house, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Wharton signals
that The Age of Innocence is as much a philosophical query into memory’s function and potential in a war-shocked world as it is a novel of
manners or escapist nostalgia.
The Age of Innocence, then, can be seen as Wharton’s transformation
of the rawest of what she called the “raw material of the after-war
world” into an inquiry that approaches memory not simply as a refuge
but as a disruptive, generative force that can produce a productive, if
painful, continuity with the past.11 Later authors may have felt that old
narrative forms could not express the simultaneity of private and public time, behavior and emotion, or ritual and transcendence that characterize our experience of modernity. But the simultaneity of all these
modes of engagement is at play in The Age of Innocence, a text that both
maintains and subverts the historical novel’s form. This novel’s genre,
style, setting, and author have disqualified it from consideration as a
modernist text, yet Wharton’s subtle manipulation of historical detail
along with her engagement with the philosophy of memory and the
physics of time make The Age of Innocence her most successful literary experiment, positioning it as a major modern literary response to
the First World War. Further, the fact that the novel sold better than
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any of Wharton’s other books indicates that she made her version of
complex, intersecting frames of time and space accessible to a wide
reading public grappling with the personal and cultural ramifications
of sweeping, traumatic change. As The Age of Innocence asks how we
might salvage from memory in order to come to grips with history, it
enacts Wharton’s desire to come to grips with the complexity of the
past—personally, philosophically, artistically, and culturally—in the
aftermath of war.
Memory’s Meanings
Wharton expatriated from the United States to France in 1907. By 1916,
her wartime humanitarian efforts both in Paris and on the front, especially her relief work with civilian refugees, had earned the wealthy
hostess the rank of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. Despite
its impact on her life, the war did not interrupt Wharton’s literary production. Between 1914 and 1918, she published a collection of short
stories and two novels, Summer and The Marne.12 She edited a major
fundraising text, The Book of the Homeless, and visited the front in
order to gather material for the journalistic accounts of the war that
she wrote for Scribner’s and Century. But she struggled to represent
war’s deep implications.
After the war ended, Wharton postponed delving into A Son at
the Front. Instead, she began The Age of Innocence. In her memoir,
she recalls: “Before I could begin to deal objectively with the stored
up emotion of [the war] years, I had to get away from the present
altogether. . . . I found a momentary escape in going back to my
childish memories of a long-vanished America, and wrote ‘The Age
of Innocence’” (BG, 369).13 To cope with the trauma of war, Wharton
withdrew to her past. Although certainly “she was trying to find relief
from the massive sorrow that had, necessarily, enveloped her,” she
turned not to pleasant memories but to the very time and place—Old
New York—she had successfully escaped by moving to Paris.14 More
than personally therapeutic, the novel allowed her to reconnect imaginatively to “the worlds, seen now across the abyss of the four-year
holocaust—in which she had grown up and passed most of her adult
life,” acknowledging and critiquing the cultural faith in science, technology, and progress that had both led to and been devastated by the
war (EW, 419). Wharton responded to the war’s destruction by asking
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 559
how memory might allow an increasingly alien past to be salvaged and
integrated into a bleak present.
Wharton derived her belief in memory’s potential to bridge past and
future in part from Bergson’s theories, which she had encountered
during her intellectually heady years in prewar Paris. Bergson and
his optimistic if elusive philosophy had taken the United States and
Europe by storm in the early twentieth century. Although he was the
best-known philosopher of the day, Bergson’s influence on Wharton
remains almost unexplored, even though she read his work “avidly.”15
At Pavilion Colombe, the house she bought immediately after the war,
Bergson’s 1911 text L’Evolution Créatrice (Creative Evolution) was on
the shelves.16
Trained as a mathematician, Bergson integrated scientific thought
and philosophical inquiry into his work, citing and critiquing thinkers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Charles Darwin and Herbert
Spencer. Although he wrote on such varied topics as laughter and
theoretical physics, Bergson was recognized in his day primarily for
his notion of durée, which posited that the past was always alive in
the present, thus extending the scientific notion of simultaneity to the
human consciousness. Bergson’s contemporary, Samuel Alexander,
dubbed him the “first philosopher to take time seriously.”17 Acknowledged as a powerful influence on writers and artists, including Marcel
Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Willa Cather,
and Gertrude Stein, Bergson won the Nobel Prize (beating out fellow nominee Edith Wharton) in 1927. Like Wharton, whose popular
success made her suspect in the eyes of literary modernists, “Bergson’s national popularity probably worked against his acceptance as
an authentic philosopher.”18 More recently, Bergson’s contributions to
modern thought, if not his significance for Wharton, have been reconsidered by historians such as Kern, who identifies Bergson’s “affirmation of the reality of private time” as “the most innovative speculation”
about time in the modern era (CTS, 8, 34). Philosophers and artists,
Kern argues, responded especially strongly to the notion that individual conceptions and experiences of time could challenge the broad
standardization of time through time zones, telegraphy, and travel
that increasingly defined the era. Thus, the coexistence of private and
public time became a key feature of modern literature.
For Wharton, memory enabled private and public time to coexist,
as a passage from her memoir indicates. In 1919, as she watched the
560 American Literature
victorious Allied Armies march down the Champs-Elysées in what
she called a “poet’s Vision of Victory,” Wharton recalled an off-hand
comment Bergson had made years before, possibly because it linked
literature to memory:
Once, happening to sit next to M. Bergson at a dinner, I confided to
him my distress and perplexity over the odd holes in my memory.
How was it, I asked, that I could remember, with exasperating accuracy, the most useless and insignificant things, such as the address
of everyone I knew, and the author of the libretto of every opera I
had ever heard since the age of eighteen—while, when it came to
poetry, my chiefest passion and my greatest joy, my verbal memory
failed me completely, and I only heard the inner cadence, and could
hardly ever fill it out with the right words?
I had the impression, before I ended, that my problem did not
greatly interest my eminent neighbor; and his reply was distinctly
disappointing. “Mais c’est précisément parce que vous êtes éblouie”
(“It’s just precisely because you are dazzled”), he answered quietly,
turning to examine the dish which was being handed to him, and
making no effort to pursue the subject. (BG, 170)
The everyday details that help to ground Wharton’s fiction are precisely what she finds easy to remember; as a reader of poetry, however, she experiences distressing memory “holes.” Her memory does
not exactly fail when she reads poetry or encounters the aftermath of
war; rather, it moves into an intuitive, almost musical mode, where
the inner cadence overtakes the words on the page and the details
merge into a “golden blur of emotion” (BG, 361). Intense emotional or
aesthetic experiences move the quotidian beyond language. Paradoxically, Wharton needed to use language to represent for and produce in
her own readers precisely such intense moments as she grappled with
the consequences of war.
Perhaps Bergson seemed more interested in his food than in Wharton’s question because he had devoted much of his early work to a
similar duality of memory. In his Matter and Memory (1908), Bergson
argues that two distinct forms of memory structure consciousness:
“habit memory” and “spontaneous recollection.” Habit memory, he
explains, develops through repetitive actions. Roughly analogous to
public time, habit memory consists of the everyday rituals that ground
productive, if predictable, lives. Spontaneous recollection, in contrast,
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 561
consists of distinctive, highly emotional memories that insert themselves unbidden into our thoughts, allowing the past to exist in the
present. Bergson would later term this mode of consciousness durée.
Noting that habit memory is quite useful, he notes that culturally we
tend “to erect it into the model memory, and to see in spontaneous
recollection only the same phenomenon in a nascent state, the beginning of a lesson learned by heart.”19 Wharton’s statement reflects this
cultural perspective: her inability to memorize great poetry seems to
her a failing, especially because her habit memory has burned other
knowledge, like the operas’ authors and her acquaintances’ addresses,
into her brain.
But as Bergson differentiates habit memory from spontaneous recollection, we begin to understand why Wharton’s memory functions
altogether differently when she encounters stunning poetry. “How,”
Bergson asks, “can we overlook the radical difference between that
which must be built up by repetition and that which is essentially
incapable of being repeated? Spontaneous recollection is perfect from
the outset; time can add nothing to its image without disfiguring it; it
retains in memory its place and date. . . . [It] appears to be memory
par excellence” (MM, 95). According to Bergson’s theory, Wharton’s
encounters with poetry, with the soldiers, or with any intense emotion, cannot become part of habit memory. Each individual experience
she has is so dazzling that it will reappear only spontaneously.
Habit memory and spontaneous recollection coexist in the psyche;
“the two memories,” Bergson argues, “run side by side and lend to
each other a mutual support” (MM, 98). This coexistence is not always
easy; most spontaneous recollections happen, Bergson claims, when
we dream. Intellectuals, including the modernists whose careers were
beginning as Wharton’s peaked, have regarded cultural habits as precisely what art—and theory—must struggle to collapse. And this view
still resonates. As Felski notes, “[T]he work of theory is to break the
spell of the everyday” (DT, 90). Yet Felski cautions us not to disavow
the role that habit plays in the modern consciousness. Anticipating
Felski’s claim that “habit is not opposed to individuality but intermeshed with it,” Wharton in The Age of Innocence tangles with the
difficult task of representing the function of spontaneous recollection
in a culture and a consciousness struggling to cling to habit memory
in the face of traumatic change (DT, 92).
562 American Literature
Habit Memory and the Future in a Culture of Progress:
The Opera
In The Age of Innocence, Wharton examines how habit memory and
spontaneous memory coexist in the individual consciousness; she then
extends this interrogation to her culture. Her representation of habit
and spontaneous memory structures the novel from its opening, when
the habit-bound Newland Archer ritually attends the opera on opening night. Wharton’s simultaneous attention to ritual and flux in this
scene and throughout the novel helps to position the text as a significant account of modernity, in which, as Felski notes, “[T]he modern is
not synonymous with the new. This sounds like a deeply paradoxical
idea because the modern and the new are often seen as synonymous
and interchangeable” (DT, 69). At the opera, different conceptions of
time coexist: time means repetition and variation, ritual and the unexpected. As its central characters use ritual and habit to navigate chaotic landscapes of dramatic personal and social change, the novel sets
hybrid temporalities into motion.
Wharton begins by making visible Old New York’s effort to create
and enforce a stable sense of the past through ritual: “On a January
evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust
at the Academy of Music in New York” (23). The details in the novel’s
first sentence mattered to Wharton; from France, she asked her friend
Sara Norton to fact-check the names of the opera and the singer.20 But
if Wharton was precise about the performance, she allowed its timing
to be simultaneously specific ( January) and vague. That the year is
left loose emphasizes that this particular performance is just one of
many repetitions. The Academy is a site for regular pilgrimages, a
building where time is made to stand still, or at least to be suspended
as performances on stage and in the audience are ritually repeated.
As ritual, the performance has power. The “conventions on which
[Newland’s] life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silverbacked brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair,
and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole” are almost beyond conscious thought (25).
While the gardenia and the hairbrushes add verisimilitude to Wharton’s evocation of a bygone era, they are also material references to a
habit memory built of “perceptions already experienced; in [which]
we take refuge” (MM, 92). For Old New York, the opera works in a
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 563
similarly instrumental way; its rituals merge past, present, and future,
creating a cultural refuge built on habit memory. Yet the opera, like
“Old” New York, is a modernizing space; its rituals obscure change.
While “conservatives cherished [the Academy] for being small and
inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York
was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to,” Wharton undermines
notions of permanence by mentioning that “there was already talk of
the erection, in remote metropolitan distances ‘above the forties’ of
a new Opera house which should compete in costliness and splendor
with those of the great European capitals” (23).
In the midst of cultural change, the habits shared by Old New York
society seem to ensure a predictable future. At the Opera, the present
may be suspended because the future is known—after all, it has
already happened, as Newland’s entrance during the famous “m’ama,
non m’ama” scene highlights. Like the rest of the audience, Newland
already knows the answer to the singer’s query; yet as the narrator
tells us, the spectators ritualistically “always stopped talking during
the daisy song” and Newland has clearly anticipated his fiancée’s
stock reaction, a girlish blush, to the singer’s final “M’ama!” (25). At
the same time, the scene highlights Newland’s persistent orientation,
via ritual, toward the future. For Newland, pleasure comes in anticipation: “thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler
satisfaction than its realisation” (25). We see this faith in the future
enacted when he glimpses his fiancée, May Welland, and immediately
conjures her on an idyllically intellectual honeymoon. “His imagination, leaping ahead of the engagement ring, the betrothal kiss, and the
march from Lohengrin, pictured her at his side in some scene of old
European witchery” (27). Because reliable rituals shore up the habit
memories that build a culture, it is unsurprising that Newland imagines the future so confidently. He knows, after all, what he can expect.
But on this opening night, May’s cousin Ellen Olenska, returning to
New York from a long residence in Europe, suddenly appears—like
one of Bergson’s spontaneous recollections—disrupting the evening’s
expected denouement, sparking dramatic changes in Newland, and
revealing the instability of his seemingly unassailable world.
Even if he can confidently imagine a new opera house, Newland cannot construct his own future. His fantasy of “European witchery” is a
far cry from the grand tour of monuments, social calls, and dress fittings that the honeymoon turns out to be; his betrothal kiss, as it turns
564 American Literature
out, seals a ceremony that begins with the minister intoning an Episcopalian funeral service.21 As Bergson cautioned, the future can never
be anticipated. “Life progresses and endures in time. Of course, when
the road has been traveled, we can glance over it, mark its direction,
note this in psychological terms and speak as if there had been pursuit of an end. . . . But of the road which was going to be traveled, the
human mind could have nothing to say, for the road has been created
pari passu with the act of traveling over it.”22 The road is created, and
this fact is extremely significant to people such as Newland who value
the past as a sort of relic. The built road is comforting, too, for people
who have confronted traumatic events that seem irrevocably to separate the present and future from all that has come before. Yet spontaneous recollections continually break through a coherent version of
the past, disrupting a smooth sense of progress but keeping the past
alive. In the novel, while May Welland invokes habit memory’s predictability with her ritual blush, May’s cousin Ellen Olenska sparks
Newland’s spontaneous recollection in all of its potential.23
Ellen Olenska comes to represent a disruptive yet generative sense
of the past, a sense that is incompatible with and threatening to a culture dedicated to making the future predictable and the past a relic.
Highly attuned to the city’s habit-bound ways, Ellen sees New York
as a place where time has stood still and where her own memories
remain undisturbed, as she reveals when she arrives late at the opera:
“Her glance swept the horse-shoe curve of boxes. ‘Ah, how this brings
it all back to me—I see everybody here in knickerbockers and pantalettes’” (37). New York has remained suspended in time while Ellen
has been gone “centuries and centuries,” developing a history that
arouses interest and speculation among her infantilized observers
precisely because her past does not conform to their habits. Ultimately, Old New York’s faith in the future and desire to preserve the
past together enforce a commitment to historical progress that denies
even radical changes any socially disruptive power. In the novel, this
commitment becomes an almost pathological strategy that spontaneous recollection, here personified by Ellen, disrupts.
As she hybridizes time in Old New York, Ellen comes to embody
the modernism that interrupts, and the novel emerges as a modernist
text. Disruption, Astradur Eysteinsson notes, plays a significant role
in modernism’s relationship to modernity: “Most of us do not experience modernity as a mode of disruption, however many disruptive his-
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 565
torical events we may be aware of. I find it more to the point to see
modernism as an attempt to disrupt the modernity that we live and
understand as a social, if not ‘normal,’ way of life.”24 Ellen does indeed
disrupt the social, “‘normal’” rituals of Newland’s world, emphasizing
that even a world encased in ritual may always be interrupted and signaling Wharton’s awareness that art offers a means both to represent
(through Ellen) and enact (via the novel) such disruption.25
Newland’s culture simultaneously commemorates the past and ritually ensures that the past is suspended into the future, a stance that
takes on ambivalent overtones almost as soon as Ellen announces,
“I’m sure I’m dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven” (38).
The future of entombment that Newland imagines at the novel’s climactic dinner party caps Wharton’s motif linking the passage of time
not to a “radiant future” but to death (48). At the Van der Luydens’
home, where one of Old New York’s truly aristocratic families has
been “rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere . . . as
bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death,” Newland
hears the “tick of the monumental ormolu clock on the white marble
mantelpiece [grow] as loud as a minute-gun” (72, 74). A minute gun,
shot at intervals of one minute at funerals of state, ceremonially commemorates the past for the living; the glacier freezes a moment in
time, indefinitely extending the present. Yet even as he begins to see
his future as a living death, Newland develops a new consciousness of
the past that is marked by leaps of imagination. Before the tomb of his
future closes on him at the dinner party, he sees Ellen; instantly she
becomes “the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with at children’s
parties” (349). In this moment, Newland remembers, too, “how he
had kept his eyes fixed” on her ungloved hand “in the little Twentythird Street drawing room” years before (349). Something radical has
happened to Newland’s memory. Ritualized behaviors have become
illuminated by emotional insight; spontaneous recollection and habit
memory have coalesced. His future has become a tomb, yet his past
has come to life.
Intimations of Relativity: Ellen’s House
If the Bergsonian spontaneous recollections that Ellen elicits in Newland solidify her “dual role as lover and philosopher,”26 the other hallmarks of Ellen’s appearances—stopped time and distorted appear-
566 American Literature
ances—invite us to see Newland’s time leaps as representations of
Einstein’s radical conception of special relativity. The theory of special relativity asserts that “physical processes are independent of the
uniformly moving frame of reference within which they take place.”27
Historian of science Peter Galison argues that this notion would “dismantle absolute time. . . . Part philosophy and part physics, Einstein’s
rethinking of simultaneity has come to stand for the irresolvable break
between modern physics and all earlier framings of time and space.”28
Einstein proposed his theory of special relativity in 1905 but gained
worldwide fame for it in 1919, when a solar eclipse proved his theory
of general relativity to be correct. Today Einstein’s theories (and his
image) are so pervasive that we may forget the disruptive force his
ideas packed in Wharton’s day. Physicist Alan Lightman notes, “On
November 8, 1919, for example, the London Times had an article
headlined: ‘The Revolution In Science/Einstein Versus Newton.’ Two
days later, The New York Times’ headlines read: ‘Lights All Askew In
The Heavens/Men Of Science More Or Less Agog Over Results Of
Eclipse Observations/Einstein Theory Triumphs.’”29 As the popular
and the scientific press immediately made clear, time would never be
the same.
Then, as now, Einstein’s basic conceptions were associated with and
explained through images derived from the “thought experiments” he
used to formulate his hypotheses. The PBS documentary Einstein’s
Big Idea (2006), for example, uses this technique. A young, virile Einstein disarmingly proposes the following thought experiment to his
intended, Mileva Maric: “What would we see, do you think, if we were
together and we sped up and up until we caught up to the front of
a beam of light?” Two elements of special relativity become visible
in this thought experiment. As Einstein and Maric “caught up,” time
would stop, and the objects they saw would change size and appear
to be distorted. These effects, while charmingly portrayed in 2006,
threatened scientific revolution in 1919. For Wharton, a committed
amateur astronomer hard at work on The Age of Innocence, such developments may have provoked her own thought experiments. Wharton’s characters seem to feel the first rumblings of this shift as their
world becomes a “huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms [spin]
around on the same plane” (368).
Time stops and appearances become distorted throughout The Age
of Innocence, particularly in the shabby little house Ellen rents, an
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 567
“oasis” that inverts Newland’s sense of time, space, and self (176).
Ellen’s house is outside of New York’s general march of progress.
When it comes to clocks, “the only visible specimen had stopped”
(88). Here time stands still while the rest of New York marches funereally on. Ellen’s room rearranges space as well as time; it smells not
of “handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar, a
smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses” (90).
And as Newland looks around her living room, he seems to be drawn,
unwittingly but not unwillingly, into an Einsteinian thought experiment. Newland seems to leap far away from Ellen’s room; he realizes
from his new perspective that “New York seemed much farther off than
Samarkand. . . . Viewed thus, as from the wrong end of a telescope, it
looked disconcertingly small and distant; but then from Samarkand it
would” (95). Spatially, this distortion that reverses near and far necessarily disrupts the city’s carefully laid grid plans and house addresses;
temporally, absolute time is dismantled.
As Wharton did at the opera, she emphasizes here that hybrid temporalities structure modern culture. Private time can assert itself;
habit and spontaneity coexist. Newland fights hard to consign this
experience to one place, and his relief when he leaves Ellen’s house
is immense: “As he went out into the wintry night, New York again
became vast and imminent, and May Welland the loveliest woman in
it” (98). But the leap through time and space that clarifies for Newland the fragility of the culture he inhabits terrifies him; it is not the
romantic thrill-ride on the light beam that the televised Einstein offers
to his beloved. The inversion experiences that begin in Ellen’s house
recur for Newland at certain particularly emotional moments, most
notably at his wedding. As the novel progresses, Newland tries to contain these unsettling leaps by consigning Ellen to a space of refuge
where the past is clearly over.
Einstein had no qualms about disrupting Newtonian mechanics—
asserting, in essence, that shifting one’s perspective and position
could transform reality. His ideas and attitude both reflected and are
visible in the modernist art and literature of the period. When we
think about modernism in this regard, we tend to think more of those
writers whose work, stylistically, represents a major aesthetic break
with what had come before: Stein, Pound, Woolf, Eliot. Not Edith
Wharton. Yet it is very likely that Wharton would have read and discussed reports of Einstein’s work. Her personal enthusiasm for astron-
568 American Literature
omy and her presence in Parisian intellectual salons before the war
strongly suggest that she would have been informed about and quite
interested in Einstein’s ideas. A still stronger indication is the role
science played in her lifelong friendship with Walter Berry, a lawyer
with widely ranging interests. Wharton and Berry were both in Paris
when the war was breaking out; he escorted her to the front so that
she could write her journalistic accounts. The two clearly shared an
interest in science. Although Wharton burned most of their correspondence after Berry’s death in 1928, many of Berry’s surviving letters to
Wharton discuss scientific texts, theories, and discoveries. He often
glued clippings of apt scientific news to his letters as postscripts. In a
1900 letter, for instance, in which Berry wrote, “Just as soon as I can
I’ll come,—at an ‘1830 Groombridge’ + gait,” he attached the following
newspaper clipping: “[S]tars as the one known as ‘1830 Groombridge,’
whose velocity is so great that gravitation, as at present understood,
cannot account for its movement.”30 Besides the fact that Wharton
had more books on astronomy in her library at the time of her death
(five) than books covering any other scientific discipline, the best evidence that Wharton was thinking about the impact of new notions of
time and space derived from astronomy is visible in her 1908 poem,
“The Old Pole Star.” There she links the shifting position of the North
Star to broader societal changes but asserts in the end that there is a
new pole-star: “the Truth.”31 By 1920, when she wrote The Age of Innocence, the power of truth must have felt much less certain to her.
In the aftermath of war, and in the face of such radical new conceptions of time, Wharton struggled to understand how the past
might be integrated into the present, as Bergson had so optimistically claimed. In her novel, Newland’s experience demonstrates how
difficult acknowledging memory’s emotional force can be. Although
his perceptions seem to return to “normal” as soon as he leaves Ellen,
later these penetrating experiences become, in Bergson’s terms,
the “fugitive, spontaneous . . . [and] capricious” “personal memoryimages which picture all past events with their outline, their color and
their place in time” (MM, 98, 102). Always threatening to reconfigure
his frame of reference, Newland’s “fugitive, . . . capricious” memories center on Ellen and intensify when he approaches the spaces he
associates with her. “Ruminating on these things as he approached
her door, he was once more conscious of the way she reversed his
values, and of the need of thinking himself into conditions that were
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 569
incredibly different from any that he knew” (122). Newland’s memory
of Ellen emphasizes her disruptive power.
The Einsteinian inversion experiences that begin in Ellen’s house
recur for Newland, becoming spontaneous recollections that erupt at
especially charged occasions, stopping time and distorting appearances. At his wedding, for instance, Newland becomes “aware of
having been adrift far off in the unknown. What was it that had sent
him there, he wondered? Perhaps the glimpse, among the anonymous
spectators in the transept, of a dark coil of hair under a hat which, a
moment later, revealed itself as belonging to an unknown lady with a
rather long nose, so laughably unlike the person whose image she had
evoked that he asked himself if he were becoming subject to hallucinations” (204). Habit memory “conquered by effort, remains dependent upon our will,” Bergson writes; spontaneous recollection, meanwhile, “is as capricious in reproducing as it is faithful in preserving”
(MM, 102). Even so, as the novel progresses, Newland tries to contain
these unsettling leaps by sealing off a space of refuge where past and
present mingle easily, a strategy Ellen does not pursue and that Wharton could understand but not condone.
The spontaneous recollections Ellen elicits in Newland of course
confirm the fact that he is in love with her: he is an individual man
in love with an individual woman. But the conflicted, disruptive, and
volatile simultaneity of past and present that Ellen produces signifies
on a cultural level as well. Early in the novel, it is clear to Newland that
“having a past” is a gendered privilege that his fiancée May should
not share: “it was his duty, as a ‘decent’ fellow, to conceal his past from
her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal” (63).
Ellen, however, tells Newland: “I want to be free, to wipe out all the
past.” This is, of course, impossible for “a young woman with such a
history” (127, 81). Ellen’s shadowy, scandalous past is precisely what
women in Old New York should not carry, and it prevents her from
reintegrating herself into American life. Ellen’s memories, in a Bergsonian sense, “interlace, penetrate, melt into, drag down, and gnaw on
present experience” (CTS, 43). If Ellen’s early statements show her to
be fighting for release from her past, later she articulates a profoundly
integrative sense of history that honors memory by allowing it to be a
part of the present.
Ellen’s presence and philosophy encourage Newland to think outside
of the cultural rituals that create a smooth sense of progress. But to
570 American Literature
Newland, who will become a card-carrying Progressive by the novel’s
end, the time inversions and distorting visions Ellen engenders are
clearly dangerous; Newland must develop a strategy for coping with
their disruptive power. And indeed he does, eventually leading, in
Kern’s words, the “life of good sense, at all times poised effectively in
the present with easy access to past and future” that Bergson argues
will accrue to those who integrate habit memory and spontaneous recollection (CTS, 46). But in order to defuse his memories, Newland
must contain them; in showing the psychic cost of his strategy, Wharton subtly critiques the optimism of this Bergsonian balance. Newland
fights to maintain his faith in ritual and progress, just as his culture
did. But by 1919, after a war that had revealed science’s deadly side,
and with new scientific evidence threatening even more radical reconfigurations, such faith would have seemed misplaced at best.
Relics and the Past: The Museum
In The Age of Innocence, Wharton uses several markedly modern strategies to critique the cultural effort to keep faith in progress by revealing the limitations of Newland’s attempts to contain the past’s disruptive power. Most notably, Wharton slyly uses the form of the historical
novel to undermine assumptions about a stable past. Together with
her focus on memory, her dip into special relativity, and her emphasis
on hybrid temporalities, Wharton’s treatment of relics and museums
helps to unsettle what is ostensibly a historical novel, enacting Janet
Lyon’s argument that “modernity is not a seamless temporal entity
characterized by period, progress and development, though its narratives often prefer that plotline.”32 For Wharton’s readers, who of
course were grappling with their own anxieties about the past and
future in 1920, this readable genre could make unsettling questions
comprehensible and offer a method by which even an unstable past
could be put to use in building a future.
Formally, of course, The Age of Innocence is a historical novel. Wharton’s precise attention to specific spatial and historical details—neighborhoods, streets, addresses, buildings—situates the narrative in a
particular time and place. Soon after her arrival, Ellen remarks: “Is
New York such a labyrinth? I thought it so straight up and down—
like Fifth Avenue. And with all the cross streets numbered!” (96). The
novel’s geographic precision helps to shore up its historical cachet
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 571
while revealing the temporary nature of the urban landscape. Similarly, Wharton’s selective historical precision helps to cover the labyrinth of time that lies just under the novel’s surface, where it destabilizes the text as history.
Historical accuracy mattered to Wharton throughout her career.
Her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), an impeccably researched
romance set in eighteenth-century Italy, was seen by at least one critic
as little more than an attempt to show off her credentials as a historian.
In The Age of Innocence, however, Wharton wanted to avoid “archaeological pedantry.”33 She needed to play with time, to rearrange and
reimagine it, which she does in part through devices such as May’s
wedding ring, which is inscribed, “Archer to May, 187–.” As Candace
Waid points out, the indeterminate specificity of the flexible date can
be read as Wharton’s signal that she had decided to construct a frame
for her novel that could evoke a particular time and place while remaining flexible enough to transcend any particular historical moment.34
Those of Wharton’s readers who had lived through the period were
quick to point out the historical inaccuracies that appeared in the
novel, several of which Wharton amended in later editions.35 One blatant inaccuracy, Julia Erhardt notes, was allowed to stand: Wharton’s
precise mention of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which Newland
and Ellen visit in Central Park in the late 1870s. The Museum moved
to Central Park in 1880. Possibly this was a simple error, but it seems
unlikely. Wharton, after all, was practically related to the Metropolitan
Museum; her uncle Frederick Rhinelander was a major force behind
its development. Wharton’s decision to situate Ellen and Newland’s
meeting in a very specific part of a nonexistent building allows the
museum, an institution devoted to creating and stabilizing the past,
to become an immensely useful literary device; through the museum,
Wharton both examines personal and cultural memory and transcends
the genre of historical fiction.
The museum presents itself as an official, reliable keeper of the
past, a site where a collective cultural memory can be amassed and
accessed. But as Ellen and Newland tour the Cesnola galleries, their
approaches to the past clash. Ellen cannot escape her past; neither can
she easily participate in the process of containing and displaying the
past that becomes Newland’s strategy for coping with the history he
has developed with her. As a result, she finds the “recovered fragments
of Illium,” preserved and displayed in their “glass cabinets mounted in
572 American Literature
ebonised wood,” quite disconcerting (325). Ellen examines a case of
artifacts, “hardly recognizable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles—made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other
time-blurred substances. ‘It seems cruel,’ she said, ‘that after a while
nothing matters . . . any more than these little things, that used to
be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be
guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: “Use unknown”’”
(325–26). Yet even as Ellen protests against the way in which the
objects are divorced from their original settings, locked away and
put on display, Newland is preserving her. Because to him it seems
“incredible that [Ellen’s] pure harmony of line and color should ever
suffer the stupid law of change,” Newland focuses on “absorb[ing]
the delicious details that made her herself and no other”: “her figure,
so girlish even under its heavy furs, the cleverly planted heron wing
in her fur cap, and the way a dark curl lay like a flattened vine spiral on each cheek above the ear” (325). Here among the “mummies
and sarcophagi,” their emotional connection is preserved. “She had
disengaged her wrist; but for a moment they continued to hold each
other’s eyes, and he saw that her face, which had become very pale,
was flooded with a deep inner radiance. His heart beat with awe: he
felt that he had never before beheld love visible” (329). Yet try as he
may to commit a perfect version of Ellen to memory, Newland will
never be able to recall precisely the feelings she inspires in him.
Wharton’s early conversation with Bergson about her difficulty
memorizing great poetry signals that Newland’s strategy has its
flaws. Although she didn’t like his comment, Wharton admits that
Bergson “had really said all there was to say: that the gift of precision
in ecstasy . . . is probably almost as rare in the appreciator as it is in
the creator” (BG, 170). When Newland looks at Ellen, he is trying, it
seems, to memorize her, to encase her in the safety of habit memory,
a reaction which, according to Bergson, is entirely normal: “The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of the past, and to admit beyond the threshold
only that which can cast light on the present situation . . . in short only
that which can give useful work” (CE, 7). Enshrining Ellen in this way
should allow her to remain useful to Newland, but this effort, Bergson
would argue, is for naught. “Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not
a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing
them in a register. There is no register, no drawer” (CE, 7).
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 573
If Newland’s strategy is dubious on a personal level, the conversation’s setting in the Cesnola galleries argues that embalming the past
is equally deceptive and dangerous as a cultural strategy. Newland
and Ellen are looking, anachronistically, at the Cesnola Collection
of Cypriot antiquities, a cornerstone of the Met’s early holdings. As
Carol Singley points out, “[T]he history of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art—and of the Cesnola collection, in particular, where Ellen and
Newland wander—is one of change, including dramas of imperial conquest, financial risk, ego, and altruism.”36 Named for Luigi di Palma di
Cesnola, the one-time American Consul to Cyprus who was appointed
museum secretary in 1877 and was promoted to director in 1879, the
collection was the centerpiece of the nomadic museum’s Central Park
home. Yet whether the antiquities were art was questionable, as the
New York Times would note: “Very few of the objects discovered by
him at Cyprus have any remarkable beauty. Their value is historical.”37 Others questioned the historical value that the Times saw as
the collection’s only strength. In the August 1880 edition of Art Amateur, French antiques dealer Gaston Feuardent claimed that Cesnola
had tampered with some of the objects in the collection. The statues
were found to be authentic, but the incident led Feuardent to bring
a libel suit against Cesnola in 1883.38 Although Cesnola was exonerated, his reputation was further damaged by scholarship that cast considerable doubt on whether a massive second find he had dubbed the
“Treasure of Curium” really existed; the Times’s editorial page called
the Curium treasury “a pure invention . . . unparalleled in the history
of archaeological fraud.”39 Art historian Calvin Tomkins notes that by
the 1890s, “Cesnola was continually being attacked in the press and
the art journals as an ignoramus, an unscholarly charlatan who knew
nothing about art and cared only for his dubious collection of Cypriote
antiquities.”40 By the time Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence, the
Cesnola Collection evoked deception, fraud, incompetence and scandal; Cesnola’s tactics as a tomb raider in the name of self and empire
could only have seemed more shameful in the aftermath of a war so
closely bound up with European imperialism. Using this infamous collection as the backdrop to Ellen’s enshrinement allows Wharton to
undermine the strategy of embalming cultural memory and divorcing
it from the present.
Almost thirty years after the novel’s major action, Newland returns
to the Metropolitan Museum; in this second museum scene, Wharton
574 American Literature
emphasizes the past’s continuing emotional presence. By this time, in
a wedding that reminds him of nothing less than a “first night at the
Opera,” Newland has married May (199). Throughout her life, May
has reliably continued to represent a sense of habit memory as the
foundation of progress and of life as an inexorable march into a future
where the personal and cultural enshrinement of memory, however
questionable, is matched by the tenacity with which rituals adhere.
After her death, May is preserved in a photograph in Newland’s study,
her image becoming increasingly outdated as time passes. Newland’s
memories of Ellen, on the other hand, remain vividly alive. When he
attends the opening of the museum’s new wing, an overheard remark
(“why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms”) evokes the kind
of transportive leap through time that had marked his relationship to
Ellen both in her presence and in her absence: “instantly everything
about him vanished, and he was sitting alone on a hard leather divan
against a radiator, while a slight figure in a long sealskin cloak moved
away down the meagrely-fitted vista of the old Museum” (359). Newland’s spontaneous recollection signals that Ellen’s enshrinement has
been incomplete. Yet unlike the objects in his earlier visions, nothing
about Ellen is distorted here. The emotional past neither disappears
nor fades over time—it simply persists.
Like the culture of which he is a part, Newland succumbs to—or perhaps embraces—the mindset that requires the past either to become a
progress-building ritual or to be defused as a relic. For Newland, Ellen
becomes both. He imagines that he has become the same for her:
“memory of him as something apart . . . must have been like a relic in
a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day” (374).
Yet to imagine this is to deny his own experience as well as to reject
Ellen’s integrative view that allows the past to be a part of a rich and
creative present. Preserving the past in the museum case, literally or
figuratively, robs us, as Ellen is painfully aware, of the human meaning
that memory holds. It is cruel, as she states in the museum, “that after
a while nothing matters . . . any more than these little things, that used
to be necessary and important to forgotten people” (325–26). History
may be safely entombed, its disruptive potential defused, but not without exacting a powerful psychic price.
Just as the museum monumentalizes the past by acquiring other
peoples’ objects and putting them on display, Newland stores his past
in its own vault. This strategy allows him to pursue productive per-
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 575
sonal and political projects, but it forces him to sacrifice the possibility of integrating his most meaningful experiences into his present
and future. When he finally visits Paris after May’s death, Newland
refuses to see Ellen, choosing instead to gaze at her window from the
street below. “It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he tells his
son Dallas (376). Perhaps the past must remain the past; perhaps it
is best controlled and accessed through the imagination. Yet clearly
this tactic cauterizes Newland from emotional experience and leaves
him with fantasies that are “more real” to him than actual interactions
might be.
The unsatisfactory quality of Newland’s decision—especially as
the ending of a historical novel—perhaps signals that history itself
now precludes either a clear linear narrative of progress or any satisfying narrative closure. Thus, while it announces that it is a historical chronicle of an innocent age, the novel seems in fact to narrate
the disruptive and slippery ways in which history presses itself into
the present and to reveal the profound cultural danger of consigning the past to a display case where its “necessary and important” elements are “forgotten.” The novel shows us the promise, the difficulty,
and ultimately the necessity of engaging with memory—and through
memory, salvaging something of worth from the past. Wharton argues
that only by resisting the urge to contain the past, complete with its
discontinuities, its contradictions, its difficulties, and its threats, can
we experience the emotional risks and rewards that constitute “the
flower of life” that Newland, in retrospect, “knew that he had missed”
(362).
Wharton, Trauma, and Memory
Although Newland belatedly becomes aware of having missed the
“flower of life,” Wharton seems to have avoided that fate. Many critics
argue that The Age of Innocence pits two of Wharton’s potential life
trajectories against one another: if Newland Archer follows Wharton’s
path not taken, Ellen Olenska, whose Paris apartment is in Wharton’s
old quartier, is some version of the road Wharton built for herself.41
Salvaging from the past became especially important for Wharton as
she attempted to give form to her life after the trauma of war. Her biographers tell us that in writing The Age of Innocence she aimed to create
continuity with the past. “In the world of her imaginings,” according
576 American Literature
to R. W. B. Lewis, “Edith Wharton, by the act of writing the novel in
just the way she did write it, brought together the phases of her life
and her nature. Her successive New York and Europeanized selves—
their relations, she had felt, sundered by the Great War—were, for
an indeterminate moment in 1919 and 1920, in harmony” (EW, 432).
Could this harmony between past and present be extended beyond
the individual in a world sundered by war? As we begin to read the
novel as a literary experiment with time, memory, and history, we can
see Wharton arguing for the personal and cultural potential of hybrid
temporalities. The Age of Innocence thus resonates with and perhaps
anticipates more canonical modernist responses to war.
Before the war Wharton had immersed herself in Nietzsche, who
advocated breaking with the past, but after the war it was memory
that mattered to Wharton, and Bergson whose philosophy could help
her resurrect and interrogate it.42 As she composed The Age of Innocence, Wharton wrote to Sara Norton, “I am steeping myself in the
nineteenth century . . . which is such a blessed refuge from the turmoil and mediocrity of today—like taking sanctuary in a night temple”
(EW, 424). Here we can see Wharton’s sympathy with Newland and
the shrine he creates to Ellen. Wharton well knew that the past could
be a refuge; she also needed, like Newland, to remain useful and productive in the present. But personally and artistically, Wharton strove
toward Ellen’s ideal of acknowledging the past’s powerful continuity
with the present. In an immediate response to the war, she created a
version of memory’s function in consciousness and culture in which
both habit memory and spontaneous recollection have the potential to
help salvage a future for a postwar world.
Younger American expatriates such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest
Hemingway may have responded to Eliot’s claim that “the novel is a
form that will no longer serve” by disrupting the narrative line in obvious ways in novels such as The Great Gatsby and In Our Time. The Age
of Innocence is more subtle. Wharton undercuts the historical novel’s
assumptions about past and future while maintaining—salvaging, perhaps—the novel’s form. And this may have been precisely what gave
The Age of Innocence a commercial appeal far beyond what her earlier
novels had enjoyed; clearly Wharton could engage a broad readership
with a novel whose characters confront and come to grips with the
past, however painful and difficult their strategies are shown to be.43
Wharton transformed this commercial success—the book earned
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 577
her almost $70,000 in two years—into another salvage effort: “The
‘most satisfactory thing about The Age of Innocence,’ Edith wrote
[Bernard] Berenson in February 1921, was that it enabled her to ‘build
walls and plant orange-orchards’” at her new houses.44 Ever a builder,
after the war Wharton became a rebuilder, renovating a house in
Hyères (where she planted the oranges) and restoring an even more
dilapidated house in the newly reopened war zone of St. Brice-sousForêt, which Lewis describes as having a legendary, “delightfully corrupt” past (EW, 420). Initially, the house was “the retreat, provided by
their aristocratic lovers, of two elegant kept ladies of the eighteenth
century.”45 “As soon as I was settled in it,” Wharton writes, “peace and
order came back into my life” (BG, 363). At Jean-Marie, in the warzone house she “fell in love with . . . in spite of its dirt and squalor”
(BG, 363), with her philosophy and astronomy books on her shelves,
Wharton would quite literally build a new and tenable reality, salvaging a future from the thick memories of the past.
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Notes
I am indebted to Renée Bergland, Sarah Luria, Bill Maxwell, Laura Saltz, and
Augusta Rohrbach for their generous comments and thoughtful questions on
this essay as it developed.
1 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920; reprint, New York: Scribner’s, 1998), 363. Further references are to this edition and will be cited
parenthetically in the text.
2 Noting that “the First World War marked the breakdown of the (western) civilization of the nineteenth century” and inaugurated an “Age of
Catastrophe,” historian Eric Hobsbawm claims that “the destruction of
the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link our contemporary
experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic phenomena” of the post-1914 era (The Age of Extremes: A History of
the World, 1914–1991 [New York: Pantheon, 1994], 6, 7). Most historians
concur. Barbara Tuchman, for example, calls 1914 “the hour when the
clock struck” and argues that “the great words and beliefs of the time
before 1914 could never be restored” (The Guns of August [New York:
Macmillan, 1988], vii, 40).
3 See Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), 49.
4 Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New
578 American Literature
York: New York Univ. Press, 2000), 69. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as DT.
5 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot,
ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975), 177.
Of course, many modernists appropriated the “old” forms of cultures in
Africa, Asia, and the Americas in order, as it were, to “make it new.”
6 Paul Fussell notes that the war “reversed the Idea of progress” and led
“to the passage of modern writing from one mode to another” (The Great
War and Modern Memory [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975], 8, 312).
7 Shari Benstock, “Landscapes of Desire: Edith Wharton and Europe,” in
Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe, ed. Katherine Joslin
and Alan Price (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 29. As Katherine Joslin
points out, Wharton is excluded from feminist anthologies of modernism
such as Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism (1990) (“‘Fleeing
the Sewer’: Edith Wharton, George Sand, and Literary Innovation,” in
Wretched Exotic, 351). Important recent work by Benstock and others,
however, has helped to challenge Wharton’s exclusion from consideration as modern; see, for example, Dale Bauer, Edith Wharton’s Brave
New World (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1995) as well as many
of the essays in both Wretched Exotic and The Cambridge Companion to
Edith Wharton, ed. Millicent Bell (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1995).
8 Carol Singley is an important exception: “Wharton’s portrayal in The Age
of Innocence, of rigid social forms that dictate all manner of thought and
behavior is even more notable in relation to the shifting social ground
upon which the novel was written in 1919. Wharton confronts a dizzying array of social changes brought on not only by late nineteenth- and
early twentieth century commerce, industry, immigration and urbanization, but also by the ravages of World War I; and she seeks through
meticulously constructed detail to impose order on disorder”; see “Bourdieu, Wharton, and Changing Culture in The Age of Innocence,” Cultural
Studies 17 (May 2003): 501.
9 Wharton to Bernard Berenson, n.d., quoted in R. W. B. Lewis, Edith
Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 424. Further
references to Edith Wharton are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as EW.
10 For extended discussions of simultaneous modes of experiencing time in
the modern era, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–
1918 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003). Further references will be
cited parenthetically in the text as CTS.
11 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1933; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1998), 370. Further references are to this edition and will be cited
parenthetically in the text as BG.
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 579
12 Lewis concurs with critics who find The Marne not up to Wharton’s par,
noting that it lacks “staying power” (EW, 422).
13 When Wharton did try to imagine writing about the war, Henri Bergson
seems to have been on her mind. In “Writing a War Story,” published in
Woman’s Home Companion (September 1919, 17–19), Wharton grapples
humorously with the difficulty of writing about the war from within. A
poet, Ivy Spang, is invited to write a “good rousing trench story, with
a Coming-Home Scene to close with . . . a Christmas scene, if you can
manage it.” Ivy Spang finds the task of representing her own memories
of the war almost impossible; we never read any of the story Ivy eventually writes. But we do glimpse Ivy Spang’s source. In desperation, Ivy
raids the notebook kept by her former governess, Madsy, during the war.
Inside the “shabby copybook,” Madsy’s notes begin “with lecture notes
on Mr. Bergson’s course at the Sorbonne in 1913, and suddenly switched
off to ‘Military Hospital No. 13. November 1914. Long talk with the Chasseur Alpin Emile Durand, wounded through the knee and the left lung at
the Hautes Chaumes. I have decided to write down his story.’” Edited,
Madsy’s memory becomes Ivy Spang’s text. Although Wharton leaves
the details of Ivy/Madsy’s story out of her own text, she makes clear
that Bergson and memory are intimately connected to the experience of
writing in response to the war.
14 Linda Wagner-Martin, The Age of Innocence: A Novel of Ironic Nostalgia
(New York: Twayne, 1996), 5.
15 Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 349, 386.
16 See Edith Wharton Papers, Book list Jean-Marie. Box 50: Personal
Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Cited with permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/
Loomis Agency.
17 Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (London, 1890), quoted in
CTS, 33.
18 See Tom Quirk, Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa
Cather and Wallace Stevens (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,
1990), 80, 62.
19 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and
W. Scott Palmer, 5th ed. (1908; reprint, London: George Allen and Unwin,
1911), 95. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as MM.
20 See Julia Erhardt, “‘To Read These Pages Is to Live Again’: The Historical Accuracy of The Age of Innocence,” in The Age of Innocence, crit. ed.
(New York: Norton, 2003), 404.
21 Lewis notes that this error was pointed out to Wharton and removed in
the novel’s second print run (EW, 430).
580 American Literature
22 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1907; reprint,
New York: Modern Library, 1911), 58–59. Further references are to this
edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as CE.
23 In the context of Bergson’s inquiry, May Welland’s allegiance to ritual
certainly represents an alternative to Ellen Olenska’s Bergsonian outlook. Because May’s stance toward memory and the past is so closely
aligned with that of “Old New York,” I do not spend much time discussing
May in this essay. On May Welland’s role in the novel, see Linda WagnerMartin and Gwendolyn Morgan, “The Unsung Heroine: A Study of May
Welland in The Age of Innocence,” in Heroines of Popular Culture, ed. Pat
Browne (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State Univ. Popular Press,
1987), 32–40.
24 Eysteinsson, Concept, 6.
25 In this aspect, Wharton’s treatment of memory has surprising resonance
with the ideas of Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky, who “notes that
‘habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear
of war,’ and states that art, through its defamiliarizing practices, ‘exists
that one may recover the sensation of life’” (Eysteinsson, Concept, 45).
26 Carol Singley, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 172.
27 Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New
York: Norton, 2003), 16.
28 Ibid., 14.
29 Alan Lightman, “Relativity and the Cosmos,” www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
einstein/relativity (26 May 2006).
30 Walter Berry to Edith Wharton, 11 November 1900. Edith Wharton
Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Reprinted by permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.
31 Edith Wharton, “The Old Pole Star,” Scribner’s, January 1908, 68.
32 Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1999), 5.
33 Wharton to Rutger Jewett, 7 February 1921, quoted in Candace Waid,
“Introduction,” The Age of Innocence, crit. ed. (1920; reprint, New York:
Norton, 2003), xiv.
34 Waid, “Introduction,” The Age of Innocence, xiv–xv.
35 For a full account of the novel’s adherence to historical facts, see Erhardt,
“To Read These Pages.”
36 Singley, “Bourdieu, Wharton,” 512.
37 “Cesnola Investigation,” New York Times, 19 December 1880, 6.
38 See Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913), 225.
39 “Cesnola Scandal,” New York Times, 24 November 1884, 4.
Memory and Time in The Age of Innocence 581
40 Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 81.
41 For information on the parallels between Ellen Olenska’s and Edith
Wharton’s lives in Paris, see EW, 432.
42 See Singley, Edith Wharton, 17–19. Eysteinsson remarks that “[o]n the
whole, Nietzsche is calling for a sudden break with nineteenth-century
culture, its positivism and scientific ideology” (Concept, 54). Benstock
notes that after the onset of war, “Edith, who had read Heine, Schiller,
Kant, and Nietzsche, and whose favorite text was Goethe’s Faust, joined
the English and French in seeing the new Germans as barbarians, the
destroyers of civilization (No Gifts, 298).
43 Wharton handily outpaced Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s sales. The Age
of Innocence sold far better than Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, which
came out in the same year. The Great Gatsby and In Our Time, both published in 1925, sold far fewer copies than either. On the literary and personal connections among these modernists, see Robert A. Martin and
Linda Wagner-Martin, “The Salons of Wharton’s Fiction: Wharton and
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner and Stein,” in Joslin and Price, Wretched
Exotic, 97–110.
44 Benstock, No Gifts, 363. See also EW, 430. Wharton’s $70,000 in 1920
would have been worth about $707,000 in 2006.
45 Millicent Bell, “Edith Wharton in France,” in Joslin and Price, Wretched
Exotic, 66.