‘A turmoil of contradictory feelings': money, women, and body in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

Abstract

While Wharton criticism has addressed the questions of money, commodity, economy, or women as a form of property in The House of Mirth (1905), few have dealt with such issues in relation to The Age of Innocence (1920). By way of the reassessment of Wharton's use of the financial panic, this essay seeks to illustrate how The Age of Innocence is profoundly informed by Wharton's recognition and anxiety as to the growing liquidity of money in the early twentieth century. I argue that in the novel, women serve as the primary vessel through which the society seeks collectively to manage money's contradictory functions as a medium of circulation and an instrument of hoarding.