Writing New York – Old and New

Abstract

Many of Edith Wharton's novels and stories are set in and around New York and in this chapter I want to focus on three of the best known and most accomplished of these. The texts: The House of Mirth , published in 1905, The Custom of the Country , published in 1913, and The Age of Innocence , published in 1920, represent her work in three periods of distinct creative activity and show to good effect her command of a range of genres. The House of Mirth can be said towork broadly within the perameters of American naturalism, The Custom of the Country , described by Wharton herself as a ‘chronicle-novel’ ( BG 183), follows the traditional pattern of the realist novel of manners, and The Age of Innocence is an historical novel, looking back over fifty years to the New York of her girlhood. All three novels have in common their setting, which was Wharton's own, as she describes it in A Backward Glance , ‘fashionable New York … There it was before me, in all its flatness and futility, asking to be dealt with as the theme most available to my hand, since I had been steeped in it from infancy, and should not have to get it up out of note-books and encyclopaedias’ ( BG 207). All three novels, in different ways, incorporate a view of leisure-class New York that gives credit to what Wharton would have seen as its virtues whilst also laying bare its failings. She does this not in a sensationalist manner but by weaving the conflicts generated by the clashes between the old and the new in terms of manners, mores, and the people who espouse them. Life in nineteenth-century America, in the upper reaches of society, as she says, again in her autobiography, was in some ways indistinguishable from life in western Europe: ‘my French and English friends told me, on reading The Age of Innocence , that they had no idea New York life in the ‘ ‘seventies had been so like that of the English cathedral town, or the French “ ville de province ”, of the same date’ ( BG 175). Things were about to change, however; the new century was clearly – even then – the American century, with the pace of change in the rest of the world being set by the USA in every arena.