Tintner, Adeline. “Jamesian Structures in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and Related Stories” Edith Wharton in Context : Essays on Intertextuality. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999: 58-74

Many critics have made the claim that The Age of Innocence is the most Jamesian of Edith Wharton’s novel, whereas others have denied it. Millicent Bell wrote that the novel “contains some of the most obvious resemblances to James’s works to be found anywhere in the writings,”1 and Cynthia Wolff stated that its “central meaning grows out of the complex way in which the novel beckons” to James.2 Yet Edmund Wilson saw her in relation to James “as a lesser disciple of whom she is sometimes pointlessly listed,”3 and Irving Howe found that in her “most important novels it is hard to detect any specific influence of James.”4  ( P 58)

Despite Wharton’s statement in A Backward Glance that she found James’s late novels unattractive, they seem to have left their mark on other stories by Wharton that are associated in time with The Age of Innocence and were written when Wharton was greatly involved with thinking about James, surrounded by his circle of friends, and rereading his letters with a view to their publication by Percy Lubbock, whom she had chosen as their editor. The year of this concentration on James, his work, and his friends was 1919-20, when she wrote The Age of Innocence and the short story called “writing a War Story.” During this time she also mapped out a group of four novellas published in book from in 1924, which she was to call Old New York, the titles she had originally planned for The Age of Innocence but ultimately discarded. Critics have noted a family resemblance between The Age of Innocence and the four Old New York novellas because of their reconstruction of a past New York society (Edmund Wilson wrote that “Old New York was a much feebler second boiling from the tea-leaves of The Age of Innocence”)5 The Jamesian strain apparent in this group of stories as well as in the novel shows that Wharton used everything that could assist her archaeologizing habit, but it has resisted detection because the specific borrowings have not been excavated except in one or two cases where, as we shall see, they have not been properly located. (  P 59)

The Age of Innocence opens with a performance of Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. In The American James for the first time had brought all his characters into the Paris opera house, where Don Giovanni is being presented. Having learned from Balzac how to present the play-within-the-play he expanded that technique in this novel to include the play-within-the-box.21 In James’s later story, “A London Life”(1888), the opera, Les Huguenots, points up the twofold drama of Selina and her lover and Laura and her young man, combining thereby the play-within-the-play and the play-within-the-box.21 In “Glasses”(1896), Lohergrin is the opera that underlines the theme of renunciation exemplified by the heroine, Flora, who, now blind, performs in her opera box. Although James had never invoked Faust as an opera, he alludes to it in a story, “Collaboration”(1892), and bases the story on the collaboration between Charles Gounod and Goethe that produced “Faust.” In James’s story the aspects of the temptation by Mephistopheles are emphasized rather than the loss of Marguerite, although that also figures in his tale. Wharton gives the Faustian analogy her own slant by making Marguerite into May Welland, who not not noly resists the unfortunate end of Goethe’s Marguerite but emerges as victor. It is clear that Wharton thus has used a Jamesian technique from The American, in the opening scene of The Age of Innocence. She has also borrowed from the The Princess Casamassima, as well as from Roderick Hudson, for Ellen Olenska has been moderled on James’s Christina Light (although Millicent Bell sees her formed on Eugenia from The Europeans), and others see her as a version of herself. The evidence for this can be seen when we consider James’s earliest novel, Roderick Hudson, in which Christina makes her first appearance.

The connection of Ellen Olenska with Christina Light is supported by a number of scenes in The Age of Innocence that seem to repeat scenes in which Christina plays a role in the two novels by James in which she appears. There is a scene in The Age of Innocence that takes place at the Vander Luyden’s dinner. ( P 65)

The meeting of Ellen and Newland in that part of the old wing of the Metropolitan Museum where the Cesnola collection was kept repeats the same general setting as that of “Julia Bride.” The technique of backing the rendezvous with the antiquities of the collection that “mouldered in the case” (“time blurred substances”) “(W.309) may also come from James’s “museum” story, “Julia Bride.” In The Age of Innocence the museum guard walked “like a ghost stalking through a necropolis” (W,311). This is a correlative of the doomed couple’s lack of hope in the city of the dead. Edith Wharton is really using James’s technique when he wrote that Julia “saw the great shining room with its mockery of art and ‘style’”31 in contrast to her own shabby future. The scene ends in The Age of Innocence with a gesture repeated from “Julia Bride.” “When she [Ellen] reached the doore she turned for a moment to wave a quick farewell” (W,313). This gesture seems to reverse the beginning of “Julia Bride,” where Basil French, also leaving the heroine in the museum, turned for “a last demonstration” and made a “cordial gesture.”32 When Archer goes home he views the objective in his own home “as if… from the other side of the grave” (W,313). The theme of death and ruin extends beyond the museum scene. Edith Wharton has thus repeated the museum scene from “Julia Bride,” even to its function as an aesthetic and moral fictional arch that covers the action symbolically. We know that Wharton admired this tale by James, as she wrote in a letter to Sara (Sally) Norton. (See Chapter 7.) ( P 69)

Making use of James’s habit of referring to a painting well known to his readers in order to establish a character, Wharton has her young collector of the not-yet-appreciated masterpieces of Italian painters before Raphael meet the great critic of the avant-garde, John Ruskin, in an alpine location, recalling his well-known portrait painted by Millais in which he stands in front of a Scottish mountain and steam. The hero makes a trip to the small chapel in Venice in which the St. Ursula fresoces by Carpaccio show him a female type resembling his fiancée. James’s hero in “The Great Good Place” describes his room as “a great square, fair chamber, all beautified with omissions… in which he was vaguely and pleasantly reminded of some old Italian picture, some Carpaccio or some early Tuscan.”35 A cultivated reader of the time would instantly recognize, once he had been clued in by the name of the painter, the fresco of the bedchamber in the Carpaccio series in which little St. Ursula sleeps. In False Dawn the ironic destiny of the marvelous masterpieces acquired by a taste too much in advance of its time reminds us of the end of The Spoils of Poynton where the “spoils,” passing into the hands of a philistine woman, are burned through her neglect, just as the Angelico, Mantegna, and Piero della Francesca of False Dawn are converted by mercenary New Yorkers of the early twentieth century into pearls and Rolls Royces and are lost to the family. ( P 71)

22. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: Scribner’s, reprint, 1970), p.63. Future references to this novel will be indicated by W plus page number. ( P 73)