Title : Age Of Innocence
Author : Edith Wharton
Narrators : Barbara Caruso
Genre : Historical
Publisher : Recorded Books
Listening Length : 11 hours 47 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️ 1/2
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2

The Age Of Innocence is set in the early 1920s and is about a love forbidden by society’s strict dictates of that time. While it starts off well, it grew tiresome and stretched towards the end.

Newland Archer, heir of one of New York society’s top families, is about to marry May Welland, daughter of the illustrious Mingott family. Newland is very much in love with May and is looking forward to a happy married life with the pretty and agreeable May. However when May’s worldly cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, makes an appearance, Newland’s love for his fiancee is tested.

The Age of Innocence is a commentary on society’s rules and morality. In this book, the New York of the early 1900s is dominated by old money, the set of reputed families that live around 5th Avenue, who hold up the double standards and pretension. These families also keep in place the strict rules for “good” women – staid, honorable and married. The men don’t have to keep to such high standards, and the book tells of many male characters who engage in affairs outside of their marriages:

…When “such things happened” it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.

So when the married Countess Olenska wants a divorce from her abusive husband, societ is aghast. Separation is acceptable, but divorce is not. For per society, it s far better to be a separated Countess (the title comes from her marriage to a Polish Count) than a divorced old maid. The Countess though is determined to not go back to her husband, is stifled by all the doublespeak, and openly flouts society’s rules. She seems lonely but puts it to Newland, just so:

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

Newland is called in to help persuade Ellen, and is impressed by her resolve and unpretentious nature. She also helps him question the hypocrisy and the false values with which he has been raised. He is drawn to the Countess’s maturity and intelligence, her ability to counter and question. She is quite the reverse of placid May in that respect, and Newland begins to realize that the marriage he has been so eagerly anticipating will not be the lively, meeting-of-the-minds he thinks it will be.

His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.

Newland and Ellen fall in love, but he is to be married shortly and she is an already married woman. Given the strong sense of duty they both harbor, they cannot possibly find happiness together, can they?

I’m impressed that Edith Wharton displays sensibilities so far ahead of her time. Via Newland, she calls out society’s double standards, and questions the so-called morality and honor it attempts to enforce. Honestly, 1920’s American society reminds me very much of present-day Indian society where a woman’s goal in life is touted as “to get married and stay married”, and women and men indulging in similar behavior are judged very differently from each other.

The feminist and egalatarian angle is great. The story though, got repetitive with all the harping on about Newland’s and Ellen’s great love and regard for each other. Newland is a respectable young man, betrothed to a very suitable young woman, so outwardly, he tries to preserve decorum. And we go back and forth between his and Ellen’s meetings and conversations where he beseeches her to go away with him, and she demurs. Well then, she almost agrees, and then she doesn’t, and so on. This got kinda tiresome after a while. Also the language is long-winded – this was the unabridged version.

So, I can’t really recommend The Age Of Innocence; I finished it by sheer force of will. Narrator Barbara Caruso is great, and brings that “old-worldliness” to her narration.