 The
underlying forces of social convention characterize the world of Edith
Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Wharton’s protagonist, Newland
Archer, describes 1870’s New York society to this effect: “In reality,
they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was
never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary
signs” (Wharton, 44). Inexorably bound by social conventions, Wharton’s
characters in The Age of Innocence rely on the signs proscribed by society’s
dictates to convey their meaning to others, and in so doing, to achieve
their implicit personal (or group) agendas. Like the layered symbolism
of a system of hieroglyphics, the mechanisms of convention operate chiefly
through the “superiority of implication and analogy over direct action”
(Wharton, 335); and thus the unobserved, implied meanings in situations
in the novel are equally as important as the actions and motives that are
directly revealed. Indeed, Wharton’s narrative structure in The Age
of Innocence is critical to our understanding of the significance of the
implied, for missing plot details leave major events in the novel glossed
over or even omitted. As readers we must fill in the elisions in
the novel’s timeline, interpreting the implications of Wharton’s omissions,
which create gaps in our knowledge of crucial thematic events. Much
like Newland, who struggles to interpret the often contradictory set of
signs that surround him, as readers we must interpret for ourselves the
significance of what Wharton leaves unsaid. As much as Newland is
bound within the constraints of his society, the conventional Age of Innocence,
as readers we too are mired in the novel The Age of Innocence through
narrative elisions. In effect, the significance of the implied in
the hieroglyphic world that is 1870’s New York is mirrored by narrative
devices which reinforce reader implication in the world of the novel.
In The Age of Innocence, “the real drama is played out below the
surface--the impeccable, sophisticated surface--and communicates itself,
if at all, to the observer by means of signs which only the initiate can
read” (Nevius, 182). The crux of the novel is Newland Archer’s impending
choice between May Welland and Ellen Olenska, and nearly every incident
and remark in the novel contributes to this central conflict. But
it is a conflict that Newland should not even be faced with, according
to the conventions of his society. The problem for Wharton, the critic
Blake Nevius suggests, is that if passions are to spin the novel’s plot,
then they must be deliberately visible (183). But in The Age of Innocence
Newland’s socially unacceptable desires are not deliberately showcased
for public view, though he and Ellen are discovered by both the family
tribe and the reader. Although as readers we are allowed periodic,
advantageous glimpses into Newland’s mind, Wharton’s art lies in her ability
to reduce us to the level of Newland’s own confusion in a hieroglyphic
world. By masking critical decisions from our view, like Newland’s
choice to go through with his marriage to May, and by omitting important
events, such as details of the couple’s life together, Wharton engages
the reader in their own reading of signs. As Gary Lindberg notes,
“the gaps between a novelist’s scenes have a curious power to implicate
us, for somehow we must tacitly account for the lapsed time, and to this
degree we participate in constructing the narrative movement itself” (47).
Wolfgang Iser’s criticism similarly asserts that a reader must act as co-creator
of the work by supplying that portion of the text which is not written
but only implied. This process of “concretization” requires that
each reader fills in the unwritten portions of the text, its “gaps” or
areas of “indeterminacy” in her own way (Tompkins, xv). Thus Wharton’s
elisions are a deliberate narrative strategy which implicates us as readers
into a relationship with The Age of Innocence where we must concretize
what is merely implied.
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