Gilded Tedium

For last week's tutorial, we read Edith Wharton's, The Age of Innocence. I have now spent close to a week trying to figure out how to review it. It's funny--not in a Wodehousian way, but in a sly, sardonic way. The three main characters all have some depth and are interesting--May, in particular, is fascinating (how naive is she?). But, and here is the thing that leaves me unable to decisively evaluate the book, the novel is another example of that huge genre: The American Gilded Age Novel. And the problem with those novels is the old "Read one, read 'em all" characteristic. Sure, The Age of Innocence has a different plot than Sister Carrie or McTeague or anything by Henry James, but nonetheless, the whole time in reading Wharton, I felt more like I was rereading the book than reading it for the first time. Now, I have never read Wharton before, and I liked her enough that I will certainly read more in the future, but nonetheless, Wharton read like James or Dreiser with a sense of humor--and come to think of it, it's the sense of humor that makes Wharton appealing--while Henry James bores me to tears with his earnest prose and plots, at least Wharton has the good sense to laugh at herself.

The interesting matter to ponder in The Age of Innocence is deciding how much we should feel bound by social conventions. The characters in the novel are all trapped by late 19th century New York Aristocratic rules. They all feel bound by them, two of them may want to break clear, but they don't and one suspects they don't because deep down, they know the importance of maintaining the social conventions. May, the third character, rather than trying to break away, uses the conventions to her advantage in rather clever fashion. Are we more or less free when we are bound by societal norms? Would we really be free if there was no society to constrain our impulses? (Cue Isaiah Berlin and the Apostle Paul.) The tutorial was mixed; one the one hand, everyone wants to be free, on the other hand, there seems to be something instinctively horrible about the idea of breaking social norms. Would you be willing to do something playful and fun (e.g., throw a sandwich across a dorm dining hall) even if there was no consequence to doing so other than social opprobrium? Why not? Would you be willing to divorce your spouse to run off with someone better if the society would frown on doing so? Is a social convention forbidding divorce a good thing? Does the pain of the spouse being left matter? Why?

Next up for the tutorial: Henry James visits the frontier.