ABSTRACT
Edith Wharton never forgave old New York for its way of “taking life ‘without effusion of blood’” (Age of Innocence 335). Though World War I gave Wharton an intense appreciation for the past—she grieved over the war’s “uprootings and rendings” which swept away “all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning to the present” (Fighting France 58)—it did not reconcile her to memories of old New York’s determination to ignore the unpleasant. Her criticism of the society that had shaped her was the creative impulse behind much of her earlier work. In describing the genesis of The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton noted that “a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals” (A Backward Glance 207). And after the war, though making the claim that “after all, there was good in the old ways” (347), >The Age of Innocence (1920) explores through Newland Archer the stultification of the individual by society’s constraints.
