328 Making It New: 1900–1945setting, in Ethan Frome (1911). But in both The Reef (1912) and the moral satirical
novel The Custom of the Country (1913), she returned to her fictional investigation
of the habits and hypocrisies of the New York social world.
By now, Wharton had become an expatriate, living in Paris, and divorced. During
World War I she worked tirelessly for combatants and refugees. After it, she wrote of
the conflict in two novels, The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923). She also
established a house in Paris that became a gathering place for many younger writers.
She had exhausted herself with her welfare activities during the war. But she
recovered her powers sufficiently to write more fiction looking back to her early
years in New York. She also completed an autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934),
and a book on The Writing of Fiction (1925). The book on writing fiction
acknowledges her debt to James. But, together with her later novels and stories, it
measures both the connection and the subtle differences between them. Like James,
and the early James in particular, Wharton was committed to the solid, detailed
presentation of a social scene, emotional subtleties, and social nuances. Like James,
too, she believed that the novelist should have a fine ear for the different shades of
conversation and a fierce concern for moral issues. But Wharton remained more
concerned than James ever was with the concrete detail of furnishings and dress, as
a measure of character and taste, and much more intensely interested in the various
gradations of social status. And, as she developed, she also paid more attention than
she did in her earlier work to careful planning – in this she was following James, of
course – to the selection of what she called “crucial moments,” epiphanies or
significant revelations, to balance or harmony of structure, and to irony. Writing
about these strategies, Wharton worked them into the fabric of her later fiction.
They are there, for instance, in her best-known collection of tales, Xingu and Other
Stories (1916). For that matter, they are there in her finest novel, The Age of Innocence,
published in 1920.
Set in 1870, The Age of Innocence tells the story of Newland Archer, a lawyer, and
his involvement with two women: May Welland, who becomes his wife, and her
cousin Ellen Olenska, the wife of a Polish count. Having left her abusive husband,
Ellen appears in New York society, where her unconventional behavior causes ripples
of concern and displeasure. Attracted by her exoticism, her difference from the social
norms of old New York, Newland falls in love with her, but the constraints of society
and his impending marriage to May keep them apart. Still, his interest in Ellen
continues after his marriage. This prompts May to disclose to her cousin that she is
pregnant; Ellen then leaves New York to live alone in Paris. It is not only external
constraints and May’s maneuverings – which, characteristically, have a childlike,
almost innocent slyness about them – that frustrate Newland and Ellen. They are
also separated by the very things that attract them to each other. Newland is drawn
to Ellen because of her candor, openness, sensitivity, and grace: qualities that are
proven by her resistance to the idea of any hole-in-the-corner affair, her pointing
out realistically to Newland that there is no world elsewhere or “other place” that
they can flee to, and, above all, by her departure when she learns May is pregnant.
Ellen, in turn, is attracted to Newland by his fineness of spirit and his making herGGray_c04.indd 328ray_c 04 .indd 328 8 8/1/2011 7:53:47 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 47 AM