leading us into melodrama, the dominant mode of the popular theater of the age she recreates, a theater of plays in which good and evil were clearly sorted out, not tainted by moral ambiguity or shaded feelings. As we read what has so often been praised as an historical novel, we must bear in mind the year it was composed, 1919. The Age of Innocence calls upon history to inform the present, and Wharton portrays a cast of clueless characters who could not conceive the slaughter of World War I or President Wilson’s ill-fated proposal for the League of Nations. Turning back to the untroubled era of her childhood, she entertains with a predictable old form that is a lure, even a joke, but not on the reader. We are drawn by the broad humor at the outset of the novel to the discovery of a darker story without the simple solutions of melodrama. Edith Wharton had a gift for comedy that has often been obscured by a reverence for the elegant lady novelist or probing for feminist concerns in her work.

The opening chapters of The Age of Innocence are given to caricature and sweeping mockery. In fact, Wharton mentions Dickens and Thackeray, whose comic exaggerations she must have had in mind. Newland Archer, superior and instructional, is foolish in the romantic projections of his marriage to May: “ ‘We’ll read Faust together... by the Italian lakes...’ he thought, somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honeymoon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride.” An understanding of Faust, the most popular opera of the nineteenth century, with its unbridled passion and soul-selling contract, will presumably improve May: “He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton” (p. 8). Meanwhile, Nilsson, the great diva, sings gloriously in the tacky garden scenery of the opera house. Early on, we suspect there will be no paradise and little innocence as the next months’ installments of the novel unfold. May, corseted in virginal white with a “modest tulle tucker” over her bosom, is too good to be true. It may be difficult for a contemporary reader to find Ellen Olenska, fated to be May’s rival, shocking in that revealing Empire dress, “like a night-gown,” according to Newland’s sister.

As they set the scene, Wharton and Newland are gossips who have the scoop on who’s in and who’s out, and on intricate family histories—the Chiverses of University Place, the Dallases of South Carolina, the Rushworths, Mrs. Manson Mingott, with two daughters married off to Europeans. We begin to hear the difference between Newland Archer’s view of his set, for it is his more than ever with his engagement to May Welland, and Edith Wharton’s parody of society tattle recreated from memory and notched up a bit. Old Sillerton Jackson, the expert on family, is a cartoon figure, one of the many minor characters who make up the closely worked tapestry of the novelist’s old New York. There’s Lawrence Lefferts, with his prissy attention to correct social form, and the newcomer Mrs. Lemuel Struthers in “her bold feathers and her brazen wig,” but it is in the portrait of Mrs. Mingott that Wharton creates a true grotesque. “The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon” (pp. 24—25). She is immobile, though far more flexible in her views than those who seek her approval, among them Newland’s mother and May’s.

Mrs. Mingott, larger than life, breaks whatever rules she pleases. In depicting the matriarch as an original, Wharton sets her apart from the proper society she can observe from above, quite literally, by building her house uptown (uptown being above Thirty-fourth Street in those days). And it is Mrs. Mingott, in her pale stone house with frivolous foreign furniture, who, with largesse of spirit, takes in “poor Ellen Olenska,” upon her return to America with bright, somewhat girlish hopes of freedom while still entangled in the disasters of a foreign marriage. In book one of The Age of Innocence these two exotics are housed together, women who understand liberty and its limits. There is a good deal of Edith Wharton’s independence of mind in Mrs. Mingott and of her troubled memories of