The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Edith Wharton · a novel in two books and thirty-four chapters · serialised in The Pictorial Review, July to October 1920, and published in book form by D. Appleton and Company in October 1920 · scored on the 1920 text, in Wharton’s English, which has stood as first published; read from knowledge, with no text in hand, and only words that are certain are quoted
Mode
The novel of manners turned retrospective: a historical novel of a society within living memory, written from inside it after the war that ended its world
Mythos
The tribe and its rites, read by a man who thinks himself their ethnographer; May as Diana, the huntress who wins at the archery; the exile who returns and is cast out again; the daisy of the opera, the plot told in advance
Phase
The early 1870s, from a night at the opera through an engagement, a wedding and a marriage, to a farewell dinner; then a leap of some twenty-six years to Archer at fifty-seven
Presentation
Fiction; close third person held almost wholly on Newland Archer, with the narrator’s irony a half-step above him; two books, of eighteen and sixteen chapters
Register
Balanced, ironic and exact; comedy of manners for long stretches, rising to dread at the farewell dinner and to a quiet height on the last page
Scale
One class in one city, a handful of houses and a few European scenes; a marriage, a love, a ruin and a generation
Governing Proposition
Newland Archer, engaged to May Welland, falls in love with her cousin Ellen, the Countess Olenska, who has come home to New York; he believes himself the critic of his society and turns out to be its most perfect instrument. The society never speaks: it settles every crisis by representation, and at a farewell dinner it removes Ellen with perfect kindness while Archer learns that the whole table has believed them lovers for months. The wager of the novel is that a society can rule by signs alone, that the innocent girl is the shrewdest player in the book, and that a generation later the man who gave up the thing he most wanted can find the memory more real than the woman.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens at the opera. At the Academy of Music Faust is sung in Italian to an English-speaking audience, and old New York sits in its tiers and boxes, opera glasses raised. Every term the book will use is set before a word of consequence is spoken: the boxes, the glass, the lilies of the valley, the daisy of the opera with its petals counted for love and not love, which tells the plot in advance. Into the Mingott box comes the Countess Olenska, Ellen, the exile come home.
The man who watches her is Newland Archer, engaged to her cousin May Welland. The point of view is close third person, held almost wholly on Archer, and the narrator’s irony sits a half-step above him. He believes he sees through his world, and the reader shares the belief; the form will later show what both have missed. The book has no other centre of consciousness, and withholds from the reader exactly what the society withholds from him.
Wharton wrote the novel in 1919 and 1920. It ran as a serial in The Pictorial Review from July to October 1920 and was published in book form by D. Appleton and Company that October, in two books of eighteen and sixteen chapters; the text has stood as first published, and that is the text judged here. Wharton was born in 1862 into the society she depicts, and she set the novel some fifty years before she wrote it, after the war that had ended that world. The distance doubles the irony: the book is a novel of manners written as history.
Movement II
Ellen is put on trial at once, though no court sits. Sillerton Jackson and Lawrence Lefferts supply the genealogies, and what looks like ornament is the court record by which she is tried; the trial is the plot. Archer reads it all as an ethnographer reads a tribe, with the detachment of a man who believes himself outside it. His word for the world is “a hieroglyphic world”, in which the real thing is never said, only represented by signs.
The society’s comedy has its throne in Mrs Manson Mingott, enthroned on the ground floor of her cream-coloured house, and its coming scandal in Beaufort. The inventory of drawing rooms runs long in places, and the families arrive in blocks; Ned Winsett’s case for public life is stated more than it is made necessary. These are the book’s slack. Everything else moves the noose a turn.
Archer falls in love with Ellen, and the first book closes on a turn: a telegram from May that moves the wedding forward. May herself is drawn as Diana, the huntress, bright and chaste; at the archery at Newport she wins, and the contest is the hinge of her power. The innocent girl of the title is the first appearance of the book’s second disclosure, that she is the shrewdest player in it.
Movement III
The marriage is made, and the love does not end. At Lime Rock Archer watches Ellen at the end of the pier and wagers his return on whether she will turn before a sail passes the light. She does not turn. The parasol at the Blenkers’ and the interview in Boston with M. Rivière move the same mechanism a turn further, and each is built as a scene in which what is said and what is meant run apart.
The two meet in the museum among the Cesnola antiquities, objects whose names and uses no one remembers, and speak of meeting once. The setting is the argument: a love kept among things the world has stopped being able to read. “Each time you happen to me all over again” rises out of plain talk, and the book lets it stand without comment.
The register stays low, and the heights are few. That is the design, and it is also the limit: whole chapters run at the level of comedy of manners, and the elevation, when it comes, is the more marked for its rarity. The double pace of Book I, half social panorama and half love story, settles in the second book into a single pressure, but the two halves are never wholly fused.
Movement IV
The society never says what it knows. Its method is in the book’s own phrase: “the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’”. Beaufort’s ruin, a public scandal, is dealt with by silence, and he is expelled. Archer’s private ruin is dealt with by the same silence, and he is kept. One law covers both, and it is kinder and crueller than any person in the book.
May has told Ellen that she is with child before she is sure of it, and wins. The farewell dinner for Ellen is the proof of the whole design. Between courses Archer sees that the table has believed him Ellen’s lover for months and has arranged, with perfect kindness, her removal. The critic of the tribe was its most perfect instrument; the tribe was real, and it has closed over him. The scene reaches the cold height of dread.
Ellen’s going is the society’s last word, and whether it is her freedom or its final victory over her the book does not say. The question has been argued since: whether May is victim or victor, whether Ellen’s refusal is liberty or defeat, whose innocence the title means, May’s, Archer’s or the era’s. Feminist criticism from the 1970s took May and Ellen as the book’s two answers to a society that gave women no third.
Movement V
The last chapter leaps a generation. Archer is fifty-seven, May is dead, and New York has changed: telephones, public life, Theodore Roosevelt. The leap recasts the whole romance as something already history, which is the book’s formal swerve, and it carries the one disclosure that reorganises everything before it. Dallas, his son, tells him that his mother knew, and that on her deathbed she said he had given up the thing he most wanted. It comes through Dallas, not through Archer’s own consciousness, because Archer never saw it.
In Paris Archer sits on a bench below Ellen’s windows and sends his son up alone. He finds the moment more real where he sits than it would be upstairs, and he walks back to his hotel. The page is the summit of a book that rises seldom, and whether the renunciation is wisdom, cowardice or habit is the question recent reading has asked of it.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1921, the first given to a woman, and has been in print without break since 1920. It was staged in 1928 and filmed in 1924, in 1934 and by Martin Scorsese in 1993, and it is taught across American schools and universities as a standard text of its period. It perfected the American novel of manners and set the type of the novel of old New York; the field, in those years, was being moved by others, by Joyce, Stein and Faulkner, and by Ulysses (9.5) two years on.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract, and very little goes without loss. The opening at the Academy of Music sets every term: the boxes, the opera glass, Faust sung in Italian to an English-speaking audience, the lilies of the valley, the arrival of the Countess Olenska in the Mingott box. The genealogies supplied by Sillerton Jackson and Lawrence Lefferts look like ornament and are not: they are the court record by which Ellen is tried, and the trial is the plot. The archery at Newport, the parasol at the Blenkers’, the interview in Boston with M. Rivière, each moves the noose a turn. What could go is small: some of the inventory of drawing rooms in Book I, part of Archer’s reflection on his reading and his club, and Ned Winsett, whose case for public life is stated more than made necessary.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a society can rule by representation alone, settling every crisis without a word spoken, and the man who believes himself its critic is its most perfect instrument. The book’s phrase for the method is “the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’”, and Archer’s is “a hieroglyphic world”, where the real thing is only represented by signs. The farewell dinner for Ellen is the proof: between courses Archer sees that the table has believed him her lover for months and has arranged, with perfect kindness, her removal. The second disclosure is May, the innocent girl who is the shrewdest player in the book. Held below the top because the truth is drawn from one class in one city, and is generalised by force of exactness rather than by range.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The register is held low on purpose, and elevation comes rarely, but it comes. The summit is the last page: Archer on a bench below Ellen’s windows in Paris, sending his son up alone and finding the moment more real where he sits than it would be upstairs, then walking back to his hotel. Below it: Lime Rock, where he watches Ellen at the end of the pier and wagers his return on whether she turns before a sail passes the light, and she does not turn; the museum among the Cesnola antiquities, where the two speak of meeting among objects whose uses no one remembers; the farewell dinner, which is elevation of the cold kind, dread. “Each time you happen to me all over again” rises from plain talk. What holds the axis is frequency: whole chapters of Book I run at the level of comedy of manners.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth is partly built. The anthropological frame bears weight: Archer reads his tribe as an ethnographer would, and the book’s late discovery is that the tribe is real and has closed over him. May is drawn as Diana, the huntress who wins at the archery contest, chaste, bright and fatal to the man who looks too long at another goddess. The daisy of the opera, its petals counted for love and not love, is the plot told in advance. Ellen carries the figure of the exile who comes home and is cast out again. But the patterns sit within a realist surface that keeps them implicit, and the book seldom lets the particular rise to the general by its own structure: the archetypes are images more than the frame of the action. The figure sits four tenths below the construction the gate asks for.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is Henry James’s international theme and the novel of manners from Austen through Trollope, with Wharton’s own The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. The departure is real and bounded. Wharton turned the novel of manners into a retrospective: a historical novel of a vanished society, written from inside it after the war that ended its world, its irony doubled by a distance of fifty years. The last chapter’s leap of a generation, which recasts the whole romance as something already history, is the formal swerve, and a good one. The stake was small. Wharton was established, the form was proven, and the book was a success with critics and buyers at once; in 1920, against what the novel in English was becoming, it refined a path rather than turning off it. The weakest of the gated axes.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The close third person, held on Archer for thirty-three chapters, is the book’s instrument: the reader shares his belief that he sees through his world, and shares his blindness to May. The narrator’s irony sits a half-step above him, so that his picture of himself as a man of taste and freedom is quietly measured against what he does. Told from May’s side, or from everywhere, the novel would know her strategy and lose the shock of the farewell dinner and of the last chapter, where Dallas tells his father that his mother knew, and that on her deathbed she said he had given up the thing he most wanted. The form withholds exactly what the society withholds. Held off the top because the double pace of Book I, half social panorama and half love story, is not fully fused.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise, across a century of reading that has kept finding new books in it. It was read first as a nostalgic portrait of old New York, then as an indictment of it; feminist criticism from the 1970s turned to May and to Ellen as the book’s two answers to a society that gave women no third; recent reading attends to its anthropology, and to whether Archer’s last renunciation is wisdom, cowardice or habit. The text keeps the questions open: whether May is victim or victor; whether Ellen’s refusal is freedom or the society’s last victory over her; what the title means, since the innocence is May’s, Archer’s and the era’s, and none is plain. Formal depth yields too: the opera, the flowers and the archery answer one another across the two books. Held below the top because the yield gathers in a few great questions that lie near the surface once found.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the American novel of the early twentieth century, and beside it the novel in English. Intrinsic force: the book perfected the American novel of manners, showed that a society could be anatomised from within at an ethnographer’s distance, and showed that the historical novel could take a period within living memory as its matter. That is a refinement more than a reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1921, the first given to a woman; the type of the novel of old New York, set here; and a place as a named model for the American social novel after it, with Fitzgerald, who admired Wharton and sent her The Great Gatsby (8.9), among its readers. But the field was being moved elsewhere in those years, by Joyce, Stein and Faulkner, and the book did not redirect it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and six years. Form: whole, as first published, in print without break, with no loss and no textual dispute. Presence: continuous and wide in the English-speaking world; taught in American schools and universities as a standard text of its period; filmed in 1924 and 1934 and by Martin Scorsese in 1993, and staged in 1928. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment, but the moment is the book’s subject, already history when it was written, so it has not dated as a topical surface dates. It stands at the usual figure for its span and not above it: its presence is strongest in America and in the academy, and it does not have the world presence of Anna Karenina (9.3) or Madame Bovary (9.2).
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Wharton’s English, in the 1920 text. Command of the medium is close to complete and bears weight. The sentence is balanced, ironic and exact, and the irony works by placement rather than comment, so that a description of a drawing room or a dinner service passes judgment without a judging word. The construction is architectural: each book ends on a turn, Book I on the telegram from May that moves the wedding forward, and the set pieces, the opera, the van der Luyden dinner, the archery at Newport, the museum and the farewell dinner, are built as scenes in which what is said and what is meant run apart. The dialogue is spare and full of what it does not say. Charged against it: some expository weight in Book I, where the families are introduced in blocks, and a habit of explaining what a scene has already done.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the whole: form governs feeling, the code is kinder and crueller than any person in it, and every escape is absorbed. Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of Mrs Manson Mingott, enthroned on the ground floor of her cream-coloured house, and the last bench in Paris. They obey the same law. Beaufort’s ruin, a public scandal, is governed as Archer’s private one is: the society expels the one and keeps the other by the identical means of silence. The tonal range runs from social satire to tragedy, and it holds without a break. Held below the top by the axis’s own clause, that narrowness is not coherence: one class, one city, a handful of houses and a few European scenes are narrower ground than the great social novels cover, so a coherence that is perfect covers less.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What is held, and held together: consciousness, in Archer’s long inward argument with himself; the family, as the clan that governs marriage, divorce and inheritance; money and the state where they meet, in Beaufort’s crash and the law firm of Letterblair; the condition of women under that law; and history, in the last chapter’s leap into a changed New York of telephones, public life and Theodore Roosevelt. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: labour, except as a servant’s tray; the sacred, except as the church at a wedding; the natural order, except as the sea at Newport and the snow at Skuytercliff; the city beyond its few avenues. This is the scale of the novel of manners, deep and narrow, and the figure records the form rather than charging it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made and The Imperishable at 9.0: a balanced, ironic, exact prose whose irony works by placement, and a construction of set pieces in which what is said and what is meant run apart; and a text whole as first published, in print without break for a hundred and six years, taught and filmed. Behind them The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 8.8, and The Inevitable at 8.7: a disclosure, which holds, that a society can rule by signs alone and that its critic is its best instrument; a close third person that withholds what the society withholds; and a design from the opera to the farewell dinner in which almost nothing can go.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, the family, money and the law, the condition of women and a changed New York are held, but labour, the sacred, the natural order and the city beyond its few avenues are absent or thin; the scale is that of the novel of manners, deep and narrow. Next above it, The Swerve at 7.9: the retrospective frame and the leap of a generation are a real turn, but a small wager placed by an established author on a proven form. Then The Sublime at 8.0, heights that are few; and The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.1, archetypes kept as images, and a refinement of the field rather than a redirection of it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.1 and The Swerve at 7.9 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The aggregate, 8.4, holds the work in Tier IV of itself; the unmet gate would hold it there in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, serialised in The Pictorial Review, July to October 1920, and published in book form by D. Appleton and Company in October 1920. The unit scored is the complete novel as first published, in two books (Book I, chapters I to XVIII; Book II, chapters XIX to XXXIV), in Wharton’s English; no revised version complicates the unit and no translation stands between. No text was in hand; nothing was measured by script, and no quotation was checked against a file. The novel is quoted only where its words are certain: “the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’”, “a hieroglyphic world” and “Each time you happen to me all over again”. Everything else is paraphrased, including Archer’s words on the bench and the words sung at the opera. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the length of the novel in words, the description of the archery prize, the order of events within the last chapter of Book I, the range of translations, and the debts of particular later writers to the book.