I read the short novel, Ethan Frome, from this collection of works by Edith Wharton. The novel is a somber, dramatic tale of love, self-denial, and tragedy. The novel builds to a suspenseful and sudden ending which the reader can only read and sigh! A fate worse than Romeo and Juliet but well worth the read there! ( )

The Age of Innocence

Like many disaffected classic readers of the movie-generation, I derived the sum total of my knowledge on Edith Wharton, and her novel [The Age of Innocence], through a Martin Scorsese film. Perhaps expecting grime and grit, a la Taxi Driver or Mean Streets, I eagerly paid for a ticket and a package of Gummi Bears. Rather than street-hardened toughs, edgy and unfiltered, the screen literally danced with prim fops and bodiced prudes. The melodrama that played out on the screen eviscerated Wharton’s original story of calculated social obeisance and self-mutilating compromise.

Set in the Manhattan of the late 1800s, [The Age of Innocence] examines the social structure of a culture in flux. Newland Archer, a young man at the leading edge of a strict, rule-oriented social system, finds his world on a kilter when Ellen Olenska arrives. Olenska flees a philandering husband in Europe, and arrives without any understanding of the carefully orchestrated customs that govern society in her new home. Though engaged to May, Olenska’s cousin, Newland is smitten with the free-thinking and independent European. The battle between revered custom and heart-felt emotion is the battle for Newland’s soul.

Scorsese’s Newland is emotional and tearful. But Wharton, in Newland, drew an imminently masculine character. He grapples for control through the practice of social custom and acquiesces in all matters of emotion. Rather than cast off the burdens of expectations, he marries May, knowing that she “represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steady sense of an unescable duty.” Only at the end of his life does Newland realize that he had missed “the flower of life.” Looking back over the days of his youth in comparison to the life his son has begun to lead, he envies the young man who maintains “the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal.” To be fair to Scorsese, and Daniel Day Lewis, the actor who portrayed Newland, the emotion of Newland’s screen character grew from the brilliant inner dialogue Wharton penned for Newland. In private, Newland gives rein to the feelings of his heart and to the idea of challenging the social mores of the time, while, in public, brutally suppressing any thought of challenging his predestined fate. Scorsese and Lewis would have been hard pressed to translate the repressive high-wire act that Wharton manages on paper.

Like the repressed society at its heart, [The Age of Innocence] throbs with a vitality that are belied by appearances. Wharton’s careful and colorful prose veil a brutal, if bloodless, story of compromise and regret.

A favorite for the year.

5 bones!!!!! ( )