Newland Archer, a man who seems to have everything, looks, wealth, and social position, finds himself, on the eve of his engagement to the beautiful May Welland, falling in love with the married Countess Olenska, who has just arrived from France.

Between them, the Countess, Archer, and May Welland might represent different aspects of Edith Wharton’s own life. She married Teddy Wharton, a sportsman and gentleman, at 23. She eventually embarked on an affair with an English journalist, and left her husband, who suffered from a debilitating chronic depression throughout their 28-year marriage. Like the Countess, she scandalized her family. And she went to live in France, which offered a freedom and sophistication not on offer in America.

Wharton’s satirical novel of manners is told through Newland. That his perceptions are blinkered, self-absorbed, is something the reader learns only very gradually. It is as much a revelation to us, for example, as it is to Archer when he realizes his secret love for the Countess is known to everyone.

This recognition comes very late — at a farewell dinner hosted by the Archers. Newland suddenly realizes the dinner is an elaborate ritual, a public exiling of the threatening other woman — and a celebration of his wife’s social triumph.

That this triumph is purely external, a matter of orders and arrangements, of propriety and decorum, is a point that seems lost on May Archer. That Newland’s heart has never been truly available to his wife is something she can overlook because social arrangements are of such importance in her world. They matter more than what is on the inside. This priority is what the novel calls innocence.

Attention to external orders, to convention, stability, and tradition, instills a sense of duty as paramount, a recognition of the importance of living up to one’s public commitments. 

And yet. The Countess offers to Newland a sense of other worlds, other possibilities of being. She suggests there is something more on offer than social orders and appearances, something that must be pursued and cultivated. That Newland is not free to pursue it is the tragedy of the novel, which becomes almost unbearably sad.

Even as the sense of a missed life deepens, though, the reader comes to understand the many reasons why this hero stays put. 

Scorsese’s Adaptation: Mob Rule

This sweeping social novel seems to have been made for film. Scorsese’s 1993 version is the third adaptation, celebrated for its faithfulness to the original. It is also refreshing, as most of our period dramas are, of course, British.

Both novel and film open at the opera, at the beginning of New York’s social season. The theme is art, performance: the opera-goers are more keenly interested in what goes on in the boxes than onstage. In the film, paintings — portraits, landscapes, and still lifes — are on every wall. They suggest an absorption in what goes on in this highly sylized world that precludes other ways of seeing.

In other words, the more sumptuous the furnishings, the finer the manners, the greater the sense of a prior script, a way of being inherited, not created — and not one’s own.

The Countess Olenska breathes a “rich atmosphere” Archer yearns for — yet for which he will give up nothing. The way of life that contains him is so intricately wrought, a willed exit is almost impossible to imagine.

This ordered, stable world comes at a price. This is where Scorsese — the director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas — is right at home. Mean Streets, his breakthrough film, is set in Little Italy, the neighbourhood where the director grew up. It explores a close-knit community that is almost impossible to leave, and whose members live by rigid codes of deference, obedience, and loyalty. If anyone breaks the rules, they will be dealt with – exiled, or killed. His decorous, beautiful Age of Innocence is not a departure from these themes. Wharton describes her old New York families as primitive, tribal — clans that run their ballrooms as strictly as Scorsese’s mafia does the streets.  

Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence is on at The Regent Monday 15 January at 7pm. Tickets @TheRegent box office. Open to all. The Gazette’s Books on Film Club meets Thursday 25 January at 7pm.