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Kerry Nolan: This is All Of It. I'm Kerry Nolan in for Allison Stewart, and it's time for the next and final installment of our summer literary series, Summer School. This summer, we've read a few classic New York-centric novels because frankly, who doesn't love to read a good book in the summer they've always wanted to read or loved so much that they read it again? Over the past month, we've been reading Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence. It was published in 1920 and Wharton was the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature. The novel takes place in a long gone old New York of the 1870s and tells the story of Newland Archer, a man of high New York society who finds himself caught up in romantic feelings for two women, his fiance, May Welland, and May's cousin Countess Ellen Olenska.

Just from that description, you can tell there's some drama, a little bit of lust, and some heartbreak to come, and there is no better place for the story to unfold than New York City in the Gilded Age. With me now to talk about The Age of Innocence, and of course, to take your calls is Sarah Blackwood, professor of English at Pace University, who also wrote the introduction to Penguin centennial edition of the novel. Hi Sarah. Welcome.

Sarah Blackwood: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Kerry Nolan: Listeners, we want to hear from you. Did you spend the month reading The Age of Innocence with us? We'd like to hear your thoughts. Who's your favorite character? What was your favorite scene and why? Call us, text us at 212-433 WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also find us on social media. Our handle is @allofitwnyc. What do you make of Wharton's depictions of old New York High Society in the 1870s, or maybe going a little deeper, what do you think Wharton is trying to say with her novel, particularly about the role of women in the world? Again, give us a call, 212-433-9692. Let's start on a personal note, Sarah. What do you remember about when you first read The Age of Innocence? How'd that make you feel? How old were you?

Sarah Blackwood: I first read The Age of Innocence just after I graduated college. I had spent much of my college education as an English major, really devoting myself to reading much of the modernist, avant-garde, and postmodern texts at the time. I didn't read any of the "classics" when I was in college, and so when I graduated, I needed to take the GRE because I wanted to go to graduate school. I knew, "Oh, I've got to kind of brush up on--" I read all of the Brontës, all of Austin. I read a lot of Trollope, and then I also read The Age of Innocence. I remember having this experience with the book. The book is really fascinating because while it shares a lot in common with the classics of the marriage plot, which have a lot of comic elements because they make fun of the rituals, but this novel has this mellowness and maturity to it. I remember being 22 and feeling like I was stepping into this more mature world of really adult romance.

Kerry Nolan: Oh, it was totally adult considering what our contemporaries were going through at the age of 22. They were just so much older than we were at that age. It's the first time I've read it, was for summer school. I wanted to read a little bit of the first page, and that's what certainly hooked me because I thought, "Oh, this is going to be all fusty and old-fashioned." It takes place at an opera house, and there's a little bit of discussion about, "Well, the acoustics in this place are okay, but they got a really nice fancy one being built a little further uptown." We are also talking about a lot of the cab drivers and the livery drivers just observing the upper class going in and out of this opera house. It's said it was one of the great livery stable men's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

They love showing up for the party, but they want to leave so they can beat traffic. It just made me laugh out loud and I thought, "This is going to be great," and it was such a wonderful romp.

Sarah Blackwood: I love that moment and the opening in the opera house is really wonderful, but the first thing you really encounter as a reader is how funny the novel is, and it's funny in a very ironic way. This is probably one of the most deeply ironized novels that I know of.

Kerry Nolan: What do you mean?

Sarah Blackwood: That she is presenting on the surface what's happening with all these people going through all of these artificial and really rigid rituals and customs, but the novel has the perspective from underneath of how absurd all of these rituals and customs are. One way you see this happening is she uses all these distancing devices in her writing. She uses scare quotes a lot. I don't know if you noticed, but it's a weird element. There's a lot of scare quotes. She's constantly depicting the main characters as thinking something they wish they were saying, but not saying it. All of these set pieces at the Opera House in the Metropolitan. Also, the characters don't know a lot of what the readers know, and part of that is because of the historical setting.

There's that great scene at the end where Newland Archer is imagining like, "Well, one day there might be a tunnel under the Hudson that carries the train straight into New York, but that doesn't exist now," but for the readers in 1920, it existed. It opened in-- There's all these things, the historical setting puts the characters in this unknowing position.

Kerry Nolan: To piggyback on that, the book is so New York but it is a New York of a time when if you went north of Central Park, that was upstate. As you just said, train tunnels under the Hudson didn't exist. What do you make of Wharton's physical descriptions of 1870s New York? It seems to me that the city itself is a literary device in the book.

Sarah Blackwood: Yes. Just to be clear, especially for readers who might not know, Edith Wharton was from this class of people, this extremely high society, old New York. This is the world that she grew up in in the 1870s. She's writing this in 1920 after having lived a lot of life, but she's really looking back to this moment that she grew up in, and she had a miserable childhood. She was rich but really miserable. Her mother was cold and unfeeling. All of these rituals were so constricting. She wanted to be a novelist, but she wasn't allowed to write. She wrote a novel when she was 11, and her mother made fun of her, and she didn't pick up the pen until she was 40 really again. The old New York that she depicts is like she was there, she was a participant observer.

She went through the debutante season, and so much of what she's being ironic about is because she too was caught up in all of these really brutal social customs that you see grind down the characters and they impacted her. She's really asking in the book, "What did growing up in this milieu do to me?"

Kerry Nolan: I think writing the novel allowed her to escape that in some form.

Sarah Blackwood: I think so.

Kerry Nolan: Let's talk a little bit about the main characters. By the way, we're talking with Sarah Blackwood, professor of English at Pace University. This is our summer school series. The book we've been reading this month is Edith Wharton's, Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer, he comes from old New York money. He works at a law firm. How would you describe him? Wharton shows a man as her protagonist.

Sarah Blackwood: Yes, it's a really interesting choice. It's funny because when you even look at the covers of most editions of The Age of Innocence, they feature two women, the visual does, but Newland Archer is the main character. He is the point of view through which we experience everything that happens in the novel. The thing that is so funny about Newland Archer is that he's very callow. He's arrogant, he's often not perceptive with occasional flashes of illumination where he seems to understand what's happening and how he's being caught up in all these rituals. Newland Archer, I always think, is really fascinating because he is an insider to this world. He really upholds and replicates all of the values of the world about social standing and proper behavior and what's accepted and what's not accepted, but he longs to be an outsider.

It's really what he most wants out of life. He never is really courageous enough to actually be an outsider but it's a really interesting choice that Wharton makes to vocalize the novel through him. Actually, when you asked about the role of women, one thing I think is interesting is that the critique of how these social customs and rituals hurt people, it comes through very strongly when it comes through a man because we have centuries of stories of how the marriage market has been harmful to women. All of the marriage plot stories are just how women all their edges get shaved down and they can't be interesting people while also being wives. When you see the way that Wharton depicts this world grinding Newland Archer down too, the critique comes through very strongly I think.

Kerry Nolan: How does she manage that point of view throughout the story though?

Sarah Blackwood: You can see it in the very opening scene, the opera house scene, you meet him and you don't know him yet and you're sitting with him and he's looking around the opera house and then his eyes light upon his fiancé May Welland across the way. He goes into this amazing reverie where he imagines how much he's going to be able to enlighten her over the course of their marriage, because he's looking at her and he's thinking, "She doesn't know anything, she's kind of dumb actually and I'm going to introduce her to the world of art and culture and literature and I'm going to enlighten her". That perspective that Archer has, the book is very clear that it doesn't share those values that Archer has. It's showing us very clearly the way men are looking at women in this example is messed up, it's not a good way to have an intimate relationship with other people.

Kerry Nolan: Now, you mentioned May Welland who's Newland Archer's fiancé and he hasn't announced it to anybody, he won't tell anyone that this is happening yet. She also comes from money and a famous New York family. How do we come to understand May early in the book?

Sarah Blackwood: May is my secret favorite. I'm a May stan which is funny because if we have the two women, one's the lover or the proto lover, and one's the wife, and of course, the wife is supposed to be the person who is constricting others and putting rules on everybody else. May does do that. She is absolutely interested in thriving inside the standards of high society, marriage, and social custom. That's what she wants for her life and she does get that. The thing that is really interesting is that the novel threads through so many moments across the whole novel where you see Wharton encouraging the reader to realize that May knows more than anybody realizes. There's all these moments where she's described as having this clear-eyed lucidity basically.

Newland Archer never gets that about his wife, he thinks she doesn't know anything. Of course, she knows that he's wishing to have an affair with the Countess and she knows everything but she doesn't let it on. Wharton I think shows a lot of sympathy for the position of the "conventional wife" in how she characterizes May. May is this athletic kind of person who always hits the target.

Kerry Nolan: If you had spent the month reading The Age of Innocence with us or if you've read it a long time ago and maybe picked it up again, we'd love to hear your thoughts about this book. Call us or text us at 212-433 WNYC, that's 212-433-9692. I'm talking with Sarah Blackwood, professor of English at Pace University. By the way, she also wrote the introduction to Penguin Centennial Edition of The Age of Innocence. Let's take a call. Marcus in Brooklyn, welcome to the show.

Marcus: Hi. Good afternoon. How are you doing?

Kerry Nolan: Good. Thanks.

Marcus: I just wanted to make a couple of comments about The Age of Innocence. I was a really precocious kid. I first read The Age of Innocence when I was 12 years old because the movie came out with Scorsese and I was really obsessed with at the time Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder. They were a couple of my favorite actresses. Just a quick interesting note, Winona Rider's Dracula and being in The Age of Innocence both won costume design two years in a row. She was in two movies that won best costume design in '92 and '93. That's something I found coincidental about her but I digress. With The Age of Innocence, we're talking about Archer as a insider versus outsider, I always felt even now I'm entering in my 40s that it's an idea that he has but I always felt deep down he'd always been an insider.

He's somebody who doesn't know how to open up and doesn't know how to basically be open to new ideas and expressing himself. He holds it all in, and because he was conditioned to believe this and to be a provider for Janie and his mother, he chooses to marry into the Wellands rather than be with his true love. I actually think that May is his true love, not Ellen. Ellen was one big idea for him and I was happy she wound up not ending up with him. [crosstalk]

Kerry Nolan: Spoiler Alert. Marcus, thank you so much for your call. I want to hold onto that and I've got a lot more questions. We want to take some more calls but we got to take a break. We're talking with Sarah Blackwood about The Age of Innocent, Edith Wharton's novel that is part of our summer reading list this summer on All Of It. This is WNYC.

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It is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kerry Nolan, in for Alison Stewart and we are looking at one of the books that we picked for this summer's summer school. It's Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. With me is Sarah Blackwood, professor of English at Pace University. Sarah, let's go back to when we first meet May and Newland, and the onset of Ellen. Ellen's a big deal.

Sarah Blackwood: Yes.

Kerry Nolan: What was interesting to me was that she's kind of shunned but not really shunned.

Sarah Blackwood: Ellen, we should all clear our schedules for the next four hours to talk about Ellen. You know where I said I'm a May stan within the context of this novel, I think that Ellen Olenska is one of my favorite literary characters, just full-stop.

Kerry Nolan: Why?

Sarah Blackwood: She has this texture to her and if you really pay attention to how she's described throughout the novel, Wharton really depicts her like what fabric she's wearing, the flowers that are adorning her home. The way that she decorates her "funny little house in the wrong area of New York City, on West 23rd Street." If we're talking about Newland longing to be an outsider, Ellen truly is an outsider. She has married this Polish countess who it's never described exactly what the problem was but he treated her very poorly and she's left him. She has violated this absolute rigid structure of marriage and she's tried to leave her husband and what she wants is to get a divorce. Her family, that is her extended family, the old New York high society people that she's come back to New York to be with are telling her, "You don't need to divorce him. You can live apart from him".

They don't care about the relationship but you can't actually get divorced because that is some kind of process violation. Ellen is really shunned by many in New York and the novel is really interested in an anthropological way of exploring the way different groups of people can come together to ostracize a single person usually for some values-based reason. "We're going to ostracize this person so we can communicate to everybody else don't do these things."

Kerry Nolan: How do you think about the dynamics between May and Ellen in the historical context of women of that time?

Sarah Blackwood: It's interesting, one thing about Newland Archer being the main character that I actually really like about this novel is that you never get inside May and Ellen's interior experience, and there's something protective about that. Normally I love a novel that just gets right into somebody's brain. I want to be in there with the character but there's something really nice because you have these really rich, important, fascinating women, but they have a privacy, which seems weird to say because they're imaginary. They're not real. They do maintain some kind of privacy. I love this question about what about their relationship to one another because May is constantly talking about these deep talks she has with Ellen, but they're always off-stage. You never see them actually interacting with one another.

They seem to have a very complicated relationship. May and Ellen are both playing strategic games with one another. May knows that her husband is attracted to this woman and she's trying to actually utilize a very fresh openness in actually welcoming Ellen into the family scenario because I think May believes that that is the most protective thing she can do for her own marriage, is to actually not ostracize this person.

Kerry Nolan: Now, the novel, of course, has, as we've just discussed, examples of bad relationships and marriages. Wharton herself had a miserable marriage that ended in divorce. At that time, to get a divorce, it was almost unthinkable. It was almost preferable just to live an ocean away from the person.

Sarah Blackwood: Yes. That's what she and her husband did for a long time. They were married for about 28 years, I think. She got married very young. She was 23. He was older. He was in his 30s, her husband Teddy, and they were never happy together. They were a bad match. He was not intellectual. He wasn't artistic or intellectual. They just weren't a good match. They mostly lived separate lives even during their marriage. It took her some 30 years to get okay with the idea of divorcing him. A lot of that did have to do with many of the tension that she felt similar to Archer, which we've been talking about as far as knowing that she's an outsider in some ways, but really having some kind of devotion to all of these forms and rituals of her social class.

Having that self-destructive class preservation instinct in her, I think, was a lot of why it took her so long to get divorced. Eventually, there were some whole financial shenanigans, and he was mentally ill. There was a whole conflagration where finally it was clear they had to be actually divorced and they finally did.

Kerry Nolan: We got a text from John in Fanwood who says, "Mea culpa, I haven't read the book, but I've been to the Mount." Edith Wharton's estate in Lenox, Massachusetts many times, highly recommended.

Sarah Blackwood: I agree.

Kerry Nolan: [laughs] What's so wonderful about it?

Sarah Blackwood: One thing about her also is she's a real Renaissance woman. She was also a really devoted gardener and interior designer and knew all about landscape gardening and architecture and interior design. She wrote a book called The Decoration of Houses, which is a really fascinating book that's about interior design-

Kerry Nolan: Oh, I bet.

Sarah Blackwood: -but about much more than that. You get a real sense of-- one thing you can say, just pulling back to the abstract, her books are all about the intersection of structures and individuals. Social structures, and then all the messy individuality and all of the stuff that happens when those two things collide. The house is a place where you can really see that because the house is the structure and you can see how she cultivated these forms in her gardens and in her home.

Kerry Nolan: We have to go back to the novel and we have to finish by talking about the ending. It's a surprise. Listeners, if you haven't read the book, we're going to do a little spoiler alert here. It ends with a flash-forward many years. Now, May has died, Newland has a son who's grown up and they travel to Paris together where they learn that Ellen is in the city and they go to visit, but Newland doesn't go inside, just his son. What do you make of that?

Sarah Blackwood: This ending is perfect.

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It is the absolute most perfect ending of any novel. There are many places throughout the novel where Newland Archer chooses, with agency, unfulfillment. He does it throughout. There's a couple of other points where he comes up with these weird interior tests for himself. He sees her and he says, "Oh, I'm going to go to her if she turns around." Of course, she doesn't turn around, and she doesn't know he's there. This end where he decides to not go up, I think it's beautiful first of all because one thing I think is-- Personally, as I said before, I find Newland Archer a very callow character. He is sentimental and drippy. He surveils the women the way that he feels bad about being surveilled himself. In the end, he seems to finally make this mature choice where he realizes his role is to leave her alone because the whole book, he's pursuing her.

He's on boats and ferries and trains. They're moving around all over the place. He's going after her. Also, she's drawn to him. They do have a legitimate and authentic attraction between them, but she doesn't pursue him in the same way that he pursues her. At that end, I like that he leaves her alone and she gets to live this beautiful life without him breathing down her neck, basically.

Kerry Nolan: I know we've been talking for half an hour or so and I've been remiss in asking you to read a passage from the book if you would.

Sarah Blackwood: Yes. I'll read a quick passage I have. This is when he goes to meet her as she's come up from Washington on the train to Jersey City and there's all this great historical texture about the transportation in the 1870s. He's gone to meet her at the ferry that will go across the Hudson River. She sees him and they start talking. She basically says like, "Okay, we have to face reality, Newland. We're attracted to each other, but we have to face reality." Now I'm going to start reading. He says, "'I don't know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is this.' She met the words with a long silence during which the carriage rolled down an obscure side street and then turned into the searching elimination of Fifth Avenue. 'Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress since I can't be your wife?' She asked."

"The crudeness of the question startled him. The word was one that women of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about the topic. He noticed that Madam Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognized place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from. Her question pulled him up with a jerk and he floundered. 'I want-- I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that, categories like that won't exist, where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other, and nothing else on earth will matter.' She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. 'Oh, my dear, where is that country? Have you ever been there?' She asked." That's so good.

Kerry Nolan: [chuckles] The book is The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 1920, still resonant and still modern as today. Sarah Blackwood, thank you so much for coming in. This was an awful lot of fun.

Sarah Blackwood: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Kerry Nolan: Sarah Blackwood is professor of English at Pace University. She also wrote the introduction to Penguin Centennial Edition of The Age of Innocence and that's Summer School for this summer.

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