Episode 289: “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton, Ch. 1-8

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 289 Summary

Title: “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton, Ch. 1-8
Release Date: August 12, 2025
Hosts: Angelina Stanford & Thomas Banks
Guest: Insights primarily from the hosts

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Introduction to the Series

In Episode 289, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks embark on a new series focusing on Edith Wharton’s classic novel, The Age of Innocence. They emphasize the podcast’s mission to delve deep into the art of reading and understanding great literary works beyond surface-level discussions.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford [00:18]: “This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading.”

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Background on Hosts and House of Humane Letters

Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks introduce themselves as experienced literature teachers and owners of the House of Humane Letters. They highlight their educational offerings, including an online academy, webinars, conferences, and a mentorship program aimed at preserving the “lost intellectual tradition.”

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford [02:34]: “From a $15 webinar to a year-long class and everything in between...our podcast is our attempt to not really replicate what we do in the classroom. It is a bit more conversational.”

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Overview of The Age of Innocence

The hosts provide historical and social context for Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, a novel set in the 1870s but written in the early 1920s. They discuss how the book serves as a parable of American culture, exploring themes of societal norms, family honor, and the clash between old and new money in New York society.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford [06:25]: “My interest is in universal stories and comparative literature. She is interested in the literature of the English language, which continues the great tradition of English literature.”

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Edith Wharton: The Author and Her Era

The discussion delves into Edith Wharton’s background as an aristocrat with deep ties to New York’s elite, paralleling the societal structures she portrays in her novels. They highlight her experiences during World War I, her contributions to literature, and her nuanced portrayal of high society’s fragility.

Notable Quote:
Thomas Banks [17:52]: “Edith Wharton is...born a member of the class that she is writing about in this book.”

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Key Themes and Social Commentary

Angelina and Thomas analyze the novel’s exploration of societal expectations, especially regarding marriage and divorce. They contrast the rigid social codes of the time with Wharton’s subtle critique of these norms, emphasizing how personal desires often clash with public reputation.

Notable Quotes:
Angelina Stanford [62:00]: “She was writing in a time when every change brings both positive and negative consequences that have to be reckoned with.”
Thomas Banks [90:06]: “There's this kind of arrogance that...we don't want to give anything that criticizes American mores or institutions the award.”

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Character Analysis

The hosts examine the protagonist, Newland Archer, highlighting his internal conflicts between personal desires and societal expectations. They discuss his engagement to May Welland and his reaction to the introduction of the Countess Olenska, who embodies the “new money” and societal scandal.

Notable Quote:
Thomas Banks [72:48]: “You have to be like Ronaldo's cousin or something like that to be, you know.”

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Social Hierarchy and the "Old" vs. "New" New York

Angelina and Thomas explore the dichotomy between old aristocratic families and the rising nouveau riche in New York during the Gilded Age. They discuss how Wharton portrays this tension through events like high-society balls and the strategic social maneuvering to include or exclude certain families.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford [35:16]: “Victorian literature really is just British literature written in the reign of Queen Victoria...the closest that American society has to a Victorian novel is the Gilded Age novels.”

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Stylistic Elements and Literary Comparisons

The duo compares Wharton’s writing style to that of Jane Austen and Henry James, noting her economy of style, irony, and the use of subtle, significant details to convey deeper societal critiques.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford [45:13]: “She's giving us the story of the fall, and it would be a mistake...to say, ‘Are they right to feel this way about divorce?’”

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Notable Quotes from the Episode

1. Thomas Banks [12:22]: “No man is so much a slave as he who thinks himself free without really being so.”
2. Angelina Stanford [15:05]: “Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves...we should be seeing God in the literature.”
3. Thomas Banks [22:14]: “Main Street was considered too anti-American, too much of a satirical take on middle-class values...Edith Wharton was selected as a more polite alternative.”

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Conclusion and Upcoming Discussions

Angelina and Thomas conclude by setting the stage for deeper analysis in subsequent episodes, promising to cover more chapters and explore the intricate dynamics of Wharton’s narrative. They also promote their upcoming content, including webinars and special features related to the series.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford [97:07]: “You’re revealing depths in this book that I had not seen and sometimes surface things that I just didn’t see, literally.”

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Final Thoughts

Episode 289 offers a comprehensive and insightful exploration of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence through the lens of experienced literature educators. The hosts effectively blend historical context, character analysis, and thematic discussions to provide listeners with a deeper understanding of the novel’s enduring relevance.

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Note: This summary excludes promotional segments and closing remarks unrelated to the book discussion, focusing solely on the analytical content presented in the first eight chapters of the podcast episode.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and with me is your side man. My side man?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I basically think I'm the bass player of this podcast.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I can see that. You can see that. You're just like the whole rhythm section. You keep just going.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure. All that.

[Angelina Stanford]

We are Angelita Stanford and Thomas Banks and this is the Literary Life Podcast. For anybody who's new to the podcast. We are literature teachers and we are the owners of the House of Humane Letters, which is a business that we established to basically devoted to recovering the lost intellectual tradition. What we do in this podcast, but we do it in much greater depth. We have an online academy and we are about to get started with our next school year, which is exciting and we offer webinars and mini classes. We have an annual conference, we have a summer camp, we have a, a mentorship program. We have all. Well, gosh, we have a student journal. We have a publishing wing now.

[Thomas Banks]

It's kind of strange when you consider this House of Humane Letters has not existed all that long. I mean, you've been teaching.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've been teaching for a while, but.

[Thomas Banks]

I mean, yeah, officially the House of Humane Letters is still in its, in its nonage, but we.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, but, but it's just been a beautiful thing to watch unfold and we have a lot of amazing scholars and teachers working with us. And so if the things on this podcast are interesting, you and you would like to go deeper. We offer many, many ways to go deeper. From, you know, a $15 webinar to a, to a year long class and everything in between. Yeah. So we are, we are starting another school year. I was just reflecting on the fact that this is my 32nd year of teaching and this is your 17th or 18th. Yeah, we've been doing this a while. We have been doing this a while. And so this podcast is our attempt to not really replicate what we do in the classroom. It is a little bit different. I would say the podcast is a bit more conversational, but to make that sort of thing available to a broader audience. And. And it's been just such a joy to us to see the podcast catch on and to see people respond the way that they have. And I think one of my favorite messages to get from somebody who discovers the podcast is when they say, I feel like some part of me that was dead is alive again. And. And that is the. That stories will save the world. That is. That is the power of literature and art. It does touch us in ways that really nothing else can. Especially now in this age of the machine, slash age of the computer, where I think we are just more and more losing touch with what's real. And the irony is it's not the things in the factory that strike our souls as being real. It's. It's beauty, it's art, it's images. It's all of the things that we try to talk about on this podcast.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, indeed.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so before we jump in, actually. Well, let me just say we are starting today a brand new series on an American book, Gas. Gas. Edith Wharton's the Age of Innocence. And I've been joking that, you know, I wanted to show we can, in fact, cover an American author, but only if they're basically a British author.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And just so you know, this still is Angelina and Thomas. And no, we haven't been kidnapped by, you know, a guild of American authors. We're not being held at gunpoint or anything like that. We elected to do this of our own free will.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Both of us have a natural preference for British literature.

[Thomas Banks]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

But we have covered some American authors. We have covered Edgar Allan Poe, who's basically a British author. We have covered Flannery o', Connor, who in one sense, I know, seems like this very southern American writer, but in another sense, she's really working hard to recapture this kind of medieval English.

[Thomas Banks]

Also Dostoevsky. In some ways, she's almost kind of Russian.

[Angelina Stanford]

She's Russian. Yes, I know. We're drawn to the American fascination of.

[Thomas Banks]

Oddities and grotesques, I think.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I really like Mark Twain. He's probably like the consummate American author. I do.

[Thomas Banks]

In your.

[Angelina Stanford]

Teach him in a tradition.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because. Yeah, I teach him in my. Good.

[Thomas Banks]

So we take American authors and make them un. American, sort of.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean, in my defense, for that. And I know that there are people out there whose absolute hill to die on. Is American literature is its own unique thing. I'm not interested in that. I won't argue whether it's true or not. I'll just say that doesn't interest me. What interests me is the literature of the English language. And so that means I'm interested in England and Ireland and Scotland and Wales and Cornwall. I'm interested in ancient Brittany, which would now be called France. And I'm interested in American literature as it continues the great tradition of English literature in the meaning, meaning English language.

[Thomas Banks]

Insofar as it represents a sequel and not a break like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right for me, that's the interest. And I'm not interested in getting into a debate about whether American literature is unique. I'm sure that it is in some way, but that's not where my interest is primarily. I mean, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know, my interest is in universal stories and comparative literature. And so I'm much more interested in the intersection of American and British literature, just like I'm interested in the intersection of British literature and European literature or Asian literature or South American literature. That's the universal story is what ultimately fascinates me. But before we jump in with this new Edith Wharton series, which I'm quite excited about and I'm really excited to talk with you about it today, Mr. Banks, let me just quickly tell you some things we've got going on at the House of Human Letter. So we just finished up our summer series, which was just fabulous. So Addison Hornstra batted clean up there with her five session class on the Alice books, Alice in Wonderland, through the Looking Glass, which really was an amazing class. And people were raving and they learned so much about not only those books, but just about literature in general. You can always go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to check out our back catalog. We've got a wonderful new system set up to, to make all everything just accessing your videos and your class information a whole lot easier now. So you can go check that out. You can also sign up for our newsletter on the House, which goes out every Friday. And that's going to keep you up to date not only with what we've got going on in terms of, you know, classes that we're advertising, but we have podcast schedules there. Atley does a great job compiling just like lots of extras, freebies, different article are sometimes poems written by various members of our faculty. So if you just want to kind of be in the know, that's the place to do it we often I will often hear from from podcast listeners. Oh, I didn't know you were doing this book on the podcast or oh, I would have signed up for this webinar if I had known. Well the newsletter is is your one stop shop for for that. And in that vein, let me tell you, we finished our summer series and we're now we're launching our September, which you know, this is the end of August. So I guess still officially summer. But for me we've started school that means summer breaks over. But we have another webinar by our very own Heather Goodman and it is it's a webinar that has needed to happen for a long time. It is on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and it's called Coleridge's Imagination Restoring the Chain of Being. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while or if you're brand new, get ready. We talk a whole lot about the ways in which the Enlightenment and this break with the medieval and antiquity basically the pre modern world that we have not reckoned with, all of that has done for us. We live in a time that presents a narrative of straight progress and every step forward is a step toward utopia. And we have not reckoned with what has happened. What are some of the negatives that have happened. And again, we're not saying we want to go back to the Middle Ages. I always tell my students, you can pry my air conditioner out of my dead, very cold, air conditioned hands. I'm not suggesting we return to the Middle Ages, but we do need to reckon with that. Every change. Of course it may be positives, but it also brings negatives that have to be reckoned with. And so this is a webinar to help us understand some of the things that were lost. Because Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of these people who tried to reckon with that question what has been lost? So here's part of her description. The Enlightenment broke the chain of being untenanting creation of its God. Medieval reason snapped through the clouds into the heavens. And 18th century England wallowed in materialistic and utility utilitarian philosophy. The veil between earthly and heavily thing. Heavenly things became an iron curtain and material things were stripped of symbolical understanding in order to be sent to the factory for base uses. In steps Coleridge. This webinar covers the philosophical beliefs of Coleridge's day and how he sought to reclaim a place for the discarded imagination by rebuilding the chain of being. In doing so, he returned to a transcendent view of the cosmos and humanity. Taught how to read with medieval eyes and opened up England to the philology practiced by scholars like Jacob Grimm. We'll walk through Coleridge's method, an epistemology that moves from experience through imagination to the mind of Christ and harmonizes every aspect of human nature, including religion, literature, education, and natural science. Coleridge's philosophy shaped Charlotte Mason, Sir Humphrey Davy, George MacDonald, the Inklings, and Northrop Fry. To better understand Coleridge is to better understand the language and writing of his philosophic and literary descendants. And that is going to be happening August 27th at 7pm but everything we do is live or later. So if you can't make the live session, you will have access to the video. Lifetime access, actually. So we know, whenever I say lifetime access, always think, whose lifetime? But that's a question for. That's a question for another day. My students always telling me I'm going to live forever. So there you go. Know it's. It's. It's my lifetime. I'm really excited about that webinar, and the things I've heard from Heather have just got me giddy with anticipation. So you'll definitely want to check that out. All right, without further ado, let's start this series, and we like to start off by sharing commonplace quotes from something we've been reading. This was a. A ritual that was established by Cindy Rollins, one of the original members of this podcast, who's been on hiatus. Of course, she came back recently this summer and did the Jungle Book series with But Dear. Cindy has been on sabbatical, but we continue to try to keep her ritual alive. So, Mr. Banks, do you have a quote from something you've been reading recently?

[Thomas Banks]

I do. I was reading some of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Maxims and Reflections and came across the following quote. No man is so much a slave as he who thinks himself free without really being so.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that is good. Yeah, you know, that is.

[Thomas Banks]

I thought that was just a, you know, kind of timeless apotheme.

[Angelina Stanford]

So insert George Orwell. Right. When you think you're actually.

[Thomas Banks]

That came to mind as well.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, my quote comes from a kind of less known literary essay by C S Lewis. I quote a lot from him, but I think this is one of his lesser known ones because it's not that easy to find. So it's an essay called Christianity and Literature. And again, you hear us talk about this all the time, and you're going to hear us talk about this in this series like the. We just talked about this in last week's episode Literary Milestones, where, you know, modern ways of reading has trained us to look at literature as some kind of mirror. We want to see ourselves reflected, or if not ourselves, we want to see our ideal vision of society reflected. But we see it primarily as functioning to give us back an image of ourselves. And the literary tradition actually is the opposite of that. It's not a mirror. It is a window into the transcendent. And here is a great quote from C S Lewis about that. Again, this essay is called Christianity and Literature. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own, but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours. I'm saying only that the highest good of a creature must be creaturely, I.e. derivative or reflective good. In other words, as St. Augustine makes plain, pride does not only go before a fall, but it is a fall, a fall of the creature's attention from what is better God to what is worse itself. So you can see there that when he said a mirror to see somebody else, he doesn't mean to see another person. He means to see God. God is what we should be seeing in the literature. Applying this principle to literature and its greatest generality, we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal beauty and wisdom.

[Thomas Banks]

You're right that that essay is too little known. I don't think I read that one until maybe a year ago or two years ago, I don't know. But, yeah, it's one of those that probably I had seen, you know, in a book and just, you know, passed by until pretty recently. But, yeah, that's in Christian. Christian Reflections.

[Angelina Stanford]

There's two really good ones in there. Christianity and Literature and Christianity and Culture. Yeah, Christianity, Culture, which is also one. Literature.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I think I also had not read the second of those until quite recently.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not that easy to find. And, and, and, and they're really, really good. I mean, I. I know we tend to think of C.S. lewis as, you know, beloved children's author or Christian apologist. But, you know, what he, what he did for a living, what he considered his life's work, and which, in my opinion is his best work, is writing about literature. He was a literature professor. This was. This is what he did. It's Tom Shippy Says, you know, the great. The great Tolkien scholar. He says that it is an odd thing that everybody wants to talk about everything about Lewis and Tolkien except what they themselves thought was their most important work.

[Thomas Banks]

That's true. I. I mean, I couldn't speak to Tolkien, but of Lewis, I think that's true because. Well, it just seems like. Yeah. You know, for every book written about Lewis, the, you know, was he. The. He was never Regius professor. No. What was the chair they set up for him?

[Angelina Stanford]

Medieval and. Medieval.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. For, you know, you don't see as many books with, you know, C.S. lewis as medievalist. I mean, thank you, Jason Baxter, for doing something to correct this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes.

[Thomas Banks]

But, yeah, I mean, there's any number of books which rehash his, you know, career as a lay apologist, as a amateur theologian, which he was very. Be very good at, we should say.

[Angelina Stanford]

But.

[Thomas Banks]

Or the writer of fiction. But. But. Yeah, I know It's. It's kind of. There is something disproportionate about that. Anyway.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, well, with that aim, we're going to try to apply some of these things to this book. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. So let's start off a little bit talking about Edith Wharton, talking about the time period she's writing in, and then talk about the time period this is set in and see if we can't kind of flesh out the imaginative backdrop, put ourselves in the. In the shoes of the original audience and what were the sorts of things that they would have known that could be. Because she's referencing a whole lot of stuff subtly with great import that is very, very easy for a modern reader to overlook. So the first thing I want to say is that this was written in 1920, published in 1921, and it won the Pulitzer Prize, and it was the first Pulitzer won by a woman.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, she was. I think she was given the unofficial title, the first lady of American Letters.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. I believe that's right. So, Mr. Banks, would you tell us a little bit about Edith Wharton?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So Edith Wharton is, well, a very important thing about her. She was an aristocrat herself. She is born a member of the class that she is writing about in this book.

[Angelina Stanford]

She is a cousin of the Astor.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, she's a cousin of the. Astrid.

[Angelina Stanford]

As high as you can get in American aristocracy. She was at the top.

[Thomas Banks]

She had relatives who died on the Titanic. You know that. Yeah, exactly. Who were traveling first class on the Titanic, I could say. Yeah. Sheesh. And she comes from. She could trace, I think on either her father's or mother's side of the family. I forget which. Her ancestry. Back to the old patroon class of Dutch merchant adventurers who first had settled up, set up a colony in what was then New Amsterdam back in the 70s.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So you don't know your New York history.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So that's the New York. That's the New York version of your ancestors coming over on the Mayflower, basically.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that's why the van der Luydens, again, a Dutch name. Yeah, you see?

[Thomas Banks]

You see that? And I mean, if you. If you're in New York today, I mean, you still see, well, like the Holland Tunnel and Stuyvesant street and, you know, place names which sort of bear out the history of, you know, the Dutch influence there. So. Yeah. So she's a blue blood's blue blood. And that being said, she's kind of a creature of two worlds because she's educated in large part, you know, I mean, as women of her class would be by governesses, but in Europe as well. She's. She is. It kind of makes Europe a second home.

[Angelina Stanford]

In her youth, I think she was six years old or five or six when her family moved from New York to Europe. And then she came back when she was 11. And the book is set in the time period of when she came back to America and felt like an outsider. So she already, even at 11 years old, has this sort of outside perspective on.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So she's not like a wandering gypsy, but she does have kind of a. What? Widely traveled, cosmopolitan sort of spirit. And you see that in her book. She seems very much at home describing the two worlds in which she had set her feet. And she's. Inevitably, the comparison always comes up to Henry James, who's. You could say the male Edith Wharton, I don't know. Or she's the female Henry James.

[Angelina Stanford]

They're like just.

[Thomas Banks]

And they were friends, two friends of us. He was a bit older. He's, I think, 20 years older than she is, roughly.

[Angelina Stanford]

But considered him her mentor, too.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And Henry James had. He had very, very serious notions of what the novel could and should be. So he was. He was a. Yeah, a critic. A pretty serious critic as well as a creative novelist.

[Angelina Stanford]

Listeners don't. Are familiar with American literature. Henry James writes the Portrait of a Lady.

[Thomas Banks]

He writes Wings of the Dove, Washington.

[Angelina Stanford]

Square, the Bostonians, lots of sort of the American version of a novel of manner.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Yeah. And Henry James's novels, like hers, often have sort of a collision between European sensibilities. And American ones with sort of the naivete of this new world meeting up with sometimes, sometime, I'll say, I think often, sort of tragically, the sensibility of the old and. Yeah, so they're both products of the Gilded Age. She is born actually in 1862 in the middle of the American Civil War. So she's kind of born right at the beginning of the Gilded Age. Henry James about 20 years before that. And both of them lived to see the wreckage of World War I and sort of the end of the polite world that they had grown up in.

[Angelina Stanford]

And she's writing and it's very hard in your mind to put these two things together. She is writing at the same time as F. Scott Fitzgerald and P S Eliot, Virginia Woolf talk about that. Because in a time of a great deal of experimentation, she's going back to an old.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And just to show, like how this book, it's so almost deliberately old fashioned, it seems it was not the expected winner of the Pulitzer prize in what, 1920, 1921 Main street by Sinclair Lewis was.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. I bumped it out. I read about it.

[Thomas Banks]

But yeah, Main street was considered too anti American, too much of a embittered satire on middle class, sort of capitalist American values. And this book was selected as a more polite alternative to it, which is kind of interesting to me because I would not call this book unabashedly pro American. Not at all. I mean, but it's not an angry book by any means. But it's not Sinclair Lewis. Yeah, but it's kind of strange. We don't want to give anything that criticizes American mores or institutions the award. Let's pick Edith Wharton instead. So that seems like an odd choice to me. But anyway, a well chosen one. I mean, this is a novel I'm finding that I like much more the second time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, me too. I do want to talk about our experiences with Wharton, but just to follow up on your point, this is on the heels of World War I, and I can well imagine people sort of doubling down on like.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, you can imagine someone reading this book with not entirely clear eyes and thinking that it's a kind of sentimental homage to old fashioned aristocratic values which we're losing now. And you know, thank God someone is, you know, giving them their due credit. It that's a misreading, but perhaps a forgivable one.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so before we move on to the next stuff, what. What was. What's your experience with Eda Wolf, the Warden? So I'll start off with mine. I had taken. I can't. I see. I think it was a women in literature class and I had read the short story by Edith Wharton called Roman Fever, which is not the, not the movie. And I loved it. And I actually, in my early years of teaching, I actually taught it it in the AP English class I taught. I loved that story. Still love that story. It just like. It's basically like Edith Wharton's version of Henry Miller's Daisy, Henry James's Daisy Miller. Like just, you know, the same, the same sort of Americans abroad and, and things on the surface look very innocent but are not actually. And I loved it, but I had never read a full length novel by her. And then I'm trying to remember, and I'm trying to remember how old one of my kids was to like put this in a time frame. So this is maybe 25 years ago one summer. I just decided I'm going to read all the Edith Wharton novels. I did not read all of them, but I read a lot of them. So I read the Age of Innocence, I read the House of Mirth and I read the Custom of the country and I remember I liked all of them. The Age of Innocence is much less direct in its criticisms than the House of Mirth and the Custom of the Country. This is a more subtle, much more subtle novel in so many ways it reminds me of Jane Austen which we will talk about as we go through. But that's been my experience with Edith Wharton and then I haven't revisited this book since then. So this is at least 20 years since I've read the Age of Innocence and I'm having a good time revisiting it. I also did not see the movie when it came out.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. So actually that was my introduction to this book and to Edith Wharton was the movie which I saw. Let me see the. So the 1993 Martin Scorsese film version of this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Winona Ryder, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day Lewis.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's a great cast and we.

[Angelina Stanford]

Are gonna be doing an episode on the film when we finish the book.

[Thomas Banks]

So my parents sat us down to show us this movie when I was about 10. And we'll talk about it more later. But yeah, I didn't love it. Let's just say I was a 10 year old boy. I wasn't really in.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like I just. I love your parents so much. I love my in laws so much and I love your parents and I love that they're like we're gonna. This is a great work of literature. We're Gonna show this, this movie to our 10 year old son. But this is a story in which everything is so subtle, everything is suggested, everything is under the surface. Like I, I, I fully expect to hear the feedback from our listeners over this first set of chapters saying nothing has happened in this book, but everything is happening under the surface. So no, I can't imagine 10 year old Thomas Banks picking up on the subtle nuisance.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, the body count. Yeah. Like this is going to be like a fight scene, you know, there was nothing like that, that, no, no, it wasn't, it wasn't, it was. Anyway, and then some years later, I was in high school at the time, it wasn't an assigned book but for some reason I decided I'm going to give this, the book a shot. Maybe it was just a bad movie because I still had strong prejudices against the movie. And so I sit down with the book, I read it one summer. I'm going to say I'm 16 at the time, on my own. Didn't like it. I still didn't like it. I thought that this was this just, you know, emotionally stunted, you know, sapless novel of manners. And if you would have advertised it that way to me, now I'm like, oh yeah, sign me up. But you know, again, teenage Thomas was not, was not easily, I was too cynical, too, too much of a teenage cynic, I guess. And other than that, again, it's interesting I never read her in school because like everyone, it seems that everyone has a story about reading Ethan Frome, that novella, that's like a standard high school classic. I never had to read that in high school for some reason. But yeah, so I picked up that one on my own. I think again, maybe I was in my twenties. I think so much of this is in the distant past that I have very hazy recollections and I enjoyed it. But again, I didn't really fall in love. And other than that, the only Edith Wharton I've read are some of her letters to Henry James. James. Henry James and she were carried on a pretty extensive correspondence and maybe it would be appropriate to introduce this later. But there's one great letter of his where he casts some shade at one of North Carolina's most storied institutions, the Biltmore Mansion.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that fits right in with the.

[Thomas Banks]

Gilded Age very much. Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Her letters are quite fascinating. Shout out to Kelly Bond who sent us a, a collection of Edith Wharton's letters. And she said, oh, you have to have these if you're going to be.

[Thomas Banks]

Doing oh, yes, absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Very, very interesting woman. And. And has. Has a very, very fine mind. So she's writing this almost as a response to what she went through in World War I. And what's interesting about her is she's. I mean, like, everybody who was alive at the time, you know, felt the effects of a global war. Right. But she had a bit of a more intimate knowledge. I was really surprised to find this out. And I know you were really surprised, too, when I told you she was actually involved in the war effort. She signed up kind of like, as a nurse, and not exactly a nurse, but like one of these women who signs up in that kind of capacity in World War I. This is before the Red Cross and all that. Is it before the girl.

[Thomas Banks]

No, the Red Cross was established in the 19th.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Okay. So. So she starts working with refugees and people who are displaced from the war. And she was so into that that in 1909. No, no, I'm sorry. In 1909, she was living in France, and so she's helping. She's there already. And so when the war efforts start, she's dealing with the refugees, she ends up getting awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor, which is the highest honor can be.

[Thomas Banks]

That can be bestowed on military or civilian. In France. Yeah. So it would be, like, significant war effort. Imagine winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Medal of Honor simultaneously. That's basically what it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. She was really involved in the war effort. And France. She's in France.

[Thomas Banks]

And France really got well in the Western fronts. That's where most of the fighting was.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't mean like the French army got kicked. I mean, France itself was physically ravaged and honestly just did not recover. And. Sorry. As a person of French heritage, I feel like my dad would always say, you have to understand France's actions in World War II in the context of it had not yet recovered from World War I. All of its best men are dead. It's a wounded country. And so it was easy pickings for the Germans at that point. But she wrote a book about this, and I did not know. I didn't. Had no idea. She wrote nonfiction, too. She wrote a book in 1915 called Fighting France From Dunkirk to Belfort.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, that's the last title I would expect to find in the Edith Wharton canon.

[Angelina Stanford]

So she's. She's got an eyewitness view of the way in which this war is decimating the world. The old world does not exist anymore.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And a lot of people are deeply affected by that. In fact, we were talking about experimental writers. I mean, Hemingway and Fitzgerald and that. That whole. What they call the lost generation of writers that was a direct result of World War I. Right. They.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, some of those guys are veterans. Hemingway. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And their. Their ex. This incredible break with the past. They're responding to it with this break in the form of the novel, too. So they're writing these experimental novels. Their themes are very much of a sort of. And Edith Wharton, so interesting to me, responds by re. Revisiting an old world that no longer exists. And so that's the setting here. So she's writing in the 1920s, but it's set in the 1870s, and in so many ways. And so hear me out, because this might sound crazy. In so many ways, this reminds me of Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind. And. Yes, Gone with the Wind comes out in the late 1930s. So it's right before World War II. But in so many ways, she's also an American author who is looking at lost worlds. Right. Worlds that are lost from a war that we can't go back to, maybe shouldn't go back to. Not again. Gets accused of being sort of sentimental and nostalgic. And I think the work is more complicated than that. But to respond to the modern world and the loss of things by setting a book in the past at a time when a world's about to end. So she sets it in the Civil War South, a world that ends. And Edith Wharton sets hers in 1870. So just past that, but again, to a world that ends. Old New York, which we're going to talk about what that is. But by 1920, I think it's important to understand that everybody reading the book knows this is not a world that exists anymore.

[Thomas Banks]

Since you bring up Gone with the Wind, I mean, which is a novel you have a close relationship with and I. I don't. But the. The emotional resonance that novel has found with different peoples in places you wouldn't necessarily anticipate. So I was reading this essay written by an American professor who had taught in Japan. He taught English language classes in Japan, I think, at the University of Tokyo in the 1950s and 60s. And he discovered that that was the novel, the American novel, anyway, that most Japanese students seem most conversant with and sort of saw. And this is kind of an uncomfortable comparison in some ways, but in the 1950s and 60s, their own society reflected.

[Angelina Stanford]

In Speaking of another world lost after Holy. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

And he didn't really know what to do with that. But yeah, he said that his students kind of. Of kind of saw their own fate and their own fortunes. Yeah, distantly echoed there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, that until my brain is like, don't get sidetracked. Talking about Going with the Wind, but it was translated into so many different.

[Thomas Banks]

That was almost my first experience with Ms. Stanford, by the way. Her getting very, very emotionally sidetracked on Gone With Me. And if I may say, our first day may have been shouting in the streets, noise codes may have been violated.

[Angelina Stanford]

And yeah, in our. On our first day.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, Elise may have been summoned.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I just think that the book is very misunderstood, but yeah, it, it was glo. Just a huge international bestseller and was translated into many, many, many languages. I don't remember off the top of my head how many languages, but extraordinary amount of languages. And so it has. Has themes, obviously, that resonate much more than just, you know, the American south and American issues. It has more universal themes. All right, so she sets it in 1870s. So let's talk about the 1870s in the United States. So some of our listeners have been confused when we talk about Victorian literature and thought that, that Victorian literature is something that is any. Any 19th century literature, which it's not. Jane Austen is not a Victorian writer. She's a 19th century writer, she's a revolution Regency writer. So Victorian literature really is just British literature written in the reign of Queen Victoria. So it's not French literature, it's not American literature.

[Thomas Banks]

So American, it has kinship amongst those, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

It has kinship, but it's not the same thing. So the closest that American society has to a Victorian novel is the Gilded Age novels, similar to the Bell Epoch novels and in France. So this is, this is the high society America. This is the novel of manners, which we'll talk about what that is.

[Thomas Banks]

It's. You see, actually the expression the Gilded Age. Maybe we should talk about a bit more because it was. It's popularized, if not coined by Mark Twain. It's coined by Mark Twain who co. Wrote a novel, a satirical novel called the Gilded agent, I think 1872, 1873 or thereabouts.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So gilded means gold plated. So he's saying this is not a golden age. This is something fake. There's something fake about here. So let's just back it up and talk about what was going on before we could talk about old New York, but let's just do the larger, like builded age. So you have the robber barons, you have the Vanderbilt also I think the Rockefellers.

[Thomas Banks]

You have a sense amongst large Portions especially of prosperous American society, that America has become a complete nation and it's sort of come into its maturity party. We've just come out of this civil war without the Union actually being dissolved. And in spite of the 600,000 deaths of that horrible tragedy, we're sort of starting to take our place internationally amongst the great nations of the world. The British man of letters, poet, essayist, historian Hilaire Belloc, in his shorter history of England, remarks that a wise observer seeing the result of the American Civil War in 1865 with the victory of the federal armies over the Confederate, would have discerned then that America within a lifetime would be certainly one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful nation in the whole world. Okay, so America has become a manufacturing power and a, you know, a banking power by 1870, almost on a level with Great Britain. I don't, we haven't surpassed them yet, but we're getting there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Start and see the American self made millionaire.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So. Right. So American capitalism really becomes a dynamic and we could say a creative and a destructive force in that, in that period. So a new, a new type of rich person, often from, you know, not necessarily privileged beginnings, but you sometimes, sometimes you know, the son of a shopkeeper or you know, the son of a guy who owns a brewing factory who then creates, you know, a nationally consumed brand of beer or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

So we've got, we've got huge, I mean, millionaire. Because of inflation today, millionaire means nothing. So if, so millionaire if. The Gilded Age would be like a billion billionaires. Okay. So we've got, we've got railroad tycoons.

[Thomas Banks]

We'Ve got steel tycoons, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegie's. Sheesh.

[Angelina Stanford]

You start to have oil money.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And, and they have just tremendous amounts of money at the same time that the ruling class in England is starting to become broke. So what you have in England is for a very, very long time money and power is connected to land, which totally makes sense. Right. And then after the Industrial revolution, we have, we're moving toward a more cash based society. And, and you know, and this process.

[Thomas Banks]

Of course begins in England before it does in America.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right, yeah. Right. Oh, I mean the dissolution of feudalism starts with the black pilling. So this is, this is a very slow process, but Basically by the 19th century you've got, but the British aristocracy are broke and they have these huge palatial homes and they cannot pay to keep them up because they're no longer feudal manners. Right. The TV show Downton Abbey, I thought, did a fantastic job of showing that kind of slow decline. Okay, so at one point, these huge manor homes, I mean, it was basically like a palace for the ruler of that area. And there would be a lot of wealth coming out of the land. Things change, you know, we're merchant classes, industrial revolution, people moving to towns. So, long story short, you've got a bunch of broke aristocracy. And so they start casting an eye across the waters. And these up and coming nouveau riche Americans, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, start to cast an eye across the waters too, because they want to feel like they're not just Johnny Come lately. They want to feel like they've got some sort of status. And so you end up with what are called the American dollar princess. The Vanderbilt family famously married one of their daughters to a duke. So basically, if you're a rich American heiress, you can marry your pick of the litter for these aristocrats.

[Thomas Banks]

Another real life example. Another real life example. In the 1880s and 90s, one of the leading figures in the Tory Conservative Party is Lord Randolph Churchill, who is the Secretary of the Exchequer. Was considered Prime Minister material for a while, but certain things happened that, you know, ruined his career. Essentially. He marries Jenny Jerome, who is an American daughter of a newspaper mogul, and their son, famously, is Winston Churchill. So Winston Churchill himself is a product.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of one of these marriages, these dollar princesses. And Edith Wharton did write a book about that. She died before it was finished. It's called the Buccaneers, which is such.

[Thomas Banks]

A great title for a book on that theme.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. The Buccaneers. It's about these four or five American heiresses who go to England and marry into these.

[Thomas Banks]

You were telling me it's been filmed too.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's been so. There is a current Apple TV version which is absolute garbage. Do not waste your time. Unwatchable. I tried. The first episode was like, I. I couldn't even get past the first few scenes. Unwatchable. And then I read reviews that confirmed, yes, quite unwatchable. But there's a 1995 Masterpiece Theater one which I very much enjoy. Great. It's got Mira Sorvino and Elizabeth Montgomery.

[Thomas Banks]

I was amazed I'd never heard of this.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know. I don't.

[Thomas Banks]

I watched so much Masterpiece Theater back in the day. Like, I can put chapter and verse.

[Angelina Stanford]

Surprise.

[Thomas Banks]

I was an odd child. But, you know.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that one was really. That was. That one was. I. I enjoyed that one. I don't know how faithful it is to the book. I never read it. Because she didn't finish it. But. But this was something that was. Edith Wharton was interested in. So in this Gilded Age period. Yeah, Mark Twain calls it the Gilded Age. And that sticks, right? So. So, yes, it's shiny and golden, but there's something artificial about it. And I think this book does such a great job of putting the finger on that. There are other Gilded Age authors who our audience has probably never even heard of, but who are wildly popular in their own time. So I think the first real Gilded Age novel I ever read that is set at the time and written at the. Was Hazard of New Fortunes by William.

[Thomas Banks]

Dean Howells, another name who was. I think he was about as popular as Mark Twain in American Letters in the late last decades of the 19th century. Absolutely forgotten. Well, absolutely mostly forgotten, I would say. Mostly forgotten. I'm going to hazard a guess that not too many people have read. What was that one you named?

[Angelina Stanford]

Hazard of New Fortunes.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, that was awkward. Hazard guess about Hazard of New Fortunes. Yes. I've never read that one. I have read the Rise of Silas Lapham. I really like that one. And I was like, why don't more people talk about this book? Because, again, I never had to read it in school. I think we read one of his short stories when I was in high school. I think that was an assigned reading. I don't remember which one, but, yeah, that's just another name that has been sort of washed out of our collective memory.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so a little further context for the book before we jump in with these opening chapters. It is a work of historical fiction. So it's written in the 1920s, and. And it's set in the 1870s. Edith Wharton has an incredible eye, an incredible eye for detail. And what we need to understand is she's just so Jane Austen. There's so much Jane Austen style, irony, and there's a lot of subtle things happening under the surface. We're going to talk about the manners and the role that they play, but these are not just giving you details for the sake of giving you details. These are meant to elucidate something about the characters themselves, something about the culture and the society and what they value. So all of these things are going to have a lot of meaning. And again, we're trained, as in. In the modern age, to think that we read and we look at the characters and we say, oh, should they have done this? And would I have done this? And let's chat about what we think about these. These decisions these characters are making that is going to be entirely the wrong approach to this book. This book has been called a parable of American culture, which, I mean, I. I love everything about that. Right. So you have to understand that she's not showing us characters to see ourselves in. She is giving us a parable of a civilization that does not exist anymore. She is telling the story of the fall, and it would be a mistake at any point to say, oh, are they right to feel this way about divorce? Is it. Is it right that women don't have any rights? Like, that is missing the point. She's not making those kinds of comments. She's showing us the society as it was.

[Thomas Banks]

I was thinking that she and Henry James have in common that. I think Henry James, in many of his books, seems kind of emotionally detached from the characters and situations he describes. I'm not completely through this book yet, and like I said, it's been years since I've read it, and I've just reread the first seven chapters. But does she seem to have that kind of. There's a kind of distance between her and the people, the society, the moral.

[Angelina Stanford]

And dramatic situation in here that is obviously Edith Warden.

[Thomas Banks]

And also, like, not too many. You can't really say this character is obviously good. This character is obviously. Or not even good or evil. But this character obviously has the author's approval. This one doesn't. Here are white hats, here are black hats. It's. Yeah. So, like, there's a kind of. I don't know, a kind of reserve in. In the author as regards her relationship.

[Angelina Stanford]

Parables.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

So she's giving us this parable. We're going to see as we get into the chapter, what I mean by that, that the characters are. It's not that they're not well developed human beings. They are, but they're types, which is. I, again, again, not to make this all about Gone with the Wind, but that is what Gone with the Wind is about as well. These are. These are types. These are about types of people that no longer exist. It's also been called an elegy. So we need to talk about the elegiac tone of the book. So an elegy is a poem, a funeral poem. Right. So this is a long contemplation, if you will, on. On a culture that's dead. And so everybody in 1920 knows this. This old New York that she's describing doesn't exist anymore. I mean, the, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, like they're not powerful families anymore, in fact.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, they are, but they've gone into politics rather than business.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And nowadays, of course, they're, they're like, there's nothing. I mean, yeah, Anderson Cooper is a. He's a. His mother was Gloria Vanderbilt, but he's just.

[Thomas Banks]

My gosh, you're right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. It's just like a regular working Joe. Right. They're no longer the movers and shakers of culture and have not been for a very, very long time. So this is, this is something that's, that's, that's, that's done. And I love the idea. I ran across a couple of critics who talk about that old New York is like Troy or Atlantis. It is, it is a. It is a civilization that is doomed as it's being described. And the readers know this is not going to last. This is all, this is all passing away. And again, as we go through, we can decide, is she being sentimental about this? Is she being happy that it doesn't exist anymore? Is it more complicated than that on both levels? What. What is she showing us? It's also a Bildens Roman, which we've talked about on this show before as well. That. A novel of development. So Newland Archer is going to be growing up in. In this book and learning some things, you know, at the beginning of the book. He definitely sees himself as very well placed in this society and, and agrees with its.

[Thomas Banks]

More on a superficial level. He's kind of of the ideal man for what, you know, the society around him expects of a man, you know, of his privileges and class and all that kind of thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, very much, very much. We're also gonna. And we're not gonna be able to, I think, decide this till we get to the end. But the title, the Age of Innocence, like, is this, is this, is it ironic? Is it ironic? Yeah, yeah. Like we'll have to wait till we get to the. To the end. The working title of this story was Old New York York. Isn't that interesting?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I like Age of Innocence better.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now you were telling me. So tell our audience that the Age of Innocence, that's referencing a painting.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's actually an 18th century painting. So it would have been a fairly old painting already by the time this novel appears by Thomas Gainsborough, who painted English landscapes and the rural gentry and. And the respectable classes of his own. It's a painting of a little girl child, a toddler and yes, Wharton, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of, took the title as maybe it was just convenient to her. But yeah, that's Thomas Gainsborough. If he and George Romney were probably the leading English society painters of that period, the late 1700s. So anyway, that's. Yeah, long story short.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, well, here we go then. Book one, chapter one. I want to really pay careful attention to this opening scene and these opening chapters, even if that means we don't get through chapter eight, because we're doing a lot of introductory work.

[Thomas Banks]

Proceed at your leave there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Ms. Stanford sets up everything brilliantly. So. So she tells us it's January, it's the early seventeens, and Christine Nilsson is singing Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. Okay, so I'm gonna actually talk about that in just a minute, but this is a real person. She's very famous.

[Thomas Banks]

So, you know, you had the Renee Fleming of her time, the leading opera soprano.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah. So quite the celebrity. So this is a big deal, actually, even.

[Thomas Banks]

Here's one for you, something I just discovered. Thank you, Wikipedia. In the Phantom of the Opera, you remember the female male.

[Angelina Stanford]

My thunder. But yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. She's named Christine. That's an homage.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's an homage to her. Yes, yes, Very good. Okay, so the second line, though there was. So they're at the Academy of Music in New York, though there was already talk of the erection in a remote metropolitan distances above the 40s of a new opera house. Okay, so that's the Metropolitan Opera House, which is the one that still exists because the Academy no longer exists. Okay, so. So right here at the beginning, she's. I mean, opening lines. This is old New York versus New New York. Boom. Okay, so the deal here is that the old Academy of Music is where the. Again, America's version of the aristocracy. Old New York, these families, that's where they went. And basically Alva Vanderbilt. So she's. She wants to make a splash on New York society and she's not given a box at the Academy. And she does. Well, it's a bold move. She decides, okay, if they want, there's.

[Thomas Banks]

The new money thing. That's what you're saying.

[Angelina Stanford]

And she's like, well, I will build a bigger, better opera house and put you out of business. And succeeds.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I hate that you wouldn't. It's like a very human reaction, but at the same time, yeah, it's like, ha, let's do the American money thing right here. If you want to invite us to join your club. We're going to build a bigger, shinier club.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right? Okay, so right there we have old New York versus New York, but New New York. But we see that the Academy is still standing and right now there's just rumors of a second opera house being built. So we're right on that.

[Thomas Banks]

Cus foundations might be shaken in the New York Times.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. By the 1880s, these old new York families will have no choice but to accept. You know, the Astors and the Vanderbilts are going to get along. They have. They have no choice. They can't ignore the nouveau riche anymore. They're just too powerful. But then we, in this, we also see these kinds of great lines, right? Conservatives cherished the old opera house for being small and inconvenient and thus keeping out the new people whom New York was beginning to dread.

[Thomas Banks]

And I love that sentence too.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, okay. So, yeah, so you see this idea of them, this old New York society being very guarded, right.

[Thomas Banks]

Very entrenched in its habits, its customs and, and its allegiances between families and corporations and things like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right? And so here's an example of this Jane Austen esque irony that I just love. It was one of the great livery stableman'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.

[Thomas Banks]

Also true.

[Angelina Stanford]

Also true. But hilarious. She has got some hilarious lines like, like that. And let me tell you, to our audience who's not American, this is still true to this day.

[Thomas Banks]

Correct.

[Angelina Stanford]

Americans will pay hundreds of dollars for concert tickets and leave before the concert's over so that they can be first to their car and get out before the rush of people. I cannot comprehend this, but they do. I have seen people, again pay tons of money to go to sporting events only to leave before the game is over so that they can get to their car and get out before anybody else.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Get is a very, very bizarre thing. And we can see that this, this goes back. So then we meet our main character, Newlin Archer. And here's what I mean when I say you need to read this as a parable. His name is Newland.

[Thomas Banks]

New land.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Be significant.

[Angelina Stanford]

New land. Okay, so he. This guy is new land. This is America. So not only are you going to have old New York vs New New York, but you're also going to have old country. That is Europe versus New World America. So he's the new land. Of course, he's engaged to May Welland, which is May well land. So we've got the new land and the well land.

[Thomas Banks]

Also, her name is suggests springtime and freshness and youth and you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly, exactly so. Exactly so. So we see lots and Lots of small details and a lot of emphasis and attention to form and fashion. So he shows up fashionably late. Late both to the ball and to the opera. This is another. I'm sorry, this is an Americanism I cannot comprehend. I am not fashionably late. That's rude. I don't. There is no fashionably late. Actually, I think if you're invited to our house, you come on time.

[Thomas Banks]

The concept of being fashionably late was invented at this time, really. I think that's where the expression I think, comes. Oscar Wilde, I think, said that punctuality is a virtue of the middle class. And when Oscar Wilde says something is the virtue of the middle classes, by the way, he's not praising it, ladies and gentlemen.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Oscar Wilde came to New York several times during this time period.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, he came. Yeah, actually, he came to Splash. He came to Colorado, Leadville, Colorado. He spoke at a old west theater there. Yeah, he was. That was actually before he had really accomplished anything. And, you know, none of his famous books were written then. He was just a performer, sort of. But yeah, anyway, to. To get back to this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so let's look about his. About his. This line about him being fashionably late. In the first place, New York was a metropolis. A metropolis. Metropolis, man. Sorry, can't read today. Try that again. In the first place, New York was a metropolis. And perfectly aware that in metropolises it was not the third thing to arrive early at the opera. And what was or was not the thing played a part as important in Newland Archers, New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago. Okay. This is the first of many, many.

[Thomas Banks]

Times you'll see some very kind of arbitrary but exacting rule about conduct.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And it being connected to something primitive, a primitive ritual. Okay, all right. And then he walks in when she's saying, singing, he loves me, he loves me not. So first I got to read this hilarious line. Actually, you read it. Read this. This had me absolutely laughing out loud.

[Thomas Banks]

She's saying, of course, ma ama. And not he loves me. Since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world requires that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English speaking audiences. That's wonderful.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's such a great line. All right, so let's talk about the opera. Because the opera would have been well known to the reader of its day, not to us. And this opera is actually a microcosm of the entire book. So it's important for us to know know. So I'm going to give a huge shout out to our own HHL's own Karita Thompson, who does our. She teaches music and at the college level. And she has done a couple of webinars on music for us. How to Read a Symphony, for example. And she wrote to me that while she was reading the Age of Innocence, in preparation for the podcast, her husband just finished conducting Faust, the opera by Gouno. Right. So this is fresh on her mind and she gave me some. Some fabulous insights into what's going on. So this is. This is the backdrop of what's happening. She says the garden scene appears in Act 3. So this means that Newland Archer shows up in the third act of this. That's how fashionably late is. He's not even halfway through. He comes at the end. The garden scene appears in Act 3, the beginning of the demise of the main character, Marguerite. The daisy song, so that he loves me, He Loves me not is part of the opera where two men are vying for her affection. One has left her a posy, and Mephistopheles has left a casket of jewels and a mirror at the bottom. Marguerite puts on the jewels and watches herself in a mirror, declaring, it is no longer Marguerite, but a daughter of a king. She decides to put on the bracelet as well and exclaims, it feels like a hand clasping my wrist. Faust tries to woo her and she tries to send him away. It grows dark and she is pulled towards succumbing. She picks a daisy and pulls the petals off. He loves me, he loves me not. And Faust sings, yes, believe this flower is the voice of heaven. She tells him to leave and he does. Marguerite retreats inside, and then from the window she calls to him and he goes to her and Mephistopheles last evilly, as the act ends. Act four begins with her being seemingly abandoned by Faust and pregnant. All right, so let's think about this. Because Newland Archer walks in at this moment and then looks over and sees his intended and she's smelling flowers.

[Thomas Banks]

Ah, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. And then he's gonna see the Countess Alinska and she is jeweled.

[Thomas Banks]

My goodness. That's so very well done.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's so good.

[Thomas Banks]

I would not have picked up on that without Karita.

[Angelina Stanford]

Shout out to Karita.

[Thomas Banks]

Can I admit?

[Angelina Stanford]

She explains it. I started yelling. Ah, it's a monster.

[Thomas Banks]

Can I admit where my knowledge of the of Faust originated? The opera, I mean. Not the. Not the Poem.

[Angelina Stanford]

Bugs Bunny. I'm joking.

[Thomas Banks]

Go ahead. Actually, it's Tintin. So in the Tintin comics, and like, every guy my age will probably know this already, but in the Tintin comics, there's a running joke where the. The. The opera singer who comes in as a comic sort of recurring character, Bianca Castafiore, she always sings the Jewel song from Faust and she always sings it way too loud. Loud. So that's where my knowledge of Gounod and Faust comes from.

[Angelina Stanford]

So the young girl is also dressed in white. So she's obviously innocent and pure and, well, fresh.

[Thomas Banks]

She's the kind of character. If this were in the 1950s, we were just talking about this, she would be played by Sandra Dean. If your cultural knowledge goes back to exactly those times.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so we learn a little bit about May Wellen. And. And so this is hard. This is. This is going to be one of these things that it's going to be hard for modern audiences to understand. It was wildly inappropriate for a woman to say I love you first or into any. Indicate Way. Indicate this was in England and America in any way indicate an interest in a man. The man had to. That would be a loose woman he has to introduce to her. And you couldn't even say I love you to a man until after you were engaged. So. So she had told him she cared for him. And that was the parentheses. Tell us New York's consecrated phrase of maiden, of owl. So you could say I cared. And so then that lets him know, you know, okay, she's gonna be willing to marry me. So she clearly follows the code. And as we say, this is well, land. Now he's thinking to himself that she's very, very innocent. And he's going to initiate all these things to her. They're going to read Faust together. They're going to read books together. He's. She's just his innocent little flower. Again, we have to just be patient as the book goes on. Don't. Don't jump in there. And how dare a man think of a woman. Just. Just be patient with the story and see what's going to happen. But he. He's seeing her as this innocent flower, and. And he's going to initiate her into all these experiences. So he starts talking with the bros, and we see that Lawrence Lefferts is the foremost authority on form. Form. Now, one of the things that's difficult for us to understand.

[Thomas Banks]

I like to think that that appears on his business card.

[Angelina Stanford]

Master.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Master of form. This is difficult for us because I think as contemporary 21st century human beings, we, we see form as not being connected to anything real. At best, it's just sort of a superficial dusting of something. But for this time period, and this is going to be very helpful to understanding why these, these codes are so rigidly enforced, but also how fragile they are, which is really hard for us to understand how fragile they are. You're really going to be confused in this book if you don't just immerse yourself in this. But form was perceived as the outward evidence of inner moral propriety.

[Thomas Banks]

One's carriage, not just like how one treats other people. But yeah, even, even things much, much more seemingly inconsequential.

[Angelina Stanford]

Somebody who can just say, ah, forget these social codes. I'm gonna do what I want. That is going to be perceived as you morally say, forget moral codes, I just do whatever I want. You're saying you're an immoral person. And this is a very, this is a very, very fragile thing.

[Thomas Banks]

It's interesting that where they're commenting about, you know, the, the reading habits of certain members of this class, while Dickens is appropriate, he's not entirely approved of because. What's the reason? Well, he could never quite draw a gentleman. And I mean, that's true. Most of Dickens characters are frankly not gentlemen. He writes about other classes than they. And that's really not an exaggeration. I, Years ago I was reading some of, of Theodore Roosevelt's letters. Theodore Roosevelt himself came from a Dutch American aristocratic New York family. Some of his letters to his children. And he actually makes exactly that comment about Dickens that he was a very talented man but not quite a gentleman. And I mean, that sounds ridiculous to us, but yeah, it's the kind of thing that would occur to someone of that particular time and status in life.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean, that's even a point of contention in Jane Austen, who is a gentleman and who is not. All right, then we see. So we're kind of following Newland Archer's gaze around the opera house. Right. So chatting with Lawrence, he looks over and he sees May. And he sees kind of to his horror that May's cousin, the Countess Olinska, who we're gonna find in these chapters, has some scandal associated with her name. Name is in the family box and she's being described as wearing jewels, which of course is going to connect her to the Faustian play on the opera. But also she's wearing blue. And Christine the opera singer was wearing blue.

[Thomas Banks]

Would that be a faux pas?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I don't know. That It's a faux pas. As much as I think warts might be trying to.

[Thomas Banks]

White wedding or something. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So she. So, okay, so we've got May Wellen in this innocent white. You know, she smelling her daisies and her gardenias. And we have the Countess Olenska, who is wearing a velvet gown. Her hair is in the Josephine style. She's wearing diamonds. So she's. She's European. She's. She looks like Napoleon's Josephine.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And his reaction is interesting because he's not like, angry or horrified, but instinctively he sees this woman as sort of an inconvenience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this is his wife. His wife to be her cousin. And she's the wrong type of woman.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And when we get to the next chapter.

[Thomas Banks]

Not someone who's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, let me finish about this chapter and then we'll get into what's going on with her in chapter two. Then he talks to Mr. Jackson, who is as great an authority on family as Lawrence Lefferts is on form. Okay? So we've got introduced two things here, family and form. And we're going to pay attention to that through the whole book. One critic said, if there's a main character in this book, it's not Newland Archer, it's family. Okay? So that's. That's going to be a big deal. All right, chapter two, then. Newland Archer, during this brief episode, had been thrown into a strange state of embarrassment. Okay? So he's embarrassed because there's this potential scandal here. And he's thinking to himself things like, oh, well, of course it's Russ. Course. I mean, through no fault of her own. Well, might as well just stay with the scandal. Is she married a dastardly husband who ran around with all kind of women.

[Thomas Banks]

And abused her, and she left a decadent Polish aristocrat.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right, she left. And that has attached a scandal to her name. And that is really, really hard for us to understand because we don't have a society like that anymore. If your cousin did something crazy, nobody's going to think I can't have you over for dinner anymore. But because your cousin did something crazy, it's not like that anymore. So if you will bear with me for kind of a crazy example because I spent a lot of time thinking about these analogies in my classes to try to help my students understand these kinds of, like, just very fragile social things that we can't grasp at all. Like trying to explain in Pride and Prejudice why if there's a scandal attached to Lydia, it's going to affect Jane and Lizzy. Right. Because it wouldn't, it wouldn't affect us today. The closest example I can get. Because we're a very live and let live society. Right. And that we can decide later if that's right or wrong or whatever. That's just what we are. Right. What your brother does doesn't affect you. What your family does doesn't affect you. I think the closest example we have is what if your brother, not you personally, so not James Banks. What if someone's brother gets arrested for being a serial killer? Now, you didn't do it. It. But there is still enough stigma attached to that that you would probably. No. Hear me? Seriously. No, no, no, no, you're right. Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

I have a kind of real life example.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, go ahead. My thought. And then you can. That person would probably change their name and distance themselves because that scandal would follow you around for the rest. If your last name was Dahmer, you would change it. That would follow around for the rest of your life.

[Thomas Banks]

No, that's very well put. That's. Yeah, yeah. That's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Even if you're innocent of it.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure. Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Somebody might not want to marry you. They might be like, oh, the gene pool might be messed up or if you're.

[Thomas Banks]

You had a family relative who was a horribly disgraced politician or something. So here's, here's my real life example. The American jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, who by the way, if you like jazz, definitely you should check out Chet Baker, if you haven't already. But Chad Baker, in the the 60s, I think this is later in his career, was playing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and he found himself on stage with an Italian jazz musician whose last name was Mussolini. And was that Mussolini's son? So Il Duce, his son grew up to be a world class jazz musician. And when he was introduced to him, all Chet Baker car thing to say was I'm sorry about your father. And then they played their set and that was that. And I was thinking that was actually pretty well handled. I wouldn't know what to say either.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

So yeah, so that, that kind of thing, like you have to be like, you know, Hitler's cousin or something like that to be, you know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Anyway, you might be saying to yourself, but there's a world of difference between Mussolini, Dahmer and a woman who's been wronged by her husband. And I agree with you. Okay. I'm not suggesting these things are the same, but I'm trying to Say, say at this time in the 1870s, that's the level of scandal, that is the fear here that, that her scandal will be catching and, and that because she's in a disgraced situation in her marriage, even if it's through no fault of her own. And we can, we can talk more about divorce because it's become plot issue. The society would have been basically okay if she had just separated from her husband and lived a separate kind of bohemian life. But it's the, it's the fact that she wants a divorce that is going to be the issue. And there's a lot of historical, like real life examples of women in horrible situations at this time and like physical abuse and their lives being threatened and their own family saying, no, you have to stay in this marriage because we don't want the stain of divorce following the rest of the family.

[Thomas Banks]

Did you say that was a something in the Vanderbilt family or was it one of the others?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, no. Yes. Okay, so that is a yes. There was a. Alva Vanderbilt did famously divorce William Vanderbilt, who was the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt. She did divorce him. He was, you know, whatever, running around. It's actually a similar situation. She immediately upon getting the divorce, married somebody else, actually married his best friend. And so this is about 10 years or so, maybe 15 years or so after this book is set. And it was. It ruined her socially.

[Thomas Banks]

And she was just like, Thanksgivings became awkward.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, she was, she was just. Wait, wait, wait. She was very determined not to let this ruin her social and by ruin her socially. It's just what we're talking about here. People are not going to go to dinner. If this person's invited like you, you're cut off. No respectable person is going to be seen where you're seeing. And she was determined that that was not going to happen and actually kind of worked toward getting women more legal protections in bad marriage situations and, and having divorced women be more accepted in society. Again, you can decide if you think that's right or wrong. But that's. This is just what it was. So, yeah, this is a serious thing that she's coming over and she's with me.

[Thomas Banks]

There's only a few opera boxes away.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. And so. And here he's thinking about this, this beautiful, innocent flower and you know, oh, here's her cousin. And it's really interesting because he's like, his internal monologues are so interesting, right? Because he's like, oh, well, of course it's right. Of course it's right. Because Ellen hasn't done anything wrong. So of course her family should stand by her. And this is. Right. But then he's like. But there's a line between, like, private kindness, yes. Public kindness, no.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. He's not like. She doesn't make him obviously pharisaical, but he's enough.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's.

[Thomas Banks]

He's used to being in control of his world, or as much of it as, you know, fallen into his province to govern. I think it's significant that he's the head of his family. His mother and sister are still alive, but his father has evidently, you know, been dead for some while. So he's. He is the patriarch. He is in charge of safeguarding not just his own, but the reputations of those around him. And, yeah, this is. This is troubling. This is a flaw in the jewel. This is a. This is a.

[Angelina Stanford]

He also feels like this was supposed to be our big night to announce our engagement, and now it's kind of being overshadowed by this potential. Potential scandal. We also find out that the Mingot family are kind of Bohemian. They're kind of foreign. The daughters have been married off to foreign people. So this is Mae's grandmother. She's Bohemian. We have a whole chapter about how she keeps a house in a very Bohemian way.

[Thomas Banks]

And we learned that Ellen's education was kind of unusual, kind of not everything, as the governess necessarily would have arranged. The kind of education to which Madame de Bourgh in Jane Austen would have said, most of the unusual.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Most.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh. Raised up without a. Without a governor. That's most unusual. And it might be helpful to think about the fact. So what's the difference between Mrs. Mingot, who's clearly still accepted in society, and be Bohemian, and Countess Olinska? The difference is Mrs. Mingot's bohemian is not a threat to the society because.

[Thomas Banks]

She'S a matriarch and she's sort of.

[Angelina Stanford]

Settled and still settled. Right. But Countess Olenska getting a divorce, leaving her husband getting a divorce, even if it's justified, that's. That potentially threatens their whole society. So. So it's not. It's not the same sort of Bohemian ness. And then we have this line here. Few things seem to Newland Archer more awful than offense, than an offense against taste that far off divinity of whom form was the mere visible representative and vice regent. So again, this goes back to morals. Like. Like, is this morally the right thing to do? To be seen in public with a woman who's got some scandal? We also see that Mae's dress had a Tucker. So that's, that's that kind of almost like translucent tulle kind of fabric. You see it in paintings. So it would have been covering the upper part of her chest. So she's completely modestly covered, basically. And Ellen Olinska is not. She's, she's very European and she's wearing sort of a daring, you know, low cut V neck top kind of thing. And Newland in these chapters sees that a lot of this is just. She's foreign and she's just forgotten how things are in America.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

She's like, oh, the character I was thinking of.

[Thomas Banks]

Do you remember in An Ideal Husband, which was not set in America, which is set in England, the sort of femme fatale villainous of the piece is a woman who has spent the last several years on the continent and adopted continental habits and manners. And that's a light comedy. This is a not light comedy. But yeah, that, that, that particular sort of person who is more a foreigner than a native born citizen simply by virtue of her associations. That's who counters Olenska is another level.

[Angelina Stanford]

We have to think about is the fact that only York is still deeply influenced by Puritanism.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Even like so the Puritan. The, the, the, the.

[Thomas Banks]

It no longer accepts Calvinist dogma, but like still a kind of. Yeah. A certain restrictive Protestantism in its. Yeah. In its domestic morality. Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

We still have that long standing stereotype that Europeans are not as moral as Americans.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so this is definitely the case in 1870. So the fact that all of these things about her are being described as European, that's less, less moral. And everybody in this scene agrees that her husband was a brute, but they still attach a scandal to her. So that's, that's what's happening here. And then of course Newland's, you know, box buddies here say, well, you know, bros. Box bros. She left with the secretary, so some man helped her escape. So of course there's a lot of rumors about that. And what.

[Thomas Banks]

That doesn't even mean there be any confusion. That doesn't mean that she was living with this man, you know.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Like husband and wife. But just like that she was traveling alone in the company of a man, especially a man of the basically servile classes.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Can't have that.

[Angelina Stanford]

So even if this, this is not ne. This is not suggesting she had an adulterous relationship and ran off with another man. It is not suggesting that. It is simply scandalous that she left her husband in the company of Another man and went somewhere else in Europe up and they lived near each other. So that, that's a potential scandal. Even though if she did in fact escape a brute of a man, she probably needed to have somebody help her do that.

[Thomas Banks]

Presumably. Yeah, it's a hard trick to carry off by oneself by the time you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Get to the end of this. Let's see. Oh, so they talked about how they knew each other as children and he didn't recognize her.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And she said, you kissed me one time. You were a horrid little boy.

[Thomas Banks]

And her manners are just forward enough. I mean she's not, she's not guilty of any like horrible gaucherie or it's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very subtle faux pas.

[Thomas Banks]

But yeah, like she seems to us like a very cultured woman, but she's a little, just a little bit more brazen than the sort of woman he's used to dealing with. And that discomforts him.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, and you'll notice a lot of comments where he has an interaction with her and, and he thinks, oh, this is not right. And he thinks, oh, but no doubt this is how they do it in Europe.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Yes, exactly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like, like, like, like she just walks over to sit down and talk to him and she, she clearly doesn't have any self consciousness about it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, actually I find that, I mean, maybe other men could second guess me on this, but like that's always kind of an exciting feeling when you're in the company of a woman who is more direct than say most of your female peers in a way that surprises you and alarms you a little bit. But it's also just kind of exciting.

[Angelina Stanford]

This explains why you married me, actually.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, it does. Well, like to even, to use a non romantic example from not, you're an iPass. I remember, I remember once some friends and I, there was a bunch of us and we were talking one Sunday morning about where to go to church and one of the women present turns to one of the guys and says, we should go to your church. Because there it was a sort of high liturgy church. And she jokes because there everything is planned out and you don't have to think at all through the entire service. And I, like, I remember I can still hear my laugh. I give like this happy laugh, cough laugh or something. And she turned to me and she said, oh, I'm sorry, that was probably a more direct statement than you're used to hearing, Thomas. So yeah, I was, I was put off my guard by that. Anyway, it was, it was kind of. Yeah, it was funny.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was charmed all right, chapter three. They go to the ball. Now, the audience would have known exactly who these people are talking about. So the ball with the ostentatious wealth of having a ball ballroom that you use once a year. The fact that she just. Mrs. Buford just shows up to make an appearance at the opera to show to everybody, I'm so rich, I have servants who can take care of this ball when I'm not home.

[Thomas Banks]

And then she leaves.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then she leaves.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, this is. This is very clearly based on Mrs. Aster's ball. So those Asters, which again, that's Edith.

[Thomas Banks]

Wharton's cousins, John Jacob Astor and.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes. So Titanic wealth and prestige and family and influence.

[Thomas Banks]

Wasn't it John Jacob Astor who died on the Titanic? I think it was, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so this would have been. Okay, let me give a little bit of backstory here. A guy by the name of Ward McAllister had. He was an American, but he lived in Europe for a while. He observed some things about the aristocracy in Europe, and when he came back, he started to use his influence to sort of to organize New York society along the lines of an aristocracy.

[Thomas Banks]

Good luck with that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, good luck with that. But.

[Thomas Banks]

But this will last many generations, I'm sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

Succeeds. Yeah, succeeds for, like, you know, 20 years. And one of the things that's true about European aristocracy is it's basically 350 families or people. Is it people or families? I should have looked that up.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't even know.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's such a small number. You give the aristocracy as a huge number. It's such a small number. They all knew each other. They all grew up with each other.

[Thomas Banks]

The modern version of having your name inscribed in the golden book of Venice, you know, back the who's who. Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he comes back and he tries to organize New York society along the same lines. And so he famously comes up with a list called the 400. And this is what he listed as the 400 people in New York that are in. Okay, so the Vanderbilts are not in this. And so this would be the Astors and the Vander Lydens and the Mingalore Scotts and the Archers, probably the Roosevelts.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I think they would have been.

[Angelina Stanford]

So families who can tie. Tie themselves back to, like, old New York, Dutch New York. And allegedly, he comes up with the number 400 because that's how many people can fit in Mrs. Astor's ballroom.

[Thomas Banks]

So he didn't have, like, any selfish reasons at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. So it was a very Much a.

[Thomas Banks]

List of how many people my house.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Who's in and who's out. Okay. And so that's clearly being raised referenced here with this ball. So the Archers are in and there's a lot of concern about are the Mingots gonna bring Ellen Olinska? And they feel like that would be very inappropriate. Like it's. It's kind of iffy and borderline that she fits the opera, but she can't come to the.

[Thomas Banks]

This is a lame comparison, but like a new nightclub is opening. You and your friend think they can get in, but you have this out of town cousin who isn't quite dressed right, doesn't have quite the right clubbing clothes on, and you think if you go with her with him, maybe you'll get turned away by the bouncer at the door.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

It's interesting that she's low end version of.

[Angelina Stanford]

They tells Newland, well, she didn't come because she didn't think her dress was fancy enough for a ball. And he's like. And he thinks, oh, thank goodness she had some sense. So he thinks she's used the dress as an excuse to not come because that would be the socially appropriate thing to recognize this is inappropriate. I'm not going to go. Of course he figures out this is not the case at all. Like she really just didn't go because she didn't think her dress was appropriate, not because she thought there was anything wrong about her going. Now, the Beauforts themselves are most likely based on the Belmonts. So the word Beaufort means beautiful stronghold and the word Belmont means beautiful mountain. And the Belmonts were a self made family and he was best friends with the Vanderbilts. Ava Vanderbilt married. Married a Belmont.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So. So, yeah, so. So Buford is basically the. The Belmont. But this would not be the same man that Belmont that, that Alba Vanderbilt married. This would have been his father. All right, but again, so this is a.

[Thomas Banks]

You're telling me all these. I'm just saying. All right, yeah. Still, I know all this.

[Angelina Stanford]

The idea is the Vanderbilts are new money, The Belmonts are new money, and Beaufort is new money. He's still socially acceptable, but there's something a little shady and iffy and nobody really knows how he made his money. So he's not like an obvious robber baron. He's not coming with railroad money. But there's something somewhat.

[Thomas Banks]

I mean imports and exports, something vague.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm a consultant. I always used to joke that people who say they're consultants are actually CIA agents because I Don't believe. That way they have an excuse to just travel all over the world doing consulting.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Especially if you live in, you know, Virginia or the Beltway or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

And we also find out that this Buford is not a good guy. He. He runs around on his wife and his wife is completely oblivious to it. So Newlin, he arrives fashionably late at this ball, too. Now, some of the subtle details, like the Love Victorious, it's a nude painting, so it's a little bit scandalous.

[Thomas Banks]

And the painter, a little alluded to is William Adolphe Buguero, who was a French academic painter at the time. And if the name doesn't resonate with you, probably everyone has seen a print of his. The Abduction of Psyche by Cupid, which I think he was a little bit cloying and sentimental. He has some. Like you have. Actually, you have one in your office right here, which is nice. The shepherd is. That's actually a very charming painting. But some of his. He was very fond of pastels.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's a. Some of his stuff is a little bit Precious Moments cherubs.

[Thomas Banks]

A little bit. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So there's something about the decor with the Beauforts that's a little bit shocking because it's nudes.

[Thomas Banks]

But also he was famous for his nudes. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

What's shocking about is it's male nudity. It's. It's a young boy cherub. And so female nudity and paintings that had been a thing for a long time, but this was male nudity. So this was a little more shock talking. So Newlyn is. He's there. He's talking with May. He is again thinking that she's so innocent, she's white, she's radiant, she's good. You know, she's all these pure and innocent things. And he's just blissfully in love. Evidently, she's always going to understand. She's always going to do the right thing.

[Thomas Banks]

An important thing that we skipped over that she mentioned about Nuland is that he's the kind of man who enjoys a prize more in the anticipation of. Of it than in the enjoyment.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And one thing we forgot to mention was when he was in the opera house in Chapter one, and he's thinking, ah, of course the Mingots should have done this, but I kind of wish they wouldn't have done it. But he literally goes and stands with them. So he's literally and figuratively standing with them. Like his appearance there is going to lend some respect.

[Thomas Banks]

We're putting up a common front here.

[Angelina Stanford]

But it's also going to lend some respectability. And he's feeling protective of May. And. And I'm going to be here. And that's going to make this less scandalous because people will know that I'm here. All right, chapter four is the betrothal visit. So this is when we find out more about the Mingots. And we already mentioned this, but the. They're. They're. They're bohemian. They're bohemian. And she's. She's foreign. And Newan notices that Ellen is not acting in any way like she's compromised. She's just going out, living her life. She's shopping.

[Thomas Banks]

She doesn't seem ashamed. No, she doesn't. She's not bashful. She's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, she doesn't think she's done anything wrong. She's not even aware. Again, she's European, so some of this stuff is not landing on her. But he's extremely sensitive to. Oh, a woman in a compromised situation should not be seen walking out with a man. That's. That's very bad. Lots of old versus new comments, even with the grandmother saying, oh, it's these new sports. That's why May's hand is bigger than mine. So just lots of subtle, oh, yes. Versus new kind of things. All right, chapter five, we've got the Jackson visit to the Archers and they start gossiping about Ellen. And in the second part of that. Okay, so wait, actually, let me make sure I mentioned this because this is really interesting. New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingots and Mansons and all their clan who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Archer Newland van der Leyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure. Okay, so this marriage is going to unite those two lines. Lines. The two lines of, like old New York are going to be united in this. In this marriage. So this is a. This is a big deal. And this is your line where she spoke severely of Dickens, which is quite funny. All little, little tiny details, like Newland's thinking to himself, why didn't she tell the server not to cut the cucumbers with that knife?

[Thomas Banks]

This is not a long book and we are only 20 pages into it. But she's already created the moral atmosphere that these people live in. Not by a lot of really long winded description, but just by supplying. If she's very good at supplying the significant detail, she does That I think she does that even better than Henry James. I think Henry James would have taken a much longer time to introduce these same characters and this same situation.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I agree.

[Thomas Banks]

And I. I'm saying this is someone who respects Henry James a lot.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very Jane Austen.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

She has that economy of style, which she can say a lot in a little bit, just to give you an idea of, like the subtle, unspoken things that have a lot of meaning. They're talking about this Struthers woman, and he says, anyhow, he eventually married her. There were volumes of innuendo in the way the. Eventually was spaced in each syllable given its due stress. Right. Are people who are much too refined to come right out and just say.

[Thomas Banks]

They'Re really good at casting shade, they.

[Angelina Stanford]

Cast shape, finishing schools, how to suggest things. And, oh, I would never have said anything against this woman. And I didn't. I said, he eventually married her. Right. So just very, very subtle things like that.

[Thomas Banks]

It's like where you describe a woman as beautiful to another woman and that woman comments, yeah, she wears makeup well, or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's. Now, the interesting that happens is they. Well, they start gossiping about Ellen, and Newland finds himself very much defending her.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. Yes. Yeah. That's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Why shouldn't she be conspicuous if she chooses? Why should she slink about as if it was she who had disgraced herself?

[Thomas Banks]

He's capable of being exasperated by the code that he strives very devoutly to live up to, which is actually an interesting aspect of his character.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is very interesting. So he's saying, why shouldn't women. Well, so what if she's with the secretary? Why should. Why shouldn't women be allowed the same freedom as men? And then. And then he says, I hope she does get a divorce. Now, in the next chapter, he's going to be like, why did I say all of that? But in the moment, he feels very defensive of her. And then there's that his mother gives him the eyebrow look to say, not in front of the servant events. Okay. So you can't even.

[Thomas Banks]

You've gone a little bit too far.

[Angelina Stanford]

So it's not a private conversation. It's public because there are servants in there, and he's gone too far. But that chapter ends with him saying, I'm sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots. So he's calling out the double standard that women and men live by and. And saying, I'm just sick of it. So. So we'll see. Women ought to be as free. As free as we are. But then in another chapter, he's going to kind of. Well, in the very next chapter, actually, he starts thinking, well, it's really convenient of me to take that position that women should be free. Because I'm not a black guard who's going to ever do that to my wife. And my wife is not the kind of woman who would actually get a scandal. So, like, theoretically, he's for it. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

He knows that, like, this proclamation doesn't really cost him anything. And that it's like. It's something of a pose that he's striking almost. Not that he doesn't. Not that he. Not that he believes the opposite. Not that he believes that no, women should not be as free as men. But this is not the kind of declaration that someone like him is ever going to really act.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Yeah. Right. Because I'm never going to be a scoundrel. And my wife is never going to divorce me. And so I'm not actually going to have to live with that. And he. We also find out he has a past. He was involved with a married woman.

[Thomas Banks]

Newland was.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

I completely missed that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes. That. I gotta find that.

[Thomas Banks]

How did I miss that?

[Angelina Stanford]

He was involved with a woman. And. And. And he thought he was gonna die from the heartbreak over it. And then that. And then he got over it. So he admits that. It's in one of the chapters we read. But he admits that he knows. Knows that he. That society dictates that he, as a gentleman, will never tell his wife what his past is. And she, as a good girl, is not going to have a past. And that this is a facade that they're both, you know, engaged in it.

[Thomas Banks]

But it is emphasized that he's something of a man of the world. Which is not to say that he's ever been involved in any, like, you know, horrible crime or something like that. But. And that. That may. Is almost like a child.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

From what we've seen.

[Angelina Stanford]

Talking about.

[Thomas Banks]

Even though there's not like some great distance between their ages or anything like that. But. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So here's a line about the facades. In reality, they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs that.

[Thomas Banks]

So far, I think that's one of the most important sentences in the book.

[Angelina Stanford]

H. And then.

[Thomas Banks]

I love that one.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then she connects it back to primitive rituals. Right. Yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance and the air of having had her hand forced. Quite. As in the books on primitive man, the people at an advanced culture were beginning to read. The Savage Bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents tent. So on the one hand, these are our social codes that keep us going. But this is twice now that it's.

[Thomas Banks]

Been compared to something you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. He talks about her innocence. And by when he. Okay, so let's see. She had a sense. I love this. So he's kind of reflecting on his. His bride to be's good, good qualities. She had a sense of humor. Chiefly proved by her laughing at his.

[Thomas Banks]

Jokes, of course, true, she has a great sense of humor.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he suspected in the depths of her innocently gazing soul a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken. But when he had gone, the brief round of her, he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. So he. Again, he loves the idea of himself as the older world worldly man who's gonna, you know, inaugurate her chaperone as well as her husband. Yes, he's gonna initiate her into all these mysteries of life, shall we say. But this artificial facade of innocence. He said it's supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow. So he's thinking all here about this horrible duzzle standard. And all of this is caused by the appearance of the countess. He's like, it's because she's here that I'm being forced to think about that. And then in the same chapter, society snubs Ellen. So the Mingots have a party to introduce Ellen again, reintroduce Ellen to everybody because she's been on the continent for many years. And people make a point by all refusing it. And they don't even have the courtesy of acting like it's because they're previously engaged. It is an obvious snub, and they want it to be a snub. And so the meangots then go over their head and appeal to the van der Luydens, who are the most respectable people, the most influential people. And they say, well, we. We won't. We don't ever leave our house, so we won't go to your party. But we'll give our own party for the Duke, and we'll have Ellen there, and we'll invite everyone. I said, because no one's going to.

[Thomas Banks]

Snub the van it's kind of a compromise. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so there's that really interesting section in this chapter, though, where they talk about the social pyramid of New York society. Who's on the bottom, who's on the top? Who's really on the top? And the van der Luydens are really on the top. And so Mrs. Archer even says, like, oh, don't tell me about that stupid newspaper nonsense about New York having an aristocracy. That's a reference to the 400 that. That list. And she's saying, this isn't. This isn't real. There are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word. So she's saying we don't. We're not real aristocrats. We're. We're merchants. We're the descendants of Dutch merchants. All right. Yeah. So they appeal to the van der Leynd and they agree to do that. So I think this is a good place to stop. Chapter eight is going to introduce us to Countess Olenska's house and his visit to her. So we can pick up there next time.

[Thomas Banks]

So amaze me, Ms. Stanford. You're revealing depths in this book that I had not seen and sometimes surface things that I just didn't see, literally.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, well, thank you. So next time we'll cover chapters 8 through 211 and stick around to the end of this podcast. Mr. Banks will have a special poem, and again, sign up for our [e-mail] you can support this podcast, which is ad free and completely member sponsored by becoming a member of our Patreon. So you can go to patreon.com backslash theliterarylife for that. And you can check out houseofhumane letters.com to information on Heather's Coleridge webinar on Addison's Alice webinar on any of the things we've got coming up or have just finished. So thanks for joining us for this Age of Innocence series. I'm really excited about jumping further into this book with you guys and with you, Mr. Banks. So until next time, keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And Keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our Member Only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

Love in a Life by Robert Browning Room after room I hunt the house through we inhabit together heart fear nothing for heart thou shalt find her next time herself, not the trouble behind her left in the curtain the couch's perfume as she brushed it the cornice wreath blossomed anew Yon looking glass gleamed at the wave of her feather. Yet the day wears and door succeeds door I try the fresh fortune range the wide house from the wing to the centre. Still the same chance she goes out as I enter. Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares? But tis twilight you see with such sweets to explore, such closets to search, such alcoves to importune.