The Age of Innocence

(See last week's post)

Edith Wharton’s society novel is set in Gilded Age of America - a time that lasted from around 1870 to the turn of the century… followed by a kind of gilded teetering and tottering, and wiped out forever by World War 1.

Wharton had been in Europe through the war. She had seen the loss of life, the hardship, the mechanised impersonal destruction that was, and is, the signature of modernity. We don’t know who we are hurting. It’s a bullet. A bomb. A hate-mail campaign. A Troll Army of algorithms. Dead bodies on the evening news. So many. We sigh. Too far away. Not us.

Wharton was in her late fifties when she published her novel in 1920.

Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Wharton was the first woman to do so.

If you haven’t read it, maybe it is, or isn’t for you. I don’t know. At the heart of it is the question of what innocence is: Childishness? Purity? Naivety? Something beautiful? Something to be protected? A quality that has no place or purpose in anyone past 18?

I am talking about this, this week, because innocence really doesn’t seem to have a place in our world anymore. Wharton’s story is about just that. Newland Archer, a rich young lawyer, is happy to marry his ‘innocent’ rich young bride, May Welland, until he suddenly starts falling in love with her cousin - someone utterly unsuitable for a man of his class and kind. This forces him to question the norms of his social circle, and his own code of conduct. He suffers because his life that seemed so perfect, is now not his own. He is living the life expected of him - all fine, until he realises it. A man who thought he was free is now trapped. Really, says Wharton, so-called innocence stands in the way of self-awareness. Innocence is lovely - in children. Not in adults. Especially not in woman, where it is usually a refusal of some kind, encouraged by society. A refusal to grow up.

How do we grow up?

The Bible story of Eve eating the apple puts the blame for loss of innocence -which is the loss of Paradise, squarely on the woman. But what a weird story it it! Don’t eat the apples is a sure-fire way to make sure the apples get eaten. Eve’s ‘sin’ is sometimes called a ‘felix culpa’, a fortunate wrong-doing. Even God was bored with the setup in Paradise. I mean, once you have named all the animals, then what? Ask a 5-year old.

Unsurprisingly, women getting the blame right at the beginning of the Bible, took the turn of women having to be more innocent from then on - meaning sexual innocence - because being seduced by a snake isn’t a good look. A man can sow his wild oats, get experience, but a woman doing that… well. There’s a long list of names for such women and the list doesn’t start with playboy or stud. Sexual purity demanded by men is always confused with innocence. In Wharton’s novel, the virginal May Welland turns out to be manipulative and vindictive. Her sexually free and politically brave cousin, Countess Olenska, is the one who is honest and true - innocent of the lies and social games that pass for a moral code in polite society. Hapless Newland Archer marries one and loves the other - he’s not brave enough to love honestly, only conventionally. What looks like moral choice is really cowardice.

Of course, neither of the women in Newland’s life is expected to work. Work equals independence, and innocence and independence don’t sit well together in patriarchy.

Patriarchy’s centuries-old refusal to educate women, refusal to let women into the worlds of business and politics, to hold down interesting jobs, to make and keep their own money, is bound up with this idea of innocence versus independence. Protection from the world on the one hand, but also being a protected place where a man could expect to go for solace and charm and not too much challenge. Women not bothering their pretty little heads about anything ‘out there’ might work, for a few years, if a woman is pretty, and if she has a small enough head with a small enough brain in it, but then what? I am sure the TradWives will let us know… you can’t be blonde and 25 and standing smiling by the oven forever. Watch that space, ladies

Meanwhile… for those of us, especially women, who don’t want to be the keepers of innocence, who would rather eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, who like to be involved in business and politics, well, we are living in an odd time where women, and especially women and feminism, seem to be the go-to Department of Blame for right-wing men lamenting their Gilded Age, or Golden Age, or whatever version of the past they are in, where apples were still on trees and women were in the home making them into apple pie.

Last week, I wrote about the Age of Anger. The Rage-Time we are in is a declaration of war on the way the world is now - and that makes a lot of sense. Of course it does. The world is awful. People can’t get homes, well-paid jobs, meaningful work, feel safe on the streets, build a community, have time for their families and friends. There’s no time and no money. What happened? We all order online or go to the mall, but hate the connections that have been destroyed, as small businesses can’t afford a presence on the street. Regular shops where people know us. Instead we grind through towns without stores, cities with nothing but chainstores, people travelling miles to work in eateries and bars where no-one greets anyone local. A transient world of air b n b’s, and flights from one grotty airport to another, to get drunk and lie on a dirty beach, go home with some selfies and a pile of cheap clothes made in sweatshops by kids. Old people stuffed in care homes. Students whose future is debt they will never repay. Processed food, obesity, mental health crisis, young people who don’t meet each other anymore, separated by screens and social media. Conspiracy theories and hatred.

All this, and the threat of global war, and the reality of climate breakdown. Who wouldn’t be angry? We are all angry. But along with every injustice and horror, every piece of despair, is something more - and it’s existential.

Loss of innocence. The innocence of a future we could believe in. The innocence of progress - that things will get better. The innocent belief humans are noble, altruistic, capable, good.

Who believes that now? Life is bitter and it’s cynical and we don’t believe that now. Right-wing Christians point to all of this horror show as evidence of humankind’s sinful unredeemed state. Go back to the Bible - which curiously seems best aligned with the 1950s - and all will be well. Innocence will be restored.

Edith Wharton’s novel is narrow in its range- it’s not about global problems, it’s about love. Yet love, above all, asks us to grow up. To see clearly. To take responsibility. To give up the naivety. When we see things as they are - not how we would like them to be, not as others tell us they are, then, yes, we lose our innocent state. But in that eating of the tree of knowledge, we have a chance at building what is worthwhile - not a simpering state of cliche.

I said last week that we have to call out people who say silly things in serious voices. Abandoning innocence means not accepting authority - you don’t become an anarchist (well, you might) - you start to question. You don’t take things on trust, not because you are cynical, but because this world just now is not trustworthy. Abandoning innocence means learning who and what can be trusted, holding yourself loyally there, and questioning the rest. Abandoning innocence means not being in a state of perpetual scamming by others. Innocence doesn’t sit well with independence - the patriarchy is right about that. So be independent in your thinking. Stand up for what you believe in. And don’t be sorry for yourself when others don’t like you because you are brave.

In Wharton’s novel, the pressure to be ‘innocent’ - to marry well, work hard, keep your head down, be fun at parties, wring you hands a bit at the state of the world, do a bit of charity for the poor, all of this, without stain, without guilt, without ever wondering who is paying for your innocence - whose lives your ‘innocence’ ruins, all of this is a price that is too high to pay. Eat the apple. Grow up

For us, now, in this time, our time, raging for a world that is gone, where everyone went to church and was kind, blah blah, in fact, a world that was bigoted and bad in all kinds of ways that get white-washed out, that is not the way to build a real and future world where we could live better than we do in this one. We still have a chance. It’s not over. It’s not too late.

Wharton wrote her novel after the biggest global horror the world had ever seen. Yet, The Age of Innocence isn’t a nostalgia novel at all. Looking back can teach us much. We should look back, but not to drool over a sanitised version of a past that might have worked for a few straight white men and their accomplices - of gender or race. We look back, not in anger, but in order to confront the kind of sentimentality, cliche, ignorance, false memory, folksy wet-eyed nostalgia, and sweaty emotional memoir that parades itself as the keeper of more innocent days. And is vicious.