She lived through it all. She chronicled a side of life most other people could only imagine.
The Infinitely Complex Individual
What’s the theory at work here? The idea is that the home is a place for private life. To enter into someone’s life is a process of gradual discovery. Why? Because the human personality is so complex. First impressions are necessarily superficial, and so are reputations, headlines, and epitaphs.The remarkable power of Wharton’s literary legacy is the exploration of the complexity of human motivation, circumstances, achievements, decisions, and social relations. To know another is even more difficult than knowing ourselves, which also is a job no one can complete.
Her home, called The Mount, illustrates these insights. Even when one enters, there is no grand foyer but rather a grotto of the sort usually associated with outdoor gardens. You have to move pretty deeply into the house to discover the elegance, which was not about ballrooms, but rather private spaces, libraries, and studies. As much focus and energy were put into the design of the gardens as the house itself. The details in the design are carefully structured to tell stories of the drama of life—its secrets, its sufferings, and its magnificence in the midst of insoluble imperfections.
Wharton and the Gilded Age
Wharton was, after all, shaped by—and became a leading interpreter of—the Gilded Age in America, the last glimmer of the Belle Epoque from roughly 1870 to 1913. These were the final decades of the age of laissez-faire, a time of astonishing invention, life expansion, explosive prosperity, and peace.A new world was being born. A new ruling class was born, too—not of privilege but of merit, not by force but by service, in a capitalist economy. Kings and presidents were diminishing in stature and the captains of industry were rising, leading the whole of humanity to an age of opportunity and plenty for all.
Another huge change in this swath of history was the emergence of the rock star woman novelist. This was made possible by the rise of the commercial marketplace for books in the mid-to-late 19th century. This new model of finance replaced the patronage system of centuries past and unearthed remarkable talent from unexpected places.
The Age of Innocence
Sharing my love of these times was the late Joey Rothbard, wife of the famous libertarian Murray Rothbard. We used to talk about the Gilded Age all evening, particularly the culture of the times: the music, painting, architecture, literature, and daily technology. She frequently recommended that I read “Age of Innocence” by Wharton. She told me that more than any other work, this book captured everything I needed to know. She kept asking me if I had read it yet. I was too busy with my head full of political economy, so I never got around to it.Whether you were in or out of it, the “society” was all-consuming. If you were in, you had to obey the rules. This crowd considered itself to be “society.” The use of that term alone is revealing. Today, we call the whole of society “society.” But there was a time when only the upper class owned this designation. What went on in “society” they imagined would somehow flow downward, class by class, to everyone else and come to define the very meaning of life for people in the country. It was an outrageous presumption, of course, but one taken for granted in countries burdened by monarchical privilege and governed with blood-and-soil ethos.
What this had to do with America is another matter. But for second- and third-generation Gilded Age nobility—people who had already begun to lose a sense of the primacy of work and creativity—living in the bubble of privilege was the essence of life. Whether you were in or out of “society” was the only metric that mattered. If you were in, you had to obey the rules.
Land of the Free?
The unlikely hero of the book and film is Ellen Olenska of American stock but raised in Europe and married into Polish aristocracy. This was hardly unusual. The European aristocracy was out of money, whereas the emergent American aristocracy of merit believed it needed the “legitimacy” of the blood and titles of old Europe. The cross-pollination of these two groups was a defining characteristic of “society” in those days. Ellen, however, finds her marriage stultifying, so she makes her way back to America in search of freedom.What she finds is the opposite. It is not freedom. As a divorced woman, she is excluded from society and cannot marry into it. She is something of a scandal. She doesn’t mind that, but she can never really get over why the Americans, given so much freedom and opportunity for social mobility, would consciously choose to affect rule-bound, privilege-obsessed, class-consciousness of national culture that had proven itself to be such a failure as compared with the more egalitarian classlessness of democratic society.
The problem with this freedom, in this conception, was not so much its tendency toward chaos but exactly the opposite: As private governance evolved, it became too rigged, too formalized, too constraining. As you watch all this unfold with your jaw on the floor, you have to be sympathetic to her point of view.
What is it with these people? On the one hand, it is impressive that they could have woven for themselves such a tight web of social control absent of any kind of government imposition. This alone is a tribute to freedom and its capacity for self-management. On the other hand, the problem with this freedom was not so much its tendency toward chaos but exactly the opposite; it was too rigged and formalized.
Here we have the subtle message of Wharton’s masterpiece. What appears to be a celebration and romanticization of the greatest times and in the greatest place in the history of humanity is really a devastating criticism, not so much of government or industry but of a micro-culture that had come to eschew the revolutionary ethos that had given rise to such prosperity in the first place. I can’t imagine a book that reveals this so fully.
The Right Balance
People who long for freedom have been thinking for centuries about the relationship between a purely formal freedom, meaning an absence of government control, and a practiced liberalism that celebrates an ethos of liberality, characterized by tolerance, love of change, and an aspiration of economic and social progress.The Gilded Age was given a glorious present of material prosperity heretofore unknown in the whole history of humanity. Must they go together? If the liberal spirit was absent, as it so often was in Gilded Age social bubbles, does this endanger the freedoms that were so hard-won by their ancestors? On the other hand, surely freedom also requires some measure of the discipline and even regimentation in which this crowd specialized in order to provide predictable patterns of rules and expectations. How much is too much?
The Big and Small
The Gilded Age was given a glorious present of material prosperity heretofore unknown in the whole history of humanity. They believed it to be immutable and expected a future of more of the same. All that was required was an unrelenting passion for improving behavior and refining the delicate rules of personal engagement within the highest social circles. They became so internal, so focused on the improvement of the in-crowd, they lost sight of the big picture, in Wharton’s view.At the same time, there is no form of freedom that can stamp out the failings of human nature. Freedom is a beginning—a necessary foundation with which no human community can do without—for the development of a truly civilized society.