Random thoughts on The Age of Innocence

1/ At the beginning, The Age of Innocence has a harshness that can be found in The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. I mean, look at this passage for instance: 

“The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.” (Ch.4) 

Wow. 

“…she waved one of her tiny hands, with small pointed nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the wrist like ivory bracelets.” (ibid.) 

Ugh.
That is Mrs Manson Mingott, or Old Catherine, May’s grandmother. I didn’t feel it at the time, but now that I’ve singled it out, there’s something about the passage that makes it stand out a bit, like it belongs in a different kind of book. 
Later on, I started to notice a change, and compared to the other 2 novels, The Age of Innocence has a tenderness and melancholy that I like.

2/ For those who don’t know the story, The Age of Innocence is about Newland Archer, in New York high society in the 1870s, who is engaged to a young woman named May Welland but finds himself falling in love with her cousin Ellen Olenska. 
I keep thinking about May as the brunette Winona Ryder and Ellen as the blonde Michelle Pfeiffer, but Martin Scorsese’s film switches the hair colour. 
In Edith Wharton’s novel, Ellen has dark hair. 

“It was that of a slim young woman, a little less tall than May Welland, with brown hair growing in close curls about her temples and held in place by a narrow band of diamonds.” (Ch.1) 

Later: 

“The light touched to russet the rings of dark hair escaping from her braids, and made her pale face paler.” (Ch.9) 

Now look at May: 

“As Madame Nilsson's "M'ama!" thrilled out above the silent house (the boxes always stopped talking during the Daisy Song) a warm pink mounted to the girl's cheek, mantled her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a single gardenia.” (Ch.1) 

Later: 

“Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire; and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity.” (Ch.16) 

I’m not quite sure what colour her hair is meant to be—platinum blonde?  
This is interesting, because of the traditional association of blonde hair with a pure and innocent image, and dark brown hair with something mysterious, exotic/ foreign, passionate, dark, and dangerous (the outsider Mrs Struthers, for example, has intensely black hair). 
(There is, as it turns out, a book called Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture). 
Wharton also uses colours and flowers to present May and Ellen as opposites: May wears white a few times, Ellen wears dark blue velvet or red velvet; Archer associates May with lilies-of-the-valley and Ellen with yellow roses, and so on.  

3/ There is a lot of interior design in the novel, a lot more than in the other 2 novels. Wharton herself wrote a book called The Decoration of Houses, and also wrote about garden design in Italian Villas and Their Gardens. 
I find myself missing out on all these descriptions and details because I don’t understand anything from mahogany to rosewood and damask and such.  
However, something stands out in the description of Ellen’s house: 

“…what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson's shabby hired house, with its blighted background of pampas grass and Rogers statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skilful use of a few properties, been transformed into something intimate, "foreign," subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments. He tried to analyse the trick, to find a clue to it […] in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.” (Ch.9) 

Ambergris! That probably doesn’t mean much to other people, but it sure is exciting to a fan of Moby Dick. 
Also this line:

“It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were called "simple dinner dresses": a close-fitting armour of whale-boned silk…” (Ch.12) 

What is whale-boned silk? Is it silk from baleen? Silk and baleen? 

4/ This is a funny passage: 

“Mr. Jackson, if perfection had been attainable on earth, would also have asked that Mrs. Archer's food should be a little better. But then New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Archer-Newland-van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure.
You couldn't have everything, after all. If you dined with the Lovell Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at Adeline Archer's you could talk about Alpine scenery and "The Marble Faun"; and luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape.” (Ch.5) 

I like travel and the best fiction, but also like good food, nice clothes, and money. Maybe I’m greedy. 
Canvas-back and terrapin is fancy duck and turtle meat, in case anyone wonders. 

5/ See this passage about Archer’s previous relationship: 

“He passed for a young man who had not been afraid of risks, and he knew that his secret love-affair with poor silly Mrs. Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret to invest him with a becoming air of adventure. But Mrs. Rushworth was "that kind of woman"; foolish, vain, clandestine by nature, and far more attracted by the secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as he possessed.” (Ch.11) 

Hold on, is that a Mansfield Park reference? It looks like it.
The next bit is more interesting: 

“The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied. In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches. The only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to marry a nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him.” (ibid.) 

This is, I believe, an important passage, especially the bit about “the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied”.