Writing Sideways: Edith Wharton, the Postmodernists, and Social Satire

If things go on at this pace,” Lefferts thundered, looking like a young prophet dressed by Poole, and who had not yet been stoned, “we shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindler’s houses, and marrying Beaufort’s bastard.

This memorable comic sentence comes in the penultimate chapter of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Lawrence Lefferts is a scoundrelly scion of the old guard of New York society, a society that is perfectly drawn—and quartered—in the novel; our protagonist, the passive skeptic Newland Archer, looks on in mute disgust as the hypocritical Lefferts rails against the downfall of their bogus little Eden. In the final chapter, set 25 years in the future, we will find Lefferts’s dire prediction to be more or less accurate: the rules of their world will have irrevocably changed, and the disgraced Beaufort clan will have indeed been forgiven; one of their daughters, in fact, will be engaged to Newland Archer’s son Dallas.

Dallas represents the ultimate victory of Newland’s ineffectual rebellion—the son lives in the “new land” of social laxity and freedom to which the “archer,” his father, has fired his arrow. In this new age, Wharton tells us, young men (still only young