By Izzi Holmes
In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, gossip operates as a form of social currency or capital with a capacity for exchange among women in old New York society. Since gossip is the sole means by which the novel’s upper class women can converse with one another in earnest, the complex social world of The Age of Innocence emerges from its subtext, and often, its paratext. Though the transmission of social information that characterizes Wharton’s style, mobilizes the plot, and implicates the reader in the novel largely takes place in the novel’s parentheses, scholars Robert Grant Williams and D.A. Miller explain that critics often denigrate parentheses and style by deeming them supplementary to plot. While Williams blames the underappreciation of parentheses on a lack of scholarship, Miller insists that style’s secondary standing is a result of unfavorable scholarship on Jane Austen that associates “Style” with “Woman” (Miller 2). Despite the absence of any kind of implied feminine reader in her prototypically stylish novels, to “be read reading” Austen is to submit to a position of femininity, and in turn, inferiority (2). Yet in a novel about feminine subtext, social conventions, and the transmission of social information in the form of gossip, Wharton’s use of these modes is strategic and dexterous — she manipulates free indirect style to illustrate and comment on social conventions in the novel’s parentheses. By writing in the style of Austen, Wharton draws on the fact that these features usually signal gender to establish herself in a female tradition, and, in turn, speak to a female audience. Wharton’s subversive use of typically feminine forms both aligns with and deviates from Austen, which reveals the extent to which Wharton draws on the inherited literary forms of female authors and rejects these conventions to create the social world of the novel.
Throughout the text, Wharton makes use of typographical features like ellipses and parentheses to pursue Austen’s particular brand of “anonymous, impersonal, universal” style where the “narration’s way of saying is constantly both mimicking, and distancing itself from, the character’s way of seeing” (27). A distinction between character and narrator first manifests in the narrator’s description of Newland Archer’s fantastical daydream: “‘[w]e’ll read Faust together… by the Italian lakes …’ he thought, somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honey-moon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride” (Wharton 26). Although the quotation marks and the phrase “he thought” prove this scene’s impersonal third person narration, the ellipses signal a closeness to Newland’s psyche because they project natural speech patterns onto the page (Blackall 145). Where ellipses help render Newland’s distinct voice, mocking phrases like “hazily confusing” and “his manly privilege” denote multiple voices, such that these voices contradict one another (Wharton 26). Dissonance between what the character sees and the narrator says is essential to Austenian style. Similar multivocality arises in the narrator’s ironic, sardonic portrait of Lawrence Lefferts:
“Lefferts…could not only elucidate …the connection between the Mingotts (through the Thorleys) with the Dallases…and…the relationship of the…Philadelphia Thorleys to the Albany Chiverses (on no account to be confused with the Manson Chiverses of University Place), but could also enumerate the…characteristics of each family…” (Wharton 28).
Though social knowledge is in theory unique to Lawrence Lefferts, the narrator’s use of parentheses reveals that this social information is available to narrator and reader — Lefferts is insignificant. The ironic distance of free indirect style grants the narrator the privileged ability to access, convey, and judge the thoughts of the novel’s characters while keeping that information from them. Wharton mobilizes parentheses as tools of dramatic irony, to withhold information from her characters, which in turn affirms her membership in an Austenian stylistic tradition.
Wharton’s deployment of parentheses as a way to withhold context from her characters also sets the novel’s plot in motion. Social communication in the novel is subtle, and it is often unclear whether May and Newland understand one another, despite their regular interactions. Just after the aforementioned condemnation of Newland’s “manly privilege,” the narrator adds that “[i]t was only that afternoon that May Welland had let him guess that she ‘cared’ (New York’s consecrated phrase of maiden avowal), and already his imagination…pictured her at his side” (Wharton 26). The narrator indicates that the characters cannot read one another: May hopes Newland can “guess” what she means, yet Newland interprets May’s words as he pleases. In the parentheses, the implication that neither May nor Newland consciously recognize their lack of sincerity becomes explicit. There is an unsettling level of opacity in this interaction, first between the two characters, then among narrator and reader. These parentheses therefore take the Austenian narrator’s necessarily simultaneous “acquaintance with” and “exemption from” the “social necessities that govern the narrated world” a step further because they provide a literal space for social commentary that—like the narrator—is both inside and outside the text (Miller 32). In this literal and liminal space, Wharton makes it clear that her plot relies on her characters’ inability to read social cues: if May and Archer understood one another, they would never marry and there would be no story. The motion of Wharton’s plot—like the success of her style— hinges on the fact that the narrator knows what the characters do not, and can withhold this information from the characters (but not the readers) by placing it in parentheses.
Though a study of parentheses affirms Wharton’s participation in an Austenian tradition, it also reveals the unique paradox of Wharton’s style. Parentheses are of paramount importance to Wharton’s crypticism: while Austenian free indirect style relies on a form of dramatic irony where “the narration never allows us to be equally in the dark” as the characters, Wharton’s cryptic narration ensures and requires that her readers are also blindsided (Miller 44). After all, it is only by attending to interjections like “(New York’s consecrated phrase of maiden avowal)” that readers come to know that May’s care is insincere (Wharton 26). If readers try to “quickly skim over” Wharton’s parentheses to “return to live text,” they—like May and Newland—will miss insight into New York aristocracy, which is the most ‘alive’ part of the work (Williams 57). Wharton traps this information in parentheses to ensure that Newland and May remain ignorant, condemning them to a life of social illiteracy. By using parentheses to dangle this same social information in front of her readers, Wharton warns them of their similar fate. Wharton then transforms the text into a literal vessel for the exchange of social information her work describes.
Since parentheses make the novel’s metaphorical gossip channels real, Wharton’s authorial triumph relies on the fact that her readers, like her characters, do not read the parentheses and therefore miss the crucial subtext they carry. Williams explains that this kind of reading is typical: the Greek word “parenthesis” translates to “to place in beside,” which implies that text inside parentheses is secondary to text outside parentheses (60). A closer look at etymology, however, reveals that there is no criteria for which is “beside” the other, which means parentheses can serve as the primary vessel for meaning in a text (Williams 60). The line “Miss Welland…hung on the threshold, her lilies-of-the-valley in her hand (she carried no other bouquet)” demonstrates how parentheses can recontextualize an episode (Wharton 38). The remark that “(she carried no other bouquet)” complicates the simple image of May holding flowers and hesitating before she starts to dance, as it insinuates that she should be holding a wedding bouquet because she should be getting married (Wharton 38). With the addition of parentheses, this passage becomes a critique of May’s failure to comply with social standards. That May waits to cross the literal threshold then represents a metaphorical hesitation to get married, while the flowers she holds represent her youth and naivete. This double meaning cues readers to May’s innocence, and foreshadows the future insecurity of her marriage. Since reading the parentheses is the sole mechanism by which readers can “peer behind the veils” that blind the characters to avoid their fate, Wharton proves it is both possible and generative for text in parentheses to take precedence over text outside parentheses (Blackall 159). This technique is most effective when whispered social information takes precedence over regular communication in a text, as in The Age of Innocence, where gossip is of the utmost value.
In The Age of Innocence, parentheses help Wharton maintain the ironic distance between narrator and character that defines Austenian style. Where parentheses serve as the vehicles for both style and the exchanges of social information that constitute The Age of Innocence, Wharton takes this irony a step further — by creating a similar distance between narrator and reader, she condemns careless readers to the same ignorant existence as her characters. Such readers will fail to understand the novel’s complex social world unless they read the stylish interjections in the parentheses. In this regard, ‘extratextual’ and ‘inferior’ stylistic and technical devices do not detract from the novel’s success, but strengthen, and often constitute the narrative — it is here that she both creates and denatures the feminine social world of The Age of Innocence. This technique brings Wharton’s work into the realm of the real—in conveying this information to the reader, the text becomes an instance of the exclusive gossip channel it describes. Wharton proves the legitimacy of parentheses and style as literary devices by demonstrating their transformative power, then turns these historically inferior and supplementary tools into hallmarks of her writing with pride. In doing so, she—like Austen—initiates a (stylish) tradition of her own.
Works Cited
Blackall, Jean Frantz. “Edith Wharton’s Art of Ellipsis.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 145–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225179. Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.
Miller, David Albert. Jane Austen, or, the Secret of Style. Princeton Univ. Press, 2005. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/janeaustenorsecr0000mill/page/n17/mode/2up. Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. Virago Press, 1982. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/ageofinnocence0000whar_o5g5/page/n9/mode/2up
Williams, Robert Grant. “Reading the Parenthesis.” SubStance, vol. 22, no. 1, 1993, pp. 53–66. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3684730. Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.