"Then stay with me a little longer," Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.
With this simple sentence, OK, two sentences, the whole mechanism of Edith Wharton’s gorgeous masterpiece The Age of Innocence (1920) springs its trap. Spring us into that trap, that is. It’s incredible to have to wait until Chapter VIII—on page 85 (!)—for the amusement ride we all signed up for to start firing up before the readers’ eyes. ADULTERY. Gasp. I don’t know why, but as I’ve written before, the two greatest generic story plots, especially for novels, I think, are: (a) being trapped on an island (literal or otherwise) and (b) adultery. Shakespeare has them both of course.
Why is adultery so potent a theme?
Well, in a patriarchal society that hinges on the institution of marriage and the bloated/hollow tyrant of the family unit. To watch someone break that ultimate taboo is indeed thrilling, to use Wharton’s word. A queer/feminist move, for sure. The Victorian era was secretly obsessed with sex yet was happy to discuss money matters. Today, any milquetoast luncheon with colleagues might soon reveal sordid dating details yet money matters? I’ve never been anywhere in my entire life and heard someone casually declare how much money is sitting in their bank account(s), what 401k retirement plan they do or don’t have, let alone their salary compared to yours.
Foucault refuted the ‘repressive’ hypothesis of Victorian studies as daft. And it’s good to remember that Freud was nothing if not a Victorian spirit, like many others who are considered the epitome of radical modernity. Freud who was too sex-obsessed, genital-literalist, for the structuralist Lacan.
Wharton’s sentences are astoundingly crisp, shimmery, crystalline (feast on these from Chapter I):
On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.