Polite Society Is Confined to Manners in Gilded Cage of ‘Innocence’
W hen we saw “The Age of Innocence,” we got hungry for an old New York society fix--civilized chitchat by the fire in damask-covered drawing rooms, gardenias in the lapel, dinners at tables laid with heirloom china.
We loved visiting it via Martin Scorsese’s brilliant film, but would we want to stay there?
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SHE: Give me about 10 years of hanging out in Scorcese’s film and maybe I’ll be recovered from spending time in our graceless “Age of Guilt.” Go ahead, call me square, but I’m sick to death of this let-it-all-hang-out era. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is secret.
Give me a social arena brimming with good taste, impeccable manners and Daniel Day-Lewis, of course.
HE: There is style, and there are good manners. Then there is suffocating convention, malicious artifice and cruel repression, all of which everyone in the story tacitly agrees upon. I’ll stay for tea on the veranda, but after the last scone, I’m outta there.
Living as a part of New York society in the 1870s might have been elegant (pretty cool vests on Day-Lewis), but it would be like being trapped in Paris in August: gorgeous and opulent, but full of chilly, haughty people smiling like snakes and not a belly-laugh to be heard anywhere.
SHE: I longed to jump into the fireside scene with Michelle Pfeiffer and Day-Lewis. I wanted to lazily sip tea from a brimless Japanese cup, pluck a cigarette from a shining gold case and then lean back and wonder--like Countess Olenska did--what it would be like to be in love with Newland Archer.
In the book, Edith Wharton describes the room as having “the scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.”
I’ll take that over Instant Maxwell House and Mountain Pine Scent any day.
HE: Yep, a cozy little tete-a-tete with Michelle Pfeiffer sounds pretty intriguing, all right. But once you’re out the door and back into that polar society, you have to watch your every step. Use the wrong fork at the table and your pals will ostracize you forever. The ladies complain that one of their number had the audacity to wear a new dress without leaving it in the box from Paris for the prescribed length of time. Someone had decided on that rule. One man was held to be the absolute arbiter of form: the Solomon in the great opera-pump-versus-patent-leather-oxford debate.
Yes, it was a fine, sweet-smelling, elegant prison. But a prison nonetheless. Any ideas on a compromise?
SHE: Tell me we’re not in prison today with our need to follow the sartorial herd, wear the newest fragrance, party at the trendiest spot, drive the hottest wheels.
For me, the beauty of “The Age of Innocence” was the attention people paid to their surroundings. Yes, they could be stuffy about it, but overall, it was a dreamy space in which to play out one’s life.
As for compromise: Give me an environment where a person can express his individuality yet not offend. The basis of good manners is consideration of another person’s feelings. There is not enough of that today.
HE: True enough. But, by your definition, did you see any good manners in that film? Correct manners, yes. Correct according to prevailing convention. But manners that allowed all sorts of viciousness and that cultivated a mindless herd mentality. Yes, their clothes were dazzling, but their cut and fit and style were determined absolutely by the richest top dog. Any deviation and you were damned. Remember that line about the whole harmony of the big house of cards being subject to destruction by a mere whisper? Believe it.
And, as far as I can tell, that sort of thing still goes on in the upper social strata.
SHE: Not quite. It’s far more democratic today than it was in the 1870s. Today, the upper social strata is more about how much you do for charity than how many homes you have, how many gowns, how many European paintings. Believe it.
For me, the film’s conflict between doing what is fashionable and what is individual was epitomized in the scene where Olenska hints that maybe Archer just wants her to be his mistress. He stammers and says: “I want somehow to get away with you into a world where categories like that won’t exist. . .”
She answers with the film’s most poignant line: “On my dear--where is that country? Have you ever been there?”
HE: We have, thank God. We’re there now, if we want to be. It was a long time coming. The posh Victorians became the posh Edwardians and doggedly hung onto their fantasy world until World War I blew it to bits forever.
Today we’re poorer for the unlovely realities that a turbulent century has imposed on us, but we are free to accept or reject convention or conventional wisdom as we like. If we live in a cage, gilded or otherwise, it’s likely we built it ourselves.
In our weird new world we can laugh loudly at a joke over tea at the Ritz and order red wine with fish and wear white shoes after Labor Day and kiss our fiancees in broad daylight and still sleep soundly that night, knowing that our lives won’t be ruined because of it.
Besides, a good tailor can still whip up a fine brocade vest.
