Hypocrisy and Innocence

* I can’t imagine anyone but a conservative think tank pundit coming out of the new film “The Age of Innocence” believing that it’s our civilized duty to sacrifice our deepest desires in order to perpetuate social hypocrisy. Does James P. Pinkerton (Column Right, Sept. 30) really need it spelled out that “The Age of Innocence” is about the tragedy of repression and hypocrisy, not a celebration of it? I guess he does. At the end of the novel (and film) Newland Archer is a broken man, a victim not just of his own ambivalences but of a society terrified of honest feeling. Edith Wharton isn’t saying that this is the way society should have been; she’s saying this is the way it was. Big difference.

Incidentally, about Pinkerton’s assertion that it was Karl Marx who said “the past is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.” It wasn’t Marx, it was James Joyce (in “Ulysses”). And Pinkerton misquoted. The quotation reads: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” It’s typical of Pinkerton’s brand of reactionary hysteria that he ascribes everything he disagrees with to the Fount of Socialism.

CORNEL BONCA

Assistant Professor of English

Cal State Fullerton

* It is assumed in our “bare all” society that the recipient of our confessions welcomes the role of confessor. This is a monstrous assumption, I believe. I do not want to hear my hairstylist had an abortion when she was 15; I only want my hair cut. I do not want to know that the daughter of the woman at the playground was recently divorced by a husband more interested in his computer than his children; I only want to watch my boys play on the monkey bars.

What we have lost amid the cacophony of these talk-show unbosomings (and one needn’t be on the air to partake) is our sense of decorum.

Pinkerton states that “for the most of human history, behavior was guided by habit and folkways.” Since this no longer appears to be so, I would like to offer an alternative: Perhaps it is time to teach discipline as a discipline. Perhaps our schools should offer courses not only in civics but in civility. Perhaps manners should be graded, and not on the curve. It is, after all, manners--good ones--that offer an oasis of propriety in this turbid sea of boorishness. Lest educators complain of being forced yet again to teach something that should be learned in the home, remember that ethics and etiquette would be courses to pass or fail, just like math and English.

WENDY SCHRAMM

Vista