Afterword: “Talking Against Time” in The Age of Innocence

Abstract

Abstract In The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton argues that “the attempt to produce on the reader the effect of the passage of time” is one of the “central difficulties” confronting any novelist. In none of her own works of fiction is that difficulty resolved more successfully than in The Age of Innocence. This study demonstrates the extent to which an awareness of time occupies the core of Wharton's novel: time as it elapses, and time as it shapes the experiences of her characters. In old New York of the 1870s, people are strictly constrained by myriad inviolable routines and rituals, forced to be perpetually mindful of clock and calendar. The suspicion that their world is in the process of being gradually but irreversibly altered is pivotally captured when several characters, envisioning future inventions like the telephone, are said to be “talking against time”—a then-familiar but seldom elucidated colloquialism. Her own response to the acceleration of the social and technological changes that overtook old New York illustrates how Wharton, too, may be said to be “talking against time” in her later critical and autobiographical prose.