Age of Innocence by Martin Scorsese - Essay Example

02 October 2009 Edith Whartons Age of Innocence and its Screen Version Age of Innocence is one of the best novel of Edith Wharton screened by Martin Scorsese. 5the film director tries to follow feelings and emotions described in the book and develop a unique spirit of the epoch and its values. Both film and novel reflect powerful individual needs, naturally comes under scrutiny. What especially concerns here is the puz­zling question of how to balance the typicality of the spouse with the uniqueness of the individual. Marriage puts us into confining roles but it also - and terrifyingly - confronts two naked essences with one another in an awful solitude. The partners are thrown into a depth of intimacy no one can imagine who has not experienced it. Thesis The film treats the theme of innocence as a minor one while the novel treats innocence as core of moral values and social traditions. Both film and novel concentrates on the theme of marriage and its relation to innocence and moral values. Marriage is dangerous precisely because it can release and feed as many urges as it satisfies — one reason, perhaps, that divorce is rarely the simple matter it promises to be. theme are governed by the strong sense - common to many writers at the time - that one must be sacrificed to the other, that art can only be bought at the price of life. Like the novel, the film directors saw art as at once the extinction and the glory of existence. Wharton depicts Newland’s marriage as: Of course such a marriage was only what Newland was entitled to; but young men are so foolish and incalculable--and some women so ensnaring and unscrupulous--that it was nothing short of a miracle to see ones only son safe past the Siren Isle and in the haven of a blameless domesticity (Wharton 22). Edith Wharton took a more robust view. The film version follows the novel precisely but it lack of emotional tension of the novel; Martin Scorsese creates vivid and bright image of the main characters and follows Wharton’s feelings and passion related to innocence. In both works, the central figure in The Age of Innocence is Newland Archer. Like Lily Bart, Archer is by no means altogether likeable or admirable - and it is one of Whartons greatest strengths that she makes us respond to such characters by presenting them with a sort of luminous completeness. Wharton describes his family: "Ah, how your grandfather Archer loved a good dinner, my dear Newland!" he said, his eyes on the portrait of a plump full-chested young man in a stock and a blue coat, with a view of a white-columned country-house behind him (Wharton 17). Fundamentally amiable, Archer is also snobbish, vain, lazy and at times almost fatuous. If the coincidence of names with Jamess Isabel Archer suggests idealism, it also hints at willful innocence. As with Isabel, his temporary inability to accept the normal order is the product not of rebellion but of fastidious excess. Whartons insistence on Archers perfect breeding (in both senses) under­scores the fact that dissatisfaction in such a man is less a reaction against his conventional upbringing than a product of it — a sort of anti-body generated by the organism which has shaped him. In such circumstances, protest is the ultimate luxury, detachment the ultimate indulgence, superiority the ultimate decadence. Ralph, Lily and Newland are the fine flowers of their environment and, like fine flowers festering, they smell far worse than weeds (Witherow 165). In contrast to the book, the film portrays that Newland and Ellen naturally find themselves defeated. Using the theme of innocence, Wharton depicts that these characters are the products of the environment against which they rebel: to reject it is at once to deny and yet confirm the grounds of their own being. The irony of the situation is underlined by the fact that everything apparently solid about New York - in which the most successful survivors are shown to be those with the firmest grasp on the mundanely real, such as old Mrs Manson Mingott — is seen to be transient and deceptive. What New Yorkers take to be immutable facts of nature are, on the contrary, products of changeable nurture. It seems that every­thing is susceptible to fashion. Wharton makes the point by exposing the depen­dence of native patrician life on alien influences; one might say that even the imagery is imported. Wharton portraits morals as: “There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one preserves ones moral freedom, what we call in French ones quant a soi” (Wharton 145). The puritanical public morality, which New Yorkers compare so smugly with the degenerate manners of the Old World, is drawn from an older European tradition which came in with Dutch and English settlers. Only the money to pay for all this luxury originates in New York, and even that is suspect, as we discover when the banker Beaufort goes spectacularly broke, leaving several of his grand clients destitute, their substantial old money down the drain with his spectral cash. At the end of the book when Archers son dismisses the whole parade of Old New York life as prehistoric, it vanishes like a bad dream. The main difference between film and novel is evident in the character of Ellen Olenska and her innocent behavior patterns. In the film, she is portrayed as tyrannical woman but a woman full of common sense. For if upper-class American life is a reproduction of the European model, that model itself may be of dubious value, as Ellen has found to her cost. Her situation as the young American girl married to an unpleasant European nobleman inevitably recalls similar relationships in the work of Henry James. The affinities between the two novelists go deep and comparisons are legitimate, but they can be misleading, especially in this case. The Age of Innocence is not a study of misunderstandings but a drama of local caste - a point made comically clear when the Duke of St Austrey visits his far grander American cousins, Mr and Mrs Henry van der Luyden. What counts in the snobbish eyes of Fifth Avenue is not the fact that St Austrey is an English duke but that he is the van der Luydens English duke (Witherow 165). The other difference is in the theme of innocence and its meaning for the audience. Novel portrays Archers transition from passive observer to emotional protagonist and social rebel. As his gaze turns inward, his outward regard progress­ively darkens, converting him from humorous toleration of the tribal gods to angry criticism of the hypocrisy and double standards their powers enforce. Whether his love for Ellen prompts this reaction or the other way round is impossible to say: the two stimulate one another until the rebellion is quashed and Archer is driven back to the old ways. Wharton writes: “It would never have occurred to Grandmamma Spicer to ask the family to countenance her, as I understand Regina calls it; though a private disgrace is nothing compared to the scandal of ruining hundreds of innocent people" (Wharton 101). In contrast to the novel, the film lacks deep understanding and clear description of innocence and its importance for society. His evolution, from complacent acceptance of the established order, though near-rebellion to sullen resignation, is registered though a series of brilliantly rendered social gatherings which culminate in the terrifying dinner party of chapter thirty-three, when members of the tribe gather in Archers dining-room to formalize the rite of Ellens expulsion from New York and to fete the sacrificial victim before she departs for Paris. Although May has succeeded in routing her rival, Archer is aware that Ellen is by no means a passive victim. Still struggling against his fate, he wonders at her meek surrender to the inevitable until his wife reveals the truth. After dinner, when the guests have gone, May tells her husband that she is expecting their first child - and that she has already hinted as much to Ellen. Against such news from a wife a mistress can offer no arguments. “Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!” (Wharton 55). At the end of the novel, by the authority of motherhood May recovers her husband for the tribe and the end of the chapter finds her blue eyes wet with victory. Similar to the novel, the film does not give a clear answer to the question of morals and ethical principles. Both works might well have finished at this moment, with individual fulfillment giving way to collective survival in the form of Mays victory over Ellen, and Archer condemned, in his own words, to a life of emotional sterility and imprisonment. Instead, a final chapter moves the narra­tive on by 25 years, shifting its centre of gravity in the process and inviting us to review our interpretation of the action. May has died and Archer is visiting Paris with his eldest son, Dallas, who is engaged to be married to the illegitimate daughter of Julius Beaufort. Such a liaison is now smiled on by New York society. Dallas suggests that they call on Ellen Olenska, revealing that May had told him shortly before her death how Archer had given up the love of his life to stay with her and how she loved, pitied and honored him for the sacrifice. Wharton writes: “I dont think Ellen cares for society; but nobody knows exactly what she does care for," May continued, as if she had been groping for something noncommittal.” (Wharton 167). Affected by this news, Archer decides not to see the countess after all, but sends his son instead, and there the novel ends. It is possible to say that film reflects minor details of the novel and tries to represent a unique spirit of the age and morals of people. The novel and film portray moral and political lessons and speak about the necessity of accepting things as they are, for example, or the difficulty of coming to terms with our true natures, and the absurdity of confusing the gratification of our own desires with principled rebellion against the social order. Parted from Ellen, Archer has nevertheless found domestic contentment with May and their three very ordinary children. The appearance of Archers son at the end of the book introduces a note of light comedy which strengthens our ironic sense of the victorious quotidian. The novel ends before we have time to examine this doubtful prospect, but readers may note in passing that Dallas is freer than his father only because he is more conventional: he feels even more at ease with his own generation than Archer did. The books key metaphor is performance, and it is no accident that its two sections both begin in the opera-house. Opera combines ritual with spectacle and theatrical illusion in a way which exactly reflects the nature of aristocratic mores and values (Witherow 165). In sum, the film tries to follow emotional climate of the novel and portray the feelings and psychological states of the characters. It is assumed that everyone knows the truth but that no-one will blow the whistle so long as the proprieties are observed. As in the novel, upper-class life is shown to be a perpetual observance of rites in which nothing much happens but everything has meaning and consequences. Still, the theme of innocence is better developed in the novel portrayed through vivid images and metaphors. Whartons mastery of such details is consummate, as befits someone deeply versed in the then comparatively new disci­pline of social values. In The Age of Innocence, all find themselves in the difficult situation accepting its ways and its standards, yet alienated from it by circumstances beyond their control. In her characters the disturbingly mingled awareness of involve­ment and detachment produces no more than a deluded sense of superiority, dissipated in idle day-dreams and often ending in tragedy. In Whartons own case it helped to generate one of the finest oeuvres in 20th century literature. Works Cited Age of Innocence (1993). dir. By Martin Scorsese. DVD. Sony Pictures. 2001. Wharton, E. Age of Innocence. Modern Library; Reprint edition, 1999. Witherow, J. A Dialectic of Deception: Edith Whartons the Age of Innocence. Mosaic (Winnipeg), 36 (2003), 165-175. Read More