This essay, rather than being a direct discussion of Wharton’s novel, is an attempt to grapple with the project of teaching it to contemporary students.

Relatability and its Discontents. An oft-heard trope among contemporary young people is that of “relatability.” If I have to sit in one more classroom or writing workshop and hear whether or not a character, a scene, a passage, a piece of action is “relatable” or not, I think I’ll scream. Why? Two reasons: One is that, in at least this area, I am a doddering (figuratively, if not yet literally) English teacher of the Hollywood central casting type, and do not like the vast majority of “made-up” words. Yes, the language evolves, and that’s absolutely fine for words like “Twitter,” which describe something that had not previously existed. But we already have several perfectly good ways to communicate the idea of “relatability” – one, quite simply, would be to say “I relate to that” (perhaps not the king’s English, but to my mind, just fine); another would be to say “I empathize” (perhaps more kingly).

But perhaps much more important is the second reason for my fusty fussiness: Why on earth do students, readers, viewers, anyone at all have to “like” a character, much less “relate” to her or him? Liking is for Facebook. When friends tell me that didn’t like a film because they didn’t “like” the main character, my reaction is always one of befuddlement. If the character is violent, misogynist, racist, has bad table manners, is boring, then a viewer is entitled to say s/he doesn’t wish to spend time with that character, but nowhere is it written that we have to like the characters who may very well be fascinating.

I’m not at all sure that I “like” Ellen Olenska or Newland Archer, and I certainly can’t “relate” to them, but I’m glad to have made their acquaintance, to have gotten a glimpse of their world and their doings, to have heard what Wharton has to say about them. I don’t know what my reaction to them and their doings would have been a hundred years ago, but one of the pleasures of reading The Age of Innocence now, for me, is its time capsule quality: Oh so this is what it was like back then, for these people. This is what they did, and said, and thought. How different than what we do! How very much the same!

Intended Audience. The students I have in mind here are two, possibly very different populations – high school students and community college students. The reason for this is that these are the students someone with the degree I am working toward (an M.A.) is qualified to teach. Too often, I find that pedagogical theory is directed toward an assumed audience of college-level English teachers and doctoral students who will (god willing and the creek don’t rise) teach college English. Many or most students at an independent high school or a well-resourced public school will quite likely be sophisticated readers and writers, while many or most community college students may be coming to the reading of (and writing about) literature as newbies; some may be second-language learners. But while the level of sophistication and ease with reading literature may vary between the two groups, I believe that many of the same issues will be at play and many of the same techniques can be used.

Learning Goals. I want the students to come away from reading The Age of Innocence with several things: an understanding of the book, an enjoyment of the book (if possible – though you can’t legislate pleasure), an ability to discuss and write about what happens in the novel and the techniques Wharton uses. As for the enjoyment part of the equation: although you can’t force pleasure, I do think pleasure is integral to these learning goals. And there is a certain pleasure to be found in becoming familiar with something that once seemed difficult to approach, in mastering its codes and terms, its language and habits. “Mastery” has become a jargon word, especially in education, and so I hesitate to use it. But I do think it pertains here.

Many contemporary students will blanch at manners and mores that will seem to them like relics of another world, indeed that are relics of another world. Calling cards and carriages, boxes at the theater and picture shows, elaborately choreographed social conventions and well-policed morals, the question of what constitutes scandal in what Wharton calls the “tight little citadel of New York” (50): all will be alien to contemporary students. Although some may have no problem seeing through and past the scrim of these things to the human emotions and interrelationships hidden behind, I suspect many will. Knowledge is the key to this. I firmly believe that a teacher cannot present an “old book” like The Age of Innocence without giving students a way in to what otherwise will remain a closed society. See below for thoughts on a “Knowledge” approach to teaching this novel.

What I Hope to Accomplish (aka My Goals). I hope to lead the class through a process of exploration of why, exactly, a student in the present moment might be required to, or might want to, read The Age of Innocence. I would present the idea of the canon, and its mutability. I would then pose these questions to the class, and to myself: Does the Age of Innocence “deserve” a place among the so-called Great Books? What actually is a “Great Book”? As teachers and students make room on the proverbial bookshelf for books by women, people of color, people of divergent class, ethnic, and national backgrounds, LGBTQ people, something’s gotta give. Should The Age of Innocence remain? Always, sometimes, when?

Activities. In addition to the above research and oral presentations, class activities will include close reading and many short, in-class writing assignments. The act of having to digest thoughts about a work of literature and then spit them out onto the page is extremely productive, in my view. So rather than waiting for a long (or long-ish) midterm or final paper, I advocate short, low-pressure exercises, preferably carried out in class (I believe that the act of writing in class reduces expectations and pressure for most students, though of course not all will feel this way).

One example might be a close reading in class of the passage in The Age of Innocence concerning “the game of precautions and prevarications, concealments and compliances … called ‘protecting a woman’s honour’,” which goes on to talk about the way a woman is “the subject creature, … versed in the arts of the enslaved” (320-322). This passage seems as though it could function well as an entry point into the novel for contemporary students, something that, without too much difficulty, they could grasp and which might well provoke lively discussion and also illuminate other, less easily accessible portions of the novel.

After students take turns reading portions of the passage aloud, we would then have a short in-class discussion of it, and I would then ask them to write about it, giving them a few simple prompts to choose from.

Additionally, here are some possible questions that could be used to spur in-class discussion or perhaps used as writing prompts, either for in-class writing assignments or for longer mid-term or final papers (obviously, not all of these questions will be appropriate for all populations of students):

• Does the world of The Age of Innocence seem alien and/or hard to comprehend? What possible ways into that world can you find?
• Compare your reactions to Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (or substitute the title of another contemporary book the class has read) to those you have to this novel, both in terms of what seems alien/familiar and in terms of ways into the book?
• Who is Wharton’s intended audience? How do we overlap with that audience? What knowledge does she presuppose on the part of that audience? Do we have that same knowledge? Any of it, some of it, none of it?
• What is the relationship between the narrator and Newland Archer? What do we know about the narrator – at the book’s beginning, as it progresses, as it ends? How do we feel about this narrator? Do those feelings change?
• What are the narrator’s attitudes toward the multiple and finely calibrated rules that govern the society in which the novel’s action takes place? What are Newland Archer’s attitudes? Are they the same?
• What can you say about the title?
• Although we may feel that the world of the novel – “the age of innocence” described by Wharton ­– is light years removed from ours, what can we say about the way Wharton addresses her presumed reader, her authorial audience, at the end of the book? On page 368, she says, “Nothing could more clearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays were too busy – busy with reforms and “movements,” with fads and fetishes and frivolities – to bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?”
• In a recent New Yorker magazine article about Edith Wharton, the contemporary writer Jonathan Franzen discusses the ending of The Age of Innocence. He says: “Wharton, in the novel, certainly shines what she once called ‘the full light of my critical attention’ on the social conventions that deformed her own youth, but she also celebrates them. She renders them so clearly and completely that they emerge, in historical hindsight, as what they really are: a social arrangement with advantages as well as disadvantages. In so doing, she denies the modern reader the easy comfort of condemning an antiquated arrangement. What you get instead, at the novel’s end, is sympathy.” (boldface mine)  Re-read the book’s ending. Do you agree or disagree with Franzen? Is it possible for something to have both advantages and disadvantages, especially something so influential and important as the “social arrangement” that governs the lives and behavior of Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska? Do you, one of the modern readers Franzen is talking about, feel the sympathy he mentions? Or do you just feel disapproval? If you do, do you agree with Franzen that you’re getting “easy comfort” out of it? Why or why not?

Knowledge Approach. As mentioned above, I believe that knowledge and context are keys for students reading a long-ago-and-far-away work such as The Age of Innocence. Tightly focused research assignments are one way to provide this knowledge and context. The class would be given a list of research topics to choose from: language (this one is important, because I think the somewhat antiquated air of both Wharton’s dialogue and her narration will be a barrier for many students), clothes, food, technology (electricity, telephones), marriage laws, transportation (within New York and from the US to Europe), culture and entertainment (what paintings would Ellen and Newland have been looking at, what theater would they have been attending, what music would they have been listening to?), maps (what was the physical layout of the New York of Wharton’s time? what was the significance and character of various neighborhoods?). Students will also be given a list of resources, such as the online version of the National Portrait Gallery’s Edith Wharton exhibition, maps, the film of The Age of Innocence, a list of books, resources from the Edith Wharton Society (see bibliography and resources). Students will write up their findings (length as appropriate: 3-5 pages), and present their findings to the class in oral presentations (this last is essential, so that the class as a whole can benefit from pooled knowledge).

Creative Writing Approach. This is an approach I have extremely mixed feelings about, and I suspect those feelings will evolve as I teach. Although I myself love the opportunity to write “creatively, not everyone does. (And just a note on the existence of the distinction between creative and non-creative work: It seems a bit capricious to me – should we be calling the “non-creative” work “un-creative”? Or, to avoid Orwellian double-speak, perhaps we should term be it “boring and tedious work”?). I’m the parent of a 16-year-old high school junior who is STEM-oriented. Every time he is asked to do a “creative” piece of work, his soul falls through the floor. The difference in our reactions has caused me to think a great deal about this mode of teaching in a literature classroom. But in spite of my doubts, I continue to think that this can be an excellent way to elicit new thoughts and interpretations on the part of students and to spur interest in otherwise disengaged students, to challenge them to engage in the “acts of learning” that Sheridan D. Blau talks about in The Literature Workshop.

Because we, and especially our students, live in the narcissistic world of contemporary social media, where everything is about the “I” – what I feel, not so much what I think – the work of using a creative writing approach lies in bringing the attention back to the text at hand. The creative writing assignment, exercise, or project cannot function simply as a handy break in the monotony of the quotidian work of the semester or year.

I propose identifying several moments or scenes in The Age of Innocence, discussing them with my students, and then giving a writing prompt based on those moments or scenes. Possibilities include the scene when Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer first meet, the provocative close of the novel referred to above, or the moment when Archer sees Ellen Olenska from afar on the pier in Newport and doesn’t speak to her. The corresponding assignments might be:

• Describe a scene in which two characters (or two people, if the student prefers memoir or nonfiction) meet for the first time. You, the writer, know that these two characters/people will be important to each other, and that their lives will be intertwined from this point on, but of course the characters/people you’re writing about can’t know that.
• Write about a moment when things turn out to be different than they at first seemed. Make us, your reader, see all the points of view: how things appeared at first, how they turned out to be, the gap between the two perspectives.
• Create a scene in which there’s a “road not taken,” as Robert Frost says [having given this poem to the students on the day of assignment]. Through the setting, the dialogue, the descriptions of the characters/people, let your reader experience the choice and see the perils/costs of each way of going.

Measuring Success. We live in a world that loves metrics, testing, quantifying things. One can – and in my view, should – rebel against this metric-loving world, and yet, here we are. And so the question arises: How do you measure the achievement of goals in an English classroom? Is it when a student’s writing has appreciably improved since s/he first set foot in your classroom? If s/he understands the difference between “which” and “that,” a colon and a dash, written and spoken language? Well, sure, of course. If s/he says on the last day of class: Wow, I loved Edith Wharton. Which should I read next, House of Mirth or Custom of the Country? Yes, absolutely, that would be wonderful. But I think a more genuine measure, a more useful metric – not instead of the above, but perhaps along with them – would be a student who by the end of the course can draw connections from the text to his/her own life, society, era, be enriched in whatever way by the making of those connections, make observations about the book on its own term, and feel as though s/he has the right, the standing, to make those observations, that s/he is a Reader — a student who has been able, in some way, to approach this work of literature, written so long ago, this time capsule from another place and time, and see it as perhaps not so alien after all.