Age of Innocence (Dramatic Reading)

The great tragedy of Newland Archer is that he knows exactly what he wants, and exactly why he cannot have it. Set in the glittering, rigid world of 1870s New York high society, Edith Wharton's masterpiece follows Archer, a young man of old money and impeccable reputation, as he courts the perfect May Welland, until her cousin Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, a Countess with a scandalous past and a wildness that shatters everything Archer believed about himself. What makes this novel endure is Wharton's radical understanding that the most devastating tragedies happen not in dramatic moments but in the spaces between what is said and what is felt. The love triangle here is really a trap: three people who cannot be honest, because honesty would destroy the world they inhabit. Wharton understood this world because she lived in it, and by 1920, when she wrote this novel, she knew it had vanished forever. The title is not a compliment. It is an indictment dressed in silk.