How Does “The Age of Innocence” Treat Divorce and Scandal?
Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” treats divorce and scandal as existential threats to the social order of 1870s New York aristocracy, depicting them as forces that challenge the stability, moral authority, and hierarchical structure upon which elite society depends. Divorce represents not merely personal failure but a fundamental attack on the marriage system that serves as the primary mechanism for reproducing class privilege across generations. The novel demonstrates how old New York society responds to scandal through sophisticated mechanisms of containment, strategic silence, collective ostracism, and the mobilization of family networks to minimize damage and restore social equilibrium. Ellen Olenska’s separation from her husband becomes the central scandal that drives the plot, with her status as a separated woman making her simultaneously dangerous and fascinating to a society that views divorce as moral contagion threatening to corrupt younger members and destabilize conventional marriage arrangements. The novel reveals how scandal functions as social control mechanism, with the threat of public exposure and reputation destruction disciplining individuals into conformity while also serving as entertainment and occasion for collective moral judgment. Wharton exposes the hypocrisy underlying scandal treatment, showing how society condemns women’s sexual transgressions while tolerating men’s infidelities, and how moral outrage serves class interests by enabling exclusion of threatening individuals through ethical justifications that obscure power dynamics.
Why Does Divorce Represent Such a Threat to Old New York Society?
Divorce poses fundamental threat to old New York society because it challenges the permanence and stability of marriage as the institution through which families consolidate wealth, transmit social position, and maintain hierarchical structures across generations. Wharton demonstrates how elite society’s investment in marriage stability derives not from religious conviction or romantic sentimentality but from practical recognition that their entire social system depends on strategic marital alliances that concentrate privilege within established families while preventing its dispersal through inappropriate unions or family dissolution (Wharton, 1920). The marriage system functions to create kinship networks binding elite families together in complex webs of mutual obligation, shared interest, and collective identity that enable coordinated action to protect class privileges. Divorce threatens this system by suggesting that individual happiness might legitimately supersede family duty and social obligation, introducing principle of personal satisfaction as criterion for evaluating marriages that were contracted primarily for economic and social rather than emotional purposes. This potential prioritization of individual fulfillment over institutional stability represents revolutionary challenge to social organization premised on subordinating personal desires to collective class interests and conventional expectations.
Furthermore, divorce particularly threatens patriarchal control over women’s sexuality, economic resources, and social positioning that marriage institutionalizes and legitimates. The permanent nature of marriage ensures that women remain under male authority throughout their lives, transferring from father’s control to husband’s without intervals of dangerous independence that might enable women to develop autonomous identities and pursue interests conflicting with family strategies (Ammons, 1980). Divorce potentially liberates women from permanent male supervision, creating category of independent women who control their own movements, relationships, and resources without direct patriarchal oversight. Ellen Olenska exemplifies this threatening figure of the separated woman who has escaped male control and developed autonomous judgment about appropriate behavior, making her own decisions about where to live, whom to befriend, and how to conduct herself without reference to male family authority. The old New York families’ anxiety about Ellen stems partly from recognition that her example might inspire other women to question their own marriages’ adequacy and consider separation as viable option rather than unthinkable violation of sacred duty. The collective mobilization to prevent Newland from pursuing Ellen and to eventually secure her return to Europe demonstrates the resources that elite society will deploy to contain divorce’s threatening potential and reaffirm marriage’s permanence despite individual unhappiness or incompatibility.
How Does the Novel Distinguish Between Separation and Divorce?
Wharton carefully distinguishes between separation and formal divorce, revealing how elite society manages marital breakdown through informal arrangements that preserve appearances while avoiding the public scandal and legal complications that formal divorce proceedings would entail. Ellen Olenska has separated from Count Olenski and lives independently, but she has not pursued formal divorce, a distinction that proves crucial for her tenuous continued acceptance within New York society (Wharton, 1920). The separation allows Ellen to escape an abusive marriage while maintaining her married status and avoiding the complete social death that divorced women experience in this historical context. This intermediate status creates ambiguity about Ellen’s social position, as she occupies uncertain territory between respectable married woman and scandalous divorcée, enabling both continued family support and persistent anxiety about her influence on conventional social arrangements. The novel demonstrates how elite society developed sophisticated mechanisms for managing marital problems that enabled individuals to escape intolerable situations while preserving institutional stability through maintaining legal marriages and avoiding public acknowledgment of failures that might undermine marriage’s sacred status.
However, the novel also reveals how separation without divorce leaves women in precarious positions of legal vulnerability and social ambiguity, lacking both the security of marriage and the finality of divorce. Ellen’s separated status means she remains legally married to Count Olenski with ongoing financial dependence on his support and potential vulnerability to his demands for reconciliation backed by legal authority over her as his wife (Singley, 2003). The family’s intervention to prevent Ellen from pursuing formal divorce reflects both concern for her welfare given the social consequences and strategic calculation about managing scandal to minimize damage to family reputation. The lawyer’s advice against divorce emphasizes practical considerations including financial implications, loss of social position, and potential for greater scandal through contested proceedings that might air private matters publicly. This counsel reveals how elite society’s resistance to divorce operates not simply through moral condemnation but through practical mechanisms making divorce materially disadvantageous for women who would lose economic security, social connections, and respectable status through formal marital dissolution. The distinction between separation and divorce thus represents compromise formation enabling some individual relief from intolerable marriages while preserving institutional stability through maintaining legal bonds and avoiding precedents that might encourage others to pursue formal divorce rather than enduring unhappy but socially acceptable marriages.
What Role Does Gossip Play in Managing Scandal?
Gossip functions as crucial mechanism for circulating information, forming collective judgments, and enforcing behavioral standards in “The Age of Innocence,” serving as decentralized communication system that supplements formal institutions in maintaining social control. The novel depicts gossip as sophisticated social technology enabling rapid dissemination of news about potentially scandalous behavior, coordination of collective responses, and enforcement of conformity through threat of reputation damage (Wharton, 1920). The drawing room conversations, opera house visits between boxes, and afternoon calling rituals provide regular occasions for exchanging information and forming consensus judgments about individuals’ behavior and social standing. This gossip network enables elite society to monitor members continuously despite lacking formal surveillance apparatus, creating distributed observation system where everyone watches everyone else and reports noteworthy information to their social circles. The effectiveness of gossip as control mechanism derives from its informal character and collective nature, as individuals internalize awareness of constant potential observation and judge their own behavior against standards they know their community will apply through gossip evaluation and collective response.
However, Wharton also reveals gossip’s destructive potential and the gender asymmetry in its deployment, with women’s reputations proving far more vulnerable to gossip damage than men’s despite men often committing comparable or worse transgressions. The novel demonstrates how gossip about Ellen’s separated status, her European lifestyle, and her male friendships circulates constantly, creating atmosphere of scandal and moral suspicion that constrains her behavior and threatens her social position (Knights, 2009). Meanwhile, male characters like Lawrence Lefferts, notorious for extramarital affairs, face minimal reputation damage because gossip about male sexual behavior operates according to different standards that excuse or minimize male transgressions while harshly condemning female violations of sexual propriety. This double standard reveals how gossip serves patriarchal interests by policing female sexuality and autonomy while permitting male freedom, using informal social judgment to enforce gender hierarchy alongside class boundaries. The novel also shows how gossip can be strategically deployed by powerful families to manage scandal by controlling narrative framing and limiting information circulation to prevent more damaging interpretations from gaining currency. The van der Luydens’ intervention on Ellen’s behalf, using their immense social authority to signal that she retains family support despite scandalous separation, demonstrates how elite families can manipulate gossip networks to protect members and minimize scandal damage through strategic social performances that influence collective judgment and limit ostracism’s severity.
How Does Society Respond to the Beaufort Scandal?
The Beaufort scandal provides the novel’s clearest example of how elite society responds to major transgression through collective ostracism, moral condemnation, and strategic exclusion that serves both punitive and boundary-maintaining functions. Julius Beaufort’s financial improprieties and business failure create scandal not simply through their illegality but through exposing the gap between his ostentatious lifestyle and actual financial stability, revealing his pretensions and making his continued acceptance impossible (Wharton, 1920). The swift collective abandonment of the Beauforts demonstrates elite society’s ruthless capacity for exclusion when individuals become more costly to defend than valuable to retain, with former friends and social connections immediately withdrawing support and invitations to distance themselves from contaminating association with scandal. This rapid coordinated response reveals the organized character of elite social power and its ability to mobilize unified action against threats to collective interests or individuals who have lost protective value through scandal exposure. The Beaufort exclusion serves multiple functions including punishing transgression, demonstrating society’s moral authority and boundary-maintaining capacity, and providing example that disciplines others into conformity through displaying consequences of scandal.
The treatment of Regina Beaufort versus Julius Beaufort also reveals gendered dimensions of scandal response, with Regina’s earlier questionable background and current social ambitions making her particularly vulnerable to moral judgment that her husband’s wealth previously enabled her to escape. Regina’s desperate attempt to secure Ellen’s attendance at her ball represents effort to use family connection to shore up collapsing social position, suggesting that women depend more heavily on social networks and reputation than men whose economic positions provide alternative sources of power and identity (Singley, 2003). The society’s refusal to support Regina, despite some sympathy for her situation as innocent victim of her husband’s crimes, demonstrates how scandal contaminates family members regardless of personal responsibility, with wives particularly vulnerable to reputational damage through association with disgraced husbands. The moral condemnation directed at the Beauforts combines legitimate outrage at financial fraud with class prejudice against new money and satisfaction at opportunity to expel family whose acceptance was always qualified by old families’ sense of superiority. This mixed motivation reveals how scandal provides occasions for class boundary enforcement disguised as moral judgment, enabling exclusion of threatening or inappropriate members through ethical justifications that obscure underlying power dynamics and class interests driving the collective response.
What Is the Relationship Between Public and Private Scandal?
Wharton carefully distinguishes between public scandals that become common knowledge and private transgressions that remain contained within elite circles through strategic silence and collective discretion. The novel demonstrates how old New York society maintains sophisticated mechanisms for managing potentially scandalous information, determining what gets revealed publicly versus what remains suppressed through collective agreement to ignore or minimize certain behaviors (Wharton, 1920). This selective disclosure serves multiple functions including protecting family reputations, maintaining social stability by limiting exposure of widespread hypocrisy, and preserving elite society’s moral authority by preventing public awareness of behaviors that contradict professed values. The private knowledge of male infidelities, unhappy marriages, and various improprieties circulates within elite circles without becoming public scandal through implicit agreements to maintain silence that protects everyone’s interests in preserving surface respectability. This strategic silence demonstrates how elite society exercises power not simply through what it condemns but through what it chooses to ignore, with the capacity to grant immunity through collective discretion proving as important as ability to destroy through public exposure.
However, the novel also reveals that this protective silence operates selectively, with some individuals and behaviors receiving tolerance that others do not, reflecting power differentials within elite society itself. Old family members enjoy greater protection from scandal exposure than nouveau riche outsiders, men receive more tolerance than women, and those with strong family networks can count on support that isolated individuals cannot access (Knights, 2009). Ellen’s vulnerability derives partly from her liminal position as family member whose European residence and separated status make her both insider and outsider, entitled to some family protection while also somewhat expendable if her continued presence threatens more central family interests. The decision about whether potential scandals remain private or become public often reflects strategic calculations about whose interests best serve collective elite purposes, with publicity deployed against individuals whose exclusion benefits class interests while silence protects those whose continued membership proves more valuable than moral consistency. This selective publicity reveals scandal management as political process involving power negotiations rather than neutral moral judgment, with outcomes determined by complex calculations about reputation, family interests, social stability, and class reproduction rather than simple application of ethical principles to individual behaviors.
How Does Ellen Olenska Challenge Scandal Conventions?
Ellen Olenska functions as the novel’s central figure challenging conventional scandal responses through her refusal to accept passive victim status, her insistence on living according to personal values rather than social expectations, and her embodiment of alternative morality derived from European experiences. Ellen’s decision to leave her marriage despite social and economic costs demonstrates active agency that conventional feminine propriety denies, positioning her as subject rather than object in her own life story and refusing the passive acceptance of male authority that elite femininity requires (Wharton, 1920). Her comfort with male friendships outside formal courtship protocols, her artistic associations, and her unconventional living arrangements all signal rejection of restrictive gender conventions that elite society enforces through scandal threat. Ellen represents dangerous possibility that women might develop autonomous moral judgment independent of social prescription, evaluating their situations according to personal standards and making decisions prioritizing individual authenticity over collective approval. This autonomous morality threatens patriarchal social control because it suggests that external moral authority derived from social consensus might be legitimately rejected in favor of personal ethical judgment based on individual conscience and experience.
Furthermore, Ellen challenges scandal conventions by refusing appropriate shame and contrition that society expects from transgressive women, instead maintaining dignity and self-respect despite her irregular situation. Her lack of visible guilt or apology denies society the satisfaction of witnessing female submission and reformation, refusing to perform the scripts of fallen woman seeking redemption through humiliation and renewed conformity (Ammons, 1980). This dignified refusal to accept society’s moral judgment represents profound challenge to social control mechanisms that depend on internalized shame and guilt to discipline individuals into conformity. Ellen’s alternative morality, which validates leaving abusive marriage as ethical action rather than sinful transgression, directly contradicts society’s teachings about wifely duty and marital permanence, suggesting that individual wellbeing might legitimately supersede institutional stability when the two conflict irreconcilably. The threat Ellen represents explains the intensity of society’s response to her presence, as she embodies not simply individual transgression but alternative value system that might inspire others to question conventional arrangements and prioritize personal authenticity over social conformity. The ultimate success in securing her departure to Europe demonstrates society’s capacity to eliminate threatening alternatives even without formal punishment, using subtle pressures and emotional manipulation to achieve conformity or departure that more overt coercion might not accomplish.
What Does Scandal Reveal About Gender Double Standards?
The treatment of scandal in “The Age of Innocence” exposes profound gender double standards that punish female sexual autonomy while tolerating or minimizing male transgressions, revealing how scandal functions as mechanism for enforcing patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and behavior. The novel demonstrates that men like Lawrence Lefferts maintain social respectability despite notorious affairs because male sexual behavior operates under different moral standards that excuse infidelity as natural masculine weakness while condemning female sexual agency as moral depravity threatening social order (Wharton, 1920). This asymmetric treatment reflects underlying assumptions about gender that position male sexuality as active, inevitable, and relatively inconsequential while viewing female sexuality as passive, controllable, and enormously significant for family legitimacy, inheritance certainty, and social stability. The different consequences for male versus female sexual transgression derive from patriarchal family system’s dependence on controlling female reproduction to ensure legitimate heirs and maintain clear lineages for transmitting property and status. Women’s sexual autonomy threatens this system by introducing uncertainty about paternity and enabling women to form alliances or bear children outside male control, explaining why female sexual transgression receives harsh punishment while male behavior faces minimal consequences.
The novel also reveals how gender double standards operate through differential scandal definitions that condemn behaviors in women that remain unremarkable in men, making women vulnerable to scandal accusations for actions that would not qualify as transgressive if performed by male characters. Ellen’s male friendships, her independent living, and her refusal of proper feminine restraint create scandal not because these behaviors are inherently wrong but because they violate gender-specific expectations that do not apply comparably to men (Singley, 2003). This differential treatment reveals how scandal serves as flexible instrument for enforcing conformity to gender roles rather than neutral moral standard applied equally regardless of sex. The novel’s exposure of these double standards constitutes significant feminist critique, revealing how ostensibly neutral moral language actually encodes gender hierarchy and serves to maintain male privilege through punishing female autonomy while permitting male freedom. Wharton’s treatment suggests that scandal conventions cannot be reformed through mere consistency but require fundamental transformation of gender assumptions and power relations underlying their selective application. The persistence of double standards despite their obvious injustice demonstrates how deeply patriarchal values permeate social organization, operating through informal mechanisms like scandal and gossip rather than formal rules, making them difficult to challenge through conventional legal or political reform.
How Do Families Manage Scandal to Protect Reputation?
Elite families in “The Age of Innocence” deploy sophisticated strategies for managing scandal to minimize reputation damage, protect vulnerable members, and maintain social position despite potentially destructive revelations. The novel demonstrates how families mobilize collective resources including social capital, strategic information control, and coordinated public performances to contain scandal and influence collective judgment in favorable directions (Wharton, 1920). The Mingott family’s management of Ellen’s separation illustrates these strategies, with relatives coordinating responses, controlling information disclosure, and using social connections to minimize ostracism and preserve Ellen’s tenuous acceptance within society despite her irregular situation. The family’s decision to acknowledge Ellen openly while carefully managing her social activities represents calculated approach that accepts some scandal damage as inevitable while working to limit its extent and prevent total social death that absolute denial or complete abandonment might produce. This strategic transparency combined with damage control demonstrates sophisticated understanding of scandal dynamics and recognition that attempted suppression might backfire by suggesting greater impropriety than actual facts warrant.
The deployment of high-status family members like the van der Luydens to publicly support Ellen demonstrates how families leverage social capital to protect vulnerable members and influence collective scandal interpretation. The van der Luydens’ invitation of Ellen to dinner and their visible approval signals to broader society that she retains family backing despite separation, effectively requiring others to moderate their judgment and maintain civility regardless of private disapproval (Knights, 2009). This strategic use of social authority demonstrates how scandal management operates through power negotiations rather than simple information control, with powerful families able to impose their preferred interpretations and limit ostracism through deploying social capital that others must respect regardless of personal feelings about scandalized individuals. However, the novel also reveals limits to family protection, as even powerful connections cannot completely overcome scandal’s contaminating effects or prevent eventual exclusion if individuals continue behaving in ways that threaten collective interests. The ultimate decision to facilitate Ellen’s return to Europe represents recognition that scandal management has limits and that some situations require removing problematic individuals entirely rather than continuing exhausting efforts to maintain their acceptance within society that remains fundamentally hostile to their presence and values. This management strategy demonstrates elite society’s flexibility and pragmatism, combining multiple approaches to preserve reputation and social stability while making strategic sacrifices when necessary to protect core interests and maintain collective cohesion.
What Role Does Silence Play in Scandal Management?
Strategic silence functions as crucial scandal management tool in “The Age of Innocence,” with the collective refusal to openly discuss certain topics serving to contain potentially explosive information and maintain surface social harmony despite underlying tensions and private knowledge of transgressions. The novel demonstrates how elite society operates through extensive deployment of conversational taboos, indirect communication, and deliberate ignorance that enable collective pretense about respectability while privately acknowledging widespread departure from professed standards (Wharton, 1920). This organized silence proves more effective than explicit prohibition or denial because it creates ambiguity about what is actually known and what merely suspected, preventing definitive scandal formation while enabling individuals to maintain plausible deniability about their awareness of improprieties. The “tribal” agreement never to discuss certain subjects openly represents sophisticated social technology for managing information in ways that protect collective interests by preventing scandals from reaching critical mass where official recognition and response become inevitable. This silence demonstrates elite society’s pragmatic recognition that complete moral consistency would be impossible and that social stability requires tolerating considerable gap between professed values and actual practices.
However, Wharton also reveals how strategic silence can become complicity that enables continued wrongdoing and protects perpetrators at victims’ expense, particularly regarding male sexual transgressions that harm women but receive protection through collective refusal to acknowledge behaviors that everyone privately knows occur. The silence surrounding male infidelities enables their continuation by preventing public accountability that might deter such behaviors or enable wives to leave marriages where husbands violate vows with social impunity (Ammons, 1980). This protective silence thus serves patriarchal interests by enabling male freedom while constraining female response through preventing open discussion that might legitimate women’s grievances and justify separation from unfaithful husbands. The novel suggests that silence operates as form of violence, particularly against women whose suffering receives no acknowledgment and whose potential resistance gets preemptively neutralized through social agreement to ignore behaviors that would, if openly discussed, justify challenging conventional marriage arrangements. The breaking of silence thus represents potentially revolutionary act that threatens established power relations by forcing acknowledgment of realities that current arrangements depend on ignoring. Ellen’s relatively frank discussion of her marital problems represents this kind of threatening speech that violates conventions of silence, making her dangerous not simply through her actions but through her refusal to maintain the quiet that enables patriarchal marriage system to continue functioning despite widespread male violations of its stated principles.
How Does the Novel Use Scandal to Critique Social Hypocrisy?
Wharton employs scandal treatment as primary vehicle for exposing the fundamental hypocrisy of old New York society, revealing gaps between professed moral values and actual practices that undermine claims to ethical superiority justifying class privilege and hierarchical social organization. The novel demonstrates how elite society deploys moral language selectively, condemning behaviors in some individuals that it tolerates or ignores in others based on calculations about power, usefulness, and class position rather than consistent ethical principles (Wharton, 1920). The harsh judgment of Ellen’s separation contrasted with tolerance of male infidelities, the condemnation of Beaufort’s financial crimes while overlooking similar behaviors by old family members, and the selective moral outrage directed against threatening outsiders versus protected insiders all reveal how scandal functions as tool for advancing class interests disguised as neutral moral judgment. This selective morality exposes how elite society’s claims to ethical authority rest on hypocrisy rather than genuine moral consistency, using ethical language to rationalize power relations and justify exclusions that actually serve material interests rather than transcendent moral principles. The revelation of this hypocrisy undermines the ideological justifications for class hierarchy and social privilege that depend on presenting elite dominance as deserved recognition of superior refinement and moral character rather than arbitrary maintenance of inherited advantage through various mechanisms of exclusion and control.
Furthermore, the novel reveals how scandal conventions perpetuate injustice by punishing victims while protecting perpetrators, particularly in cases of domestic violence and marital abuse where wives face scandal for leaving while abusive husbands maintain respectability through wives’ silence and society’s refusal to acknowledge male violence. Ellen’s situation illustrates this perverse moral calculus, where leaving an abusive marriage creates more scandal than the abuse itself, with society focusing moral condemnation on female resistance rather than male wrongdoing (Singley, 2003). This victim-blaming demonstrates how scandal serves patriarchal interests by making it more costly for women to escape abuse than to endure it, effectively protecting male authority through threatening women with social death if they refuse to accept subordination. Wharton’s exposure of these dynamics constitutes powerful feminist critique revealing how ostensibly neutral social conventions actually encode gender hierarchy and operate to maintain male privilege through mechanisms that appear to enforce universal moral standards but actually serve specifically patriarchal interests. The novel thus uses scandal treatment to indict entire social system whose moral claims disguise power relations and whose professed values contradict actual practices in ways that reveal ethical corruption at the heart of elite society’s self-presentation and ideological self-justification.
Conclusion
Edith Wharton’s treatment of divorce and scandal in “The Age of Innocence” reveals these phenomena as fundamental threats to the social order of 1870s New York aristocracy, exposing the sophisticated mechanisms through which elite society manages potentially destabilizing forces to preserve institutional stability and class privilege. Divorce represents existential challenge to marriage system that functions as primary mechanism for reproducing hierarchy across generations, explaining the intense collective mobilization to prevent Ellen Olenska from pursuing formal marital dissolution and to contain the threatening example her separated status provides. The distinction between separation and divorce demonstrates elite society’s pragmatic capacity to manage marital breakdown through informal arrangements that preserve appearances while avoiding formal legal dissolution that might establish precedents encouraging others to prioritize individual happiness over institutional stability. Gossip functions as crucial decentralized control mechanism enabling rapid information circulation, collective judgment formation, and behavioral enforcement through reputation threat, while revealing gender asymmetries in its deployment that punish female autonomy while tolerating male transgressions. The Beaufort scandal illustrates swift collective ostracism of individuals who lose protective value through exposure, demonstrating organized character of elite social power and its ruthless exclusionary capacity when class interests require expelling threatening members. The relationship between public and private scandal reveals strategic information management that protects powerful members through selective silence while exposing others to destructive publicity, with outcomes determined by power calculations rather than neutral moral principles. Ellen Olenska challenges scandal conventions through refusing passive victim status, maintaining autonomous moral judgment, and embodying alternative values that threaten social control mechanisms depending on internalized shame and conformity. The exposure of profound gender double standards that punish female sexual autonomy while minimizing male transgressions reveals scandal as mechanism for enforcing patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and behavior rather than neutral moral standard. Family scandal management strategies demonstrate sophisticated deployment of social capital, strategic information control, and coordinated public performances to minimize reputation damage, while strategic silence serves as crucial tool for containing explosive information and maintaining surface harmony despite underlying tensions. Through examining scandal treatment, Wharton exposes fundamental hypocrisy of elite society whose selective morality serves class and gender interests disguised as neutral ethical judgment, using divorce and scandal as vehicles for comprehensive social critique revealing power relations underlying ostensibly moral social conventions.
References
Ammons, E. (1980). Edith Wharton’s argument with America. University of Georgia Press.
Knights, P. (2009). The Cambridge introduction to Edith Wharton. Cambridge University Press.
Singley, C. J. (2003). Edith Wharton: Matters of mind and spirit. Cambridge University Press.
Wharton, E. (1920). The age of innocence. D. Appleton and Company.