The World Old New York Was Built to Hide

Before you can follow the love story in The Age of Innocence, you have to understand the world it moves through, and in her Rebind Classics reading, Roxane Gay treats that world as the novel's true subject. Edith Wharton's old New York is a closed system of inherited money and inflexible custom, and Gay's commentary is most pointed on the question the gilded surface is designed to hide: whose labor built all of this, and why the novel almost never lets you see them.

Servants as Familiar as the Curtains

The erasure, Gay insists, is deliberate. The servants who run this world are nearly absent from the page, and that absence is the point. "It's absolutely deliberate because they don't matter," she says, before correcting the cruelty of the phrasing into its real meaning: "of course we know they matter more than anything because they make all of their lives possible. They keep them clean, they keep them fed, they keep them dressed." But they are not seen as people. They are, in Gay's indelible image, "as familiar as the curtains hanging in a room. They're just there." Wharton, she argues, made this choice on purpose, "trying to show how oblivious the people in this world are to the very people that make their lives possible."

Gay names the foundation the whole edifice rests on without flinching. Asked whether she admires the wealth on display, she answers: "Not really. I feel sad for the people that made them wealthy, the people on whose backs they earned all of those millions of dollars." And she shows how the financial imperative runs through every level of the institution, not just its manners. When Newland's law firm wants to prevent Ellen's divorce, Gay points out, the motive is not only propriety: the firm is "also worried about losing the business of a very wealthy family." Underneath the etiquette, there is always money doing the deciding.

The Right Kind of Wealthy

Status in this world operates by a peculiar inverse logic that Gay captures sharply. The truly secure wear their privilege quietly. They "wear it secretly, like on the inside," she says. "They wear it proudly, but publicly they wear it like, oh, this old thing." She extends the observation into the present: "oftentimes the wealthy will drive an old beat up car to their private jet. When they do it's shabby chic and when everyone else does it's shabby." The same object means opulence on one body and poverty on another, depending entirely on where you sit in the hierarchy.

That hierarchy is policed most fiercely at the boundary between old money and new. Gay reads the Van der Luydens, the novel's social arbiters, as existing precisely to enforce that line. "You can be wealthy," she explains, "but if you're not the right kind of wealthy, you won't fully be embraced." The Van der Luydens are "the vanguard of old money," and their horror at any suggestion that newer families might be setting the rules is the horror of a caste defending its border. Wealth alone is never enough; it has to be the correctly aged kind.

Freedom at the Top of the Food Chain

Within this structure, Gay observes, real freedom is vanishingly rare and tied entirely to position. The only people who exhibit "any kind of emotional freedom," she says, are those like Mrs. Mingott, "who is at the top of the food chain. And therefore nobody can say no to her." Freedom in old New York is not a right but a function of where you stand: the higher up, the more latitude, and even then it is hedged. Gay points to the one other figure who manages it, the financier Beaufort, who "kind of just does whatever he wants," and notes that "of course, he pays a price in the end." The system permits a little defiance, but it always collects. The system is total, and Gay's reading keeps the reader's eye on its costs, on the labor it refuses to see and the people it quietly uses.

The novel renders all of this, Gay notes, with a recognition that the Gilded Age has not entirely passed. New York "is a city that is still economically stratified," she says. "For some, that Gilded Age continues." Her conclusion is that the book is finally less a period piece than a mirror: "the more things change, the more they also stay the same." Wharton drew old New York in fine, dry detail. Gay reads it as a portrait of how wealth organizes a world and erases the people who hold it up.