Freedom, Choice And The Other

Edith Wharton is acclaimed as one of the finest novelists and short storywriters in United States. As a prolific writer, Edith Wharton wrote more than forty books during her long writing years, including fourteen novels, thirteen novellas, eleven short story collections and nine nonfiction books, etc. Among them, The House of Mirth(1905), The Custom of Country(1911) and The Age of Innocence (1920)have been regarded as her masterpieces. Best known as a novelist of manners, most of Edith's fictions expose the cruel excesses and moral decay of aristocratic society in the Unite States between the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century. In 1921, Wharton received the Pulitzer Prize, as the first female recipient of American literature, for her novel The Age of Innocence.The criticism of The Age of Innocence is roughly divided into two schools: Naturalism and Feminism. Naturalists think that this fiction is influenced by writer's growing background and the big change of society. No matter it is Newland Archer, Ellen Olenska and May Welland in The Age of Innocence, they all respectively illustrate their tragic fate in their own way. Social and economic environment, hereditary factors and uncontrollable force of fate and chance all permeate their tragic fate. The feminists set eyes on the feminist traits in The Age of Innocence, although the writer never declared herself a feminist. The Age of Innocence is a male story, but female story pass through it. The fiction express the females'constrain and rebellion. The most of her works open out the concern about female fate in patricentric society.There was no evidence that Edith Wharton was influenced by Existentialism when she wrote The Age of Innocence. So it is not this paper's intention to prove that there is actually a Sartrean influence on The Age of Innocence. We might interpret this fiction by changing our viewpoint. If we might interpret The Age of Innocence from a Sartrean perspective, we may have some new discoveries.The paper will apply basic Satrean existentialism principles such as freedom, choice, and the Other to the analysis of the fates of characters in The Age of Innocence. Sartre's idea is that existence precedes essence, and we human beings are condemned to be free. Existentialism is a philosophy of freedom. Its basis is the fact that we can stand back from our lives and reflect on what we have been doing. In this sense, we are always"more"than ourselves. But we are as responsible as we are free. Our entire life is an ongoing choice and that the failure to choose is itself a choice for which we are equally responsible. But this absolute freedom condemns people to be in anguish. Existentialism is also a person-centered philosophy. Everybody in every choice we form an image of the kind of person he wants to be and, indeed, of what any person should be. But other people are also conscious beings who are in creating the man they wish to be and at the same time is creating an image of man such as they judge others ought to be. One's freedom is always inscribed within the freedom of the Other,"Hell is other people". What this paper intends to prove is: First, struggle or not, Newland Archer, Ellen Olenska and May Welland all choose freely while circumstances only help them to move further down their own roads. If it was not for their free choices, the outcome might be very different. Second, Wharton's exquisite weaving of the social fabrication in The Age of Innocence echoes with some ideas of Sartre. The characters in The Age of Innocence always make the same kind of mistakes: they take too much for granted, when they find that they themselves are being looked at, their doom is already at hand. In a word, looking from Sartrean existentialists'view, all the characters of The Age of Innocence are free to make choices. The freedom is absolute freedom of consciousness. But no one can be free in a concrete sense unless everyone is free. This kind of freedom is not the abstract individual freedom.