Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [11]

The formal and elaborate dinner parties in New York in the seventies are described here with a gusto that the steady undercurrent of irony quite fails to conceal; there were epicures in those days who sallied from their Fifth Avenue mausoleums not to talk, but to dine. They were professional diners-out, who noticed details—why does she allow her butler to cut the cucumbers with a steel knife? — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 11

Note

Phelps picks out the dinner-table micro-observation—the steel knife on cucumbers—as the model of scrutiny in the book, exactly the reader’s ‘total visibility’ premise. ‘Fifth Avenue mausoleums’ converts the houses to tombs while the inhabitants are ironically alive as diners.