Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1231]

“To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition—somebody else’s tradition—that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.” She smiled across the table. “Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?” — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1231

Note

Ellen’s witticism about Columbus and the Selfridge Merrys compresses the whole critique of New York’s derivative social conformity into one joke — the ‘copy of another country’ as the failure of the American project. The smile carries it lightly.