Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [37]

Wharton’s remarkably detailed memory enabled her to re-create the New York of the early 1870s with a richness of color that justifies Edmund Wilson’s description of her as the pioneer and poet of interior decoration. We are reminded that her first book was The Decoration of Houses. When Martin Scorsese filmed the novel, with infinite research and pains, some critics complained that he had made the city of that era too opulent. They forgot that surviving interiors of that day are usually shabby and that nothing is drabber than chipped panels showing white plaster. With plenty of money and cheap labor the rich burghers of that time kept their houses brightly painted and filled with flowers. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 37

Note

The introduction’s materialist defense of opulence: critics of the film’s richness forgot that we only see the survivors’ shabbiness, while cheap labor and new money kept interiors bright. ‘Pioneer and poet of interior decoration’ makes the decor interest constitutive of Wharton’s art.