Stymied by Edith Wharton

We've just started reading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence in my Literature Into Film class so of course I get to hear all kinds of student complaints about how hard it is to read all that Old English and how boring the plot is because nothing ever happens and how annoyed they are with the petty concerns of the character and so on, but I really don't care--I love Wharton and rarely get a chance to teach her work and the book is so full of sharply pointed zingers critiquing the upper crust that I get a thrill every time I turn a page. 

But one student's complaint stopped me in my tracks: "It's harder to read than Shakespeare." 

Um, what? 

The Age of Innocence is certainly longer than the average Shakespeare play, but harder? 

Sure, students are bound to encounter some unfamiliar vocabulary in Wharton's prose, but context clues abound and they won't need massive numbers of footnotes just to understand the dialogue. They're not going to miss out on important plot points just because they don't recognize words like canvasback (in reference to dinner) or cobs (in reference to horses).

But they've just finished reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild and, before that, Yann Martel's life-or-death adventure Life of Pi, and they're finding the slow pace of The Age of Innocence rough going. So much of the plot involves characters observing other characters and drawing (sometimes false) conclusions about them, an activity far less exciting than, for instance, sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger or trying to fend off a rattlesnake on the Pacific Crest Trail.

In my introductory lecture about Wharton, I made a big deal out of the author's conviction that too much innocence is a dangerous thing, and I informed the students that Martin Scorsese once called The Age of Innocence his most violent film, even though it includes no actual bloodshed. I told them about Sam Jordison's statement that The Age of Innocence is "about gangs, their unspoken rules, their codes of honour, and the structures of power." This may have led them to expect a novel less sedate than the one they're reading (or not reading as the case may be).

So I can see why they're finding it a challenge, but harder than Shakespeare? This I don't see. 

Maybe what they need is a little comic relief, a grave-digger scene between some of those stilted formal conversations amongst characters clad in evening dress. If only those uppity New Yorkers would invite Falstaff to dinner--I'm sure he'd enjoy the canvasbacks, and what a stir he would cause!

But instead we'll muddle through the book we have instead of the one some students wish for. They'll be writing papers about how the book and film portray guilt or innocence, comparing a character in The Age of Innocence with one from the next novel, Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress. If Walter Mosley and Edith Wharton could sit down for a dinner date, I'd love to overhear that conversation!

But wouldn't it be better if Falstaff were invited?