Tacit Innocence in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence

Although innocence has been frequently interpreted as having a singular meaning, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence demonstrates how innocence comes to have multiple, pluralized meanings at the turn of the twentieth century. The novel reveals how the characters comply with the standard of old New York and, simultaneously, how they formulate their individual notions of innocence within or slightly outside the norm of society. Instead of interpreting innocence as a concept with a singular meaning, the novel suggests the pluralization of the meaning of innocence by showing how the characters pursue their own individual notions of innocence within society. Rather than deciding which character is innocent while the other is not, The Age of Innocence indicates the coexistence of different innocences and that each character can be innocent in his/her own way. This coexistence of disparate notions of innocence within society is occasioned by tacit knowledge, namely the tacit operation of habitus explained by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Instead of stipulating definite rules, society operates by distributing tacit knowledge and allowing members to form their own tacit knowledge which eventually enables gradual social change. As Bourdieu explains how social change takes place over time, The Age of Innocence demonstrates how the characters can be assessed in terms of their innocence over time. As the characters choose what is meaningful for themselves without demanding recognition from others for their sacrifice, their innocences remain tacit from others and are sometimes only detected after decades. As tacit knowledge occasions social change over time, so the innocences of characters are actualized in a tacit manner and discovered over time.