November 2020
Favorites of the month: My Own Words and The Age of Innocence
My Own Words presents a thoughtful and engrossing collection of essays, lectures, and speeches from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Compiled with the help of her two official biographers, Georgetown Law’s Mary Hartnett and Wendy M. Williams, the book offers a wonderful look into Ruth’s thoughts on everything from gender equality, constitutional hermeneutics, and the mechanics of dissent to growing up in Brooklyn, her Jewish heritage, children’s literature, opera, marriage, and friendship. Teeming with precious life lessons on work-life balance, civil discourse, and the importance of finding the right partner, My Own Words emerges as less a book and more a key into Ruth’s heart, with each page unlocking some new, beautiful insight into the truly incredible person she was and the country she hoped we could be.
When Ruth entered law school in 1959, women represented less than three percent of lawyers in the United States, and only one woman had ever served on a federal appellate court. When Ruth graduated first in her class from Columbia Law, she received not a single firm bid for her employment due to the fact that she was female and Jewish (and a mother to boot). Yet Ruth refused to give up, becoming a law professor at Rutgers and, as time went on, the country’s preeminent litigator on gender equality. Under the aegis of the ACLU, she served as lead architect of more than twenty cases submitted to the Supreme Court, preempting a transformative standard of review for sex-based classifications and divisions under the law. Later on the Supreme Court, she continued this work in monumental cases like United States v. Virginia, reframing any “official policy that denies women equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in, and contribute to society” as presumptively “incompatible” with equal protection under the law.
As a law professor, litigator, and justice of the Supreme Court, Ruth considered our Constitution to be a “living” document whose tenets should be regularly monitored and reinterpreted to keep pace with a changing world. Alluding to the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, she wrote that “while the Constitution’s endurance is indeed something to celebrate, the framers had a distinctly limited [and decidedly patriarchal] vision of those who counted among ‘We the People.’” As such, she believed that the Constitution required of 1787 should not necessarily dictate the Constitution required of today.
Yet even with her commitment to constitutional flexibility, Ruth remained both expressly apolitical (“the founders did not envision a rule of law based on pure majoritarianism”) and kind, always favoring civility over vitriol. Of her relationship to her colleagues on the Supreme Court, she wrote, “We genuinely respect each other, even enjoy each other’s company. Collegiality is key to the success of our mission.”
Sometimes, this baseline collegiality could evolve into true and lasting friendship, as it did with Ruth and her former colleague on the Court, Justice Antonin Scalia. Ruth and Antonin were diametric opposites in terms of judicial outlook, rhetorical style, and personal temperament, though they were somehow able to each look beyond their differences and allow the things that brought them together matter more than the things that brought them apart.
In the wake of what may be the most divisive political season in contemporary history, Ruth and Antonin’s relationship may appear like an unattainable unicorn or a vestige of a bygone and irretrievable past. But perhaps there is something to be said for William Blake’s famous maxim that “opposition is true friendship.”
For so many countless reasons, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a gift to the world, as is this wonderful book. If you are ever missing her or want to learn more about her incredible life, it is definitely worth a read.
Perhaps more than any writer of her era, novelist Edith Wharton followed the directive to “write what you know.” As a member of Caroline Astor’s infamous Four Hundred, she wielded her intimate knowledge of the Knickerbocker elite, using fiction as a tool to construct deliciously vivid tales of New York City in the Gilded Age. Focusing on the lives of three Manhattan socialites, Newland Archer, May Welland, and Countess Ellen Olenska, her eighth book, The Age of Innocence, was an unprecedented success. Winning the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it bewitched both audiences and critics, who praised the book as a romance best presenting the “wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standards of manners.”
Of course, it is neither fair nor accurate to classify Wharton’s Age of Innocence as just another “romance.” Far from “wholesome,” the book represents less a love story and more an ethnographic excavation of a world where love serves as a “humbugging disguise” for the rules that dictate the social order of the day. Though in different ways, Newland, May, and Countess Olenska all occupy a society “wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant” – a society where “the real thing [is] never said or done or even thought.” Here, in this space of coerced “innocence,” a deep and uncomfortable tension starts to emerge, suspending Newland, May, and the Countess in a purgatory between the gentility, ritualism, and refinement of old New York and the individuality, freedom, and indulgence offered by the dawning Gilded Age.
As a personal product of these tensions, Wharton delivers a story that feels at once glittery, nostalgic, and dreamy and yet profoundly unsettling, like a turn-of-the-century Gossip Girl. Certainly, none of her characters are who you would expect them to be. Newland, for one, is an elitist snob who (professedly) wants women to be “indestructibly” youthful and pure, like a beacon of “whiteness, radiance, and goodness”; at the same time, he feels “oppressed by [the] creation of factitious purity.” Newland’s fiancé, May, presents an “image of invincible innocence,” which leads him to infantilize and patronize her (though she is nobody’s fool). And while Countess Olenska seems initially to fit the prototype of the fallen woman, she is actually wise and reserved — a contradiction that Newland finds almost incomprehensible given her neglect “of all the dictates of Taste”: “She was so quiet…quiet in her movements…and the tones of her low-pitched voice.”
In reading The Age of Innocence, I, like Newland, was also tempted to interpret May and the Countess as polar opposites, unfairly assuming the former to be sweet, demure, and self-sacrificing and the latter to be disruptive and unstable. Yet as constructed by Wharton, May and the Countess both demand a much closer examination. In the end, they reveal themselves as so much more than the antithesis of the other.
In presenting May and the Countess as people and not just components of a puritanical social order, Wharton brilliantly urges us to interrogate the parameters and objectives of “innocence” as a moral and social value. Certainly, how should we define innocence – by what is done, by what is said, or by what is thought? Does it have to be genuine? Or can it be manufactured, like a wall against unpleasantness and pain?
Throughout The Age of Innocence, Newland finds fault in May for an “innocence” that he fears will seal “the mind against imagination and the heart against experience.” Yet his own inconsistencies lead the reader to question whether the concept of innocence is limited to a particular period or “age” or if it is fundamentally comparative, spectral, and changeable, depending simply on one’s perspective. Surely, what may seem “innocent” to one person or society may seem inappropriate, threatening, or iconoclastic to another. For this reason, the definition of “innocence” may not necessarily hinge on a particular conversation or deed, but rather the social, historical, and personal context in which that conversation is had or that deed is performed. “In a way,” Elif Batuman tells us, “every age is an age of innocence, because every age has its own unsaid, half-known truths, which are articulated more clearly over time.”
In reading The Age of Innocence, we are compelled to contemplate the “unsaid, half-known truths” of the Gilded Age — as well as those of our own time. If we are, in fact, living in an “age of innocence” today, then what are we trying to avoid or protect ourselves from? And if we somehow aren’t living in an age of innocence, then what will our age be of?