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In the historical context of Newland Archer's New York, opera marks the opening of the winter season, delineates the inner circle of privilege, and exemplifies the wealth and leisure of this class. Serving as a structural frame for Wharton's novel, opera illustrates the duality of the artifice of performance: the one on the stage and the one in the opera box.
On a January evening of the early seventies," Wharton's narrator relates, "Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York" (3). With these words, Edith Wharton thrusts the reader of The Age of Innocence into the socially exclusive world of New York society. In this carefully codified and elitist realm, opera marks the opening of the winter season, "defines those who were members of the inner circle" (Montgomery 22), and exemplifies the wealth and leisure of this class. Serving as a pivotal opening, punctuating the action throughout the novel, and appearing again at the conclusion, opera functions as a structural frame for the work. As Herbert Lindenberger argues in Opera: The Extravagant Art, the "operatic and real-life worlds" are both "thoroughly implicated in artifice" (174). By framing several key scenes at the opera, Wharton illustrates the duality of this artifice of performance. Opera, with its "penchant for ceremony and display" (38), provides the audience an opportunity to gaze upon the embodied exhibition of artistic imagination and passion. Within the opera boxes, where the conventions of "taste" and "form" prevail, members of New York's society participate in their own spectacle of behaviour. Both opera and the code of "manners and customs" (Wharton 136) exist within constrained and ordered systems. The artifice of opera allows its participants to express their imagination and passion; however, the artifice of the conventional behaviour of the elite stifles its conformists.
In the opening paragraph of the novel, Wharton artfully reveals several key details about the values of New York society. She situates her novel in the early 187Os. By the end of that decade, the upper class was bitterly divided by controversy over the building of a new opera house, the Metropolitan Opera. As the narrator explains, "though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances 'above the forties,' of a...