SOURCE: “The Rituals of Dining in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence,” in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4, Summer, 1993, pp. 465-80.

In the following essay, Davis theorizes that Wharton's dining scenes are metaphorical representations of the social and personal relationships among her characters.

The act of dining fascinated Edith Wharton as a social ritual exposing aspects of human behavior that people in her world preferred to conceal. Beneath the complex etiquette of their formal dinners she saw people torn by rivalries, revolts, hostilities, and betrayals. In their social posturings they could divert and deceive where concealment was crucial. Dining ritual also afforded her opportunities for satirizing the social elite and the nouveaux riches—the former intent upon preserving their exclusivity, the latter upon penetrating aristocracy's Fifth Avenue dining rooms, its restaurants, receptions, and balls.

As John F. Kasson explains in his essay, “The Rituals of Dining,” the elaborate...