Take the case of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth.  She goes to pieces on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly.  But she cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she has the Aristotelian hero’s fatal defect of a single weakness.  In that golden game not to go forward is to fall behind.  Lily Bart hesitates, oscillates, and is lost.  Having left her appointed course, she finds on trying to return to her former society that it is little less impermeable to her than she has seen rank outsiders find it.  Then there is Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, who, marrying and divorcing with the happy insensibility of the animals that mate for a season only, undertakes to force her brilliant, barren beauty into the centers of the elect.  Such beauty as hers can purchase much, thanks to the desires of men, and Undine, thanks to her own blindness as regards all delicate disapproval, comes within sight of her goal.  But in the end she fails.  The custom of her country—­Apex City and the easy-going West—­is not the decorum of New York reinforced by European examples.  Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence neither lose nor seek an established position within the social mandarinate of Manhattan as constituted in the seventies of the last century.  They belong there and there they remain.  But at what sacrifices of personal happiness and spontaneous action!  They walk through their little drama with the unadventurous stride of puppets; they observe dozens of taboos with a respect allied to terror.  It is true that they appear to have been the victims of the provincial “innocence” of their generation, but the newer generation in New York is not entirely acquitted of a certain complicity in the formalism of its past.

From the first Mrs. Wharton’s power has lain in the ability to reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or merely as social impossibility.  She has, of course, studied other communities than New York:  the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth century in The Valley of Decision; modern France in Madame de Treymes and The Reef; provincial New England in The Fruit of the Tree.  What characterizes the New York novels characterizes these others as well:  a sense of human beings living in such intimate solidarity that no one of them may vary from the customary path without in some fashion breaking the pattern and inviting some sort of disaster.