The time trap in Edith Wharton’s the Age of innocence

CYCLE: Tomorrow
SPEAKER: Chiara Lagani
DATE: Tuesday, December 1st, 6:00 PM
LOCATION: Bibliotheca Maior - Sala della Crociera

In her most celebrated novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton tells the story of a love stifled by the puritanical conventions of 1870s New York society, "a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.” Newland Archer, a lawyer betrothed to a young woman of good family, falls in love with Countess Ellen Olenska, who has just separated from an abusive husband. As Archer attempts to reckon with his own tumultuous feelings, this impossible love appears to him by turns real and unreal; his state of mind vacillates between identification and detachment, between emotional surrender and a retreat into social conventions. In Wharton’s sophisticated portrayal, time dizzily overlaps glimpses of the present with reminiscences of the past, eventually becoming a destabilizing trap within the continuous promise of an eternally deferred future.

Chiara Lagani, actress, playwright, and translator, co-founded the theater group Fanny & Alexander in Ravenna in 1992 alongside Luigi De Angelis, serving as the dramaturg and author of the original texts for all the company's productions.
In 2017, she was awarded the Special Riccione Prize for Dramaturgic Innovation. She co-authored the play La mia battaglia (My Battle, Einaudi, Turin 2021) with actor Elio Germano. She has edited and translated several notable works, including The Oz Books by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Mara Cerri (“I Millenni” series, Einaudi, Turin 2017), Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll (Einaudi, Turin 2021), and Mrs. Manstey's View by Edith Wharton (Einaudi, Turin 2025).

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