EDITING THE NOVEL

An Architectural Alphabet

The Decoration of Houses often resorts to literary metaphors in describing design. In the opening chapter, for instance, Wharton and Codman speak of an “architectural alphabet.” Describing the disconnect between interior design and architecture that they aim to amend, they mention that “[t]he decorator of the present day may be compared to a person who is called upon to write a letter in the English language, but is ordered, in so doing, to conform to the Chinese or Egyptian rules of grammar, or possibly to both together.”

Wharton at her writing desk

Wharton’s focus on architecture and interior design continues into her fiction. The novels reveal her attention to creating specific images of the material world in which her characters are immersed. In The Age of Innocence design details help Wharton recount a moment in the past—she evokes a lost world fifty years prior to the novel’s publication through architecture and interior design.

All manuscript items on the following pages are from The Age of Innocence, ca. 1920.