Edith Wharton: Designing the Drawing Room

PUBLISHED DRAWING ROOMS

Ellen Olenska’s Drawing Room

Through the editing process, Wharton refined her description of the material world that defines her characters. In the published novels, the drawing rooms offer a particularly fascinating view of Wharton’s attention to interior design. Ellen and May’s drawing rooms in part articulate the difference between the two characters. For Wharton, the drawing room was associated with the taste of the woman who designed it. For example, the atmosphere of Ellen’s drawing room aligns with her experiences living in Europe. By describing her drawing room objects as “bits of wreckage,” Ellen implies that they contain aspects of her past and become part of her identity. As a space in which guests would wait for her to receive them, the drawing room, filled with pieces of her history, becomes a stand-in for Ellen.

Ellen’s design choices are out of keeping with the fashions of 1870s New York City society. In addition to signaling Ellen’s time abroad, this disregard for custom draws out the contrast between Ellen and May, who creates a drawing room in the same style as her parents’.

“What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known. He knew that the Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her—bits of wreckage, she called them—and these, he supposed, were represented by some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little Greek bronze on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in old frames.”

Since 1859, artists gathered in a Tenth Street studio building in Manhattan. William Merritt Chase occupied a place in the building from the late 1870s until the early 1890s. In these paintings of his studio, the space resembles Wharton’s depiction of Ellen’s drawing room in The Age of Innocence. The paintings features walls lined with rich cloth, objects from around the world, and dark wood furniture.

Studio Interior, ca. 1882

The Tenth Street Studio, 1880

In the novel, Wharton notes that Ellen lives beyond the neighborhoods frequented by well-to-do New Yorkers—her home is in “the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and ‘people who wrote.’”

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