Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, set in Manhattan in the "early 1870s," begins with Christine Nilsson singing at the Academy of Music. The opera is Gounod's Faust. The "world of fashion" has assembled in the boxes. In their own eyes the embodiment of "New York," the fashionables are prisoners of convention: Newland Archer arrives late because "it was 'not the thing' to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not 'the thing' played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago." Newland takes his place among "all the carefully-brushed, white-waist coated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and turned their opera glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product of the system." That "the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences" seems "as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-baked brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole." The box opposite belongs to "old Mrs. Manson Mingott, whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to attend the Opera." It contains a surprise: the Countess Olenska. This finding is assessed by Laurence Lefferts; the "foremost authority of 'form' in New York," he has devoted long hours to such questions as when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and the matter of pumps versus Oxfords for the feet. The countess is next appraised by Sillerton Jackson, as great an expert on "family" as Leffert is on form. Taking it all in, Newland elects to visit the box in question and inspect the countess for himself. Meanwhile, little Victor Capoul, as Faust, is "vainly trying, in a tight purple velvet doublet and plumed cap, to look as pure and true as his artless victim." Madame Nilsson, "in white cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her muslin chemisette," listens "with downcast eyes to M. Capoul's impassioned wooing," and affects "a guileless incomprehension of his designs." Opera, in short, is here depicted as an expensive backdrop to social display and intrigue, a metaphor for artifice and pretension, a pastime as vicarious and silly as the fashionables themselves.

     This well-known vignette may be the single most defining image of Gilded Age high culture. It resonates with perceptions of a moneyed elite setting standards of snobbish taste and decorumÑa constellation of ideas, including "social control" and "sacralization" as exerted from on high, embedded in such influential studies as Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982) and Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). And yet Wharton no more purports to describe all of New York culture than her bemused 1921 novel of New York society describes all of New York. The same Academy of Music, as we know from the Evening Post of July 26, 1859, contained a basement "lager beer cavern:"

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