hard · Enhanced ACT reading
In a single passage, a literary critic argues: "Wharton's narrators are often praised for their irony, but this praise mistakes the symptom for the disease. The irony in *The Age of Innocence* is not a stance the narrator adopts toward Old New York; it is a stance Old New York adopts toward itself, which the narrator merely transcribes. When Newland Archer congratulates himself on seeing through the conventions that bind him, the narrative voice neither endorses nor mocks his self-congratulation. It simply lets us watch him deploy, as the very instrument of his supposed liberation, the same fastidious discriminations by which his society polices its members. The reader who laughs at Archer for being trapped has merely traded Archer's blindness for a flattering one of her own."
The critic's final sentence ("The reader who laughs…") functions primarily to:
- extend the passage's central claim to implicate the reader, suggesting that the ironic detachment the reader feels toward Archer reenacts the very self-deception the critic has been describing.
- concede that some careless readers will inevitably misread the novel's irony, while maintaining that sufficiently attentive readers can avoid the error through closer attention to tone.
- introduce a second, wholly distinct flaw within the tradition of Wharton criticism, namely reader condescension, which the critic treats as unrelated to the earlier misreading of irony.
- resolve the passage's central interpretive tension by identifying amused laughter as the appropriate response that the narrator's careful transcription is ultimately designed to provoke in readers.
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