After some deliberation, I’ve decided to change my senior exit topic. I’ve found that keeping up appearances is an omnipresent theme in many works of literature, and I’d like to explore the implication and relevance of this idea on today’s society. As teenagers, most of us spend entirely too much time on social media networks in order to keep up appearances.  Whether it be through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. we are able to stay up to date with everyone’s daily happenings as well as broadcast our own. When looking back on a mediocre party, we can fool ourselves and others into thinking that it was a crazy, unforgettable night through photos and comments, when in reality it wasn’t all that great. It is also possible to connect the idea of keeping up appearances to memory in psychology, with terms such as rosy retrospection and the misinformation effect. Rosy retrospection refers to remembering events more positively than how they felt when they were actually taking place, while the misinformation effect involves incorporating misleading information into one’s memory of an event.

New sources that I’m considering for this topic are:

  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  • A Separate Peace by John Knowles
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  • The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

For right now I’d like to touch on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Old New York, in the 1870s, is described by Wharton as a society determined to maintain a constant stability. Members of this elite class are expected to live by a set of unspoken rules and keep up with the latest fashions, proper etiquette, and appropriate behaviors and conversations. The novel’s opening scene at the opera places the characters in their natural social environment, introducing the reader to the style and entertainment preferences of this exclusive group of families and individuals that thinks and acts upon the same beliefs. However, the sole purpose of such an extravagant event is not to enjoy one another’s company or to enjoy fine art, but rather to observe and scrutinize others. Besides gathering to gossip, those attending the opera must appear up to standards to avoid scandal. Unlike Countess Ellen Olenska, the always proper protagonist Newland Archer does just that. He arrives to the opera with his hair deliberately parted by “two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel” and a flower in his buttonhole for good measure. “Poor Ellen”, on the other hand, arrives unexpected and uninvited wearing a revealing dress and speaking of divorce.  In other words, she is the black sheep of her family and an embarrassment to New York’s elite. Her disregard for society’s expectations in fashion and manners, as well as rumors of adultery do not bode well to the rigid social code of her surroundings. It comes as no surprise that Newland’s current good standing among society is put at risk upon meeting Ellen in a society that goes out mainly to see and be seen, to judge and be judged. To Newland, Ellen represents the freedom missing from the suffocating environment of the New York aristocracy, but in the end conforming to society’s conventions and keeping up appearances triumphs.
That’s all for now, but I’m interested to see where this project will go and how I can connect the modern causes/effects of keeping up appearances with examples in literature.
Ps. Shout out to Rebecca Liu for helping me with this idea! : )