The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [5]
Ellen Olenska, who has lived much of her life abroad, questions old New York’s claim to America and its imitation of European class and culture. “It seems stupid to have discovered America,” she tells Newland, “only to make it into a copy of another country.... Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?” (p. 196). We can read this witty complaint as Wharton‘s, yet Ellen, like the novelist, is conflicted, bridling at the fact that she is considered exotic, judged as “foreign.” She longs to be free of the past, though in one of her most telling exchanges with Newland Archer—its as close as they come to a full-blown love scene—she tells him, petulantly: “I don’t speak your language.” His language is at once too simple and too romantic—too simple in its claims for a life free of duty and honor, too romantic in presuming that love conquers all. Madame Olenska refers to deep cultural rifts, untranslatable experience that is more complex than his impassioned love-talk. If Newland was merely a young man viewing the world through rose-colored glasses, his fate would not hold our attention, but he is aware that Ellen speaks “from depths of experience beyond his reach.” His self-excoriating thoughts portray an inner man possessed of feelings that are beyond the knowing young suitor we first encountered at the performance of Faust. He is aware of this failure even as he sets up an assignation with Ellen: “It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures already wearied of: it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary” (p. 251). Yet that is exactly how he speaks when proposing that they flee to a place where they will be “simply two human beings who love each other....” She replies with a laugh: “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?” (p. 235).
The depth of his attraction to Ellen is not to be doubted, but his self-doubts are a burden, particularly his knowledge that the freedom he proposes is impossible. Newland is a man trapped between two women: the Countess, who understands how cruel the world can be to those who believe they can cut loose from obligations, and May Welland, who enforces the boundaries of what her husband knows to be honor and decency. When Newland urges a short engagement, simple May, holding to custom, delivers one of Wharton’s most telling lines: “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?” Which is precisely what the three principles in this love triangle do. His reply: “Why not—why not—why not?” suggests his longing for a plot more compelling than May’s conventional story line of their future marriage. May, the boyish American girl who turns their honeymoon into a sporting holiday, never gains any emotional depth, but she exacts what is her due. With sleight-of-hand deceptions, she outplays both her husband and her “foreign” cousin in the game plan that carries the novel forward. At each turn when Newland is about to declare his love for Ellen Olenska, May trumps him. Wharton echoes May’s manipulations in drawing us into the love story only to cut off the possibility of freedom. We may gasp at the end of a chapter in which Newland’s wife wins another round: more melodrama, but without the easy solution of that genre which would render May demonic: She is a realist with a healthy desire for self-preservation. Looking at May’s mother before their marriage,