The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [6]
If Newland is unable to speak Ellen’s language, he is also at a disadvantage with his wife, often unable to reply to her cheery or mocking views, driven to “inarticulate despair.” The scenes of their marriage in which they talk past each other are chilling. In one painful instance, Newland opens the window in his library.
The mere fact of not looking at May, seated beside his table, under his lamp, the fact of seeing other houses, roofs, chimneys, of getting the sense of other lives outside his own, other cities beyond New York, and a whole world beyond his world, cleared his brain and made it easier to breathe.
After he had leaned out into the darkness for a few minutes he heard her say: “Newland! Do shut the window. You’ll catch your death.”
He pulled the sash down and turned back. “Catch my death!” he echoed; and he felt like adding: “But I’ve caught it already—I am dead. I’ve been dead for months and months” (pp. 240-241).
The important words here are “felt like adding.” He is driven to silence, to inner thoughts, betrays himself with a gentleman’s kindness, perhaps even the niceness he deplores. At times Newland is a study in pent-up anger at the life he has accepted—one of “habit and honor,” to put the best light on it, but also one of irreparable loss. It is the life that Wharton turned from, but the portrayal of his fury surely recalls her pain, suffered in the stultifying atmosphere of old New York, and her inability to speak the same language, if speak at all, to her husband. As we read of Newland’s suffering and alienation, it may be appropriate to recall that he is a man without a calling. He is a great reader, like Wharton, but the novelist had the salvation of her work and her devotion to it.
In this novel of emotional infidelity, of duty to family and to the social standards of old New York, Edith Wharton incorporates a tale of money, which at bottom is what made the whole system of that endowed society work. Money is not window dressing. It is the substance of who her characters are, or claim to be. Newland does not work with much diligence at his law office. Ellen is something of a financial hostage to her Polish husband, Count Olenski. Inherited money is more desirable than riches got by the sweat of the brow or by recent grubby acquisition. The manufacture of shoe polish provides Mrs. Struthers with her tasteless costumes and arty entertainments. As for Julius Beaufort, who would he be were it not for the power of his extraordinary wealth? Wharton makes it perfectly clear that old New York was a commercial society, whatever its pretense to aristocracy. Only the van der Luydens, generous yet stiff with moral rectitude, can trace their line to Dutch heritage. Colonial heritage, is that aristocracy? Henry van der Luyden is still patroon of their vast estate at Skuytercliff, up the Hudson. Wharton does not leave their heritage at that; with great wit she invents the van der Luydens’ connection to royalty through the patroon’s wife, who had been a Dagonet. In a highly amusing construction of a family tree, she stretches branches to English nobility and to the Duke of St. Austrey, who comes to visit in America. The Duke is less pretentious than the stuffed shirts of New York society who put on an elaborate show for him. The Duke is a charming fuddy-duddy, perfectly happy to attend Mrs. Struthers’s salon, which is scorned by the proper people.
Throughout the novel Wharton entertains with a cast of somewhat raffish characters, including Medora Manson, a marchioness no less, who has made unfortunate foreign marriages and is a champion