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sexual knowledge as well as from sexualactivity; they are prohibited, too, from contact with works of art, such as Faust, that touch on erotic subjects. In consequence, ‘‘nice’’ girls are ignorant about much of Western art, music, and literature; their intellectual and aesthetic capacities have been incompletely cultivated. Their emotional development is likewise stunted, since they are ‘‘carefully trained not to possess’’ such important prerequisites for adulthood as ‘‘freedom of judgment’’ or ‘‘versatility’’ or ‘‘experience.’’ It is clear that Archer is scrutinizing this exaggerated female naïveté, which his community strenuously enforces, from an anthropological vantage point: he recognizes it as ‘‘an artificial product,’’ a culturally constructed constellation of behaviors. A ‘‘factitious purity’’ has been ‘‘cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses.’’

Archer realizes, in short, that the ‘‘innocence’’ characterizing female members of his community is not an innate attribute of young girls: it is socially imposed. The result is suffering, both for the women subjected to such cultural training and for the men they marry. Inevitably, Archer sadly reflects, these women make less interesting, less companionable wives than they might have become if their early lives had been less systematically stifled. As his thoughts move in an even more sinister direction, he wonders whether young women raised under such restrictive conditions can ever overcome the disadvantage of deliberately engineered lacunae in their mental, moral, and emotional development. The famous passage in which he likens his fiancée to Kentucky cave fish, who lose their sight because they had no opportunity to use their eyes, grimly prophesies what may happen to girls kept, metaphorically, in the dark. Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion. May herself proves to be ‘‘incapable of growth,’’ the victim of a ‘‘hard bright blindness.’’

Archer’s growing estrangement from community values is fostered by the arrival of an attractive outsider who defies many local conventions. Ellen Olenska is a cultural hybrid: she does not fully belong either to the New York society that produced her or to the European milieu she has inhabited for a good portion of her life. Introduced by her parents (those ‘‘continental wanderers’’) to foreign ways of life and habits of mind, she enjoys a cosmopolitan perspective that appeals for obvious reasons to Newland Archer. From the way she decorates a room or arranges flowers to her confident projection (in dress and manners) of a mature sexuality, she provides a powerful reminder that New York customs are not universal. She seems refreshingly unconcerned with community prejudices and proprieties: ‘‘ ‘Why not make one’s own fashions?’ ’’ she asks. Archer is entranced by her ‘‘mysterious faculty of suggesting . . . possibilities outside the daily run of experience.’’ It is her plight as a woman thwarted in her quest for a divorce, tellingly, that triggers his unsparing assessment of female ‘‘innocence’’ and prompts his analysis of the handicaps New York social traditions impose upon women. Ellen’s predicament illumines issues that assume thematic centrality in the novel, as he subjects his social world to ever harsher criticism.

Archer is disposed to appreciate Ellen’s ‘‘outlandish background’’ and foreign ways more than most New Yorkers can. He falls in love with her differentness as much as with her other qualities. Above all else, he cherishes her ability to suggest the existence of ‘‘bigger places’’ and ‘‘a wider world.’’ Thus his romantic feelings for her achieve meaning that goes beyond the merely personal. By ‘‘making him look at his native city objectively. . . . as through the wrong end of a telescope,’’ she helps him detach himself from its parochialisms. She ‘‘reverse[s] his values,’’ showing him that despite its