The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [2]
In deriving his status in society from his family and his connections rather than from his work, Newland Archer is not unusual. Wealthy men of the 1870s were to be employed in light work—Newland is a lawyer who occasionally goes into his office to deal with money matters concerning wealthy families, but who never has a problem taking weeks off—and their women were to display, as girls, the wealth of their fathers, and as wives, the wealth of their husbands. Based on ignorance and duplicity, these marriages are destined to fail privately, even while both partners strive to maintain their veneer of permanent affection. Can love exist when a woman’s highest achievement is ‘‘to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it,’’ and a man’s goal is to find a wife who might ‘‘be as worldly-wise and as eager to please’’ as his mistress, asks Wharton? With these paradigms, how can any authentic relationship survive?
Many relationships survived only because there was no possibility for an alternative. If one spouse grew ‘‘weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the temperature of passion yet with all its exactions,’’ there were few options aside from quiet adulteries or scandalous and ruinous divorces. ‘‘[T]rained to conceal imaginary wounds under a Spartan smile,’’ men and women in Wharton learn the corrupting arts of compromise and disingenuousness just as they learned, as children, which silver knife to use at dinner.
And yet Newland realizes that the matrimonial two-step is not necessarily easy. Eager to do the right thing by marrying the pretty offspring of a fine family, Newland nevertheless has deep forebodings concerning his attachment to May Welland. We never quite believe he loves her except as a perfect specimen of what he has been taught to regard as appropriate womanhood. ‘‘Marriage,’’ the hero realizes within the first month of his engagement, ‘‘was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.’’ And yet he embarks on this voyage, risking the lives of two women who love him as well as jeopardizing his own sense of self and place in the world. Wharton’s novel supplies the map, the key, and the emotional compass allowing the reader to observe the progress of Newland Archer, his wife, May Welland, and their cousin Ellen Olenska, as they make their journey through the currents and eddies of wealthy New York in the 1870s. In doing so, Wharton indicates repeatedly that it can be as dangerous to be drawn to the shallows, as personified by May, as to the depths, personified by Ellen.
A favored younger son of established, monied New York society, handsome and smug Newland Archer has known irreverent, unconventional, and ‘‘slightly foreign’’ Ellen Olenska long enough for her to remember him in ‘‘knickerbockers’’ stealing a kiss when they were children.The novel opens on the occasion of Ellen’s first public appearance in New York society since her separation from her dissipated husband, Count Olenski, who has remained in Europe. The Mingotts have not yet decided how to treat the prodigal in their midst, but they have protectively closed ranks around Ellen. ‘‘Thin, worn, a little older-looking than her age, which must have been nearly thirty,’’ Ellen nevertheless possesses a magnetic charm that makes every head in New York turn her way as she enters the opera under the aegis of the Mingott clan. Joined in the opera box by Newland, Ellen flippantly recollects that ‘‘You were a horrid boy, and kissed me once