The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [3]
Significantly, Newland and Ellen, having known one another for years, become erotically interested in one another only on the eve of Newland’s engagement to May Welland. If Ellen falls in love with men who don’t look at her, she has found a formidable counterpart in Newland, who will love women as long as they remain mysteries to him. The key to Archer’s character, given within the first few paragraphs of the novel, also provides the key to the unexecuted nature of his affair with Countess Olenska: ‘‘[H]e was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were. . . .’’ Identifying Newland as a dilettante, Wharton locates the center of emotional life in his vanity and in his inability to give himself completely to an unmediated, unobserved response to pleasureand pain. His addiction to delay, to the slow savoring of what-is-yet-to-come, will inform his behavior in ways he could not even imagine.
At the moment Wharton delivers her assessment of Newland as a dilettante, she positions him on the verge of one of his early and innocent pleasures, but the implications even of this minor pleasure are telling: He arrives at the opera precisely in time to hear his favorite aria. Wharton’s narrator slyly points out that ‘‘if he had timed his arrival in accord with the prima donna’s stage manager he could not have entered the Academy at a more significant moment than just as she was singing: ‘He loves me—he loves me not—he loves me!—’ ’’ The gap between a longing for love and the knowledge of love is the shadowed valley where Newland’s passion flourishes; he thrives on the indefinite and the delayed. Erotic longing works well with distance in The Age of Innocence, and feeds itself on interruptions and imagination.
Scruples and ceremonies add more than spice to the relationship between Newland and Ellen, because the very boundaries preventing them from having a sexual relationship also act as the outlines of their erotic relationship. ‘‘I can’t love you unless I give you up,’’ Ellen cries, and in the rawness of her pain lies the truth about their relationship. Their intimacy is paradoxically defined by their separateness, and we come to realize that without distance all intimacy would be impossible. ‘‘Her choice would be to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer,’’ Newland reminds himself. ‘‘And it depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.’’ The images of safety are inevitably twinned with the concept of separation, however, when Wharton presents these two lovers: ‘‘There they were, close together and safe and shut in, yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.’’ Their love can exist only in the absence of their relationship.
Edith Wharton had a complex relationship with New York, not unlike the one between Newland and Ellen; Wharton and New York needed and understood one another,but existed best out of one another’s company. Like Ellen Olenska, Wharton lived apart from the world that informed her upbringing and her world view, but never completely escaped its influence and impact. Like Ellen, Wharton escaped an unsatisfactory marriage and created for herself an existence away from her homeland— as one critic put it, she left her husband and then she left town—but Wharton had her own version of Newland’s reverence for the past. Keeping an idea of New York enshrined in