The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [5]
Wharton’s early descriptions of Newland satirize his unexamined beliefs with a certain measure of glee, pointing out, for example, that ‘‘an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded.’’ Wharton demonstrates that Newland’s inner life, like the opera, gets lost in translation: Layer after layer of interpretation takes its toll on the authenticity of his experience.
Newland exits the prelapsarian world of the early part of the novel and enters the more complex one of considered, adult actions once he meets, and falls in love with, Ellen. Ellen arouses his interest because, in part, she does not read the script provided by the genteel society in which they live. When, for example, Ellen walks across the drawing room at a party to talk to Newland, she commits a serious social crime by displaying ownership of her own wishes and showing respect for her own desire. ‘‘It was not the custom in New York drawing rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another. Etiquette required that she should wait, immovable as an idol, while the men who wished to converse with her succeeded each other at her side.’’ Ellen has left her husband and abandoned her place in the highest ranks of European society to return to New York; it is unlikely that she would remain immobile in a drawing room. Her mobility, however, is dangerous to the idea of womanhood espoused by New York. Ellen, for one, cannot be contained by forms which fail to encompass the possibility of a woman’s experience of life as a free agent; she remains outside the realm of the expected, as do so many of Wharton’s characters. But her strength, ultimately, lies in the fact that she remains on the periphery of social and cultural structures, undermining these structures by her very presence. She is unassimilable.
Drawn to her difference, Newland’s imagination is captured by Ellen in part because she represents a danger to the structures he has held as indestructible. Newland, whose self-professed appetite for intellectual and sexual adventure belies a deep conservatism, believes that everyone apart from himself should follow the rules, unless instructed otherwise. But Ellen embodies the shattering of every rule. He wants complete control over any situation he is in, and does not see that Ellen is as far beyond his control as a falling star or a wild animal.
The relationship is not one-sided: Ellen is as attracted to Newland as he is to her. Newland represents for Ellen precisely what his name signifies: A new land where she can begin her life again and erase the mistakes she made in older, more dangerous Europe. (It should be pointed out that May’s surname is Welland, and that Ellen is as equally exiled from the well as from the new.) Newland fascinates Ellen because of what he represents as well as for who he is. Ellen fastens onto his way of life—a way of life she had seen and touched as a young woman, but a way of life into which she had never been fully initiated—and is as enthralled by the idea of its safety and security as Newland is enthralled by her irreverence. Questioning the commonplace, Ellen by extension questions the place of women in her society. Wharton implies throughout The Age of Innocence that Ellen, despite— or perhaps because of—her separation from society, is superior, in most respects,