The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy. ~ Socrates

Penguin Classics describes this book as one of the ‘best books ever written’. A strong claim, and a person could be forgiven for indulging in a spot of cynicism over it. Until suddenly you’re transported back to New York’s upper crust 1870s society with descriptions so vivid and characters so real you feel like you’re truly sitting down to dinner with them rather than spying  through the pages of a book.

Edith Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence in 1920. It was her Pulitzer Prize winning crowning glory. From the first page you feel her world springing to life around you. You become acutely aware of the importance of honour, duty and reputation. Of society ranking, ancestry and wealth.  And so begins a heart breaking glimpse into the small universe of Mr Newland Archer.

Newland Archer isn’t immediately a man who naturally draws sympathy. A well to do Manhattan resident with a career in law and a pretty fiancée he adores, Archer appears rather set when we first tune into his life. And then his head is turned by his wife’s rather beautiful cousin Ellen Mingott, who is in possession of the rather more glamorous and suiting title of Countess Olenska.

What unfolds afterwards is Newland’s struggle between fulfilling his duty to wife May and maintaining his reputation in the process, or throwing caution to the wind, declaring his love for Ellen and abandoning ship (or island) with her. What he eventually decides to do I shan’t reveal here in case anyone has not yet read it. And if you haven’t, you really should. Wharton beautifully captures Newland’s emotional turmoil leaving you desperately willing him on. And the ending is the most touchingly frustrating finishing to a novel I’ve read since Gone with the Wind.

This brings us to the focus of this blog. Our ladies. May and Ellen, connected through their grandmother, the family matriarch Mrs. Mingott, the former Catherine Spicer.

May Welland is as uncontroversial as can be. Ellen Olenska is as unconventional as can be. Ellen is welcomed back into New York life having left her titled husband in Europe and fleeing home. She is cloaked in scandal, and, ironically, shielded from negative comments and society’s shunning only by respectable family connections made through her cousin May’s engagement to Newland. She is thirty, beautiful and exotic. Newland, who is portrayed as something of a feminist, is drawn to her vivaciousness and lust for life. He wants her because she is different to the other ‘wife material’ girls he has been consorting with.

Before Ellen sweeps onto the scene Newland is quite happily aboard a ship going full steam ahead into his marriage to May. He begs her family to bring the marriage forward, desperate to be with her as quick as possible. May is portrayed as everything expected from a good nineteenth century society wife. Bland, apparently lacking opinions, deeply concerned with outward appearances and the comfort of her own life. As Ellen crashes into Newland’s world like a hurricane he begins to realise this about the woman he is set to marry. He subscribes to the idea that women should be able to do as they please, making a mental note to allow his wife to be ‘free’ rather than kept at home like his society believed a good wife should be. May, to Newland’s frustration and disappointment, doesn’t appear to realise she’s been set free. She is happy to play the part he has come to despise.

On the other hand Ellen has defied all the rules by leaving her husband when she was unhappy and absolutely refuses to get back together with him whatever the cost to her finances and reputation. She lives in a part of town upper class sort wouldn’t normally delve in, and does it happily. She mixes with disreputable people, the kind whom ‘nice’ people wouldn’t enjoy the company of.  And Newland falls in love with her for it. And the feelings are mutual. The two begin an emotional, if not physical, affair.

So far, so classic story. The man falls in love with another woman. One who is exciting, different to anyone he’s ever met before, and worlds away from the monotony of life with his wife. But Newland can’t shake off the old bonds that tie him to convention and duty. Firstly, he is engaged, and he feels he must see that through. Then, the marriage he has harassed his wife’s family to bring forward IS brought forward. By this time he knows he does not love May, at least not to the extent he loves Ellen. But he marries her still. Out of duty and awareness of how easily reputations are damaged.

Now, I am usually 100% in favour of the anti-heroine figure. The one who Ellen represents. The different, not conventionally womanly one. But here I am torn. I feel that May is greatly underestimated and both admire and pity her equally. Whilst Newland is running about dealing with his angst over his love for his wife’s cousin, his wife, not being stupid, is aware of his dwindling love for her and the usurping of his affections by her own cousin, the one she herself welcomed and tried to protect from a mass society rebuff.

At one point, just prior to her marriage, May even offers Newland a get-out-of-jail-free card. She suspects him of loving another woman, albeit at this point she believes it to be an ex flame of his rather than Ellen. She explains she does not want to set up her married life, her future, on a foundation of someone else’s unhappiness, and that if he wanted someone else then he should go to her. Newland refuses and marries her, despite not wanting to and May having hit the nail on the head in a roundabout way.

Newland’s love for Ellen continues after his wedding and for a couple of years into it. May comes in for a lot of criticism: she does not care for the splendour of Europe, she is interested in clothes. She does not indulge in many intellectual pursuits, instead preferring sports. Negatives in Newland’s eyes, but they always will be when he believes her a vacant, immature airhead, and one that is never going to measure up to his beloved Countess Olenska.

And so Newland continues to underestimate his wife whilst taking good care of his growing desire for Ellen, until, finally, he decides he would rather cause waves of scandal and leave. By this point, May has beautifully manipulated the situation so Ellen is fleeing overseas believing May to be pregnant, and Newland is once again forced to stay by his wife’s side when she finds out she really is going to have a baby.

May knows what is going on under her own nose the whole time. She knows her husband would prefer to be with another woman, and yet does everything in her power to keep him anyway. Whether for love of him or in an attempt to maintain her own reputation is debatable. Either way it is deeply sad, and I feel sorry for her even as I wonder why she doesn’t just leave him as her cousin Ellen left her husband when she discovered he was cheating on her.

Which leaves me with respect for Ellen, Countess Olenska. Though she is clearly after Newland from the start, it is family loyalty that prevents her from stealing away with him early on in the book, and it is an acknowledgment that May is having a child who needs Newland that causes her to leave New York. Her moral compass does not point as firmly north as it could, but it is this that makes her an appealing, interesting and exciting character. Even if May is not the wish-wash character Newland thinks she is, Ellen still trumps her in having the guts to think it better to go it alone in life without a husband she’s unhappy with despite what damage it might do to her reputation than May, who so desperately wants a husband and a perfect looking life that she stays with a man who loves another woman.

 

I promised earlier not to mention how Wharton resolves the situation, so I won’t. But the thread of duty and appearance that runs through Ellen, May and Newland’s lives leads a trail of devastation, heart ache and tears which perhaps would not happen in today’s world. Though it is of course debatable whether that is a good or bad thing. Ellen and May are two women who I think are more alike than common consensus gives credit for. Both do, or at least offer, to sacrifice Newland to another woman. And both show steely determination in getting what they want. Both are hurt in the process. Ellen and Newland hurt May in their obvious love for each other. May hurts Ellen and Newland in her bittersweet ploy to keep them apart.

 

Three captivating, endearing, frustrating and very human characters, beautifully written by Wharton.