Lexi Curnin

Ms. Heath

AP American Literature

3 December 2013

A Look Through The Inverted Telescope

Although one may think that residing comfortably near to the top of the Manhattan social pyramid guarantees inclusion, the protagonist of Edith Wharton’s Age Of Innocence, Newland Archer, comes to find himself on the psychological fringe despite his wealth and lofty familial status, isolated by the unique attitudes about life and love he develops after falling for Ellen Olenska.  By presenting Newland’s emotional defeat at the end of the novel, despite his conscious attempt to diverge from societal rules, Wharton demonstrates the inescapability of high society and its nature as a hindrance to free thought.

In the beginning of the novel, Newland Archer seems every bit as stuffy as the members of society he is surrounded by, but his outlook begins to change with the arrival of Countess Ellen Olenska, returned from Europe.  His image was formerly of the utmost importance to him: he arrived late to the Opera because it was “the thing” to do (Wharton 4) and “few things [seemed to him] more awful than an offense against ‘Taste’” (Wharton 12).  When Ellen, the black sheep of the Mingott family, made an appearance at the Opera, Archer at first becomes annoyed that this “strange foreign woman” was attracting negative attention to the box of his betrothed, May Welland, and agrees with fellow high society onlooker, Sillerton Jackson, that the Mingotts should not have “tried it on” (Wharton 10).  But, upon spending time with Ellen, Archer’s pretentiousness begins to dull and his self-alienation from the rules of society begins.  During a dinner with Sillerton Jackson, Archer defends Ellen and even goes so far as to say that “Women ought to be free – as free as we are,” though he was painfully aware of the “terrific consequences” his words could bring (Wharton 34).  Archer later exclaims that he does not care “a brass farthing” for family during a discussion of familial status with his sister, Janey (Wharton 70).  When Ellen’s husband expresses a desire to have her return to him, Archer insists that he would “rather see her dead” than return to him, an opinion that is a far cry from the wish of exemplary members of society, the Mingotts and Wellands, that she reconcile with the Count.  By illustrating this transformation in the beginning of the novel, Wharton is setting the reader up to notice when Newland is ultimately unable to truly separate himself from the grip of society.

After his eyes are opened by the antithesis of proper society, Ellen Olenska, Archer cannot help but begin to notice how perfectly his life parallels that of any consummate high society man.  For Archer, May comes to represent everything Ellen was not, and even society itself.  She was, indeed, the “terrifying product of the social system he belonged to,” perhaps even the living embodiment of it (Wharton 35).  And, accordingly, May had been “carefully trained not to possess” the “freedom of judgment” that Archer now believed he had.  However, though Archer has realized that he was simply going through life like all the other society men before him and wants to “strike out,” he has seen “enough of other men who dreamed his dream… and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders” to know that the “dream” he envisions for himself rarely comes to fruition (Wharton 68, 103).  In this phrasing, Wharton is foreshadowing Archer’s descent into the appropriate high society lifestyle he dreads so much and the inescapability of that destiny.  This statement eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wharton uses the character foils Ellen Olenska and M. Rivière to highlight the degree to which Archer remains tethered to the societal rules he so desperately wants to escape.  Though Archer breaks with “form” on several occasions involving Ellen, including his following her to Skuytercliff, kissing her while engaged to May, and lying to May in order to visit Ellen in Washington D.C., it becomes clear that he is unable to fully remove himself from the world that is keeping him from his love.  Realizing that he can never be with Ellen, Archer insists that he and May marry sooner, hoping the wedding would remove the temptation he felt.  This, however, only worsened the situation, as the wedding failed to extinguish the passion between him and Ellen and created another obstacle.  Archer’s marriage to May and the unspoken rules of society made it so that even when alone together, Archer and Countess Olenska were “so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart” (Wharton 200).  From M. Rivière as well, Archer was miles apart.  While May represents society, Ellen Olenska and M. Rivière represent the opposite and are therefore unfit for Manhattan life.  When Rivière expressed his desire to move to Archer’s New York, Archer thought to himself, “[Rivière’s] very superiorities and advantages would be the surest hindrance to success” (Wharton 165).  These superiorities are Rivière’s “intellectual liberty” and “moral freedom:” two things not commonly possessed by those in who run with Archer’s crowd (Wharton 164, 165).  It is these two things that Archer longed for but never fully acquired.

In the end, Archer is the man “to whom nothing was ever going to happen” (Wharton 186).  His relationship with the Countess was ended abruptly by the treachery of the embodiment of society herself, May Welland, who informed the Countess of her pregnancy prematurely in order to keep her away from Archer.  Archer then lived out the rest of his youth and beyond with May until her death, bound by “duty” and little else.  When Archer visits Paris with his son Dallas, he suddenly recollects his time with Ellen and is forced “to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime” (Wharton 294).  Without the freedom that society had robbed him of, Archer was unable to be with Ellen.  He had lived a “starved” life and when he returned to Paris, nothing had changed.  Though he was technically free from his marriage to May, Archer did not go up to Ellen’s apartment that evening.  He had buckled under the yoke of the innumerable, unquantifiable rules of society.  The ropes binding him to May, and to the rules of society, for all of those years had left deep scars.

Although Archer had high hopes for himself, he was unable to live the life apart from Manhattan society that he desired.  Wharton summarizes perfectly the nature of society with the following: “If one had habitually breathed the New York air, then there were times when anything less crystalline seemed stifling” (Wharton 77).  Archer, despite his transformation at the hands of Ellen Olenska and an inspiration in M. Rivière, was suffocated by the absence of the rules that laid everything out so clearly and ultimately, made things simpler.  Even though he was freed from his commitment to May by her death, he was not truly free because once one learns to abide by the rules of society, it becomes far easier to swim with the current than to break free.  So, that night in Paris, Archer walked back to the hotel alone, unable to sever the cord tethering him to the rules that had governed his life since birth.