We made it! Welcome to the final week of our slow reading of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
I’m so excited to dive into the chapter with you all today, and to focus on a few favorite moments from this absolutely incredible finale chapter.
But before we dive in:
A fun new thing! If you’d like a postcard to celebrate reaching the end of the novel, please send me a DM here on Substack or fill out this form. I designed a few Age of Innocence cards that I can’t wait to share with anyone who’d like one to commemorate their reading experience!
A brief summary
Here’s a breakdown of what happens in these chapters, with any new characters we meet in bold.
You can listen to an audio summary here.
Chapter 34
Newland reflects on the last 26 years of his life, in which he has raised three children with May and now finds himself a widower at 57 years old — with one more chance to reunite with Ellen Olenska in Paris
If I were to write a “final paper…”
I’d like to share my reading of the novel on this go-round with you, the kind of essay I might start to draft were I asked to submit a final paper on this subject. And I’d like to share with the disclaimer that when closely reading, and when building an argument about a piece of literature, a good scholar (as I hope I am) is never saying that there are not other ways to read the very same story. I’m also not saying my reading is “right,” only that it is how the nuances and textures and emotionality of the novel are adding up for me this time, on this re-read.
“The first reading of a book is an adventure; the rereadings are an immersion and a gaining of agency.”
— Beth Nguyen, in this collection
Every time I read The Age of Innocence it happens to me all over again — a testament to Wharton’s powerful literary talents that gift us the kind of story that never changes on the page, but constantly changes within us as we encounter and re-encounter it, throughout our lives.
“Rereading makes me feel stronger; it makes me assess what I thought I knew and reminds me that I’m the one who gets to interpret. The text stays the same but the reading of it changes. We change, because the reading changes us and later we change the reading.”
—Beth Nguyen
For someone whose heart is happiest and most fulfilled when she is closely reading, I don’t know that there’s any place I’d rather be than enthralled in the task of paying attention to a story like Newland’s.
The end of his age of innocence
In chapter 34, we learn that in the long passage of 26 years, which includes May’s untimely death, the age of innocence seems to have ended. Newland Archer, now 57 years old, occupies a vastly different world — but it is one he and his set predicted in several ways, not the least of which is the detail that Dallas, the Archers’ eldest son, is about to marry one of “Beaufort’s bastards.”
As I read chapter 34, I’m left wondering: what was the true innocence of Newland’s era?
We learned, in chapter 33, that Ellen returned a key to Newland—presumably the key to the room in which they planned to finally have sex—and so, at least, that level of “innocence” has been preserved. They never consummated their affair.
(In her original drafts, Wharton had Ellen and Newland consummate their affair. And my understanding is that in the original draft, they consummated it a few times. She had to change this for publication. All this to say: I don’t think the titular innocence was ever really about sex.)
We also learned in chapter 33 that May’s supposed innocence to Ellen’s and Newland’s emotional affair was a profound performance; May, in fact, knew what was going on the entire time and was carefully working behind the scenes to ensure Newland would not leave her to destructive gossip, embarrassment, and heartbreak. So, that “innocence” was mere artifice.
(We have hints of the performative nature of May’s innocence early on in the novel, as when Newland realizes: “all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product” that May has learned to create thanks to “a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted” (emphasis mine).
The fact that Newland does not actually want the brand of innocence “so cunningly manufactured” by these generations of women becomes both his power and his downfall: his power because he can “[smash] it like an image made of snow,” (a powerful visual metaphor given his wintery day with Ellen in the snow…) and his downfall because, not wanting May’s artifice undergirds his lasting preference for what appears to be, by contrast, Ellen’s authenticity.
In fact, in the new generation of the Archers’ children, we learn that the kind of performative innocence that May and Newland lived by so dutifully has come to an end—and is, in fact, a bit silly to the younger generation.
Dallas squarely calls out his father for having never said anything clearly to May and believing he could read her mind. Dallas says plainly what many of us pointed out over and over again, especially in early chapters:
“You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.—I say, Dad," Dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me? If you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's. I've got to rush out to Versailles afterward."
Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Dallas plainly understands what Newland himself could never be quite self-aware enough to know: that he was only ever guessing at the realities of what was happening inside another person — and inside himself. His confident, easy judgements of May, of Ellen, even of himself, were only ever guesses — resulting in “packed regrets,” “stifled memories,” and an “inarticulate lifetime.”
“Inarticulate lifetime”: what a powerful phrase. In a life, and marriage, filled with the unsaid and the unshared, filled only with vague assumptions about the self and about others, what else could someone feel but regret?
As I ruminate on the exchanges between father-and-son in chapter 34, I’m reminded of something the brilliant feminist bell hooks wrote in her book about masculinity:
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
I can’t help but wonder if this is the precise kind of violence that the novel so ritually and routinely details for us: if Newland Archer’s emotional self, and how it is violently stripped away from him, is the story of his own age of innocence.
After all, Newland’s emotional self is bandied about by others as a problem to be solved, and understood by his own self as the rough, sharp edges of his selfhood that he most wants to keep but that his marriage is dutifully sawing off.
This culture of money and marriage, of whittling down individuals into whatever version of them will best ensure the survival of their social group (which includes routine sacrifices in the name of social order) feels, to me, a bastion of patriarchal power. Even the hoarded matriarchal power of the Mingott family falls in line to uphold the Almighty Social and to uphold the values, revered by men and women, that keep their money and marriages in the topmost seats of power and in the best seats at the old opera house.
Disgraced, embarrassed, and financially ruined by her blatantly unfaithful husband, Regina Dallas Beaufort appeals to the powerful Mrs. Mingott for support — but is swiftly rebuked in the name of Patriarchy: “[Your name] was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it's got to stay Beaufort now that he's covered you with shame.”
As Beth Nguyen puts it, “In the end, it is the women who all agree, without ever saying so, to uphold the Old New York system.” This: the same system that denies them the right to divorce or to own property without a husband; this, the same system that denies them the right to vote for another fifty years. These women decide to uphold that system even as they place Newland Archer, an impressive figure of generational power, on the sacrificial altar.
But it is crucially not his reputation or his financial position or his social safety that is sacrificed—it is not his name or his social power he must sacrifice.
I’d argue, instead, that we can read The Age of Innocence as the “psychic self-mutilation” of Newland’s emotional self. That the novel brutally details the subtle but no less life-altering violence of a slow but painful emotional death that “felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.” This, the death that occurs between a noncompliant individual and his controlling Society.
Newland will not emotionally damage himself to the level it would require to remove Ellen from his life, and so the “patriarchal men” around him — Lefferts the Terrible, included — “enact rituals of power,” at dinner parties and in opera boxes and everywhere in-between to “assault his self-esteem” and remove her for him.
The brilliance of the novel is to showcase how patriarchal women also engage in, and often spearhead, these “rituals of power,” which routinely result in the ever-depleting emotional wellness of Newland, who becomes more impatient, angry, and unkind as the walls of his world close in around him. "The room is stifling,” he tells May one night, “I want a little air." She calmly tells him to close the window.
By the time we reach chapter 34, the emotional “crippling” of Newland Archer has been wholly successful.
Though he is just 57 years old, it is clear from his wearying levels of self-doubt (about his intellectual prowess, about his lack of cultural experience, even about his short political career) and also from his practiced closing of any thoughts about his desires (how he shunts all thoughts of Ellen back to thoughts of May and his dutiful, faithful life) that Newland is a man whose self-esteem and emotional self have been violently stripped away for good.
Recall, in chapter 33, the desperate moment Ellen is ushered out—or stripped away—from him, never to be seen again. The scene has to be the most critical death-blow against Newland’s ability to believe that he can have anything he wants:
"Is your carriage here?" he asked; and at that moment Mrs. van der Luyden, who was being majestically inserted into her sables, said gently: "We are driving dear Ellen home."
Archer's heart gave a jerk, and Madame Olenska, clasping her cloak and fan with one hand, held out the other to him. "Good-bye," she said.
"Good-bye—but I shall see you soon in Paris," he answered aloud—it seemed to him that he had shouted it.
"Oh," she murmured, "if you and May could come—!"
Mr. van der Luyden advanced to give her his arm, and Archer turned to Mrs. van der Luyden. For a moment, in the billowy darkness inside the big landau, he caught the dim oval of a face, eyes shining steadily—and she was gone.
Even in his own home, Newland had no power to hold onto the one thing that mattered most to him — and we learn, from his own son, that everyone including his own children, over 20 years later, knew that Ellen was the one “thing he wanted most.”
"Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't," continued his surprising son.
"I didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.
"No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said—"
"Your mother?"
"Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone—you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted."
Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
Dallas knew because May told him the thing she could never, and did never, tell Newland: that a life with Ellen was really what Newland wanted more than anything, and that May knew she forced him to give it up.
Because they lived in that hieroglyphic world of assumptions and guesses, May and Newland never really knew each other.
And while Newland is deeply moved, in that moment, to realize May had guessed right about his desire for Ellen, I can’t really imagine that is enough of a balm against the fact that she knew and still “asked” him to give it all up, when everything in him was telling him not to.
Perhaps she was acting from a place of self preservation, but the novel prompts me to ask: for what kind of self?
The truth is, as Newland says, that May never asked — she forced his hand, placing him at the head of a table ripe for his humiliation and when he tried to run away, she revealed the cruel secret she’d kept all long.
But the truth also is that Newland never asked, either.
A lifetime exhausting self-annihilation, for everyone involved.
And then we come to the present.
Even as Newland admits that Ellen configures the “the flower of life,” and the “composite vision of all that he had missed,” it also seems clear that Newlanddoesn’t have enough self to let himself go to Ellen, now that nothing — not even social convention — stands in their way.
Newland, whose emotional self has been wholly annihilated, could only ever fantasize and guess at the possibilities for his life. He was never taught to articulate whatever was most complex and contradictory inside of himself: he never learned how to speak his desires, that which is most inarticulate within all of us.
“Newland can only experience the suggestion of desire.
And he can find such suggestions only outside of the structures where he understands himself to be capable of experiencing belonging.”
—Arielle Zibrak, in this collection
And because he never learnt how to key into or follow his desires in any lasting way, and can only see glimmers of that ability shining in his own children, he struggles to speak his desires now, at 57 years old, when his options to have an artistic and cultural life in Paris, to have what and who he wants, are finally open. The cage door is unlocked, but Newland does not know how to fly.
I believe this is the true heartbreak of the novel; I believe this is why I cannot read chapter 34 without sobbing through almost every paragraph.
And: of course, of course, we can read into his continued desire to cling to his fantasies of Ellen over the realities of being with her as a kind of personal failure or embarrassing shortcoming; of course, of course, it is fair to be upset or frustrated or annoyed by his inability to make a choice. Of course, of course, you may have rolled your eyes or cried a little or felt something inside of you rear up in wild reaction when Newland insists he cannot go upstairs to Ellen because he is old fashioned.
In fact, I think all of this is the point.
The cage door is unlocked,
but Newland does not know how to fly.
Newland, as one scholar puts it, finally submits to “acquiescence to a stultifying existence.”1 Newland never learned how to bring inarticulate desire into reality for himself; any time he tried, he was ritually flogged. Newland was never in a safe enough position to make a clear choice toward what he wanted without those same annihilating consequences for others.
Newland never had a chance to become anything other than old fashioned.
We’re supposed to be angry and sad and frustrated and perhaps even heart-broken-to-bits that Newland has been fashioned by the old entrenched powers of a society that wanted nothing to do with, and had no use for, his emotional reality. He has been fashioned into that stifling, ill-fitted mould, in which the parts he loved best in himself were routinely rubbed off, leaving him to fit into a space he perhaps never wanted to occupy.
“Maybe we all have an age of innocence, which is to say an age of dissonance, though we don’t know it until we get beyond it and recognize, with astonishment, how much time has gone by.” — Beth Nguyen
Newland is, indeed, old fashioned.
Perhaps, though, we’re not meant to be angry with him for this, but instead with what led him to such an existence: that ritual annihilation of whatever in him was curious, passionate, and confused.
Perhaps the age of innocence was never about May’s naivety or the threat of sexual consummation in an all-encompassing love affair. Perhaps the age of innocence was always about Newland Archer’s emotional self — and the way it was violently ripped from him over and over again, precisely because he so desperately clung to it.
“Change was change, and differences were differences.”
This line, from chapter 34, echoes an earlier line of dear old Granny Mingott’s (a woman who is strangely typified, by Newland in chapter 34, as having had a glinting “malice” in her eyes — a quiet, tiny observation about her that is completely rearranging my reading of her, but I digress…).
Here’s Granny Mingott’s line, which she shares with Newland as she reveals her plot to keep Ellen safe in New York:
“After all, marriage is marriage, and money's money—both useful things in their way ... and I didn't know what to answer—" She broke off and drew a long breath, as if speaking had become an effort. "But the minute I laid eyes on her, I said: 'You sweet bird, you! Shut you up in that cage again? Never!' And now it's settled that she's to stay here and nurse her Granny as long as there's a Granny to nurse. It's not a gay prospect, but she doesn't mind; and of course I've told Letterblair that she's to be given her proper allowance."
If we were to closely read these lines, I think we’d do well to sit with the larger context of Granny’s statement: that these two social institutions of money and marriage are “both useful things in their way,” and yet are also both cages in which “sweet birds” can be so painfully and unfairly trapped.
Granny’s line of thinking here makes me have a few questions:
Does Granny really believe she’s setting Ellen free by keeping her in New York as her caretaker?
Does Granny think she’s helping Newland, somehow, by locking Ellen into this society that so obviously loathes her presence?
How does Granny define “freedom,” as a powerful matriarch of a well-regarded, if often judged, Old New York family?
How do we see that definition of “freedom” problematized by Ellen? by Newland? by what actually ends up happening in the end?
It feels so striking to me—and so brilliant, in the realm of craft—that Wharton draws such a subtle parallel between these lines. Each follows the pattern of a dictum or motto — a kind of punchy “truth” that is less about actual truth than it is about revealing the beliefs of those who say it. (As in the saying: “boys will be boys.”)
What’s more: each line is shared by a speaker—Granny or Newland—who often problematizes social truth, or shows the grey areas invoked and ignored by the black-and-white thinking of such phrases as these.
Each speaker also invokes a social dictum only to position themselves against it:
Granny knows the power of money and marriage, but she also knows that money and marriage cause as many problems and pains as society purports that they solve.
Likewise, Newland says “change is change and differences were differences,” in the exact moment that he longs for more sameness and routine with Dallas, who is about to marry and start his own independent life.
For me, this is a super subtle line that reveals so much about the connection between language and truth, and subjectivity and society — and reveals so much about how Newland’s once dramatic and frightening stance toward the dictums of the social has softened across a long 26 years in which he has realized that all of the terrifying and rigid lines that defined his life have been mostly erased by the passage of time, relaxed by a new generation who break so many of the rules that governed his own life and happiness.
My favorite lines (or, the ones that make me weep)
I mentioned last week that there are three lines that make my breath catch in my chest and fill me up with tears each time I read the final chapter. Here they are, in all their heart-grippingly magical glory:
“He supposed it was all a man ought to ask.”
“Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”
“He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony.”
All of these lines, for me, point at the heartbreaking fact of Newland Archer’s embattled masculinity, or rather, his suffocated dreams and desires in the name of being “a good citizen.”
If I were going to ever teach this final chapter in a literature course, I might ask my students to conjure other, related imagery of men like Newland Archer. I’d be very tempted to share a deeply emotional moment from one of my favorite films (which is also a story about how patriarchy hurts men as much as it hurts women): Mary Poppins.
“A man has dreams,” the Banks’ family patriarch speaks, solemnly, “of walking with giants, to carve his niche in the edifice of time.” His voice softens into song: “Before the mortar of his zeal has a chance to congeal…” his voice picks up in tenor, emphasizing the damage done: “the cup is dashed from his lips! The flame is snuffed a’borning! He’s brought to wrack and ruin in his prime.”
I think of Newland Archer. I think of the cup of his desire—the flames of his passion—snuffed out (What he had missed: the flower of life) as he reflects on a small and dutiful life lived well-within the bounds by which it was forcefully defined:
“He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship to be his strength and pride.
He had been, in short, what people were beginning to call "a good citizen.””
Mister Banks continues his wistful song: “My world was calm, well-ordered. Exemplary. Then came this person with chaos in her wake. And now my life’s ambitions go with one fell blow. It’s quite a bitter pill to take.”
Mister Banks grapples with the demands of Edwardian masculinity in the Great Britain where he must display a ceaseless adherence to laws and codes of order, calm, and respectability. Across the pond, under the evolving definitions of manhood put forth by Teddy Roosevelt — that soldier-cowboy high on his horse — Newland Archer’s emotional self perhaps never had a chance.
“Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself were what his country needed, at least in the active service to which Theodore Roosevelt had pointed.”
Both men grapple with the exhausting demands placed on them by faceless powers, enacted by the men in suits at the bank or the men in stylish evening jackets at the opera; both men have their worlds thrown into chaos by women who—for whatever mysterious reason—do not accept their exhaustion as a badge of honor.
And well, Ellen Olenska is no Mary Poppins — but I’m struck by the power both women have to bring “chaos” into the well-ordered Social Worlds of marriage and money, and to fly into an established system and bluntly question the status quo. Both women, for better or worse, help these men see that their exhaustion is not a bug but a feature of the system, that their freedom is the price for their calm.
In the end, Mister Banks flies a kite and reunites with his long-neglected children (and his dallying wife, with her suffragette parades, can stop all that activism now that she has a doting husband again!).
Newland’s end is not so different—he also has a wife and children, with whom he safely travels the right parts of the world at the right time, in just the right way. He, in fact, becomes an arbiter of the exemplary life: “Ask Archer,” his society learns to come to him, just as May did, because he’ll always put the Social above Himself.
For this reason, his life is “calm, well-ordered, exemplary,” no longer disturbed at all by the “chaos” of a woman from a faraway land who brings color and energy to an otherwise well-controlled little life. It’s a lovely life, Newland reflects at the end of the novel. Quiet. Safe. Admirable, even.
And all it cost was his self.
For you:
This week, I can finally give you *all* the wonderful links to essays and articles and videos about the novel because you know the ending. Spoilers abound throughout these pieces.
Additional readings
First of all: David, who read the novel with us and writes the fantastic Substack Sparks from Culture wrote this gorgeous essay about (un)fulfillment and Newland Archer after finishing the novel last week.
Here are links from around the web — I highly recommend bookmarking all of them!
The Age of Awesome by Ta-Nehisi Coates // How Edith Wharton lost her innocence from NPR // “The Age of Innocence” at a Moment of Increased Appetite for Eating the Rich from The New Yorker // Wharton’s journey in writing The Age of Innocence from The Mount // The history of the opening scene of the novel from The Mount // A video lecture, detailing the research on The Age of Innocence (I actually attended this lecture virtually back in 2020!) // Author Elif Batuman on The Age of The Age of Innocence from The NYT // The Edith Wharton collection at the Beinecke at Yale University (my dream research trip; someday, someday—you can find the original handwritten manuscript) // What do we do with The Age of Innocence in 2020? by Sarah Blackwood //
Books on Wharton & her world
Dying to read more Edith or to learn about her life? You can shop my Edith Wharton book list on bookshop.org to find a collection of novels and nonfiction by Wharton, popular and academic criticism, and related authors. (Books you purchase on my booklist send me a portion of the sale, and every purchase supports small indie bookstores!)
Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to show your support and help fund my energy and time for another read-a-long this fall!
Thank you, thank you
When I started our first read-a-long earlier this year, I thought maybe 1 or 2 interested folks might check out the guides. Maybe another 1 or 2 might hit the “Like” button.
Imagine my thrill and surprise to find this brilliant community of willing and engaged readers who come, every week, with electric insights and passionate defenses and clear-eyed commentary and analyses of everything from the color of Ellen’s roses to the generational trauma of unhappy marriage.
Just like I did during The House of Mirth read-a-long, I learned so much from you all and from our slow, meticulous reading of each chapter of The Age of Innocence.
Ah, good conversation. Monsieur Rivière is right. There’s nothing like it, is there?
’Til next time, happy reading! 📚
Carol J. Singley in “Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence,” and American Individualism.” The essay can be found in this collection.
David Tomlinson was robbed when the Oscar nominations came around for "Mary Poppins". He deserved at least a nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
I love this analysis of the end! I know I’ll be returning to it again to sink deeper into your reading of the last chapters, but on first reading - the idea of Newland’s psychic self-mutilation rings so true and helps me understand the great, amorphous heaviness I feel at the novel’s close. I think of the line in chapter 32 of 33 about people who valued decency over courage - Society’s rules over the courage of living an articulate and authentic life.
I’ve been juggling a few too many projects this summer so I haven’t always been able to sit down and write my reading responses in a form to share here - but I love reading everyone’s commentary and seeing how my thinking evolves in response to so many ideas and reflections. Thanks, Haley - this reading group is such an exquisite pleasure.