The Age of Innocence: Chapters 22-24
"I'm the man who married one woman because another one told him to."
Welcome to another week of our slow read of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
In this week’s chapters, Ellen and Newland are back together again for a long, quiet day in Boston where they can finally talk — and boy, do they have some real talk. Finally!
Unfortunately, I have no audio guide for you on these chapters, but I do have the written guide — and I’m putting it out a day early.
So let’s dive in!
A brief summary
Here’s a quick breakdown of what happens in the first chapter, with the characters we meet this week in bold.
Chapter 22
Emerson Sillerton — “a thorn in the side of Newport society” — throws a party for the Blenkers
This party represents an awkward social obligation, and so May agrees to go for a drive with her dad that day, so he can miss the party; Mrs. Welland says she’ll stop by to represent the family
In the midst of this social planning, Newland offers no clear answers or support — and his lack of planning is obvious to everyone except him
Newland busies himself with a visit to see a second horse for their carriage, and while on the property to see the horse, he sees a pink parasol and believes it must be Ellen’s
He smells the parasol as he fantasies about her. Oh, Newland.
The parasol is not Ellen’s — it belongs to a young Blenker girl instead, who lets him know that Ellen was called away to Boston
Chapter 23
Archer goes to Boston and finds Ellen, who has come to town all by herself (she didn’t even bring her maid, Nastasia!)
Ellen explains the details of her estranged husband’s offer to her — that she return to him and sit at his table (and, essentially, go back to life-as-usual)
Ellen explains that she is thinking things over and her husband’s emissary is planning to speak with her later that day
So, naturally, Newland convinces her to leave and spend the day with him instead
Ellen tells Newland she knew he was on the dock that day, and intentionally worked to get as far from him as possible — and was surprised when he didn’t come get her
Ellen won’t leave until she’s given a note to the hotel for the emissary, and Newland gives her his newfangled pen to write the note with (This is a neat touch: a portable pen, rather than ink and quill, was quite an invention in this time period!)
“Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation.”
Chapter 24
Over lunch, Newland asks Ellen the exact question May asked Archer: Why hasn’t Ellen gone back to her husband, if she has decided she dislikes New York society so much?
Expecting a fight, Newland is shocked as Ellen takes seriously his question and tells him that he is the reason she doesn’t want to return
They spar and, as usual, I found myself totally caught up in their dialogue as Wharton weaves their intentions and motivations and secrets and assumptions throughout their veiled dialogue
Archer realizes Ellen has loved and longed for him as much as he has for her, and the tone of their conversation changes completely
Ellen tells Newland she’ll stay in America as long as they can stay in each other’s lives, but at a great and intentional distance
As they part, she tells Newland not to be unhappy and he makes sure she’s going to stay
“You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one.”
What strikes me this week
It is so clear, in Boston, as Newland and Ellen have lunch together, that Ellen has been having as hard a time as Newland has been — if not a lot harder, and a lot more lonely.
We learn that she has ached for Newland, even as she has wanted to respect his choice to marry May — and even after he blames her for his unhappiness by suggesting that it is all because of her that he married May at all.
These two have such a complicated and strange relationship and yet, especially in chapter 24, it felt totally believable to me. I wanted to close read one part, in particular, for the deep sense of reality and emotional truth it conveyed for me:
“His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone. But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. 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.”
I love this.
Closely reading it, I’m really struck by the way their emotional connection — even agonizing for both of them — seems to ease their loneliness, or the feeling that they’re odd for feeling the constrictions, or chains, of the destinies imparted onto them by capital-s Society.
Newland’s “one terror” is to do, or perhaps even say, anything that could make Ellen’s words insignificant — he wants to hold onto the meaning, onto how important they are to him.
And then, in the next moment, he feels “the sense of waste and ruin.” Just as meaning, or a new story, with Ellen starts to build, it is collapsed by reality: the fact that, even in this stolen afternoon together, they have “separate destinies” that will forever keep them apart.
With Ellen, Newland feels close and far, safe in being close to her, but far away from her in the real world where they cannot truly be together.
This is a tantalizing and exhausting tug of war, and yet, as I read and reread their conversation, rendered in the beautiful emotional realism of Wharton’s prose, I felt that I understood why they’re both so willing to engage with this impossible wish they have to be together and why, at least for Ellen, it can never come true.
(For their impossible wishes to come true, too much would be ruined and lost. This is a price neither is willing to pay. And so, in limbo they decide to stay.)
A reader’s question
“Could you elaborate on the archetype (if that’s what you might call it) of the dilettante and it’s positive or negative connotations for Wharton’s era?”
Yes I can!
Now: I am no expert on this particular type, but I can get us started down the road here.
My basic understanding of a dilettante in Wharton’s time is that of an individual who is high-class enough to have what was a precious commodity during this time period of nonstop work, unhinged (basically non-existent) labor laws, and overall Industrial Revolution: leisure time.
Rather than having to work for his financial stability and family security, Newland Archer is a lawyer for fun. He practices the law professionally, but not as a professional. He’s highly learned and he spends a great deal of time devoted to studying the law (as well as, we know, art and literature).
But he does so out of passion and love for these arts or professions, rather than out of a pure necessity or dire need to embrace them as a way to make money.
So: some twinned tensions here:
Doing a thing out of passion/interest/curiosity vs. Doing a thing for money/stability/safety
Doing something because you want to vs. Doing something because you have to
Having enough money and class position to have free time and hobbies vs. Not having money or a stable class position, and therefore using all time for work/making money
Notice how all of these tensions pit personal desire against social compulsion — the individual against the collective.
I had an inkling that the connotation of the word was not necessarily negative in Wharton’s time, but I knew that it did carry some baggage.
After all, Newland is high-class enough to not need to worry about how not being a “real” lawyer will impact his status; and the fact that he’s intelligent and has a high work ethic would’ve likely been admired by family and friends.
(Recall Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth who seems to sit on a must cusp-ier part of this line: Selden has to work, but he’s still high class enough to be considered a society man, rather than a professional. Newland does not have to work, though chooses to, and is certainly viewed as a society man and not a professional.)
But as I dug into this (because damn, what an amazing question with lots to explore!), I started to have new questions:
How is a dilettante like a flaneur? (another “type” of person from this time period, one who primarily enjoyed walking around cities to observe people and society during working hours — a profound level of leisure)
How have connotations of dilettantism changed over time? (we don’t seem to have the same cultural respect for those who “dabble” these days, do we? And many of the wealthiest people on earth are known for, and revered for being workaholics…)
When does the idea of dabbling start to equate with laziness?
How do American ideologies of labor and work meet up with the idea of dilettantism? I have a feeling early American ideologies — born out of Calvinist and Protestant work ethics — would’ve reallyyyyy hated the idea of a man who doesn’t work for what he has, so when does this figure emerge historically, especially in Western civilization?
To find out more, I googled “scholarly books on dilettante” and eventually found my way to a few books that look VERY fun on the topic, and this particular one looks fantastic: Richard Hibbitt’s Dilettantism and Its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the fin de siècle
I found a short preview of an academic review of the book here, which reads:
Dilettantism – tantamount to laziness, often described as amateurish and widely considered a negative, if not irresponsible attitude – is newly defined in Richard Hibbitt's wide-ranging study. He offers a fresh approach and invites the reader to reconsider the concept, studying how it has been theorised and practised in both France and Germany from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. The book illustrates how the idea emerges and progresses, exploring its importance to French and German writers, namely Gautier, Baudelaire, Bourget, Schiller, Mann and, above all, Goethe. The word's etymology suggests that the “dilettanti” was an amateur actor “who caused delight” in medieval Italy with his sense of improvisation (Chapter one). In Germany, the term appears in a comic poem in the 1760s, but it is Goethe and Schiller, with their “dilettantism project”, who define it as a key to art as well as a form of artistic apprenticeship (Chapter two). Viewed, according to Weimar Classicism, as a failure or a forger (Chapter three), the dilettante will become an aesthete for Baudelaire, or a sceptic for Bourget (Chapter four). At the fin-de-siècle, he has become a kind of passive cosmopolitan, a perfect personification of the mood of that epoch (Chapter five). This study explores, with great erudition, the hitherto unknown faces of the dilettante, revealing an intriguing complexity. Hibbitt succeeds in showing how this “empty figure” can, thanks to his openness, mirror the concerns of different times and cultures.
Here’s what I glean from this:
For a long time, we all thought dilettantism meant, in so many words, a lazy person who dabbles in things (from professions to arts)
But actually, Hibbitt will argue, throughout different time periods and cultural moments, a dilettante has meant many things and held interesting connotations that tell us quite a bit about particular social moments in history!
The most relevant connection for our Newland Archer is likely the definitions it sounds like Hibbitt covers in his chapters 4 and 5: the dilettante as a skeptic and a critic, a kind of wandering but purposeful personality that observes his own cultural world with an aloofness or intentional distance.
I want to read this book! And do a whole side project on dilettantism now!
Finally: I’m resonating with this term “empty figure” (from the last sentence of the review, and since it’s in quotes, it likely means it’s Hibbitt’s term for the dilettante). I’m resonating because I think of all the ways Newland fears emptiness: the shallowness of social meetings, the thoughts inside May’s head. How is a dilettante — a kind of “empty” seeming figure — in this novel a man obsessed with depth?
Thank you for such a fun research question! While I’m not sure we have a super definitive answer here, I hope this is food for thought you can snack on as you continue reading.
Starting chapter 25
“Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him.
The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska's hand with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of farther opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over, and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt her. Even after they had clasped hands for good-bye at the Fall River station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed.”
As we embark on this final stretch of the novel, I’d invite you to closely read this passage: which gives us (I think) the blossoms of the many roots planted in Book 1. If we’ve been doing the work to track themes — like oppositions, deep emotions, sacrifice, and performance — then we see here how those themes are starting to take deeper root, by branching out into new pathways, as well as bear fruit by showing us the kind of “result” of all we felt building in Book 1.
Another way of putting this might be to say that, like the many flowers we’re tracking in this novel, this scene blossoms.
For you:
Up next:
For next Wednesday, read chapters 25, 26, 27, and 28 (Full schedule here)
Ask your questions about the novel here and I’ll answer them in an upcoming reading guide
Use this Google Docs notes outline to help you take notes each week
‘Til next time, happy reading! 📚
Haley, I really love your deep dive into the various meanings if dilettante - and I think you’re on to something with dilettante/flaneur as a kind of empty screen that’s filled by the leisure to observe the world as well as conjure your own inner world, as Newland does. Even if dilettante didn’t have the “lazy” connotation in Wharton’s time, I suspect she used it deliberately and understood its “baggage.” She was very tuned in to the constraints of both Puritanism and the Protestant work ethic.
Much more to say about this, but mostly I’ll just note that the Boston section of the book has always been most memorable to me - including the streamy summer heat (in the movie the detail of them escaping on a ferry into the harbor is dropped, but that’s part of what anchors their conversation in lived reality).
In the passage you highlight toward the end, I’m struck by Newland’s observation that “the danger had passed” - so interesting! Defining them succumbing to their physical passion as a “danger” tells me a lot about how much he’s exalted his own fantasy. And I wonder how much he’s aware of the way he’s boxed himself in.
Newland is clearly obsessed: : “…he had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure…”. The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving…” But it is not until these chapters that I see Ellen express her true feelings for him: "You too -oh, all this time, you too?:" But I still don't know or understand May and why Ellen cares so much for her. "Is it a bad business - for May?...if it's not worth while to have given up , to have missed things, so that others may be saved from disillusionment and misery,...if all these things are a sham or a dream..." Clearly Ellen has been through major trauma. I'm not certain her "wistful tenderness" is truly for her cousin or for her own lost innocence that she believes May still possesses. Wharton manages to capture in a few scenes of limited dialog the swirling complications of these two human's emotions. Is her point that innocence is not knowing/feeling these intense feelings and the consequent pain of choosing not to act on them because of the impact on others? May, Mrs. Welland, Mrs. Archer, even Janey to some extent can move blithely through life seemingly untouched by any dissonance because they choose not to see or accept any messy feelings.