Welcome back to our very slow read-a-long of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. (Is this drawn out pace excruciating? Perhaps now you know how Newland feels!!)
In this week’s chapters, Newland springs to Ellen’s defense a few too many times — making himself conspicuous as he weaves false stories and grows more desperate for her time and attention. He’s in the throes of excruciating desire and ceaseless adoration for the woman he did not marry and, well, he’s not handling it super great.
So let’s talk about it.
A brief summary
Here’s a breakdown of what happens in these chapters, with any new characters we meet in bold.
Chapter 25
After his romantic, secret day with Ellen, Newland feels he is in “a state of abstraction” back in New York.
Newland runs into M. Rivière again.
Rivière tells Newland he’s been sent to Boston to bring the Countess back to her husband but, based on what he knows of the Count, he cannot bring himself to make her to leave.
Rivière essentially confirms Newland’s fears: that the Count has nothing but pain to offer Ellen and she is right to resist his attempts to win her back.
Chapter 26
The summer is over and we enter the opera season of late fall and early winter.
In November, Archer attends his mother’s Thanksgiving dinner — where the party’s conversation veers from critiquing the Reverend’s sermon to the fashions at the opera house that fall, and finally to judgmental talk of those Bohemian families, like the Struthers and the Blenkers, who have embraced Ellen’s presence.
We learn that Ellen has distanced herself even more from the upper echelons of society, embracing a quieter and less visible life among the lower tiers of “people who write” and artists.
We also discover some scandalous news about Beaufort: he’s made bad investments and is causing a major bank shutdown, which affects multiple Old New York families. (If there’s something other than being an estranged wife that’ll get you exiled from New York, this is it.)
Newland leaps to Ellen’s defense after it’s heavily implied that a broke Beaufort will leave her destitute and then impulsively tells May he has to go to Washington on business.
May tells Newland to “be sure to go and see Ellen” with a “cloudless smile” that implies she knows exactly why he’s going to Washington.
May and Newland have a true standoff, in which Newland presumes to read her mind — that she knows he’s going to see Ellen and she wants him to know that she knows he’s not going for work.
Then, May utters the most scathing double-meaning we’ve seen thus far, as she mends Archer’s stinking gas lamp: “They smell less if one blows them out.”
Yeah: she’s basically saying that if he’d just snuff out this obsession with Ellen, the tension and gossip increasingly building around his attention to Ellen would “stink” less and stop being a bother to their marriage.
“They had simply, as Mrs. Welland said, ‘let poor Ellen find her own level’ — and that, mortifyingly and incomprehensibly, was in the dim where the Blenkers prevailed…”
Chapter 27
Archer goes to work and readies himself for a long week in Washington.
At the office, he receives a letter that Granny Mingott has had a stroke.
Ellen has been called to town by Granny, and so Newland decides to cancel his trip.
“It did not hurt him half as much to tell May an untruth as to see her trying to pretend that she had not detected him.”
Chapter 28
Beaufort’s failure — narrowly avoided for one weekend at the opera — finally hits the papers. It’s an economic crisis, brought about by the outsized power of a single businessman, and Old New York is not happy about the power imbalance.
Newland volunteers to escort Ellen from the train station and May catches him in his intricate web of lies about the court cases and the work trip.
Wriggling under the pressure, Newland resorts to cruel sarcasm and intense eye contact. Classic.
Newland brushes it off and gets excited about two whole hours in a dark carriage with Ellen…
What strikes me this week
All those deep gazes between May and Newland drove me wild this week. If Newland has been longing for someone — a lover, a woman — to see through all his social personas and masks, he is married to the woman who sees him clearer than anyone else. And he hates her for it.
In fact, with both of the women in his life — May and Ellen — Newland traverses this complicated space of things unsaid and gazes unbearable.
With May, there are those telegraphic moments where Newland believes he can understand exactly what May is thinking and believing without any words being exchanged.
With Ellen, there are likewise long, lingering gazes in which Newland believes he can feel what Ellen is feeling, and understand her depth of love for him, without hardly any words being shared.
And what strikes me this week is that I’m not sure Newland is wrong in these moments. At least, not every time.
Part of this has to do with the depth of the social training he’s undergone: he really can assume, many times, that he knows what someone is thinking or feeling or how they’re reacting because feelings and thoughts are profoundly disciplined by this rigid society. He’s been trained, like others in his ilk, to only feel and think certain things — and to disdain thoughts and feelings that don’t fit predetermined categories.
And, this week, I was starting to think that part of this also has to do with emotional connection — and the “depths of feeling” that run like live wires between Newland, May, and Ellen. Newland can feel May’s frustration and judgments in her simplest statements; he experiences Ellen’s passion even as she keeps him at a distance. My reading of Newland is that he’s not inventing this emotional terrain, but is sensitive to it. Newland, with his artistic sensibilities and his desires for a more Bohemian and passionate life, perhaps springs from an inner sensitivity or capacity for feeling nuanced, difficult, and strange feelings.
And as we know, the nuanced, difficult, and strange are Enemy Number 1 to his society: a tribalist party that punishes and exiles anything that falls outside the “norms” defined by its unstated but rigidly coded laws.
A reader’s question
“I've looked but can't seem to find any detail of what is in the Count's one letter to Ellen that so enrages Newland. Is there subtext here that I'm not seeing?”
Excellent question — and the answer is: yes, and no.
No: the novel never details the contents of the letter. It does not quote the letter or offer any explicit details.
But, we do get Newland’s (strong!) reaction to the letter, as well as Ellen’s dismissive comments about its apparent threats.
Yes: Newland’s reaction to the letter suggests there is something in it that accuses Ellen of having been unfaithful, just as Ellen accuses her husband of being unfaithful (among other things).
This is one of the many reasons Newland is enlisted to talk Ellen out of divorcing: the Count seems to threaten, in the letter, that he’ll make public accusations (true or false) against Ellen, if she attempts to divorce him.
The subtext here is that the Old New York society doesn’t actually care if what the Count says is true or not — they simply want to avoid a long, drawn-out scandal that brings shame to the Mingott family. (And, as you can imagine, a woman’s word against a man’s word, especially a powerful Count, wouldn’t amount to much, unfortunately. Still doesn’t.)
So, when you’re wondering “what enrages Newland” about the letter, there are quite a few factors contributing to his strong reaction:
If the Count’s accusations of Ellen’s infidelity are true, Newland is probably feeling judgmental (and maybe a little bit jealous) about it — after all, we know Newland was pretty interested in Ellen’s relationship to the emissary in Boston
If the Count’s accusations of Ellen’s infidelity are false, Newland is probably feeling defensive and protective of Ellen’s (and the Mingott family) reputation
If the Count is making more general threats against Ellen, and the wider Mingott family, Newland is probably feeling some anger on behalf of his new family and Ellen
Another reader’s observation
This observation comes from Shruti of The Novel Tea newsletter:
“After The House of Mirth read-along, I picked up The Custom of the Country, and I noticed that Wharton frequently includes subplots (and sometimes major plot lines) about the economy, characters’ finances, and the stock market — and more often than not, things go very poorly. I haven’t yet started The Age of Innocence (I’m behind!) but I’m really interested in learning more about the economic aspects of the book and the financial context for her novels!”
This is a fantastic observation: economics are certainly an enormous topic in Wharton’s novels. (Especially in Innocence this week, with Julius Beaufort’s downfall!) If you want to learn more about money and economics in Wharton, here are a few links to get you started:
The Economics of Marriage in the Novels of Edith Wharton (paywalled)
Old Story, New Money (a critique of HBO’s Gilded Age by Wharton scholar Sheila Liming)
The opening of chapter 25
Last week, I quoted the intro to chapter 25 at length because I think there’s something rather interesting going on in it — a kind of microcosmic summary of Newland’s tensions and emotional state that we’ve observed in the novel thus far. I’m going back to our sentence annotation activity from Week 1 to dig in.
As a reminder, here are the themes we were tracking back in Week 1 (with “emotions” in grey added to the list):
Now, if you’re going to do this annotation activity yourself, you can change the themes to whatever you want them to be to help you closely read the passage. Note that I’m using the ones we’ve used previously to help show the longevity of tracking similar themes throughout the novel. (And imagine how differently I’d annotate the passage if I were highlighting words about “selfhood” and “performances,” for example.)
At a glance, the passage is overwhelmingly purple and grey — the colors I’m using to annotate moments of passion and emotion. There are also steady pulses of time and capital-S Society, those twinned forces keeping Newland so far from Ellen and against which Newland’s soul rages in these chapters.
Using color to code our close readings can help us track the prevalence of themes, and help us key-in on those highly quotable moments that become evidence toward the arguments or observations we want to make about a story.
For you:
Up next:
For next Wednesday, read chapters 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33 (Full schedule here)
If you can resist, wait to read the final chapter until our final week!!!!!!!
If you cannot wait, I completely understand. But bite your tongue in the comments, k?
Ask your questions about the novel here and I’ll answer them!
Use this Google Docs notes outline to help you take notes each week
Let’s get into the comments
I end the audio guide this week with a question, which I’d love to throw into our comment thread for anyone who wants to play with it: How is Beaufort’s failure in the financial sphere a parallel to other “failures” we’ve seen in the text? Beaufort’s bad investments are a foil for something else that’s happening in the novel. I’d love to know what you think that foil could be.
Happy reading! 📚
Thanks for including the annotated sentence. I learned something new when you used the annotation to unearth the pattern in the passage - overwhelming passion and emotion interrupted by the forces of "time and capital-S Society". Ha! there's the cover blurb.
These chapters really moved the story along. Newland learns he's been a lot more transparent about his inner "sanctuary" than he thought as he realizes the family has left him out of the loop in discussions about Ellen. Even though Newland and Ellen have deferred their desires, they are not completely innocent. In today's terminology, they've been carrying on an emotional affair. I like how Wharton keeps using Lawrence Lefferts as a guidepost for Newland's conscience. Newland doesn't like Lefferts's behavior, but when he starts creating a web of lies to cover his planned trip to DC he finds himself "furnishing details with all of Lawrence Lefferts's practiced glibness". Now that Newland knows that May (and probably everyone else) is fully aware of his feelings about Ellen, Lefferts gets an almost irrational rise out of him with insinuating comments about her. Even so Newland is super excited about his errand to meet Ellen and the prospect of time alone together. This meeting surely has to be the inflection point that is going to determine how the rest of the story will play out. Because it's Wharton, I anticipate something a lot more complex than for the two of them to flout society and run off together.
In terms of bank failures, it's important to realize that there was no FDIC and no SEC and no Federal Reserve.
Basically, banks attracted deposits based on reputation. A bank makes money by taking in deposits and investing the deposits at a higher rate than they pay out on the deposits. So for every $100 of deposits, a bank might keep $10 in reserve and invest the other $90.
Once rumors start flying about whether a bank's investments, in this case the $90, was "shaky," depositors will rush to withdraw their money. If too many depositors ask fro their money back and the bank can't sell its $90 of "shaky " investments the depositors will lose money.
You can imagine Beaufort taking big risks with the $90 hoping to make a fortune but failing. Basically he's mostly gambling with his depositors' (his social set's) money.