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Welcome to our second-to-last week of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. If you’ve saved the final chapter for next week, I applaud you! If you found yourself wholly unable to wait, I completely understand.
Please be mindful in your comments this week to not spoil the final chapter for any readers who are waiting to read it in the timeline of the read-a-long!
As we wend our way to the end of the novel, I am so eager to hear what your reactions were to the carriage ride, the ritual exiling of Ellen Olenska, and May’s midnight revelation in the library!
In the first of this week’s chapters, Newland and Ellen happen to each other all over again, in one of the most heart-wrenching carriage rides of all time. Newland confesses his belief that their life together is a plain certainty in his mind — while Ellen encourages him to look “not at visions, but realities.”
And oh, how the heavy doors of reality slam shut on him.
Let’s get into it.
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 29
Newland fetches Ellen from the station in May’s brougham (or enclosed horse-drawn carriage — May’s carriage is, of course, very nice and comfortable, as well as very private.)
Newland confesses that he starts to forget Ellen until he sees her again, and each time they meet is like the first time they met (Is this the most romantic moment in a novel, ever?)
Ellen, however, meets his dreamy projections and wistful thinking with strong reservations — encouraging Newland to admit the reality of their situation, rather than perpetuate false hopes.
This hurts Newland’s feelings so deeply that he cries and gets out of the carriage early.
“Oh my dear — where is that country? Have you ever been there?”
Chapter 30
Back at home from the stimulating carriage ride, Newland sits alone in the drawing room, before dinner. He’s ruminating again and wonders if May is as bored as he is.
May arrives home and asks why he didn’t come to Granny’s with Ellen and once again, Newland is caught in a lie and a web of miscommunication with May.
After an awkward dinner, the couple head to Newland’s study where Newland decides not to read poetry because May’s interpretations always ruin it for him. She (clumsily) embroiders instead.
Newland literally imagines May dying and how it’d be sad, but awesome, because it’d set him free. (Ugh. This part is so sad.)
Newland visits Granny Mingott alone and she heavily implies that she wanted Newland to end up with Ellen. She tells Newland she has decided to keep Ellen safe and make it possible for her to refuse her husband by staying in New York and living with Granny Mingott.
Granny enlists Newland, once again, to help turn the family toward Ellen and support Granny’s decision to invite her to stay.
“You sweet bird, you! Shut you up in that cage again? Never!”
Chapter 31
Newland grapples with Ellen’s decision to move-in with Granny Mingott and how, even though she’ll be closer than ever, he’ll likely have even less time with her under Society’s watchful eyes.
He’s lost in thought, wandering the streets, and catches Ellen on her way out of Regina Beaufort’s house, surprising her.
He asks her to meet him somewhere private. The only place they can think of is the Metropolitan Museum (lol: the insinuation being that no one in their society would ever visit a museum).
At the museum, unable to find any satisfactory way to be together, Ellen plainly asks Newland if she should visit him just once (for sex, finally) and then go back to Europe.
Newland can’t bear the thought of losing her but tells her to come to him in two days, anyway.
Ellen leaves the museum with a “radiant” expression.
May comes home late and says she spent the evening having a “long conversation” with Ellen and feels bad about her judgmental treatment of her over the past year.
“His mind, as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other.”
Chapter 32
The van der Luydens, “reluctant and heroic,” host a somewhat impromptu dinner before going to the Faust opera. They’ve invited their little clique to discuss the Beaufort problem.
The group begins discussing Ellen’s shockingly visible visits to Regina Beaufort—and why she won’t just buck up and follow the rules.
At the opera, Newland surveys the scene with new perspective, thinking back on the night two years prior when he saw Ellen for the first time (from way back in chapter 1!)
Newland looks at May and notices she’s wearing her wedding dress (a custom for women at this time) and remembers how she almost set him free before their engagement was moved up.
He fakes a headache and asks her to come home with him so he can tell her he wants to leave her to be with Ellen.
May rips her wedding dress on their way into the house (damn, that’s some symbolism) and seems impatient with Newland as he fumbles to his point.
Just as he musters the final courage to tell her, May interrupts and says “it’s all over now,” referring to Ellen’s plan — unknown to Newland but known to literally everyone else in their circle — to move permanently to Paris and to live independently there.
Newland is shocked. (As are readers, I think. Were you shocked?)
“Wherever she went, he was going.”
Chapter 33
The Newland-Archers host their first ever dinner party as a married couple — and it’s the Farewell Dinner for Ellen Olenska. Ouch.
Newland hasn’t heard from Ellen at all over an excruciating two weeks, other than the envelope she sent him in which she returned a key—presumably the key to a private hotel room. {When did he send her a key!? This is one of the key (pun intended!!) mysteries of the novel that reminds us we don’t know every move Newland makes.}
Throughout the dinner, Newland realizes everyone assumes he and Ellen are already passionately involved lovers, and despises how readily he can read pretense and formality in their every gesture: they’re nothing to him but “a band of dumb conspirators.”
Ellen is rushed out for a ride home with the van der Luydens at the evening’s end, leaving Newland no time to give her a proper goodbye.
After everyone has gone home, Newland begins to tell May that he needs a break from everything and that he’s planning to do some lengthy travel, perhaps to India or Japan. (He intends to follow Ellen to Paris and leave May behind.)
May tells Newland he won’t be able to travel, because she is pregnant — and she told their mothers, as well as Ellen, long before telling him.
Newland snaps into the same hysterical, haunted laughter as the night he realized his engagement had been moved up, and he realizes he really is trapped in New York with May.
“It was the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave use to them.”
What strikes me this week
This week, the novel invokes the powerful Gorgon, that wide-eyed underworld monster (critically female!) whose gaze turns onlookers to stone.
The invocation makes me wonder: What realities turn Newland to stone? What moments in his life shock him into a kind of numbed or stony existence? Which gazes freeze him in place, and which gazes move him to action?
In a novel where we’ve seen so much anxiety about visibility, being seen, and the blindness of ignorance, Ellen’s invocation of the Gorgon feels anything but coincidental.
As Ellen pleads with Newland to keep their love affair within safe bounds — and not to scare her away with his sexual fantasies and passionate meetings — she and Newland both invoke the imagery of the soul turned to stone after confronting the harsh gaze, not of the Gorgon, but of reality.
Perhaps more than ever, Newland’s naivety is on display as he tells Ellen he doesn’t want her to be his mistress; he just wants to find some magical place where categories like “wife” and “mistress” don’t exist.
Ellen rightfully questions his fantasy with the clarity of someone who has been to that “country” before — a place where hopeful and romantic fantasies are wrought into dingy and promiscuous folly.
Ellen also turns his anxieties of blindness on their head:
“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” Newland says, in what feels like an aggressive retort to her retreat from his passionate promises.
Ellen responds with a depth of understanding that Newland has perpetually underestimated, finally laying bare for him the reality of the dream he continues to pursue with Ellen:
“Well, she opened my eyes, too; it’s a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary—she fastens their eyelids open, so that they’re never again in the blessed darkness….Ah, believe me, it’s a miserable little country.”
There are some kinds of experiences you can’t un-experience; there are some truths that, once seen plainly, cannot be unseen.
Ellen and Newland are perhaps conspirators here, in their shared fantasy of May’s innocence. That innocence, which is the very thing Newland wants most to get away from by leaving May, is the same exact thing Ellen wants to preserve for May (and the Society she represents).
These opposing desires — to abandon or to preserve — take on deeper meaning when, just a few pages later, Newland convinces Ellen to meet him at the Metropolitan Museum.
There, in a space of intentional cultural preservation, both Newland and Ellen observe the apparently meaningless and uselessness of the preserved objects; their attention to the obscurity of the artifacts begs the question of the value of May’s, and Old New York’s, status of “innocence,” and the coded, ritual performances of their adherence to a strict cultural code.
“Innocence,” is after all, tied to this age via the title of the novel: a kind of time-bound phenomena that typifies an entire moment in cultural history, but perhaps does not transcend that time and instead becomes a kind of artifact in a larger museum, a characteristic element in a revered epoch.
It is perhaps deeply meaningful that, in this space where Ellen and Newland are surrounded by reminders that time wears down even the most meaningful of artifacts, Ellen finally offers Newland their long-awaited night together. She offers, quite bluntly, to sexually consummate their relationship.
And Newland, once again stunned by her brazenness, tells her to come to him in just two days’ time.
But the gaze of the Gorgon is not so easily escaped.
After her “long conversation” with May Welland, and before the final dinner party, we learn that Ellen quietly returns a key Newland sent her. (And no: we don’t know when Newland sent the key, or what the key was to — I talk about this little detail at length in this week’s audio guide).
And in the final act that freezes Newland in place: May reveals a surprise pregnancy that she has told everyone about — except Newland, until that fateful night.
May’s gaze at Newland—part frightened, part hesitant, part emboldened—is the look of a woman who knows she’s about to turn her husband’s heart to stone.
As Wharton scholar Emily Orlando puts it, “May, a winning archeress, ultimately proves her aim to be more effectual than Archer, or any of the men in her circle, had imagined.”
With her final revelation, May Welland Archer reminds us of something Newland observed in her, early on in the novel: May Welland always gets what she wants. And, after throwing a beautiful and elaborate dinner party that ritually separates Newland from Ellen forever, May Welland gets precisely what she has been putting into place, right under Newland’s own ineffective and unwitting gaze.
All over again
I’d be remiss not to closely read one of the most romantic lines in all of Wharton’s fiction—and perhaps in all fiction, ever.
As Ellen and Newland embrace in the carriage after such a long time of being apart, Newland seems stunned by her — the same way he’s been stunned by her in almost every meeting they’ve ever had.
“Each time you happen to me all over again,” he tells her.
“Oh yes, I know, I know!” Ellen responds.
What does it mean to happen to another person? What does it mean when another person’s presence can conjure, for you, the magic of the first time, every time?
This moment, for me, helps explain Newland’s desperation to be with Ellen alone for two hours in a private carriage. He craves the revivification of her presence; the way that, so numbed by his Social self and obedient existence, she happens to him all over again. Like that meteoric flash against the pale snow, Ellen fires Newland back to life with each time she re-enters his sphere.
And, here, we learn that Ellen feels the same way, too. That, for Ellen, something about Newland freshens or opens up her life.
The simplicity of the exchange here — that such a profound feeling can be captured in such a fleeting exchange — feels meaningful, as well.
We know Newland’s marriage is filled with pregnant silences and constant misreadings, of insides not matching outsides, or that what is going on inside of himself feels, for whatever reason, unsafe to share with May. For a man who rarely shares his feelings, and almost never feels safe enough to share his true feelings, this moment of emotional honesty with Ellen feels more than warming and sweet—it feels triumphant. It’s a mode of emotional telegraphy that feels, finally, legible to both the sender and the receiver, as if their connection is a true live wire that sparks meaning on both ends.
Each time you happen to me all over again: this is Newland saying that Ellen is a sensation and a feeling, she is a moment in time, she is distinct and integrated; she is her own and she is also his.
She is someone who gifts to him the very thing he longs most for: experience.
As I was thinking about this line, I absent-mindedly typed it into the Substack search bar and came across this beautiful personal essay about the line by a writer named Rachel, who runs a Substack called Cornflake Victorians. Here’s what she writes about the line:
I love the fullness of it, the physiology—the suggestion that a person can be so precious to you that they are both event and entity. That verb, “to happen,” tells a story of the body and the mind, and although it might be exhilarating, the pleasure is not uncomplicated. Because, after all, a happening presupposes a prior absence. A person happens to you when they cannot be with you, remain with you.
—Rachel Vorona Cote
Ellen can happen to Newland, as Rachel says, because she is not always with him. I love the attention to how the line highlights the agonizing distances—physical and emotional—that Ellen and Newland endure together, but apart.
And yet, each time she is with him, Newland experiences that rush of excitement and novelty, that break with the dusty and stuffy traditions of the life scripted for him and accesses, briefly, that intoxicating power of the (im)possible.
For me, this is the line that encapsulates the power of the entire novel. It is the composite phrase that best encapsulates what has motivated Newland to attempt the impossible, to wish for a life he knows he cannot have.
A reader’s question
“This is a question for the end of the story, from someone who has read the book many times.
Larry Lefferts is one of the many counterpoints to Newland Archer in the novel. Everyone knows that Lefferts constantly has affairs, generally with the wives of his peers if I understand correctly. But he isn't run out of town like other transgressors. He never appears to be punished at all. Even when Newland is being punished (or at least, put in his place) at Ellen's farewell dinner, Lefferts rubs it in by asking Newland to cover for him in yet another affair. Larry can have affairs--but Newland can't even just passionately imagine them!
I can see some reasons for this, following the principles enumerated when we were introduced to Granny Mingott and her history: he is rich; he is handsome; he does everything else correctly, aside from his "indiscretions"; and he has cultivated an essential role as arbiter of Form. The other contrast is that his wife is not, apparently, respected or well-liked. And this may be the clincher for Newland: he deliberately married an icon of all that is supposed to be Best in New York, who is well connected to very supportive family. As the narrator observes, the whole Society has rallied round May, in ways they never rally 'round Mrs. Lefferts.
I don't know Wharton scholarship. What can you tell us about analysis of Lefferts and his juxtaposition with the cancellation of the assumed Newland-Ellen affair?”
This is a stunning and very thoughtful question — and I think you’re already onto extremely plausible answers here.
It may help to take what we know of the extreme double standards in this society and tie those into your observations about Lefferts:
We know women are meant to be visible, like May at the archery competition, but not too visible, like Ellen in her dark velvet dresses.
We know men are meant to be intelligent and hard-working, like Newland’s dedication to the law office, but not too intellectual or working class, like Ned Winsett or M. Riviére.
We know the rich are meant to follow strict social rules, like how and when the van der Luydens extend kindness or hospitality, but not to be gauche about it, like the Beauforts, who throw the best ball in town but who frequently skirt social customs and flaunt their wealth (to their eventual downfall)
We know, in other words, that the appearance of following the rules matters a lot more than actually following the rules. These are, after all, “people who dreaded scandal more than anything else.”
Because he’s the great arbiter of Form, Lefferts knows how to embody a formal adherence to social codes, without actually living by that code. He knows how, in other words, to avoid making “scenes.”
The problem with Newland Archer is not just that he fantasized about Ellen. It’s that he made his fantasies conspicuous.
He was obviously and visibly attracted to Ellen and he frequently caused “scenes”: He sought her out at parties. He sat by her at dinners. He spoke up in her defense too often and too loudly. He made up clumsy lies about work and got caught in his own web of deceit. He went to Washington, for god’s sake.
Recall the clumsy moment when Newland grabs Ellen’s arm on her way to her carriage outside of Regina Beaufort’s home — we know that Lefferts and a young man are walking down the street and see the interaction. Recall the bad visibility of Newland never arriving to Granny’s when he promised May to meet her there — but Ellen still arrived right on time in May’s carriage. Recall, even, the moment in the opera box at the end, when Newland breaks social custom by asking May to leave mid-song.
These are all “scenes” or moments in which Newland, like Ellen in her velvet gowns and European social attitude, is all too conspicuous.
All this, and he still never managed to get what he wanted—while Lefferts, quietly navigating his private desires behind the scenes, ends up sneaking off with any woman he desires.
So, as all of these examples help to illustrate: the transgression isn’t necessarily the having of affairs, but the visibility of those affairs. Lefferts keeps his just discreet enough to avoid embarrassing anyone. By contrast, Newland toes the line way too many times. As if to save him from himself, May swoops in with a pregnancy to put all questions of his sexual and familial devotion to her at rest and to facilitate Ellen’s exile from the group.
And this is critical: the exiling of Ellen Olenska is a highly visible and ritualized performance: it is made and staged not for Ellen but for Newland Archer. It is an elaborate show put on for an audience of one.
Newland’s conspicuousness is the true crime for which they are both, in the end, ritually tortured and punished by society. They became too visible in their desire for one another and their pleasure in each other’s company. They became too visible in the honesty of their connection; and for it, they’re ripped apart.
(At least Ellen gets out. Newland is locked inside the very cage he’s wrestled against from the start, and May’s stuck in with him. Has anyone’s innocence been preserved?)
A favorite moment
One of my favorite moments this week (apart from the carriage ride, which I could read a thousand times and never tire of) is the moment, in his study with May, when Newland opens the window.
“I shall never be happy unless I can open the windows,” he tells her, and May immediately frets that he’ll catch his death and needs to close the window.
This moment feels like such a perfect encapsulation of the incompatibility of May and Newland—as well as a reminder of why Newland loves Ellen so much. For Newland, an open window represents a kind of layered freedom. It is, after all, a welcoming breeze of fresh air, the invitation of the outside world into one’s private inner space, and (perhaps most crucially) it creates an exit.
For Newland, who has just learned that Granny Mingott refused to send Ellen back to her husband—keeping her, like a small bird, free from being caged—the window metaphor couldn’t be more apt.
In the first stanza of her 1902 poem “Vesalius in Zante,” written decades before The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton writes:
SET wide the window. Let me drink the day.
I loved light ever, light in eye and brain --
No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
But just the common dusty wind-blown day
That roofs earth's millions.
O, too long I walked
In that thrice-sifted air that princes breathe,
Nor felt the heaven-wide jostling of the winds
And all the ancient outlawry of earth!
Now let me breathe and see.
(I’ve bolded the pieces of the stanza that I’m closely reading.)
The imagery and sensations evoked here feel Newland-esque, to me. Newland, like Wharton’s poetic narrator, wants wide-open vistas of possibility; wants to “drink the day.” He, like the poet, loves “light in eye and brain” and deplores the “thrice-sifted air that princes breathe.”
Toward the end of the novel, as in the wedding chapter, Newland’s eyes are increasingly typified with darkness and blindness; he sees with “unseeing eyes” and looks at May with “unseeing stares.”
He is being shut into a life he does not love and he therefore cannot “see” with the open vistas he once enjoyed; in the library with May, he realizes he cannot breathe, either.
He longs for the “light in eye and brain” represented by the artful conversations with the “people who write” in Paris and London, for the stimulating connection between himself and people, like Ellen and M. Riviére and Ned Winsett, who do not and cannot perfectly fit the social mould.
In the last line quoted here, the poet’s desire is to break free from the suffocating airs of the life designed for her and to “breathe and see” the world in all its fullness and mystery.
This, too, feels like Newland’s wish—the very texture of his fantasies throughout the novel, and the fuel of his love for Ellen. He wants to breathe and to see. He wants, in other words, the freedom represented by fresh air and novel sights. He feels he cannot live under the monotony of stuffy indoor ballrooms and dining rooms, of only seeing the same old people at the same old operas, year after year after year.
He craves the novelty and freshness that Ellen represents—and that she brings to him, as if for the first time, every time they meet.
The final chapter
Of all the novels I’ve ever read, the final chapter of The Age of Innocence reigns supreme in my mind for its artful dedication to the project it brings to a close.
Should you be so inclined, I’d invite you to read the chapter aloud to yourself. Revel in the exquisite prose. And, when it happens, use a pencil or a highlighter to mark—like a breath mark in sheet music, or a check in the margins—the moments you begin to well-up with feeling.
There are three places, three moments, at which I always begin to cry. I’ll tell you what they are next week, in our finale guide of this absolutely marvelous novel.
For you:
Links to additional readings
The Dread Gorgon in Lapham's Quarterly // The gorgon, defined in the Brittanica encyclopedia // The most outrageous dinner party of the gilded age // Extreme dining in the gilded age // Wild gilded age parties // How to throw your own Old New York dinner party, sans exile ritual //
Up next:
For next Wednesday, read chapter 34 (Full schedule here)
Ask your final questions about the novel here and I’ll answer them!
Use this Google Docs notes outline to help you take notes each week
Meet me in the comments
I can’t wait to read your thoughts today.
If you’re enjoying our read-a-longs, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to show your support and help fund my energy and time for another read-a-long this fall! I’ll be sending out a few ideas for what we’ll read next together later this summer.
‘Til next time, happy reading! 📚
What struck me about these chapters was that Newland was likely the only one unaware that everyone else knew about him and Ellen. It's necessary and believable for the novel's purpose, but it does degrade my sense of Newland's self-awareness.
Newland does not come out of these chapters well, privately or publicly! Ellen knocking down his magical thinking about being able to pursue her without the "wife" and "mistress" categories getting in the way, and his discovery that everyone assumed he and Ellen were together despite him thinking himself secretive, is a real double-blow. I like your breakdown of why Lefferts is able to get away with what Newland can't, and it explains why that dinner party plays out the way it does. What a dramatic few chapters!
Also, I should've seen that pregnancy reveal coming... but I did not haha. A shock to me and Newland alike.