Welcome to Week 3! This week, we got our first real encounters between Ellen and Newland — and had a front-row seat to more Old New York drama, like an entire society of people refusing an invitation to a great dinner party.
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Now. Let’s dive into our reading.
A brief summary
I’ve put out an audio summary of this week’s chapters. Because these chapters are so jam-packed with detail, I focused on the main theme I am tracking, and talked a bit about how I see this theme — of Newland’s relationship to reality — evolving from chapter 1.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what happens in the first chapter, with the characters we meet this week in bold.
Chapter 6
Newland starts to panic about his wedding to May
The Mingotts send invitations out for a welcome dinner for Ellen and receive a hard pass from literally everyone (except Sillerton Jackson and those audacious Beauforts)
Newland’s mom decides to enlist a more powerful family in Ellen’s welcome campaign
Chapter 7
Newland and Mrs. Archer visit the van der Luyden household and convince them to invite Ellen to their upcoming, exclusive dinner party
We learn about the most supremely elite Old New Yorkers, who seem to still puppeteer social dynamics with powerful, invisible strings
Chapter 8
The high-end, exclusive dinner party takes place
Defying custom (again!) Ellen shows up late and then sits with Archer after dinner, instead of waiting for all the men in the room to swarm her
Ellen and Archer have their first real conversation about his engagement to May
Ellen invites Archer to her house for a visit the next day
Chapter 9
Archer visits Ellen’s strange, shabby, Bohemian little house and seems completely charmed by it
Ellen is late (again!) because she’s out seeing new homes with Beaufort — her family wants her to move somewhere more “fashionable”
Ellen and Archer have a long conversation by the fire, discussing culture, fashion, and the expectations of Old New York society
Ellen insists she needs Archer’s help to navigate the confusing social mores of this culture
Archer insists he needs Ellen’s help to see his culture with a clearer view
Archer leaves Ellen’s house and stops by a flower shop to send May her daily order of lilies of the valley
While at the shop, Newland also orders a bouquet of bright yellow roses to be sent to Ellen — and removes his name from the order, so it will arrive anonymously
“It’s you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I’d looked at so long that I’d ceased to see them.” -Newland Archer
Newland’s soliloquy
In chapter 6, Newland spends a long evening by the fire, contemplating his impending marriage and the new notes of falsity ringing in his ears. He also ends up, somewhat unsurprisingly, blaming all of his apparently newfound discontent on Ellen.
“What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?”
From chapter 6
In this week’s audio guide, I dive into a closer reading of what’s going on in this dark night of the soul Newland is experiencing here.
The chapter is, in many ways, a play on a similar chapter that Henry James wrote in his beautiful novel, The Portrait of a Lady, a novel that Edith Wharton loved and admired. (Henry James became her mentor and beloved friend for many years before his death.)
In The Portrait of a Lady, the titular lady, Isabel Archer, spends a long night in front of the fire in her room, contemplating her failing and abusive marriage and pondering her future. Yes: “Archer” is absolutely a reference to James’s famous heroine, and Wharton makes a brilliant play on the allusion by placing her own Archer, Newland, before the fire for a long night of contemplating his future and wondering about the likelihood he’ll feel trapped by marrying a woman as socially obedient and well-trained as May Welland.
Essentially, this chapter works as the first real crack in the glass house Archer has dutifully built for himself by getting engaged to May. We dive deeper into that egotistical psyche we met in chapter 1 and learn that Newland isn’t quite as “bought in” to the whole idea of life down the well-manicured paths prepared for himself and for May.
In fact, the chapter teems with a vocabulary of doubt and rising fury. We learn that, as he gazes at May’s photograph, she turns into a stranger before his eyes; “What could he and she really know of each other,” he wonders, as he considers the man he has been trained to be and the history-less woman she has been carefully “manufactured” to present to him. May ceases to be a real person and instead comes to represent a powerful composite of socially sanctioned training and appearances. Newland seems to wonder, also, if the same is true of himself: how much has society molded him.
We see those cracks grow through the rest of the chapters. Newland’s frank statement about women and equality (from last week’s reading) starts to take on additional tensions and layers of meaning as he seems to contemplate if anyone can be free in a society as rigid and forceful and controlling as theirs.
Newland’s dichotomy of desire
Another problem or framework that Newland starts to explore in these chapters is the idea of May and Ellen as polar opposites — and the text does a lot to establish their critical differences.
While May is the virginal, young bride, Ellen is the older, worldly married woman; where May is expected to be a blank slate with no history, Ellen is a messy history of exotic places, strange connections, and a gossip-filled and sexual past.
Newland expects May to need his guidance to learn everything about literature, art, and other cultures; after a single visit to Ellen’s house, Newland realizes she has a lot more to teach him about paintings and writers he’s never heard of or seen before.
May is a standard bouquet of lilies of the valley; Ellen is an arrangement of vibrant yellow roses.
If all those tensions and oppositions weren’t enough, we also learn — throughout the chapters we’ve read thus far — that Newland’s desires and ambitions about each woman vastly differ.
With May, Newland can readily desire:
The safety and stability of a sanctioned marriage into a well-established family
A clear picture of a well-structured and ready-made future
The comforts of a home he can clearly picture and understands already how to exist within
A life without surprises or uncertainty
The role of being the “soul’s custodian” of his wife, where he will lead all discussions and teach her how to embrace new ideas
But with Ellen, all these relational dynamics would be turned on their head:
Conversations are filled with surprises and unexpected insights
There is the sense of being untethered, and therefore uncontrolled, by family
An unclear future with the pathways not yet paved or even outlined
A messy, eccentric, Bohemian home filled with personal treasures
Reader questions
Here’s our first question from this week:
Flowers are fascinating signals in this novel. Newland devotes significant energy to his flower orders for May (and Ellen...), and to his interpretation of flowers he sees in Ellen's home. What should we know about the meanings of different flowers in the world of Old New York (which is its own hothouse!)?
I am so glad that quite a few readers are noticing — and wanting to closely read — the flowers in the novel!
Here are a few fun flowering tidbits to keep in mind:
At this time, American botanists and biologists were busily creating new species of flowers and floral hybrids
Flowers were an extremely common, and expected, gift for men to send to the women in their lives — namely, their girlfriends, fiancees, wives, and mothers.
It was common for men to include their card with their flower deliveries
So it’s a bit of a “secret admirer” move for Newland to remove his card from Ellen’s roses…
I’d also like to invite you to poke at your questions with more questions, so you can make your own close readings of flowers in the novel:
What do flowers symbolize more generally?
What does gifting or sending flowers tend to mean?
What is a flower? What connotations or meanings does it carry?
What cultural references or meanings do different colors have?
What cultural references do certain types of flowers carry?
(Think: white = purity to help you get started.)
Okay. Next question:
From chapter 5, page 59 in my edition: "What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out ball?"
Any thoughts on the significance of black satin? from the immediate context you can gather it was taken to be rather scandalous and portending Ellen's later disrepute, but wonder if there's something else here!
This is a fantastic observation. And my note above, about considering the cultural meanings of certain colors, is helpful here, too.
A coming-out ball, or debutante ball as they’re also known, is traditionally an event that signals the arrival of a young woman onto the marriage market. It’s a formal introduction of a young lady to a room of her peers — in age and class — meant to essentially tell her society that she’s now in circulation on the marriage market, or open to offers.
Traditionally, young women were expected to wear white or eggshell-colored frocks, and these were typically covered in lace, ribbons, and tailoring details.
That Ellen would wear black — a funereal choice — and satin — a form-hugging fabric, is pretty on-brand for the eccentric woman we’ve come to know thus far. Ellen asks the wonderful question, “Why not make one’s own fashions?” while also questioning the impact of her insistent individuality on her social standing. Ellen is not a conformist, and black satin makes that abundantly clear.
This choice also suggests something about her caretaker, aunt Medora. Namely, that she has poorly guided Ellen into this announcement of her “womanhood,” by allowing her to appear as the literal opposite of the other women. This non-conformity to expected categories and traditions is, as we discussed last week, makes Ellen a threat to society.
And one more thing to consider: A coming-out ball anticipates a marriage. What does a young lady wear to her wedding? A white gown.
What did we first meet May Welland wearing? A white gown — with a bouquet of white lilies-of-the-valley in her lap.
What did we first meet Ellen wearing in chapter one? A dark blue gown, with a modern design and ornate headpiece.
We continually meet May in her virginal white dresses, with ribbons and flowers, adorned in symbols designed to mark her purity and innocence.
By contrast, we see that Ellen is constantly appearing in bold and unexpected colors — black satin, dark blue velvet, even vibrant red at the Duke’s dinner — and these colors, for New York Society, certain bring symbols with them. Far from the innocent whites of May Welland, these bold and dark colors suggest that Bohemian, non-conformist, and bold nature of Ellen.
Keep on this track. It’s very much worth noticing their clothes and the colors of their clothes!
Finally, Shruti asked:
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! There is one book I’d point you to more than any other to learn more about this:
Thorsten Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class — Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” and knew better than perhaps anyone else the theories of money, power, and prestige that circulated throughout the upper classes of Old New York
There are, of course, lots of other ways to learn more about economics in Wharton’s novels, including conducting academic research (should you have university library access to read pieces like this or this) or by looking at collections of essays, like The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton or this collection of essays on The Age of Innocence to read how scholars explore economic themes in Wharton’s work.
Themes to watch + my favorite sentence
If you’re developing your own list of themes to track during your reading of this spectacular novel, here are a few more (in bold) you may want to watch out for:
Performance and visibility
“Harshness” and violence
Anxiety
Conformity vs. individuality
Nostalgia/“The Past”
Flowers
Opposites (young/old, dark/light, sharp/dull)
References to the exotic or unfamiliar
Old vs. New, in terms of cultural customs
Safety and “home”
My favorite sentence this week:
“The young man felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow doorstep, and pass through a Pompeiian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood. But beyond that his imagination could not travel.”
I love the way the novel starts to establish the idea that Archer’s safe, predictable life with May is starting to feel suffocating to him — that this beautiful future of cast-iron railings and an ornate vestibule becomes the limit of his imagination. By entering Ellen’s space, Newland’s perspective expands and he sees the limits of the potential he’s been invited to envisage for himself and for May. It’s as if he never realized there were other lives he could be living, other connections he could be enjoying, and the recognition of how small his view has been is a shock to him.
What I love most is the way Wharton leverages the words “imagination” and “travel” here — two things that, so far, we’ve seen are very tightly controlled and determined in Newland’s society. Beyond the limits of what he’s been trained to desire, Newland is at a loss to imagine anything else. The strange art, vibrant colors, and completely unexpected conversation he’s able to have with Ellen are like a foreign land that Newland never knew about.
How could he travel somewhere he didn’t know about? How can you desire something you didn’t know existed?
For you:
A few additional readings:
A close reading of the Henry James scene Wharton is riffing on in chapter 6 // A Pinterest board of Age of Innocence imagery (made by yours truly!) // Wedding traditions in the nineteenth century // An amazing historical primer on the period of American Reconstruction (following the Civil War) // Women during Reconstruction // Photos of 1870s Manhattan // The art world of 1870 - 1890
Up next:
For next Wednesday, read chapters 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 — I know it’s a bit longer this time around, but it’s worth it! (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 — make a copy or print it out for handwritten notes (alternately: copy the questions into your own notebook to collect your notes in a single place!)
Send in your close readings or sentence analyses via DM!
If you’d like to have your close reading of a sentence shared here in the guide, send me a DM! I will collect submissions each week and add them to our weekly guide!
Share your thoughts in the comments
…and tell me all about your experience with these chapters. Share your favorite sentences, your questions, and your ideas about what will happen next.
‘Til next time, happy reading! 📚
So many things in these chapters had me scribbling notes. But what most stood out to me this week were Wharton's descriptions of rooms. The rooms are so detailed that to me they seem to stand in for the inner personalities of the inhabitants. As Newland cools his heels waiting in Ellen's room, his curiosity is piqued. Her room had "faded shadowy charm unlike any room he had known". The "pictures bewildered him for they were like nothing he was accustomed to look at". The "shabby hired house...had, by a turn of the hand...been transformed into something intimate, 'foreign', subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments." The "vague pervading perfume" was like "the scent of some far off bazaar". It's almost as though in Ellen's absence, Newland is being seduced by her room. He then thinks about how May would decorate her drawing room. Of course since she's a blank slate, all he can imagine is that she would probably copy her mother's style. I went back to review other room descriptions. The Van der Luyden drawing room is chill, white-walled, expensive, and so unused that the chairs are "obviously uncovered for the occasion", and the gauze is still veiling the ornaments. Going back to Chap 4, Mrs. Mingott's room breaks all the rules. She's "mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire", and meets visitors in a room on the first floor where they can catch sight of her bedroom "through a door that was always open". Newland's library is, at least to him, "home-like and welcoming" with its "rows and rows of books, its bronze and steel statuettes". One telling detail though is the "many photographs of famous pictures". Is that the equivalent of modern day cheap copies of art used as hotel decor? His space seems masculine but bereft of individuality. Close reading seems to be taking me on flights of fancy like this.
I'm intrigued now by your thoughts on flowers.
As for Ellen's debutante gown of black satin I had wondered at the time if she was making a statement about the death of her freedom. She likely already knew her aunt had plans to sell her into marriage with the highest bidder. I saw it as rebellion but of a more calculated kind than just against propriety.
Question: Is Ellen one of our earliest Manic Pixie Dream Girls?