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.
Great comment - yes, I thought the same about Ellen's rooms reflecting an exotic 'other' which might be tantalising to someone like Newland whose perspective has been so blinkered by the narrowness of his experience in NY society. With May, Newland is the experienced one introducing her to the world, culture etc, whereas with Ellen, N is the inexperienced one. N's shock at (and secret enjoyment of) E's frank observations about his world is telling. There is also that fascinating contrast between the Van der Luyden's bloodless rooms (and bodies it seems!) and the full-bodied self-expression of Mrs Mingott's rooms. The VdL's are 'closed.' The doors are closed. Their NY house is often closed up as they are hardly ever there. Mrs Mingott house, on the other hand, reflects her openness - literally. Even her bedroom door is open!
I read somewhere that Wharton wrote books on interior decoration so she seems to have had a more than passing interest in the subject!
Yes! I will talk more about this, and it’s definitely relevant here: Wharton’s first ever booklength publication was a nonfiction work on interior decorating, called “The Decoration of Houses,” which she co-authored with an architect, Ogden Codman Jr. I’ll have some links & additional info about it in our next guide :)
I keep thinking about how brilliant this question is, because I think NEWLAND is fashioning Ellen as a MPDG, even though it's clear from the rest of the views we are getting she is anything but.
Yes—that’s it! His perception of her seems clouded by what he sees as her quirks and what they represent to him, more than any actual (at least at this point) understanding of her as an individual.
Just as he's doing with May, too. Is it accurate to say that what he imagines about people is more real to him than what they may actually feel and experience? It's clear that he has been trained to assume that surface signals and how others respond to them are all he can really know, since no one talks about things directly: they can only signal, and interpret. He is discovering, I think, that he doesn't know how to question those assumptions--how to interrogate them--even when he knows he wants to. Will he be able to let other people be real, beyond what he wants from them, as he moves through this story?
Thanks for drawing our attention to the meaning of flowers and clothing. It reminds me that Ellen was also described as wearing her dress in the 'Josephine look' at the opera, linking her to the French Empress who was older than her husband Napoleon, patronised the arts, had lovers - and was later divorced. And Ellen's aunt is then linked to another imperial woman, Catherine the Great of Russia.
I was also intrigued by some of the language evoking Ancient Egypt: the idea of being in a 'hieroglyphic' world and the suggestion of the tomb in descriptions of the van der Luydens: 'preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence' and husband and wife being 'seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity' makes me think of seated statues of Egyptian pharaohs and gods. Is Ancient Egypt standing in here for the idea of an archaic society of fusty rituals and dignity? A society that, as the reader of 1920 would know, will also be lost? Also, Napoleon famously invaded Egypt - but that's maybe a bit of a reach!
I don’t think it’s a reach! The ancient Egypt references are everywhere and you’re onto something with what they may mean. There was a considerable boost in Egyptology during the early 20th century — I can share more about that in an upcoming guide!
I’ve been following the whole flower thing and they are everywhere! I’ve noticed too that colour is really important.
I’m guessing Wharton is establishing yellow as the colour of desire. One of the opulent rooms in the Beaufort house is called the ‘bouton d’or’ or the buttercup room and houses the scandalous nude - Love Victorious.
Meanwhile old Catherine Mingott’s bedroom, which for Archer resembled ‘scenes in French fiction and architectural incentives to immorality’ and which reminded him of ‘women with lovers’, has a looped back ‘yellow damask portiere’.
When Beaufort the womaniser accompanies Ellen to Mrs Mingott’s house he sits on one of her yellow armchairs.
And then Archer chooses a ‘cluster of yellow roses’ for Ellen because they did not ‘look’ like May. They were too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty.’
Mrs Archer really has a handle on the whole ‘slippery pyramid’ of New York’s elite of the elite, from the plain people who married up to the the apex of the Van der Luydens. She tells us that New York’s elite is primarily a merchant class who came from Europe and made their fortunes in trade. ‘New York has always been a commercial community.’
Since last week's reading, I can't stop thinking about old Katherine Spicer, and her prowess as the matriarch of the family. She produced Medora who produced Ellen, so Ellen's independence and vivacity is a testament to them, too! Their family is delightfully breaking the mold.
The chapters this week are such a fascinating (and gossipy!) look into old New York's elites. I love how Wharton has been weaving Newland's character and awareness of his own world through the chapters we've seen, with doing exactly the expected - and being pleased with it - at the beginning, to now starting to question that world and what he wants. If I wasn't reading slowly on purpose, I would've missed so much of it. I keep thinking about that other reader's comment about Newland seeming like a man about to get his world rocked - excited to see what Wharton has ahead for us!
I really enjoyed this week's set of chapters, but I have to say that chapter nine is one of the most compelling chapters I've read in the novel so far. It feels like a masterclass in establishing the core cast of characters' opposing wants and desires, constraints, tensions, and beliefs, all while continuing to offer a multitude of details and hints about story behind each sentence. Right at the beginning, we see Archer begin to crack under the pressure of pretending and conforming: "Archer...parted his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped." From this sentence up to the moment that Ellen arrives, there is a feeling of claustrophobia as we begin to see all of the ways Archer is more confined than liberated by his social position. Maybe he's so drawn to Ellen because he hasn't fully bought into the game, despite his best efforts, and she represents someone who found freedom outside of it, rejected but not fully shut out?
I would loooove to read an essay about claustrophobia and space in The Age of Innocence. I keep thinking of your observations here and they're fantastic!
I have to agree with Jordan: Chapter 9 is/was my favorite of the moment. I felt like I was reading a painting. It wasn't just the description of Ellen's home ("...the peeling stucco house...") but also the neighborhood she lives in that is composed of "Small dress-makers, bird-stuffers, and 'people who wrote' were her nearest neighbors." The theme of confection builds leading up to chapter 9 but the final scene on the flower shop....!
Newland's jealousy of Julius Beaufort is equal to my own growing fascination with him (who IS that guy?!). I was also intrigued by Newland's acknowledgement of the conflict he not only feels inside but how Ellen seemed to be "helping" him come to terms with it. This sentence was beautiful: "New York seemed much further off than Samarkand, and if they were indeed to help each other she was rendering what might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look at his city objectively."
I am also intrigued by how Ellen is (to me) being portrayed as a bit of a free thinking "bohemian". From the decor of her home ("How do you like my funny house?") and how some of the artwork stumped Newland's knowledge of Italian art to her aforementioned neighbors. Also, Ellen tells Newland that Julius was showing her houses "...since it seems I'm not to be allowed to stay in this one...", and finally Ellen's neighborhood is described as "des quartiers excentriques" ("eccentric neighborhood").
I was also struck by the attention paid to Ellen's facial details in chapter 8: "Her dusky red cheek"; "...a grave mouth and swelling eyes..."; "...the red cheeks had paled..."; "...a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which without being in the least theatrical, struck him as highly trained and full of conccious power."; "He saw her lips trembled." There was a sentence earlier in the chapter where part of Ellen's "expensive but incoherent education, which included 'drawing from the model', a thing never dreamed of before..." I got the impression Wharton herself was "drawing from the model" throughout these chapters - especially 9.
I'm totally intrigued! Bring on the next reading!!!
Ellen knows the value of rarity, not only in the hospitality of the van der Luydens, but in her "rare smile that enchanted her whole face."
Twice Wharton uses the word meditatively to describe Ellen's gaze. Like Vronsky with Anna Karenina, it may be that Archer is going to fall in love with Ellen's expressive and bold eyes.
And removing the card from the flowers raises the romantic stakes of the gesture; it suggests that there is something improper about it.
I also liked Wharton's witty, self-deprecating remark that Ellen lives in a "strange quarter" inhabited by "small dressmakers, bird-stuffers, and 'people who wrote'."
I love the connection to Anna here. So much. That is an excellent connection to the same kind of tensions and high-stakes love affairs we see in other novels about people torn by desire.
I’m finally caught up! And I have sooo many thoughts:
I am loving every word of this novel - Wharton’s prose is so arrestingly beautiful I just want to swim in her sentences. I didn’t think it was possible to love one of her books more than The House of Mirth, but it’s looking like The Age of Innocence may become a new favorite.
What I noticed most in these chapters, in addition to all the light/dark vocabulary (which I can’t wait to learn more about in future chapters), is the references and allusions we get when we get descriptions of Ellen: many of them are about Europe, or its arts and culture. Of course, she lived there, but the references are particularly focused on Latin countries (France, Spain, Italy… occasionally Greece) and so I’m thinking of all the things those cultures are associated with: antiquity? Scandal? Romance and passion? Fashion? Danger?
From chapter 9: Ellen’s living room is described as having “been transformed into something intimate, “foreign,” subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments.”
In another example, Ellen is compared by Newland to Diana (Roman goddess of the hunt) in contrast to May (constantly paralleled with the Virgin Mary with all the white and purity) - and this makes me think of traditions in Gothic fiction and the tensions between Anglo-identities and Continental threats, or Protestantism vs. the more “dangerous” Catholicism.
I’ve also been tracking the flowers from the beginning of the book, and for anyone interested, here are the cultural/historical meanings of each of the flowers, and the person they are accompanying:
- Daisy (May): innocence and loyal love
- Gardenia (May and Newland): secret love
- Lily-of-the-valley: sweetness, the Virgin Mary, and humility
- Pink rose (on stage at the opera): happiness
- Red rose (on stage at the opera): love
- Pansies (“Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses” on stage at the opera): thoughts
This week's reading and Haley's take on the close read was fascinating. At times I feel like Wharton is poking fun of Newland. For example, the line "Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts." Archer is depicted so far as arrogant & pompous. I wonder how long his fall will be to 'reality.' I'm most interested in his character growth and to see where he ends up at the end of the novel. Will I still think he's a fool by the end? I'm also enjoying Wharton's depiction of Ellen. It must have been stifling to be a woman back then and I'm thrilled that she is writing her in a free-spirit bohemian way. This is my first book of Wharton's and will have to do some research on her beliefs of women's rights. Haley - do you have any background info on this?
I will get you some sources! (Be warned: she was vocally *not* a feminist. Though there’s reason to read her work as deeply feminist, Wharton didn’t have many nice things to say about the movement in her time.)
During the first chapters I was thinking the title of the novel described this particular time period in general and women like May in particular, virginal blank slates waiting only for a husband. But all we know about May is that Newland doesn’t know her, mostly because he never bothered to ask and made some easy assumptions. She might have an inner life as rich and as sensual as anyone.
Now I think the eponymous “Innocence” belongs to Newland himself: for a man who read a lot, traveled some and had at least one romantic affair, he really is out of his depth. Ellen is not particularly devious as far as we know, but seeing how New York’s high society and Newland in particular are reacting to her, you’d think she was a practiced seductress. It makes us smile today, and even people in the early 1920s would find her rather vanilla.
I suspect that Ellen wasn’t that strange for 1870 standards either, except when dealing with incestuous old money New York, a microcosm clinging to European values that barely survived in Europe itself. It’s a world on the edge of extinction, so old and fragile that even a woman bringing nothing more exotic than a few trinkets is about to put it into serious jeopardy. I find it rather adorable to see Newland getting all hot and bothered about her, there’s something pure about it. Or, well, innocent.
Arg, I keep having life get in the way of literature! You all have made so many fascinating observations, some of which I shared and some of which were deliciously eye-opening. Huzzah for reading community!
The one piece I want to add now that may too late for anyone to read (like my last-minute Chapter 1 thoughts!), is what struck me about perceptions of Ellen and her behavior, vs. her understanding of herself in New York. We see the evolution in Newland's responses to her, from miffed disapproval of what he sees as her flippancy when they first talk at the opera, to annoyance at what he sees as his duty to defend her because of his alliance with May's family, all the way to the revelations of her "funny little house" (which she won't be allowed to keep).
Ellen is so very heavily scrutinized and judged right from the beginning. The men in the box with Newland at the opera all seem ready not only to speculate that she is ripe for the plucking as a mistress, but to assume that she knows it, and is deliberately displaying herself to that end. All the men notice her, including Newland. When she leans forward and casually displays "a little more of her shoulder and bosom that New York was accustomed to seeing" the narrator dryly adds, "at least in ladies who had reasons for wishing to pass unnoticed." Everyone in Newland's circle assumes that Ellen knows all of these principles as well as they do, and that if she came to the opera dressed this way and so willing to lean forward in public, she must want to be noticed.
This is partly why she confounds Newland so greatly in the early part of this week's reading (it's almost rom-commy: the person who most irritates you is the one you--well, you know...). Doesn't she *know* what a scene she's making, at the opera or at the Van der Luydens' dinner? She must! Everyone does! It's an offense against Taste, which Newland observes is even more important than Form (in that glorious sentence about "'Taste', that far-off divinity of whom 'Form' was the mere visible representative and vicegerent").
But Ellen *doesn't* know. We learn from her in Chapter 9 that she is just discovering that the New York she thought of as home, her safe haven, is neither the "dear old place" nor the "heaven" she affectionately called it in Chapter 2. When she said this to Newland at the opera, he thought she was being tastelessly and disrespectfully whimsical; but we learn in Chapter 9 that she was simply giddy at seeing her childhood companions, and she actually spoke her real feelings. Newland is not used to people saying what they feel, much less saying what they mean. His wordless exchanges with May (by line of sight only), which gave him such satisfaction at the time, later only underscore in his Chapter 6 long dark night of the soul how very little they actually have to say to one another.
So it's important that Ellen does not know the rules of appearance that have been paramount for Newland all his life. He takes them for granted as normal, what everybody knows they should do to preserve and maintain the natural and honorable order of things. But Ellen does not know, for example, that one does not display oneself in public with Julius Beaufort, on a busy shopping day, if one wishes to be considered a proper lady (and that if one does so, people are likely to assume that one has deliberately abandoned propriety). One does not get up and cross a room to sit with an engaged man for a tête-a-tête (not even just to talk about his betrothed), ignoring all the other men in the room and making oneself entirely conspicuous in one's red gown while doing so. One does not live amongst dressmakers and animal stuffers and writers or other interesting people, for heaven's sake. One does not have a "funny little house".
Ellen is starting to realize by the time she has her conversation with Newland in chapter 9 just how much she does not understand about how people see each other, and her, in New York, and the restraints they put on each other and want to put on her. How many obliquely correcting conversations have the women of her family had with her since the one in which she decided that her blue velvet gown was not good enough for her to go to the Beauforts' ball? (Mean Girls, Haley, yes!)
It takes time for Ellen to fully understand what all of this means, and she has only just started putting the pieces together in chapter 9, to the extent that she doesn't catch Newland's sarcasm about the issue. She has grown to adulthood in Europe, in circles of art and artists and performers, among people who do not worry so much about the human body or about sex. She thought she was coming home to New York, to heaven, to the people who knew her as a child (ooooh, her Age of Innocence?), and that everything would be good that was bad there, as she says to Newland when he corrects her about arranged marriages.
Poor, poor, Ellen.
Poor, poor Newland, who is realizing too late that there is a wider world that his heart could take him into, if his dabbling were to become a lifestyle and a passion...
Haley, I loved your audio essay this week, and what you're saying about Newland and his reality. Lovelovelove it! Onward to Week 3!
This is such a gorgeous mini-essay all in itself, Abbie!
I especially love this: " Newland is not used to people saying what they feel, much less saying what they mean."
In the latest audio (which I just dropped a half hour ago), I am thinking about Newland as an unreliable narrator and your comment here has me thinking about how Newland is, in part, unreliable because he's never been taught to tell the truth -- he doesn't know how to say what he feels, or to say what he means to say. Unreliable, indeed.
I noted your aside about your comments bring "too late for anyone to read" and I will say that I have been going back to posts on earlier chapters to see what "late" posters have to say. I enjoy the community aspects of Hayley's reads so much that I don't want to miss anything.
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.
Great comment - yes, I thought the same about Ellen's rooms reflecting an exotic 'other' which might be tantalising to someone like Newland whose perspective has been so blinkered by the narrowness of his experience in NY society. With May, Newland is the experienced one introducing her to the world, culture etc, whereas with Ellen, N is the inexperienced one. N's shock at (and secret enjoyment of) E's frank observations about his world is telling. There is also that fascinating contrast between the Van der Luyden's bloodless rooms (and bodies it seems!) and the full-bodied self-expression of Mrs Mingott's rooms. The VdL's are 'closed.' The doors are closed. Their NY house is often closed up as they are hardly ever there. Mrs Mingott house, on the other hand, reflects her openness - literally. Even her bedroom door is open!
I read somewhere that Wharton wrote books on interior decoration so she seems to have had a more than passing interest in the subject!
Yes! I will talk more about this, and it’s definitely relevant here: Wharton’s first ever booklength publication was a nonfiction work on interior decorating, called “The Decoration of Houses,” which she co-authored with an architect, Ogden Codman Jr. I’ll have some links & additional info about it in our next guide :)
Question: Is Ellen one of our earliest Manic Pixie Dream Girls?
I hope Wharton has something more complex planned for Ellen that she is slowly revealing.
I do too, of course!
I keep thinking about how brilliant this question is, because I think NEWLAND is fashioning Ellen as a MPDG, even though it's clear from the rest of the views we are getting she is anything but.
Yes—that’s it! His perception of her seems clouded by what he sees as her quirks and what they represent to him, more than any actual (at least at this point) understanding of her as an individual.
Just as he's doing with May, too. Is it accurate to say that what he imagines about people is more real to him than what they may actually feel and experience? It's clear that he has been trained to assume that surface signals and how others respond to them are all he can really know, since no one talks about things directly: they can only signal, and interpret. He is discovering, I think, that he doesn't know how to question those assumptions--how to interrogate them--even when he knows he wants to. Will he be able to let other people be real, beyond what he wants from them, as he moves through this story?
Thanks for drawing our attention to the meaning of flowers and clothing. It reminds me that Ellen was also described as wearing her dress in the 'Josephine look' at the opera, linking her to the French Empress who was older than her husband Napoleon, patronised the arts, had lovers - and was later divorced. And Ellen's aunt is then linked to another imperial woman, Catherine the Great of Russia.
I was also intrigued by some of the language evoking Ancient Egypt: the idea of being in a 'hieroglyphic' world and the suggestion of the tomb in descriptions of the van der Luydens: 'preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence' and husband and wife being 'seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity' makes me think of seated statues of Egyptian pharaohs and gods. Is Ancient Egypt standing in here for the idea of an archaic society of fusty rituals and dignity? A society that, as the reader of 1920 would know, will also be lost? Also, Napoleon famously invaded Egypt - but that's maybe a bit of a reach!
I don’t think it’s a reach! The ancient Egypt references are everywhere and you’re onto something with what they may mean. There was a considerable boost in Egyptology during the early 20th century — I can share more about that in an upcoming guide!
I’ve been following the whole flower thing and they are everywhere! I’ve noticed too that colour is really important.
I’m guessing Wharton is establishing yellow as the colour of desire. One of the opulent rooms in the Beaufort house is called the ‘bouton d’or’ or the buttercup room and houses the scandalous nude - Love Victorious.
Meanwhile old Catherine Mingott’s bedroom, which for Archer resembled ‘scenes in French fiction and architectural incentives to immorality’ and which reminded him of ‘women with lovers’, has a looped back ‘yellow damask portiere’.
When Beaufort the womaniser accompanies Ellen to Mrs Mingott’s house he sits on one of her yellow armchairs.
And then Archer chooses a ‘cluster of yellow roses’ for Ellen because they did not ‘look’ like May. They were too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty.’
Excellent observations with yellow here! I wonder: why yellow? And doesn’t May have blonde hair? (Interesting.)
Mrs Archer really has a handle on the whole ‘slippery pyramid’ of New York’s elite of the elite, from the plain people who married up to the the apex of the Van der Luydens. She tells us that New York’s elite is primarily a merchant class who came from Europe and made their fortunes in trade. ‘New York has always been a commercial community.’
Since last week's reading, I can't stop thinking about old Katherine Spicer, and her prowess as the matriarch of the family. She produced Medora who produced Ellen, so Ellen's independence and vivacity is a testament to them, too! Their family is delightfully breaking the mold.
The chapters this week are such a fascinating (and gossipy!) look into old New York's elites. I love how Wharton has been weaving Newland's character and awareness of his own world through the chapters we've seen, with doing exactly the expected - and being pleased with it - at the beginning, to now starting to question that world and what he wants. If I wasn't reading slowly on purpose, I would've missed so much of it. I keep thinking about that other reader's comment about Newland seeming like a man about to get his world rocked - excited to see what Wharton has ahead for us!
I really enjoyed this week's set of chapters, but I have to say that chapter nine is one of the most compelling chapters I've read in the novel so far. It feels like a masterclass in establishing the core cast of characters' opposing wants and desires, constraints, tensions, and beliefs, all while continuing to offer a multitude of details and hints about story behind each sentence. Right at the beginning, we see Archer begin to crack under the pressure of pretending and conforming: "Archer...parted his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped." From this sentence up to the moment that Ellen arrives, there is a feeling of claustrophobia as we begin to see all of the ways Archer is more confined than liberated by his social position. Maybe he's so drawn to Ellen because he hasn't fully bought into the game, despite his best efforts, and she represents someone who found freedom outside of it, rejected but not fully shut out?
I would loooove to read an essay about claustrophobia and space in The Age of Innocence. I keep thinking of your observations here and they're fantastic!
I might have to keep pulling on this thread for the next few weeks!
I have to agree with Jordan: Chapter 9 is/was my favorite of the moment. I felt like I was reading a painting. It wasn't just the description of Ellen's home ("...the peeling stucco house...") but also the neighborhood she lives in that is composed of "Small dress-makers, bird-stuffers, and 'people who wrote' were her nearest neighbors." The theme of confection builds leading up to chapter 9 but the final scene on the flower shop....!
Newland's jealousy of Julius Beaufort is equal to my own growing fascination with him (who IS that guy?!). I was also intrigued by Newland's acknowledgement of the conflict he not only feels inside but how Ellen seemed to be "helping" him come to terms with it. This sentence was beautiful: "New York seemed much further off than Samarkand, and if they were indeed to help each other she was rendering what might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look at his city objectively."
I am also intrigued by how Ellen is (to me) being portrayed as a bit of a free thinking "bohemian". From the decor of her home ("How do you like my funny house?") and how some of the artwork stumped Newland's knowledge of Italian art to her aforementioned neighbors. Also, Ellen tells Newland that Julius was showing her houses "...since it seems I'm not to be allowed to stay in this one...", and finally Ellen's neighborhood is described as "des quartiers excentriques" ("eccentric neighborhood").
I was also struck by the attention paid to Ellen's facial details in chapter 8: "Her dusky red cheek"; "...a grave mouth and swelling eyes..."; "...the red cheeks had paled..."; "...a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which without being in the least theatrical, struck him as highly trained and full of conccious power."; "He saw her lips trembled." There was a sentence earlier in the chapter where part of Ellen's "expensive but incoherent education, which included 'drawing from the model', a thing never dreamed of before..." I got the impression Wharton herself was "drawing from the model" throughout these chapters - especially 9.
I'm totally intrigued! Bring on the next reading!!!
I can't wait to learn what you thought of Beaufort in this week's (May 28-29th) reading!!!!
Ellen knows the value of rarity, not only in the hospitality of the van der Luydens, but in her "rare smile that enchanted her whole face."
Twice Wharton uses the word meditatively to describe Ellen's gaze. Like Vronsky with Anna Karenina, it may be that Archer is going to fall in love with Ellen's expressive and bold eyes.
And removing the card from the flowers raises the romantic stakes of the gesture; it suggests that there is something improper about it.
I also liked Wharton's witty, self-deprecating remark that Ellen lives in a "strange quarter" inhabited by "small dressmakers, bird-stuffers, and 'people who wrote'."
I love the connection to Anna here. So much. That is an excellent connection to the same kind of tensions and high-stakes love affairs we see in other novels about people torn by desire.
I’m finally caught up! And I have sooo many thoughts:
I am loving every word of this novel - Wharton’s prose is so arrestingly beautiful I just want to swim in her sentences. I didn’t think it was possible to love one of her books more than The House of Mirth, but it’s looking like The Age of Innocence may become a new favorite.
What I noticed most in these chapters, in addition to all the light/dark vocabulary (which I can’t wait to learn more about in future chapters), is the references and allusions we get when we get descriptions of Ellen: many of them are about Europe, or its arts and culture. Of course, she lived there, but the references are particularly focused on Latin countries (France, Spain, Italy… occasionally Greece) and so I’m thinking of all the things those cultures are associated with: antiquity? Scandal? Romance and passion? Fashion? Danger?
From chapter 9: Ellen’s living room is described as having “been transformed into something intimate, “foreign,” subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments.”
In another example, Ellen is compared by Newland to Diana (Roman goddess of the hunt) in contrast to May (constantly paralleled with the Virgin Mary with all the white and purity) - and this makes me think of traditions in Gothic fiction and the tensions between Anglo-identities and Continental threats, or Protestantism vs. the more “dangerous” Catholicism.
I’ve also been tracking the flowers from the beginning of the book, and for anyone interested, here are the cultural/historical meanings of each of the flowers, and the person they are accompanying:
- Daisy (May): innocence and loyal love
- Gardenia (May and Newland): secret love
- Lily-of-the-valley: sweetness, the Virgin Mary, and humility
- Pink rose (on stage at the opera): happiness
- Red rose (on stage at the opera): love
- Pansies (“Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses” on stage at the opera): thoughts
- Yellow roses (Newland sends to Ellen): jealousy, decreasing love, infidelity (!!)
Amazing flower notes here!!
I’m also going to tell you to hold onto the Diana and goddess references cuz omg.
This week's reading and Haley's take on the close read was fascinating. At times I feel like Wharton is poking fun of Newland. For example, the line "Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts." Archer is depicted so far as arrogant & pompous. I wonder how long his fall will be to 'reality.' I'm most interested in his character growth and to see where he ends up at the end of the novel. Will I still think he's a fool by the end? I'm also enjoying Wharton's depiction of Ellen. It must have been stifling to be a woman back then and I'm thrilled that she is writing her in a free-spirit bohemian way. This is my first book of Wharton's and will have to do some research on her beliefs of women's rights. Haley - do you have any background info on this?
I will get you some sources! (Be warned: she was vocally *not* a feminist. Though there’s reason to read her work as deeply feminist, Wharton didn’t have many nice things to say about the movement in her time.)
Okay: a few links for you.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/11/01/why-do-women-want-edith-whartons-present-tense/#:~:text=Wharton%20was%20not%20personally%20a,figure%20of%20the%20young%20woman.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/what-edith-wharton-knew-a-century-ago-about-women-and-fame-in-america
And there is MUCH literary criticism on this -- happy to get you citations, if that is something you'd like!
During the first chapters I was thinking the title of the novel described this particular time period in general and women like May in particular, virginal blank slates waiting only for a husband. But all we know about May is that Newland doesn’t know her, mostly because he never bothered to ask and made some easy assumptions. She might have an inner life as rich and as sensual as anyone.
Now I think the eponymous “Innocence” belongs to Newland himself: for a man who read a lot, traveled some and had at least one romantic affair, he really is out of his depth. Ellen is not particularly devious as far as we know, but seeing how New York’s high society and Newland in particular are reacting to her, you’d think she was a practiced seductress. It makes us smile today, and even people in the early 1920s would find her rather vanilla.
I suspect that Ellen wasn’t that strange for 1870 standards either, except when dealing with incestuous old money New York, a microcosm clinging to European values that barely survived in Europe itself. It’s a world on the edge of extinction, so old and fragile that even a woman bringing nothing more exotic than a few trinkets is about to put it into serious jeopardy. I find it rather adorable to see Newland getting all hot and bothered about her, there’s something pure about it. Or, well, innocent.
I love this suggestion: maybe Newland is the most innocent of all.
Arg, I keep having life get in the way of literature! You all have made so many fascinating observations, some of which I shared and some of which were deliciously eye-opening. Huzzah for reading community!
The one piece I want to add now that may too late for anyone to read (like my last-minute Chapter 1 thoughts!), is what struck me about perceptions of Ellen and her behavior, vs. her understanding of herself in New York. We see the evolution in Newland's responses to her, from miffed disapproval of what he sees as her flippancy when they first talk at the opera, to annoyance at what he sees as his duty to defend her because of his alliance with May's family, all the way to the revelations of her "funny little house" (which she won't be allowed to keep).
Ellen is so very heavily scrutinized and judged right from the beginning. The men in the box with Newland at the opera all seem ready not only to speculate that she is ripe for the plucking as a mistress, but to assume that she knows it, and is deliberately displaying herself to that end. All the men notice her, including Newland. When she leans forward and casually displays "a little more of her shoulder and bosom that New York was accustomed to seeing" the narrator dryly adds, "at least in ladies who had reasons for wishing to pass unnoticed." Everyone in Newland's circle assumes that Ellen knows all of these principles as well as they do, and that if she came to the opera dressed this way and so willing to lean forward in public, she must want to be noticed.
This is partly why she confounds Newland so greatly in the early part of this week's reading (it's almost rom-commy: the person who most irritates you is the one you--well, you know...). Doesn't she *know* what a scene she's making, at the opera or at the Van der Luydens' dinner? She must! Everyone does! It's an offense against Taste, which Newland observes is even more important than Form (in that glorious sentence about "'Taste', that far-off divinity of whom 'Form' was the mere visible representative and vicegerent").
But Ellen *doesn't* know. We learn from her in Chapter 9 that she is just discovering that the New York she thought of as home, her safe haven, is neither the "dear old place" nor the "heaven" she affectionately called it in Chapter 2. When she said this to Newland at the opera, he thought she was being tastelessly and disrespectfully whimsical; but we learn in Chapter 9 that she was simply giddy at seeing her childhood companions, and she actually spoke her real feelings. Newland is not used to people saying what they feel, much less saying what they mean. His wordless exchanges with May (by line of sight only), which gave him such satisfaction at the time, later only underscore in his Chapter 6 long dark night of the soul how very little they actually have to say to one another.
So it's important that Ellen does not know the rules of appearance that have been paramount for Newland all his life. He takes them for granted as normal, what everybody knows they should do to preserve and maintain the natural and honorable order of things. But Ellen does not know, for example, that one does not display oneself in public with Julius Beaufort, on a busy shopping day, if one wishes to be considered a proper lady (and that if one does so, people are likely to assume that one has deliberately abandoned propriety). One does not get up and cross a room to sit with an engaged man for a tête-a-tête (not even just to talk about his betrothed), ignoring all the other men in the room and making oneself entirely conspicuous in one's red gown while doing so. One does not live amongst dressmakers and animal stuffers and writers or other interesting people, for heaven's sake. One does not have a "funny little house".
Ellen is starting to realize by the time she has her conversation with Newland in chapter 9 just how much she does not understand about how people see each other, and her, in New York, and the restraints they put on each other and want to put on her. How many obliquely correcting conversations have the women of her family had with her since the one in which she decided that her blue velvet gown was not good enough for her to go to the Beauforts' ball? (Mean Girls, Haley, yes!)
It takes time for Ellen to fully understand what all of this means, and she has only just started putting the pieces together in chapter 9, to the extent that she doesn't catch Newland's sarcasm about the issue. She has grown to adulthood in Europe, in circles of art and artists and performers, among people who do not worry so much about the human body or about sex. She thought she was coming home to New York, to heaven, to the people who knew her as a child (ooooh, her Age of Innocence?), and that everything would be good that was bad there, as she says to Newland when he corrects her about arranged marriages.
Poor, poor, Ellen.
Poor, poor Newland, who is realizing too late that there is a wider world that his heart could take him into, if his dabbling were to become a lifestyle and a passion...
Haley, I loved your audio essay this week, and what you're saying about Newland and his reality. Lovelovelove it! Onward to Week 3!
This is such a gorgeous mini-essay all in itself, Abbie!
I especially love this: " Newland is not used to people saying what they feel, much less saying what they mean."
In the latest audio (which I just dropped a half hour ago), I am thinking about Newland as an unreliable narrator and your comment here has me thinking about how Newland is, in part, unreliable because he's never been taught to tell the truth -- he doesn't know how to say what he feels, or to say what he means to say. Unreliable, indeed.
I noted your aside about your comments bring "too late for anyone to read" and I will say that I have been going back to posts on earlier chapters to see what "late" posters have to say. I enjoy the community aspects of Hayley's reads so much that I don't want to miss anything.