Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence is a glimpse into a society of the subtle and the implied, where the appearance of a thought is more important than the thought itself. At least, this is what we are told according to Archer, a narrator who sees “a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs (Wharton, 20). It is an environment of constant scrutiny, in which a declined dinner invitation is the ultimate humiliation and an evening at the opera is more consequential than any public tribunal. Archer, a self-proclaimed intellectual and an idealist, is locked in his position within this system. Subsequently, his way of navigating this world is to develop a bifocal view of it, separating himself into two internal and external selves that are completely disjoint. The external self is what he presents to society, operating entirely within its rules and customs, and the internal self is what he thinks inwardly to himself, a narrator who is relentlessly hyperaware and critical of every false pretext and hypocrisy. As the book progresses, this rift between the two selves increases: the external going through the motions of a traditional marriage with May while the internal pines for a love for Ellen that is never realized. It is the external self that addresses May with “‘Darling!’” while the internal is aware that a “black abyss yawned before him and he felt himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his voice [rambles] on smoothly and cheerfully” (137). However, we must not be too quick in absolving Archer of responsibility. There are continual moments of surprise throughout the novel in which he is presented with the opportunity to adjust his narrow reading of the world, moments in which he nevertheless actively chooses to continue his adherence to the binary. It is these moments that make him most complicit in the very system whose other players he so harshly condemns.
Society, as introduced to us by Archer in the opening chapter, is a rigid one that operates in strict adherence to its rules and customs. And yet, everyone around Archer is constantly breaking – and getting away with breaking – the very same rules that he considers so set in stone. According to Archer, “New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons … and the Archer-Newland-van-de-Luyden tribe” (15). It is not a place in which a newcomer like Mr. Beaufort, whose “habits were dissipated, his tongue bitter, his antecedents mysterious” (9) should be able to prosper, let alone marry into, and when Mrs. Manson’s cousin announces her engagement to him, “it was felt to be one more act of folly in poor Medora’s long record of imprudences” (9). This societal debacle is short lived, however, and it takes just two years for it to be “admitted that she had the most distinguished house in New York” (9). We similarly bear witness to a steady stream of affairs of varying degrees of legitimacy throughout the novel, from Lawrence Lefferts’ brief entanglements (20) to Mr. Beaufort’s drawn-out engagement that eventually becomes his second family. Ms. Struther’s Sunday dinner parties that are so controversial when first introduced (41) evolve into a weekly staple (121), and wearing Parisian dresses of the same season, initially considered vulgar, becomes the rule rather than the exception (120). Society, it seems, does not have a memory quite so long as Archer believes.
Archer, on the other hand, finds himself in complete adherence to the rules and principles that those around him are so comfortable with breaking. Unable to move beyond his compartmentalization of the social and the internal, his “conformity to the discipline of a small society [becomes] almost his second nature” (151). His social self provides him with a familiar framework with which to interpret and navigate his surroundings, making it “deeply distasteful to him to do anything melodramatic and conspicuous”. By safely residing in the familiar, there is “little scope for the unforeseen” and by direct implication the non-traditional. This leaves no room for his internal self in the real world, and he aptly notes that “the worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else” (165). This adherence is so severe that his internal self even experiences a sense of disembodiment with regards to his own actions. Seated at Ellen’s farewell dinner, Archer “seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if float[ing] somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondering[ing] at nothing so much as his own share of the proceedings” (157). This moment of externality is accompanied by the simultaneous recognition that he is complicit in a situation that he finds painful and abhorrent.
This dichotomy between the external and the internal is not limited to Archer’s view of himself, but spills over into how he views those around him, particularly in how he sees May. She starts out as the model wife Archer’s internal self, and when he contemplates his upcoming marriage, it resides purely in the realm of the intellectual: “What a new life it was going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one’s side!” (11). May, to him, will become the embodiment of his intellectual aspirations, “develop[ing] social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the ‘younger set’” (3). His contemplation of her as his future wife takes the form of Platonic ideals rather than concrete reality, but crumbles in the face of change, replaced with a view that is perfectly aligned with what is expected of his social self. This transition happens a few weeks into their honeymoon, during which Archer realizes that it is “far less trouble to conform with tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends [treat] their wives than try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied” (91). It is a complete departure from his prior grand plans. “He had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which tradition and training had molded her” (153), we are told, and “now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland” (138). His external self settles into an interpretation of his wife that is consistent with the role he thinks society expects from her, and by extension, himself.
However, this outlook is not inevitable, and throughout the novel Archer consistently faces situations in which his reductionistic narratives are proven wrong, moments in which he nevertheless chooses to return to the safe harbors of his neat compartmentalization. May’s first departure from the unoriginal comes before their marriage, in the form of a confrontation about Archer’s past dalliances. After this exchange, Archer notices that “there was something superhuman in an attitude so recklessly unorthodox”, an impression that leaves him “still dizzy with the glimpse of the precipice they had skirted”. This awe is short lived however, and with no dialogue or actions from May except a tearful smile, “in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself” (70).
Nor is this the only moment in which Archer is faced with the realization that he has been mistaken in his views of May only to revert her back to prior assumptions, and we see that the same is true after the two are married. Mere days after Archer’s proclamation that “never, in all the years to come, would [May] surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion” (138), he looks around at Ellen’s farewell gathering, shocked by the realization that everyone around him sees his relationship with Ellen as an affair. The biggest shock comes from May, and when “he [catches] the glitter of in his wife’s eyes” he for the “first time [understands] that she [shares] the belief (159)”. This surprise is yet again soon forgotten, and in the years after her passing, glancing at her photograph from before their marriage is followed by thoughts that “as he had seen her that day, so she had remained”, a figure who is “so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change” (166). The surprise doesn’t stop there, and May proves herself capable of originality yet again in her final words to her son, in which she reveals that she always understood the full intensity of Archer’s feelings for Ellen. It is a profound understanding that “[seems] to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guessed and pitied… and that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably” (168). And yet this realization isn’t followed by the rewriting of May’s narrative that we expect and instead comes to rest as the final thought about his wife that we bear witness to.
In addition to this inability to see those around him beyond his narrow definitions of them, whenever Archer is confronted with non-conformity he conforms as a reflex, echoing back the same hypocrisy that his internal self is so critical of. When Ellen’s husband accuses her of having an affair, Archer is conscious of “the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticized in his mother and her contemporaries”, finding himself wholly unprepared for situations whose “very vocabulary was unfamiliar to him” (52). In these uncharted waters he is quick to jump to the very same conclusions that he finds so perverse. At Ellen’s first mention of just wanting freedom, “it flashed across him at that instance that the charge in the letter was true, and that she hoped to marry the partner of her guilt”. Safe within this assumption, his subsequent advice clings to convention, “stock phrases that rose to his lips in his intense desire to cover over the ugly reality which her silence seemed to have laid bare” (52). He behaves similarly in other unexpected situations. When Madame Olenska asks him if he expects her to become his “mistress”, we learn that “the crudeness of the question [startles] him” and that “he [notices] that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognized place in her vocabulary,” leading him to wonder “if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from”. We as the readers aren’t the only ones that notice his tendency towards the socially accepted, and at the end of Archer’s life we are told that “he had been, in short, what people were beginning to call a ‘good citizen’” and that in all matters pertaining to what is acceptable and proper in the public eye “people said ‘ask Archer’” (163). There is a two-fold irony to this: having created an external self as a way of salvaging the internal, he becomes an example of blameless adherence to the very rules and principles that he cannot stand.
In many respects, Archer’s incessant splitting of the world into the internal and external comes from his being the purest form of a dilletante, an aesthete for whom the mere idea of something brings more pleasure than the thing itself. It is why the absence of an embrace in an opera touches him more than the loudest arguments, and why he chooses to sit on a bench outside Ellen’s apartment after a lifetime of longing. Much of his self-worth hinges on his being a well-read intellectual, and the only way he can maintain this tendency towards idealization and the romantic is by relegating these feelings wholly to the world of the imagined. As a result, the version of himself that remains exposed to the public eye is one that is highly filtered and irrefutable. By refusing to view things beyond this binary worldview, Archer actively rejects any form of agency over the social currents that have so much sway over the trajectory of his life, and for this we must hold him responsible. It is a decision to do nothing in the face of hypocrisy, to fully recede, both in action and principle, and one that he makes again and again throughout the book. Growing complacent in a reality that he cannot approach head on, he ultimately upholds the same rules that even the most established members of his society cannot help breaking. It is what results in an internal self that sits in stunned horror while the external keeps up polite, forced conversation at Ellen’s farewell dinner; his fate is a lesson in what it means to choose to misunderstand the world.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. Wisehouse, 2020.