The Age of Innocence

“Madame Olenska’s pale and serious face appealed to his fancy as suited the occasion, and to her unhappy situation; but the way her dress (which had no tucker) sloped away from her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him. He hated to think of May’s being exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless of the dictates of Taste.”

While Ellen’s face aligns with the apparent tragedy of her situation as an estranged wife, her revealing dress makes both her body and her person unnecessarily conspicuous. Archer worries about his impressionable young fiancée being exposed to such an irreverent woman. The capitalization of “Taste” indicates that good manners and appearances are almost a deity in New York society, capable of making “dictates” and personified in the same way the virtues would have been in medieval morality plays.

“Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the ‘unpleasant’ in which they had both been brought up.”

May’s discretion and adherence to the rules of social propriety are the traits Archer admires the most in her. There is something almost comic in her tendency to ignore “the unpleasant” to “the utmost limit”—this level of pretense suggests the cunning intellect underlying the simplicity and naturalness May projects. While at this stage in the novel Archer approves of May’s hypocrisy, as the plot develops, he will grow to despise it. 

“Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t? I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots […] Women ought to be free—as free as we are.”

Archer is at odds with his society’s view that Ellen ought to make herself scarce because she had the misfortune of having a cruel husband. The hyperbole of a woman burying herself alive refers to the ancient practice of a widow burying herself with her husband. Defending Ellen by pointing out that her husband was living “with harlots,” Archer voices his dislike of his society’s double standards for male and female sexuality. He then voices the radical view that women ought to be “free” as men—that Ellen has the same right to start over as he did when he became engaged to May following his affair with a married woman. 

“He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”

Archer views May as a product of a system that has trained her out of independent thought and an individual personality. He worries that with such training, no deep or interesting marriage can take place, and though he would like to believe he will escape the fate of other unions, he does not see how.

“What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known. He knew that the Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her—bits of wreckage, she called them.”

Ellen is often associated with the faded, but picturesque beauty of Europe. She invests the spaces she decorates with foreign allure. The darkness of the room hints at attractive mystery and intimacy that is in direct contrast to the affected simplicity of May and other women in New York society. Ellen charmingly calls her possessions “bits of wreckage”—a self-deprecating slight that indicates her understanding of their aesthetic value and their evidence of her escape from an abusive marriage.

“Our ideas about marriage and divorce are particularly old-fashioned. Our legislation favors divorce—our social customs don’t.”

Archer is forced to deliver Ellen the news of American hypocrisy about divorce. While it was legally easy to procure a divorce in 1870s America, in their circle divorce is taboo—it would marginalize Ellen and make her status even more precarious than it already is.

“There was something superhuman in an attitude so recklessly unorthodox, and if other problems had not pressed on him he would have been lost in wonder at the prodigy of the Wellands’ daughter urging him to marry his former mistress, but he was dizzy with the glimpse of the precipice they had skirted, and full of a new awe at the mystery of young-girlhood.”

Archer is amazed at May’s brazen suggestion that they should break off their engagement so he can marry his former mistress. He realizes that May is aware of far more than she is allowed to show and that she is capable of independent thought. He hopes this means that she is actually an exciting woman, rather than the predictable society animal he assumed.

“‘Nothing’s done that can’t be undone. I’m still free, and you’re going to be.’ He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise. The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple.”

Archer fantasizes about undoing everything standing in the way of his relationship with Ellen: his engagement and her decision not to divorce. The attraction between Archer and Ellen makes every physical contact a moment of sexual thrill, which Archer mistakes for the illusion of facility to his new plan. Describing their reservations as “vain ghosts” extinguished by light indicates his naïve belief that their desire will set them free and make all their social responsibilities irrelevant. 

“I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and—unnecessary. The very good people didn’t convince me; I felt they’d never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands—and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I’d never known before—and it’s better than anything I’ve known.”

Archer was able to convince Ellen to align with the rigid and obsolete-seeming customs of New York because she relates to him as a person who is tempted by a less morally exacting lifestyle. She finds his resistance to the things that tempt him admirable and inspiring. This will remain her inspiration for the rest of the novel, as she resists his physical advances.

“If, now and then, during their travels, they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to.”

Travel does not suit May because it is intended to broaden horizons, while she has been conditioned by her upbringing to resist opening her mind. This puts her at odds with Archer, who wants to experience life away from America. However, in New York, they return to the same state of distant equilibrium they had before the engagement.

“What if ‘niceness’ carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness? As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final bull’s-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that curtain.” 

Archer bristles at Beaufort’s slight that May is too docile to be alluring. However, the comment rhymes with his own doubt that May’s “niceness” (here used in the word’s older meaning of fastidious) might indicate an absence of personality. May’s scrupulous approach to propriety is a way to hide: A “curtain” Archer cannot get behind to ever get know his wife.

“As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.”

As Archer boards the paddle-boat with Ellen, he cannot help feeling that they are leaving the familiar behind and beginning a new life together. He longs to have Ellen confirm his feelings, wishing to be reassured that they can break free of the social customs that bind them. 

“You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It’s beyond human enduring—that’s all.”

Archer accuses Ellen of showing him “real life” where he could be himself, and then withdrawing it, insisting that he should keep up the “sham” of a socially proper existence. He finds this to be torture “beyond human enduring”—she is asking him to go against nature and his humanity in continuing to live without her.

“It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquilized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity.”

Archer realizes that Ellen has landed them in what modern readers would call an emotional affair: Taking deep pleasure from each other’s company without actually having a physical affair that would condemn them. However, the difficulty of skirting this line is evident in the physical symptoms of Ellen’s emotional distress. Something will happen to end this state of uneasy equilibrium.

“I’ve always thought that people like the Countess Olenska, who have lived in aristocratic societies, ought to help us to keep up our social distinctions, instead of ignoring them.”

Ellen’s upending of social expectation and lack of regard for the distinctions of social class run counter what Mrs. Archer expects of a woman who has lived among aristocrats in the most hierarchical European societies. This remark shows Mrs. Archer’s hypocrisy, as she criticizes Ellen for being too European and on the one hand and too lacking in European distinction on the other.

“And when she said: ‘But my name, Auntie—my name’s Regina Dallas,’ I said: ‘It was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it’s got to stay Beaufort now that he’s covered you with shame.’”

Mrs. Mingott’s speech to Regina Beaufort conveys society’s idea that a wife belongs to her husband through thick and thin—a comment that cannot help but reference Ellen’s situation. Mrs. Mingott sees Regina’s distress as weakness of character, rather than the natural reaction of someone who has been betrayed. Now that Regina has tolerated her husband’s awful behavior because of his lavish fortune, she must live with him in financial ruin as well.

“The carriage stopped, and as he jumped out she leaned to him and laid her hand on his. ‘Good-bye, dearest,’ she said, her eyes so blue that he wondered afterward if they had shone on him through tears.”

This is a moving portrayal of May’s turmoil, which is just visible through the performance of her duties as a sweet Victorian wife. The typically self-involved Archer’s cannot discern May’s thoughts; however, he does have the retrospective reflection that her eyes are bluer because she is on the verge of breaking down.

“I mean: how shall I explain? I—it’s always so. EACH TIME YOU HAPPEN TO ME ALL OVER AGAIN.”

Each encounter with Ellen reinforces Archer’s attraction to her. The use of upper case reinforces the passion of his speech. Unlike May, who is always the same, Ellen makes Archer see her with fresh eyes every time they meet: The novelty of her presence contrasts with May’s humdrum predictability.

“Where is that country? Have you ever been there? […] I know many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo—and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.”

Ellen rejects Archer’s fantastical entreaty that they find a new country where they could be lovers without external judgement. Ellen knows there is no such place. A worldly woman, she has heard the stories of “many” who have tried to lead this kind of life but were defeated by their status as social pariahs. The idea that one meets “the old world” everywhere means that there is no hope of getting away from a judgmental society. Ellen tried to do just that by moving to America, but this did not allow her to make a clean break from her past.

“What if it were SHE who was dead! If she were going to die—to die soon—and leave him free! The sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and overmastering, that its enormity did not immediately strike him.”

Archer is so desperate to be with Ellen that he contemplates all the methods by which he might procure his freedom, including the death of his wife. The contrast between the extreme occasion of her death and the “warm familiar room” that they inhabit indicates his wish to ruthlessly dispense with her. He feels so liberated by the fantasy of May’s death, that the “enormity” of wishing for such a misfortune is not apparent to him.

‘“Don’t let us be like all the others,’ she protested. ‘What others? I don’t profess to be different from my kind. I’m consumed by the same wants and the same longings.’”

Ellen does not want to turn their love affair physical because that would make them just like any other adulterous couple. The idea of “all the others” implies an excessive surplus of marital transgressors. Archer, however, finds virtue in being like his “kind” and sharing the passions that are common to all humanity. Whilst they are transgressing cultural norms, by the standards of natural law, they are healthy and normal.

‘“I knew you’d been the one friend she could always count on; and I wanted her to know that you and I were the same—in all our feelings.’ She hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and then added slowly: ‘She understood my wishing to tell her this. I think she understands everything.’”

May creates an implicit understanding between her and Ellen in the most polite and congenial terms possible. By stating that she and her husband think alike on everything, even Ellen, May presents marital complicity that distances Ellen from Archer. May uses rituals of courtesy as weapons for building the world she wants.

“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 nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.”

Ellen’s farewell dinner feels like a weapon to Archer. Ellen’s family veils her departure in custom and ceremony, subsuming any possible bitter confrontations under the appearance of decency. Still, Archer considers that the more essential value of courage has been sacrificed for this display.