“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
a few thoughts on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innoncence
“…every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirst waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true” — Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
At the very end of the novel, Newland Archer utters one of the most poignant phrases yet: ‘It’s more real to me here than if I went up’ – I think it's the kind of ending that can frustrate many readers, but for me, it's perfectly understandable. Throughout the book, I had the uncomfortable experience of noticing many similarities between myself and Newland, to the point of developing a real dread of becoming like him, of being too cowardly to take a risk in the name of an overwhelming desire, of giving up on truly living for the comfort of letting ‘life’ choose for me - except that this is precisely Newland's illusion. Life doesn't choose for anyone.
Non-choice is also a choice. Newland is too cowardly to take responsibility for what he wants, so he blames the world, the invisible hand of fate; inevitably he discovers in the end that all the supposedly insurmountable barriers that turned him and Ellen into Romeo and Juliet never actually existed. Thirty years later all those social chains that he believed (or wanted to believe) were indestructible have evaporated – this is a story of enormous unfulfilled potential, as the best love tragedies are.
Then he tried to see the persons already in the room—for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one—and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it.... He thought she would be sitting in a sofa–corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.
"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.
Thus, he leaves Ellen and the ill-fated romance in his imagination — it's ‘more real’ that way. Not even at the end of his life did he have the guts to face reality and realise that all along he had been the only obstacle, that he possessed all the narrow-minded beliefs and prejudices that he disdained with such superiority. The hypocrisy he detested was also his own.
And having said all that, I understand Newland. Nothing is ever as good as it seems in our fantasies – it's something I've repeated to myself countless times, not as consolation but as advice for resignation. It's a rather inconvenient and embarrassing fear: the fear of facing up to your desires, actively pursuing them, and venturing to get what you want... only to perhaps discover that it wasn't what you wanted. It's one of the worst tragedies, worse than not getting what you wanted because it leaves a void and an existential question: what do I want then? Newland let ‘fate’ answer for him.
Idealism saves us from consequences. Plato, in his Theory of Forms presented in The Republic, divided the universe into two categories: Forms, the thing in itself, which is ideal, eternal and unchanging; and embodiments of Forms, a representation or reflection of the ideal, which is always mutable and decadent, lesser than the Form but derived from it. We can interpret the romance-that-never-was between Newland and Ellen as a platonist Form because it is an ideal preserved in Newland's romantic imagination as an intense affair, constant in passion and glamour and without suffering the mutations and interferences of the material world. The illusion is undone by May Welland — the true realist in the love triangle despite Newland’s constant dismissals of her intellect — when she asks her fiancé after one of his romantic paroxysms: “We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
However, it’s important to state that Ellen isn’t a mere victim of Newland’s idealisation. She also demonstrates a romantic tendency to tragedy, sacrificing her pleasure and renouncing Newland for May’s sake, yet never letting him go completely, even though she fled New York at the end of Book I. Newland later discovers that she has refused the Count because of him – even though he is now a married man. This way, Ellen introduces the paradox that their love is based upon mutual renunciation. Newland, ‘stirred and yet tranquillised’ by ‘the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves’, (DAIGREPONT, 2007)1 is more inclined than ever to romanticise their relationship in theatrical terms.
Besides the Theory of Forms, Plato also offers insight through the idea of Platonic love as explained by Lloyd M. Daigrepont, who considers Newland and Ellen as lovers ‘almost self-consciously elevating desire through sexual abstinence and separation counterbalanced by intense declarations of love.’ This easily becomes an obsession that takes Newland further and further away from the real world, as Ellen herself points out:
‘I want—I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that—won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.’
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. ‘Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?’ she asked;
After talking to a friend who has also read this book, I realised that the ‘love’ Newland feels for Ellen is narcissistic and illusory: as an incredibly self-absorbed man, he loves the idea of him with Ellen; he loves the idea of being someone capable of loving and being loved by Ellen, because this reinforces his superiority to ‘ordinary’ people and places him as a ‘romantic hero’ of the poems in which he sees himself reflected, such as Rossetti's The House of Life, which he reads envisioning Ellen as the poem's object of passion – a ‘Lady’ whose eyes ‘yields thee life that vivifies | What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall’. According to Daigrepont:
‘In what has become a ‘cult of passion,’ malcontented lovers – in history as in literature – seek to transcend the frustrations and limitations of social and material existence through ardent devotion to some ‘beloved other’ who represents or provides thereby an all-encompassing passage into divine oneness. Ironically, such “love" proves narcissistic in that devotees cultivate feeling – including the highly gratifying sensation of being objects of others' adoration – as a means of finding their own release from life's imperfections.’
His desire for Ellen can also be seen as a desire to escape ennui, yet since she’s an ideal, such desire is always impossible to fulfil, unattainable like Plato’s Form. I dare say her elusiveness is the main source of attraction. This is why he defers from meeting her at the end: if the dream remains a possibility it’s ‘more real’ than if he reaches it and gets inevitably frustrated. Right at the novel’s beginning, Wharton tells us this: ‘because he was at heart a dilettante, and a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.’ Twenty-six years later, he still hasn’t changed – he missed ‘the flower of life’ and remained self-absorbed: ‘When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or picture: she had become the composite vision of all he had missed’.
The ‘Innocence’ of the title refers to Newland – the naiveté in which he sees himself and his obliviousness to the assumptions being made about him and Ellen is evidence of that. According to Daigrepont, ‘he prefers to think of himself as unconventional and liberal as he easily contrasts himself with the elite, custom-ridden New Yorkers who form his social milieu.’ Newland needs the dream of the alternative life, the ‘what if’ to fill the inescapable moments of monotony with daydreams; he needs to believe that he could have been a romantic hero ‘if it hadn't been for duty’. It's the lie that sustained him throughout his marriage with May and what gave him a false sense of self – because he, like the Mingotts, Wellands, and Van der Lydens he despised so much, can't ‘face the unpleasant’ either.
Daigrepont, Lloyd M. “The Cult of Passion in ‘The Age of Innocence.’” American Literary Realism, vol. 40, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–15.
não tinha pensado sobre esse aspecto platônico do relacionamento deles! muito bom
This was a great read!