15. love
spoilers for the age of innocence by edith wharton
The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by Edith Wharton about the stifling social codes and rigid conventions of the Gilded Age. It focuses on Newland Archer, an aristocratic lawyer engaged to the lovely but traditional socialite May Welland. But when May’s worldly, bohemian cousin Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe fleeing a failed marriage to a Polish count, Archer is instantly enchanted by her presence. Although divorce is legal, it is considered scandalous, and Ellen is regarded as a fallen woman. Ellen’s arrival exposes the facades and hypocrisy of New York high society, and as his feelings for Ellen grow, Archer begins to question his engagement to May. May represents the status quo and feminine ideal of the society that Archer is a part of, while Ellen represents freedom from its suffocating rules of conduct.
Archer finds an emotional and intellectual equal in Ellen. They begin to see each other in secret, believing that no one else knows. But everyone knows, including May, and they make subtle moves to obstruct Archer’s pursuit of Ellen. Archer chafes at the expectations of his family, business partners, and social class, and contemplates giving it all up to be with her.
But for Ellen, Archer represents something precious, too: acceptance, honesty, and shelter from the judgment of others. He is a rare type of good man, and it is for this reason that she eventually encourages him to go through with his engagement and marry May, despite her feelings for him. She knows that Archer’s opulent lifestyle and status are threatened by his proximity to her, and doesn’t want him to face the same ostracization that she must endure as a gossiped-about, scandalized divorcee. Nevertheless, Archer is changed by their flirtation, and their brief emotional affair sets into motion a lifelong performance of angst and self-sabotage.
In Chapter 13, Archer and Ellen separately attend a performance of The Shaughraun, Dion Boucicault’s melodramatic play about Irish siblings Robert and Claire Ffolliott. Set during the Fenian Rising, Claire is forced to choose between her brother and suitor when she falls in love with Captain Molineux, an English officer whose mission is to arrest her brother for his involvement in the Irish independence movement. Claire helps her brother evade capture, but her divided loyalties result in her coming clean to Molineux. Archer is captivated by the scene in which Claire (played by Miss Dyas) tells Molineux (played by Harry Montague) that he should never speak a word of love to her again until her brother is free before they go their separate ways. It is this scene that catalyzes an artistic obsession in Archer:
There was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor to ceiling. It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad, almost monosyllabic scene of parting with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and turned to go. The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and looking down into the fire, wore a gray cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded to her tall figure and flowing in long lines about her feet. Around her neck was a narrow black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back.
When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands. On the threshold he paused to look at her; then he stole back, lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon, kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or changing her attitude. And on this silent parting the curtain fell.
It was always for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer went to see "The Shaughraun." He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London; in its reticence, its dumb sorrow, it moved him more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.
Archer reenacts this scene later on when he gets sent to fetch Ellen, who he finds standing at the end of a pier. He explicitly recalls The Shaughraun and tells himself, “If she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll go back.” Like a teenager waiting for signs from the universe that their crush likes them back, he expects fate to intervene instead of taking action himself. He watches the boat glide well beyond the rock, but Ellen never turns around, and the decision is made for him. In the future, Ellen will admit that she knew he was there, and she chose not to face him in order to distance herself from him.
She still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face. “Why didn’t you come down to the beach to fetch me, the day I was at Granny’s?” she asked.
“Because you didn’t look round—because you didn’t know I was there. I swore I wouldn’t unless you looked round.” He laughed as the childishness of the confession struck him.
“But I didn’t look round on purpose.”
“On purpose?”
“I knew you were there; when you drove in I recognized the ponies. So I went down to the beach.”
“To get away from me as far as you could?”
She repeated in a low voice: “To get away from you as far as I could.”
Interestingly, the ribbon-kissing scene was a change made to the original script during production of The Shaughraun. In the original text, Claire and Molineux kiss, reconciling the two lovers despite their opposite roles in resisting and enforcing British colonialism. But in the version described by Wharton, Claire turns away, and Molineux silently kisses the end of the ribbon before exiting the room. Although Molineux agrees to the distance that Claire puts between them, his love compels him to steal an unnoticed kiss, if only on the end of her neck ribbon. The interplay between the two versions of this scene are echoed in Archer’s fantasies of an alternate reality with Ellen, and visually recreated in Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of the book.
In the final chapter of the book, it is revealed that May has passed away, leaving a middle-aged Archer free to pursue Ellen. He is presented with the opportunity to meet her in Paris, but as he sits on a bench underneath her apartment, just a few flights of stairs away from his former love interest, he changes his mind. He sends his son up to see Ellen, but he stays seated, gazing at her balcony. When a servant closes Ellen’s windows, he takes it as his cue to leave, just as he did years before with the sailboat. In the movie, Archer imagines Ellen once again at the end of the pier, but this time she turns around and smiles at him.
“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.
He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
There are multiple reasons why Archer does not go upstairs to see Ellen. One is that Archer is obsessed with the art he considers meaningful, and wants his life to conform to art. In order to complete his performance of the ribbon-kissing scene, he reenacts the restraint demonstrated by Molineux in the play. A second reason is that actualizing his relationship with Ellen would shatter his reality by destroying the construct of poetic distance standing between them. By walking away, he can preserve his faraway, idealized image of Ellen, as well as his own innocence of the fact that the shape of his life was decided for him by New York society. At the end of the movie, Archer is depicted looking at a painting in a museum, and the narration explains that “whenever he thought of Ellen Olenska, it had been abstractly, serenely, like an imaginary loved one in a book or picture. She had become the complete vision of all that he had missed.”
I wouldn’t consider The Age of Innocence to be my favorite book or count it among the books that have influenced me the most. But ever since I first read it in high school, the ribbon-kissing gesture has stuck with me, and the thought of Archer’s final resignation to the distance between him and Ellen makes me seize with heartache. Martin Scorsese called The Age of Innocence “the most violent film [he] ever made.” There are no murders, no gunshots, no stab wounds. The violence of this story is in Archer’s internalization of social rules, the denial of happiness, and the excruciating weight of a lifetime spent wondering what could have been.
The scent I chose for today is Masque Milano Russian Tea. It draws me into the setting of the novel with notes of leather, raspberry, black tea, and incense that conjure the saddlery of horse-drawn carriages, meetings at high tea, and the embers of a dwindling fire. It brings to mind a particularly devastating scene where Archer picks Ellen up from a train station, having lied to May beforehand to arrange their meeting. During their carriage ride together, Archer confesses that he hardly remembered her when he saw her. When Ellen asks what he means by that, he says, “I mean: how shall I explain? I—it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.” In the movie, he then removes his own glove to unbutton hers and kisses her wrist, on her pulse point where perfume is normally worn, before the two embrace.
Archer intends to consummate their love and have a full-blown affair with Ellen. But this never happens, and the scene ends when Ellen breaks his delusion that they could happily see each other while Archer is married to May. When Archer reveals that he has “a vision in [his] mind” of the two of them together and that he is “quietly trusting it to come true,” Ellen laughs at his naïve belief that such an arrangement would ever be allowed in the society they live in. Ellen tells Archer that they can remain in each other’s lives, but their destiny is to look “not at visions, but at realities,” to which Archer replies, "I don't know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is this."
"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?"
It is clear that Archer excels at living in his head, and in his old age, Archer retreats even further into the fantasy he dreamed up. By the end of the book, he has spent years dwelling on everything he gave up when he married May. Even though he is free of the marriage that once held him back, he cannot summon the courage to face Ellen in Paris and find out what could have been: “Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things.”
Founded by two orchestra directors, Masque Fragranze describes their philosophy as scenting “the Opera of life in four acts.” Their fragrances are meant to be worn like a mask, which the wearer imbues with their own individuality: “The fragrances of Masque are to be created with a soul, and the nose’s appointment is to give life to our scene.” I take this to mean that the fragrances of this house are meant to represent different acts and roles that the wearer should don and inhabit, performing their own variations on the original scene (Russian Tea is labeled Act I-Scene III). I feel like this brand concept has a common thread with the layers of performance in The Age of Innocence, particularly in Archer’s reenactments of the ribbon-kissing scene. I’ve written about the angst and repression of this book not because I really identify with any of the characters, but because there have nevertheless been certain points in my life when I, like Archer, expected life to imitate art and concocted fantasies and was disappointed with the outcome. And like Archer, I feel safer living in daydreams and memories of love than finding meaning in the real thing.
