Abstract
Maya Higashi Wakana elaborates on Newland Archer’s gentlemanhood in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Newland initially appears aloof, detached, and analytical. However, Wakana shows that Newland’s detachment is likely a pose, a negotiated result of his microsocial need to express himself as an assertive male subject while being faithful to his need to fit into the community that produces him. Illustrating how Newland’s intimacies with his wife May and his wife’s cousin Ellen answer in complex ways to these urgent needs—May and Ellen can complement one another, be equally desirable, or be equally undesirable—demonstrating also Newland’s vulnerability to sentimental or dramatic scripts, the author elaborates on the meaning of Newland’s choice at the end of Wharton’s novel not to see Ellen in Paris.
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Notes
- 1.
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- 3.
Katherine V. Snyder (1999) directs our attention to the “presence of competing ideologies and practices within and between styles of manhood” (25) throughout the period from 1850 to 1925.
- 4.
Christian impulses seem to have found their way into the American psyche through the powerful ideal of chivalry and its descendant of sorts, gentlemanhood, whose trajectory Mark Girouard (1981) demonstrates. Girouard’s study focuses on Britain, but as Girouard asserts, the chivalric ideal was, like civility, a transatlantic one (“Preface”).
- 5.
When Wharton’s Lawrence Lefferts, declares that the “younger lines of Leffertses” are stingy, that the Rushworths have the “fatal tendency” of “mak[ing] foolish matches,” and that “insanity recur[s] in every second generation of the Albany Chiverses” (Wharton [1920] 2003, 7), ideal readers realize that, as Saunders (2009) claims, “the behavior of any one individual can injure the social standing and economic welfare of those to whom that individual is linked by recognized kinship” (70).
- 6.
In managing everyday relationships, Spitzberg (1994) notes that “a large dose of ambiguity, vagueness, and opacity” (37) is advantageous. In asserting this, Spitzberg cites Eric M. Eisenberg (1984), who specifically explains, as follows: “[A]mbiguity allows for both agreement in the abstract and the preservation of diverse viewpoints,” which promotes “unified diversity” and facilitates change while saving face (232).
- 7.
In the frontstage, Lefferts’s infidelities, Julius Beaufort’s extramarital relationship, and Newland’s deviant behavior do not become overtly public, thanks to the institution of the old boys’ club, the microsocially moral practice of differentiating between the frontstage and backstage of life, and Sillerton’s practical realization that “his reputation for discretion increased his opportunities of finding out what he wanted to know” (Wharton [1920] 2003, 8).
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For my analyses of Adam Verver, see also Wakana (2009, 119–22).
- 9.
Wharton’s description of May Welland Archer during her and Newland’s honeymoon in London recalls Henry James’s American Mrs. Westgate in An International Episode . Protective of her dignity, Mrs. Westgate does not write her British acquaintances for months after she arrives in London An International Episode . If she does not write, no one can snub her. By refusing to bring her face into question, Mrs. Westgate protects her own face as well as those of her British acquaintances, simultaneously preventing her from being the cause of their embarrassment—or of hers. Wharton’s May also believes that “it was not ‘dignified’ to force one’s self on the notice of one’s acquaintances in foreign countries” (Wharton [1920] 2003, 116–17). Her desire to dress in an impeccable way is May’s “defense against the unknown” (121) and her way of ensuring that she embarrasses nobody, including herself.
- 10.
Anna Bryson (1998) demonstrates how the ideal of the gentleman was a carryover from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The “originally Aristotelian” concept of a gentleman’s “magnanimity” included “the notion of the great-hearted man’s self-sufficiency” and “indifference to the praise or blame of the world. He performs admirable deeds solely for their intrinsic merits” (226).
- 11.
This scene recalls the boat scene in James’s The Ambassadors when Strether runs into Chad and Madame Marie de Vionnet in the French countryside. Jessica Levine (2002) also notes the parallel between the two novels and writes, “The way in which Ellen’s reticence feeds Archer’s desire is reminiscent of the way in which … Madame de Vionnet’s discretion facilitates Strether’s fantasies about her. In both novels, female discretion creates misunderstandings, which in turn opens [sic] up an imaginary space generating male desire” (164). For my reading of Lambert Strether’s interaction with Madame Marie de Vionnet and Chad Newsome in the French countryside, see Wakana (2009, 46–50).
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Philosopher René Rosfort and psychologist Giovanni Stanghellini (2009) claim that while moods are “unfocused and nonintentional,” they “permeate [one’s] perception of the environment” and “elicit a certain atmosphere that becomes the tonality through which [one] perceive[s] the world and [one’s self]” (258; 259; 259). Noël Carroll (2003) asserts that moods “can give rise to thematically corresponding emotional episodes,” though “emotional states can also give rise to mood states” (532).
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Lambert Strether’s sense of self in Henry James’s The Ambassadors is also inextricably linked with his perception of Chadwick Newsome’s worth (Wakana 2009, 21–56).
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When Newland observes the van der Luydens and sees that “though there were many other reasons for being attracted to Ellen, … beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go on rescuing her,” he assumes of the van der Luydens what the case would be if he were them. Newland would feel “the gentle and obstinate determination” “to go on rescuing” Ellen, were he the van der Luydens (Wharton [1920] 2003, 81).
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Newland does not act on his agitation immediately. This is because May’s letter of the previous day has already reaffirmed his noninferior position as “the only person in New York who can talk to her [Ellen] about what she really cares for.” At this juncture, Newland has achieved what he wants, which is to be that person. Newland promptly decides that he does not “care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska’s champion” (Wharton [1920] 2003, 76), especially when she also has Beaufort and Mr. van der Luyden sending her flowers.
- 16.
On the “looking-glass self,” Charles Horton Cooley (1922) writes, “As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it” (184).
- 17.
Donald Pizer (1924), for example, observes that Newland and Ellen “never consummate their love,” making The Age of Innocence “a novel of inaction rather than … one of doing” (138).
- 18.
As communication theorists Cupach and Spitzberg (2004) claim, “Mutuality is an ideal state; hence, its achievement is relative rather than absolute. All relationships contain disjunctive elements, yet they can provide immense satisfaction when partners converge on some personally important expectations and meanings” (34).
- 19.
In the scene involving Newland and May right after their wedding, Wharton ([1920] 2003) shows Newland actively claiming the demeanor expected of him. When May “turn[s] to him with a triumphant smile” as they climb into their carriage, Newland hears himself say, “Darling!”—only to see “suddenly the same black abyss [yawn] before him” and to feel “himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his voice,” he realizes, “rambled on smoothly and cheerfully” (114). Archer is locked into paying deference to May’s demeanor as the happy bride. Newland reciprocates May’s adoration for him, and May reciprocates Newland’s reciprocation. May and Newland thus come to generate one another’s faces as loving husband and wife.
- 20.
When Newland plans his visit to Ellen in Boston shortly after his marriage to May, he is reminded of “Lawrence Lefferts’s masterly contrivances” (Wharton [1920] 2003, 140). Newland’s negative view of Lefferts comes back to haunt Newland’s sense of self when Newland—in “furnishing details with all Lefferts’s practiced glibness”—tells May of his plans to travel to Washington (in pursuit of Ellen), finding also layers of meaning in May’s casual comment of “and you must be sure to go and see Ellen” (161). In New York, “audience segregation,” and hence “role segregation” (Goffman 1967, 108), is not available—unlike in Boston—and Newland cannot give exclusive attention to both Ellen and May, any more than Ellen can simultaneously be May’s friend and cousin and Newland’s lover.
- 21.
This scene recalls the one in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove in which Merton Densher and Kate Croy meet at London’s National Gallery. More importantly, it recalls the scene in The Golden Bowl where Amerigo walks with Charlotte to the Bloomsbury antique shop in search of a wedding gift for Maggie Verver. Both the conversation about the crack in the bowl in The Golden Bowl (Wakana 2009, 155–57) and the discussion of how useful things are destined to eventually be labeled “Use unknown” in Wharton’s novel seem somewhat out of place in their respective scenes, but their function as tropes for civility brings these two novels together.
- 22.
As Gary H. Lindberg (1975) asserts, May rescues Newland and Ellen from becoming enemies—whatever her intent: “May’s intervention saves, rather than destroys, their [Ellen and Archer’s] special bond” (135).
- 23.
Rather than understand these scenes as an outcome of Wharton appropriating from or being influenced by Henry James’s work, readers could make better sense of them if they were to understand them as Wharton’s (deliberate) tribute to her dear friend James. Wharton depicts her Newland in the act of spontaneously identifying himself with some of the most memorable protagonists, scenes, and situations in James’s repertoire, thereby reifying their prototypicality of sorts—into and through which Newland expresses himself.
- 24.
Hunter et al. (2011) essay alerted me to Goldstein’s essay.
- 25.
- 26.
Carol J. Singley (2000), for example, asserts that “readers have the impression” that ultimately, “negative critique overrides appreciation” (1).
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Wakana, M.H. (2018). The Gentleman in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. In: Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne, Austen, Wharton, and George Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93991-9_5
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