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What it argues
Newland Archer is a well-meaning, intelligent young man preparing to marry May Welland — a suitable, beautiful, entirely conventional young woman from his own social world — when her cousin Ellen Olenska arrives in New York. Ellen has left a bad marriage to a Polish count and returned to the family fold, scandalous and fascinating. Newland, whose engagement gives him some immunity to her, is appointed by his law firm to advise her against divorce. He ends up falling in love with her instead.
Wharton wrote the novel in 1920 but set it in the 1870s New York she grew up in, and the gap between authorial perspective and subject matter is essential to the book. She is writing about her own world with the benefit of distance — able to see its codes as codes, its certainties as contingencies, its rituals as rituals. The society she depicts operates through a shared, tacit understanding: certain things are known but not spoken, certain people are accepted or excluded based on invisible criteria, and the enforcement of these norms happens without anyone having to say anything directly. Ellen Olenska is not ostracized dramatically; she is simply not visited.
What it gets right
- 1.
Newland believes he is more free than his society; the novel's project is demonstrating that he is not — he has simply internalized his constraints more elegantly.
- 2.
Social control in the novel operates through shared silence and willful blindness rather than explicit enforcement — which makes it harder to resist.
- 3.
May Welland, dismissed by Newland as conventional, is the most strategically intelligent character in the book; her apparent passivity is in fact very active management.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist and short story writer best known for her unsentimental examinations of Gilded Age and early-twentieth-century New York society. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Age of Innocence in 1921. Her other major novels include The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Ethan Frome. During World War One she organized relief efforts in France and was awarded the French Legion of Honor. She lived in France for much of her later life and died outside Paris at the age of 75.
