Wharton introduces us to many women in “The Age of Innocence” all significant to the part they play in the novel, but the two most significant female characters are May Welland and Countess Ellen Olenska.
Ellen Olenska is May’s cousin, a non-conformist. She is daringly sexual: her revealing opera dress looks to one appalled observer "like a nightgown," and another evening dress, a "bold, sheath-like" red velvet robe, with black fur trim and bare arms raises eyebrows with its sensuality. Newland falls in love with her for her defiance of social convention. Ellen has, to the changing of society, left her husband in Europe for the comforts of her home in New York. However when she returns she finds New York very different from the simple paradise she had remembered.
Ellen Olenska in my opinion represents the alternative, the disagreeable taste of “ happiness brought by the disloyalty and cruelty of indifference…”
Ellen is all that Wharton remembers the old New York of her youth lacking: beauty, passion and danger. Ellen returns home after leaving her morally corrupt husband but old New York does not know how to respond to a woman who might or might not have sexually rewarded the secretary who aided her escape from the Count Olenska’s house.
“Belonging to a European tradition, Ellen Olenska perhaps best utilises her “own unique and inherent resources” but she does this at the cost of expatriation…she is seen through a social filter that reduces her image.” Goodman
Nevertheless her family rallies and decides to champion her cause if she does not demand a divorce. We see pressure from her family in the old New York society here towards Ellen Olenska as they don’t want to be associated with someone who they feel is so “unconventional”, just as I feel Wharton was pressured by her family, in particular her mother, and society in her life.
Ellen is decidedly original, deflating stuffy New York conventions "at a stroke," and scattering her quaint little parlor with fresh flowers, obscure Italian paintings, and avant-garde French novels. Throughout the novel, it becomes clear to the reader that she is “unconventional” and it is difficult for the reader to decide if she doesn’t want to change or is not allowed to by the society she is trying to become part of. What is obvious id that she is independent of mind and spirit:
“ Her visitors were startled by the foreignness of her arrangement which recalled scenes in French fiction, and architectural incentives to immorality…that was how women lived in the wicked old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their novels described.”
This description of the Countess’ accommodation is interesting, because it is immediately clear that society do not approve of the Countess because of her fashion sense and decoration, even though she is family. This shows how shallow the society was and implies you had to dress and act according to their rules or become excluded from their society. Even the very name she was given is ridiculed by the New York society.
“…Its odd that she should have kept such an ugly name as Ellen. I should have changed it to Elaine…its sounds more – more polish…”
This reflects back to Wharton’s life as she feels that she was not accepted in the society she lived when she returned from Europe, she did not like the America she came home to, she shows this in a letter she wrote to a friend Sara Norton in 1903 “…my first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here…One’s friends are delightful, but we are none of us Americans…”.
Not only do we see Ellen Olenska in Wharton’s life becoming the chance she had to escape the life of convention; it is also reflected in Newland Archer’s life in the novel. Ellen functions more as a symbol for Archer’s struggling “self” than as a flesh-and-blood person. He sees himself wanting to be like her, in the way that she is free from the conventional life, the expectations he has to live up to and free from the New York society and routine he is trapped in.
Her free-spoken irreverence about "pompous" New York society delights him, and her radical taste in art and literature "whetted his interest.” He even finds himself defending Ellen's "French Sundays" as innocent gatherings for "good music" on nights when, as he sees it, "the whole of New York is dying of inanition." More than anything, however, Archer is fascinated by Ellen's worldly, knowing Artisan eyes. Looking into her eyes, Archer can imagine that Ellen "had lived and suffered, and also perhaps tasted mysterious joys." And more darkly, Wharton tells us "it frightened him to think what must have gone into the making of her eyes."
As Archer is thrown together with Ellen on a number of social occasions, and later on, as he visits her on family legal business, he finds himself more and more "deeply drawn into the atmosphere" of her sensuous, impulsive Artisan way of life. He responds to her "perverse and provocative" clothing with an undeniably sexual intensity: he stares at her arms, "bare to the elbow," and when she brushes him with her plumed fan, "it was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress."
The events in Archer and Ellen's liaison over the next several months, the secret meetings and the stolen moments, the passionate tears and the sorrowful kisses is all the more affecting because the love has such little room to grow, and is in fact never consummated. This crippling, typically nineteenth century dilemma , of two people loving one another and yet not able to be together, is shown here and has been felt and experienced by Wharton who reflects this affectively in “The Age of Innocence.”
May Welland, Newland Archer’s fiancée, is the picture of feminine innocence in the novel, "the young girl in white," as Wharton calls her. May is pink-cheeked and white-gloved, and she is also the delicate "May" flower of the New York social nursery, carefully tended "by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers." And without question May's blushing modesty (she is only twenty-two) has perfectly captivated Archer. As he watches her at the opera on the night of their engagement, sitting demurely in her grandmother's box and holding a bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knees, Archer smiles with a "tender reverence" on her childlike purity.
“…it was custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York, she usually accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons…”
Archer often thinks of May as a vessel holding all the virtues of home and family-life. He calls her "straightforward, loyal and brave," and then again "generous, faithful, unwearied." He trusts that, in her eyes, the world is "a good place, full of loving and harmonious households." And he feels that May is just the girl to keep a rein on his rebellious imagination, putting him more securely in touch with the familiar New York world around him. I feel this could be contrasted in Wharton’s life because she needed someone like May Welland to keep her “on track” to keep her aligned with the conventional New york
May is presented by Wharton as strong, generous, brave, this is shown when she offers during their engagement, to set Newland free to love another women (Ellen Olenska), or when she tells her son Dallas that she has understood Newland’ s sacrifice of what he wanted most in life.
She knows exactly what her husband is up to with Ellen, but instead of confronting him about it, she plays along with it, but in a very obvious way, she acts like she doesn’t have a clue what is going on and lets him think that, but she actually knows exactly what’s going on. What interests me is why she does this?
“…the case is postponed?…how odd! I saw a note this morning from Mr. Letterblair to Mamma saying that he was going to Washington tomorrow for the big patent case that he was to argue before the Supreme Court…You said it was the patent case didn’t you?”
May has remained insignificant after the wedding until the farewell dinner, her gradual removal from the plot reflects her decreased individuality after the marriage.
Instead of confronting Newland about it, she takes a more cunning, shrewd approach, she consults with her family, how conspire to take Ellen out “out of the picture” May asks for a private moment and tells Archer in her timid way ("all dew and roses") that she is pregnant with their first child and the news stuns him, and mocks him, and binds him irrevocably to his family responsibility. Archer might have been able to abandon his marriage for some imagined ideal of a more perfect woman, but the idea of forsaking his child is too much to bear, and with cold hands and a "sick stare" he strokes May's shining hair and accepts his fate. Ellen leaves immediately to live in Paris, and Archer resolves once again -- and this time finally -- to do his "dull duty" and become "what was called a faithful husband."
The New York society have a farewell dinner for Ellen and she leaves the country. Significantly she tells Ellen of her pregnancy before she tells Newland, this gives Ellen no other choice but to leave Newland alone and Newland no other choice but to leave Ellen alone. This conveys the cunningness and manipulative skills of May Welland and the New York society.
Upon the bones of this love triangle, It is not surprising that Wharton’s paired heroines often find that satisfying either the need for power or the need for affection excludes the other. This echos Wharton’s life, as she never felt adequately loved, either by her mother or several suitors.
May arises as the novels true heroin, for as Ellen told Archer, “the real loneliness is living among those kind people who only ask one to pretend…”
The other female characters in the novel, also play a very important part in Wharton’s portrayal of women. They play a significant, powerful part of the New York society.
Mrs Manson Mingott is May and Ellen’s grandmother. The matriarch of New York society. She is the head of the society, but interestingly got her position by being defiant and aggressive in her youth. Mrs Archer is Newland’s conventional mother. She is a widow. Mrs Welland is May’s very conventional mother. Mrs van der Luyden is a socially influential woman capable of making or breaking any reputation. She in particular is consistently in control of Ellen’s fate.
I find myself comparing these women to a court, the society appeal to these women for help and advise, base their lives in the New York society around these women and never betray them, because they know that they will be “ex-communicated” from society if they do so. Ellen Olenska experienced this and I feel that Wharton has also experienced this at some stage of her life, thus portraying it in the novel.
Conclusively I feel that Wharton’s description of New York society is so finely detailed that it seemed I was sitting amongst the characters. At first glance, it would seem that women held the inferior position in society. However, I feel that it was the two heroines of the novel May and Ellen who really knew the type of life they wanted and knew what was necessary to achieve it. I found the women to be strong and honourable about their own fashion. In the end it was Newland I pitied. Wharton has portrayed women intelligently, accurately and intimately, just as she seen it and experienced, but most of all she has presented them precisely as they should have been.
