FINALLY DONE. This post might be the hardest, actually. I have so many Age of Innocence feelings but absolutely zero coherency about them; I basically just cry every time this book comes up. Seriously. You can rightfully assume that I cried at some point while putting this post together. I don't know what it is. This novel sends me to pieces.
Ellen is a fairly tragic figure from the very start. She lost her parents at a young age and was raised by a loving, though unreliable and unconventional aunt. She grew up primarily outside of her native New York, the product of "an expensive but incoherent education" which took place all over Europe. She married to the Polish Count Olenski, and supposedly lead a very cosmopolitan life with all sorts of exciting people over at her home constantly and lots of money and nice things. However, she'd in fact made a very bad marriage. The text never goes into the extent of it, but her husband is cruel to her - possibly abusive (though this is never stated outright) and certainly unfaithful, primarily using the services of prostitutes. She eventually is able to make her escape - though, quite shockingly, it's with her husband's secretary who she then lives with for some time. It's unclear as to whether it was romantic or not. Finally she makes her way home to New York, to her family, only to find she is a curiosity to the people there and a source of some shame, despite not being at all at fault for what went wrong in her marriage.
Ellen only wants freedom. Throughout the novel, she expresses a need for independence and freedom that is constantly denied, because it's improper for a woman of her station at her time. She equates America with freedom and is baffled by all the invisible rules she seems to be constantly breaking - why create a new world, she says, only to make it a copy of the old one?
Everyone finds Ellen quite shocking. Even Newland (main character, love interest) is unsettled by her at first. She makes her first appearance at the opera, in a dress considered too theatrical and out of style - revealing a little too much décolletage, if you feel me. He finds her to be inappropriately flippant. Nevertheless he is clearly immediately taken by her, because he can't stop thinking about her or bringing her up. She shows up the same day he becomes engaged to her cousin, May Wellend, a very nice and proper girl who is not a particularly deep thinker (though, sidenote: one of my favorite things about this novel is that the narration passes no judgement on May for being like this. She's simply a typical girl for her set, and there's nothing wrong with that. She's a good person with a good heart caught up in this situation as much as Ellen and Newland are. It's not her fault she ends up not being ~the one, you know?).
So even though Newland is unsettled by Ellen, he doesn't react to her in the same way other people do. Everyone gossips, of course, says Ellen's lost her looks, what is her family thinking parading her around, etc, etc. But Newland immediately defends her and protects her - he stands up for her in conversation, proclaims that women should be as free as men are, rightfully puts the blame on her husband and not her. And he announces his engagement ahead of schedule simply to take attention away from Ellen, as well as to show that two families stand beside her instead of one. It's important that he does this, because Newland's kindness becomes indispensable to Ellen as the novel goes on.
Ellen is interesting for a lot of reasons. She's a rulebreaker without seeming to be aware of it at all. It's simple to her: "Why not make one's own fashions?" She chooses to live in a funny unfashionable little house decorated with what she calls "bits of wreckage" - things from her former life she was able to save, paintings and other miscellany that are terribly exotic to Archer. She speaks to her maids in their native Italian and treats them like equals. She does everything wrong, really, by New York standards. She associates with people she's not supposed to. She says things no one else would dare to say. She lives her life on her own terms as much as she possibly can, and this makes it extremely difficult for anyone to understand her - and extremely difficult for Newland to resist.
Her being so unaware of how scandalous she's being is what's most interesting to me. Is it that she knows what she's doing and flouts the rules anyway? Or is it just impossible for her to follow them because by doing so she would be too untrue to herself?
The novel says something about how surprise is the emotion she is least familiar with, and I love that. Several times Newland looks for shock or surprise in her expression and doesn't find it; it seems to imply to me that Ellen is the kind of person who has already thought everything through, or who has already been through so much that she cannot be shocked. Perhaps she just expects the worst. Regardless, it's just not something she feels.
Ellen is always torn by personal desire and familial duty, like Newland. She feels Newland is the only one who truly understands her, who can truly explain the strange unnecessary rules of New York to her in a way that makes sense. He is kind to her when no one else is, like no one else is - he expects absolutely nothing in return. He only wants to help her, genuinely, though it takes him some time to realize why. So when the family counsels her against getting a divorce - because obviously divorce is the worst, even worse than getting abused and controlled by your shitty husband - and manipulates Newland to the same end, she does it. For him. For him and for May, to stop from bringing more disrepute to her family. She's also giving up the only thing she really wants: her freedom. It's one of those earmarks of a noble character, that they give up what they want most for those they love. Of course, ultimately doing so will ruin any future she and Newland could have had.
Newland and Ellen's relationship is doomed long before it ever begins, and the tragedy of that comes to define them both. Newland is destroyed. Losing his chance with Ellen is losing an entire future he could have had, losing the life he truly wanted. He is emotionally ruined (MUCH LIKE I AM EMOTIONALLY RUINED, EDITH WHARTON) by this life he will never have; the man he will never become.
Ellen, on the other hand, feels she is given so much. She has only known inconstancy and cruelty but Archer is honest and sweet, and I think his love gives her something she'd never had, fills a void in her. His love gives her strength to continue striking out on her own and living her own life. The narrative describes them as "chained to their separate destinies" - Newland trapped in his supposedly happy life, married to the right girl from the right family; Ellen alone, solemn but strong, as free as she can get.
In the same vein as her constant lack of surprise, Ellen is the pragmatist to Newland's dreamer. I have such a thing for pragmatic female characters. Newland is always wanting to run away to some place that doesn't exist where they can be together and the outside world ceases to exist; some land out of novels where everything is perfect. But Ellen knows that isn't real; her illusions have long been stripped away. "We'll look not at visions," she says, "but at realities." The reality may be painful but it's inescapable and Ellen knows no good comes of pretending it away.
THE END OF THIS NOVEL. This is the last time we see Ellen - that line. Newland is set on chasing after her to Europe, abandoning May because he just can't stand it anymore. But he can't, ultimately, because May tells him she's pregnant. And that's it. He never sees Ellen again. Thirty years later, he sits beneath her window in Paris while his son goes up to speak to her and thinks of the life she's lived without him: the books she's read, the paintings she's seen, the plays she's enjoyed, the conversations she's had. He thinks of the entire life she has lived that he will never know. He pictures her upstairs in her sitting room, surrounded by flowers, and he decides the fantasy is more real than anything else could ever be. And he leaves.
I'm not doing it justice, it's literally the worst thing a novel has ever done to me. Both of their spouses have passed. There is literally nothing keeping them apart anymore. But they've lived so much of their lives away from each other that it's impossible for their two worlds to ever touch again. We see how this affects Newland: he's a shell of what he was, settled into his lackluster life because he lost his only chance to escape it. But we never see how Ellen fares. We can only imagine, like he does.