The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Class notes from Professor Egan
Class 1
The opening paragraph of The Age of Innocence already condenses so much for the setting. (Lesson: Fiction is an act of compression).
It sets the time and designates it as an era that has already passed (The early 70s); the main group of people (conservative, sociable old, historic associations); and the social dichotomy ("new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to).
In doing all of this so early on, it sets the tone for an anthropological and almost scientific narrative analysis used throughout the book. The cumulative effect shows the prejudices and perspectives of the first few sentences
“On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.”
Published in the 1920s, Wharton was ~60. Born in NY on West 34th st to an “elite” family, she marvels and documents on the details of the vanished world of her childhood
The most elevated members of the elite NY families gain their status from their blood ties to European aristocracy
Form (what can and can’t be done) and Genealogy (bloodlines) have their ‘experts’ – Sillerton Jackson and Laurence Lefferts, respectively
Invisible servant class
What is problematic/disruptive about Ellen Olenska?
Alleged affair w/ husbands secretary + left her husband (run away)
Her parents died and she was raised by whacky aunt who didn’t conform to NY
Spent many years in Europe, which was seen as a tainting place of looser morals. Her husband was a Polish count.
Suspicion of Europe yet pedigree from blood there
Dresses risky (low cut, colors)
She isn’t supposed to be in the opera box with May Welland (who is a virgin)
Woman were expected to be totally ignorant of sex and be virgin → May and Ellen were inversions of each other
Infidelity
Tacit tolerance for infidelity in both men and woman, but held at different standards
Divorce is legal but frowned upon – only acceptable if there is no report by the husband about sexual misconduct → husbands perception means everything
A great deal goes unsaid in the book, especially unpleasant things
Newland looks at his world anthropologically
He read Darwin, but Freud hasn’t been published but you can see the influence
Barchester Towers vs The Age of Innocence
Set in the same time period
Unlike Barchester, The Age of Innocence never mentions or focuses on sin, virtue, heaven, or hell.
Trollope narrates with an omniscient narrator who can use many perspectives. Wharton has an omniscient narrator who only gives Newland’s POV
Description of the body
May described in bodily terms, always. Ellen isn’t sexualized or body-focused and is even referred to as having a “pathetic, even pitiful figure”
Huge difference to Trollope’s body-focused accounts of Madame Neroni and Mr. Slope
Why is Newland attracted to Ellen?
She is an “occasion for action.” Things happen to her
She says shocking things that are unpleasant to NY
Culturally engaged
Vulnerability & marginality – she needs Newlands protection
Newland’s jealous of Beaufort
She seems Free-er than the people in his world
Her tragedies & mysterious background, having lived in a atmosphere so thick with drama
Metaphysical attraction → contact with her changed his view to his own world
Newland is aware of the smallness and unchangingness of his own world. He feels trapped → fixating on Ellen
With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other
Narrative Modes
Anthropological mode
Aware of evolution; interest in primitive man; describing a social system; “rights, habits, customs”; social pyramid described scientifically in specificity
Journalistic witnessing
Clothing; furniture; lighting; cultural references
Collective point of view
“New York” asa unified entity
Descriptive irony
Metaphors to describe + comment on what is being seen
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows
^One of my favorite bars from the novel
Class 2
Fannie Ring is an unmarried woman having an affair w/ Beaufort. She’s treated as contamination
Social extinction – society cutting off something to save itself
A world where family loyalty has its limits. The family will ostracize (and harshly) when needed. Total expulsion becomes possible
Argument: Ellen & Newland wouldn’t have felt the same way if they had the affair
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.
Each time you happen to me all over again
Newland’s love is emotional, not lustful. His own life and role in it had become intolerable to him
Newland’s superiority complex shows a mental health crisis
Feeling your world is fake and nobody else can see it
Mental health crisis
Inner sanctuary vs unreality of actual life
he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.
Absent minded / dissociation
Perception & description is often formed bny belief and he clearly views himself as a prisoner
Cost Benefit Analysis of which narrative model to choose
If only 1st person – (gain) deepest intimacy of the person's interior thoughts but (lose) everything else: retrospective awareness, journalistic witnessing, etc.
We have reason to think Newland’s more transparent than we think.
Ellen is still a mystery by the end of the book. She is an attractive mystery and a question mark
What she does for all the time she’s not interacting w. Newland
Did she have an affair?
What happened between her and her husband?
Did she want Newland to fall in love with her?
In the absence of May / social norms, will Newland still like Ellen, who in modern society is now no longer an act of rebellion? Does it feel more real to keep it in his imagination?
Saved snippets from the novel (via Zotero):
“On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.”
“She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.”
“He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the "younger set," in which it was the recognised”
“custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it”
“As he entered the box his eyes met Miss Welland's, and he saw that she had instantly understood his motive, though the family dignity which both considered so high a virtue would not permit her to tell him so. The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done. He”
“Medora Manson, who was always doing the wrong thing from the right motive.”
“Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the "unpleasant" in which they had both been brought up.”
“The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows”
“The long habit of living together in mutually dependent intimacy had given them the same vocabulary, and the same habit of beginning their phrases "Mother thinks" or "Janey thinks," according as one or the other wished to advance an opinion of her own;”
“it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas”
“His own exclamation: "Women should be free—as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.”
“He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”
“But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”
“non-committal by nature and training”
“Mrs. van der Luyden's attitude said neither yes nor no, but always appeared to incline to clemency till her thin lips, wavering into the shadow of a smile, made the almost invariable reply: "I shall first have to talk this over with my husband."”
“"You like so much to be alone?" "Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely."”
“"Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that? Why not make one's own fashions? But I suppose I've lived too independently; at any rate, I want to do what you all do—I want to feel cared for and safe."”
“"The reason—?" "For their great influence; that they make themselves so rare."”
“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"”
“He turned into his florist's to send her the daily box of lilies-of-the-valley”
“May's radiance, and she burned like a young maple in the frost. Archer was proud of the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship cleared away his underlying perplexities”
“He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?”
“His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make—even to the point of calling him original.”
“"Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We're like patterns stencilled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves, May?"”
“Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?" She was evidently staggered by this. "Of course I should hate it—so would you," she rejoined, a trifle irritably.”
“Swinburne's "Chastelard”
“"I'm not engaged to be married to the Countess Olenska!" The words had a fantastic sound in his own ears.”
“felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting”
“and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations; and there might even be one in which a woman naturally sensitive and aloof would yet, from the force of circumstances, from sheer defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable by conventional standards.”
“Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and "people who wrote." These scattered fragments of humanity had never shown any desire to be amalgamated with the social structure. In spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves.”
“He was once more conscious of the curious way in which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself into conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were to be of use in her present difficulty”
“Archer looked at her perplexedly, wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her to touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her reputation in order to break with it.”
“New York society is a very small world compared with the one you've lived in. And it's ruled, in spite of appearances, by a few people withwell, rather old-fashioned ideas.”
“Better keep on the surface, in the prudent old New York way, than risk uncovering a wound he could not heal”
“The fire had crumbled down to greyness, and one of the lamps made a gurgling appeal for attention”
“plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate”
“He immediately took it upon himself to assure them both that she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce, basing her decision on the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the proceeding; and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the "unpleasantness" she had spared them”
“Look at the career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us." "Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"”
“The day was past when that sort of thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture”
“you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ... God! If I could emigrate ...”
“that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue”
“"Tell me what you do all day," he said, crossing his arms under his tilted-back head, and pushing his hat forward to screen the sun-dazzle. To let her talk about familiar and simple things was the easiest way of carrying on his own independent train of thought; and he sat listening to her simple chronicle of swimming, sailing and riding, varied by an occasional dance at the primitive inn when a man-of-war came in.”
“she was always a wayward child. I wonder what her fate will be?" "What we've all contrived to make it," he felt like answering. "If you'd all of you rather she should be Beaufort's mistress than some decent fellow's wife you've certainly gone the right way about it."”
“Because she's not like that: she's so much nobler. She insists all the more on the long engagement, to give me time—" "Time to give her up for the other woman?" "If I want to."”
“crouching among the festive ripples of her dress like a stricken masquerader”
“He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shrivelling up like ghosts at sunrise”
“The day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust”
“How like a first night at the Opera!" he thought, recognising all the same faces in the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if, when the Last Trump sounded, Mrs. Selfridge Merry would be there with the same towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet, and Mrs. Beaufort with the same diamond earrings and the same smile—and whether suitable proscenium seats were already prepared for them in another world.” ----Newland see’s the same structures and the same faces no matter the setting.
“Lawrence Lefferts's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the invisible deity of "Good Form" who presided at the ceremony” ----Lefferts is pictured be to not good form itself, but the guard of something more pure “the good form”
“there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance”
“a murmur ran”
“glassy stare”
“gaunt and mincing lady”
“baleful eloquence”
“eight tall ushers, gathering themselves together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory manoeuvre, were already slipping through the side”
“the low benedictory murmur of the Rector's voice”
“the train, shaking off the endless wooden suburbs”
“he saw that she would probably go through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as it came, but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance. Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person”
“wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards.”
“Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, would have been more "undignified" than to force one's self on the notice of a "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service. But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who had been so kind at Botzen. With touching fidelity they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the States”
“Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.”
“He had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within it there would be nothing small and stifling—coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open. And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would”
“"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented”
“But beauty, even when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart”
“a languishing affair”
“he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally”
“Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty”
“good conversation appeared to be the only necessity”
“His hour with M. Riviere had put new air into his lungs”
“he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of view had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible. Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice”
“the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. "After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep”
“The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.”
“He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty”
“she was extraordinarily festooned and bedizened”
“A contrast indeed to this gay scene of worldly pleasure—but then I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony”
“In the interval not a thought seemed to have passed behind her eyes or a feeling through her heart; and though her husband knew that she had the capacity for both he marvelled afresh at the way in which experience dropped away from her”
“No one could ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the feeling that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them. But when her eyes met her husband's her face glowed with the pleasure she saw in his.”
“the bay spreading northward in a shimmer of gold”
“Archer stopped at the sight as if he had waked from sleep”
“—watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell”
“Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society; and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable and venerated family tree. He was, as people said, a man who had had "every advantage." His father was Sillerton Jackson's uncle, his mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth and position, and mutual suitability. Nothing—as Mrs. Welland had often remarked—nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did. But at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society in the face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right to expect "something different," and money enough to keep her own carriage. No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the house with longhaired men and short-haired women, and, when he travelled, took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to Paris or Italy. But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently unaware that they were different from other people; and when they gave one of their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the Cliffs, because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots and send an unwilling representative.”
“"Newland never seems to look ahead," Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: "No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book." "Ah, yes—like his father!" Mrs. Welland agreed, as if allowing for an inherited oddity; and after that the question of Newland's unemployment was tacitly dropped.”
“he had kept it to himself as if there were something clandestine in the plan, and discovery might prevent its execution”
“The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hay-field”
“Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry”
“As he approached he was struck by her listless attitude: she sat there as if she had nothing else to do”
“Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation”
“it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself"—she drew together her troubled brows—"but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid."”
“You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring—that's all.”
“At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her face. She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him. They fell into his, while her arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her surrendered face say the rest.”
“over the sunlit waters Boston loomed in a line of haze”
“The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska's hand with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of farther opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over, and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt her. Even after they had clasped hands for good-bye at the Fall River station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed”
“Archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the edge of a sliding precipice”
“Observing it from the lofty stand-point of a non-participant, she was able, with the help of Mr. Sillerton Jackson and Miss Sophy, to trace each new crack in its surface, and all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered rows of social vegetables.”
“For New York, to Mrs. Archer's mind, never changed without changing for the worse; and in this view Miss Sophy Jackson heartily concurred. Mr. Sillerton Jackson, as became a man of the world, suspended his judgment and listened with an amused impartiality to the lamentations of the ladies”
“No one really liked Beaufort, and it was not wholly unpleasant to think the worst of his private life; but the idea of his having brought financial dishonour on his wife's family was too shocking to be enjoyed even by his enemies. Archer's New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty”
“It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age. There was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable?” ----Anthropological view of society
“Archer looked at her with the sense of strangeness that sometimes came over him when she was most in the tone of her environment”
“I don't think Ellen cares for society; but nobody knows exactly what she does care for," May continued, as if she had been groping for something noncommittal.” ----I don’t like noncommittal statements.
“"Madame Olenska is a great favourite with the gentlemen," said Miss Sophy, with her air of wishing to put forth something conciliatory when she knew that she was planting a dart.”
“he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.”
“he was exactly in the state when a man is sure to do something stupid, knowing all the while that he is doing it.”
“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.”
“eedless generosity and the spasmodic extravagance o”
“lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.”
“in Archer's little world no one laughed at a wife deceived, and a certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their philandering after marriage. In the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once”
“resently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects—hardly recognisable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles—made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances. "It seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters ... any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: 'Use unknown.'"”
“sparkling with an unwonted animation”
“"You haven't kissed me today," she said in a whisper; and he felt her tremble in his arms.”
“Newland Archer was a quiet and self-controlled young man. Conformity to the discipline of a small society had become almost his second nature. It was deeply distasteful to him to do anything melodramatic and conspicuous, anything Mr. van der Luyden would have deprecated and the club box condemned as bad form.”
“She lowered her eyes under his unseeing stare, and another fugitive flush passed over her face”
“e understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.”
“It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.”
“And she had died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own, and resigned to leave it because she was convinced that, whatever happened, Newland would continue to inculcate in Dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped his parents' lives, and that Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her) would transmit the sacred trust to little Bill.”
“Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen, after the death of her parents, had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won it thirty years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid of her, society took her joyfully for granted. She was pretty, amusing and accomplished: what more did any one want? Nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's past and her own origin”
“The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?"”
“Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....”
“"Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone—you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted."”
“No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own”
“The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze”
“"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.”
Currently reading:
Passing by Nella Larson
Leadership by Henry Kissinger
The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by Peter Zeihan
HPMOR -- sorta