Newland Archer's Crisis of (Im)mobility: Gendered Routes of Travel in The Age of Innocence
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19405103.56.1.02
ISSN1940-5103
Autores Tópico(s)American Sports and Literature
ResumoOver three decades ago, David Holbrook coined the phrase “unsatisfactory man” as a moniker for some of Edith Wharton's male characters. He characterized Newland Archer as particularly and “deplorably unsatisfactory,”1 citing his cowardice and his stifling adherence to convention. Newland's understanding about his roles as a man, husband, and father conform to traditional ideas about gender roles and gender expression in white upper-class U.S. society, demonstrating that such rules about sex and gender, while harmful to women, are also limiting for men. Furthermore, his performance of what he considers “natural” gender and sexual identities exposes such markers as illusory, as readings of the queer contexts of the novel by Gregory Woods and Richard A. Kaye confirm.2 Newland's commitment to these roles comes at the expense of his and others’ personal fulfillment, but May Welland often has been viewed as the cause of the characters’ misery and missed opportunities. In this vein, Carl Van Doren argues that Ellen Olenska and Newland sacrifice their relationship due to the incapacities of May, who is “willing to suit herself to the least decorum of their world because she is incapable of understanding that there is anything larger or freer. The unimaginative not only miss the flower of life themselves but they shut others from it as well.”3 The negative effects of May's narrow perspective notwithstanding, I argue that Newland is the cause of his and other characters’ suffering due to his immobility and inability to move or think beyond the confines of his social world and gender role. Newland's deficiencies in this regard play out in the context of his travel experiences and coincide with Wharton's own fraught cosmopolitanism.Newland's social and gender identities are informed by his relationship to travel and physical mobility and, in this context, the narrowness of his experience and perspective is especially surprising. Like other young men of his class, he is able to travel abroad and within the United States as he pleases, and he is superior to his Old New York peers in this regard: “[H]e had probably read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world, than any other man of the number.”4 Wharton viewed Newland's travel experience and mobility as a key component of his character. Indeed, in another artistic context, Margaret Ayer Barnes wrote to her co-collaborator, Edward Sheldon, about the 1928 stage adaptation of the novel that “It nearly killed Mrs. Wharton to have us say that Archer had never been abroad.”5 Of course, Wharton herself was an avid and experienced international traveler, and most pertinent to The Age of Innocence, she traveled to Morocco in the fall of 1917 at the invitation of General Herbert Lyautey, French Resident-General in Morocco. The resulting travel narrative, In Morocco, was serialized in Scribner's in summer 1919 and published in book form in fall 1920, just a month before The Age of Innocence. Wharton referred to the writing of The Age of Innocence (between September 1919 and the end of March 1920) as a “momentary escape” from the Great War and a way to “get away from the present altogether.”6 A similar tone pervades In Morocco's descriptions of escapist motor trips and experiences with an exotic Moroccan landscape and culture. Wharton's complex relationship to cosmopolitanism and otherness, on display in In Morocco and other texts even as early as her 1888 travel diary Cruise of the Vanadis, informs her portrayal of Newland's similarly fraught relationship to travel experiences that ultimately render him immobile—socially, romantically, and physically. It is a “novel of inaction,” Donald Pizer contends,7 and, paradoxically, Newland's supposed cosmopolitan ideals and travels combined with the fragility of his white upper-class masculinity render him immobile and compromises his personal freedom, an effect that escalates as the novel progresses.Wharton was enthralled with Morocco and characterized it as a spectacle to “rouse the hunger of the repletest sight-seer.” In the preface, she expresses the hope that her travel narrative might be a “first step” toward a guidebook for the country. Yet she also notes that due to war-time travel restrictions and the approaching rainy season, she has only one month to travel in Morocco, not enough time for a “leisurely study of the places visited” that would have allowed her to craft such a guidebook. Her impressions are nonetheless rich and evocative, evidence of the “unexpected and picturesque opportunities” afforded by her travels.8Wharton also characterizes her travel in Morocco as an adventure, filled with the kind of unique experiences and sensations available to those who will take the trouble to travel to “an almost unknown Africa.” The lack of a Moroccan travel guidebook enhances the adventure, leaving travelers, especially those “accustomed to European certainties,” unsure about where the road will “land” them in the “vast unknown” beyond Tangiers. Adding to the adventure a sense of danger, Wharton also supplies enticing stories of peril, such as that only three years prior, “Christians were being massacred in the streets of Salé, the pirate town across the river from Rabat,” and that even more recently, “no European had been allowed to enter the Sacred City of Moulay Idriss.”9To emphasize Morocco's evolving modernity and movement away from such limits on mobility, Wharton observes that, with an increase in roads and railways, Morocco is quickly becoming more accessible to travelers. The country stands on the cusp of “transition between its virtually complete subjection to European authority, and the fast approaching hour when it is thrown open to all the banalities and promiscuities of modern travel.” Indeed, all that currently “prevents the tourist from . . . letting loose his motor on this new world,” Wharton writes, are war restrictions (limiting travel to those persons whom Lyautey permits) and, once those are removed, she warns that “no eye will ever again see Moulay Idriss and Fez and Marrakech as I saw them.” This implies that her travel book is even more significant for the perspective it provides on the uncharted delights and “ancient mystery” of Morocco just before it becomes a tourist destination.10Despite Wharton's obvious delight in her exotic travels, she fails to immerse herself in Moroccan culture to a degree that would allow her to gain access to the kind of cosmopolitan experience she seems to desire. The concept of cosmopolitanism suggests a generosity of spirit and openness to the culture and history of a region and to a global exchange of ideas—the ability to take the position of what Melanie Dawson refers to as the “ideal cultural interlocutor” in Wharton's work: “an appreciative viewer who witnesses and endeavors to understand history and artifacts, exploring a culture on its own terms and through its particular traces.”11 Wharton has a refined understanding of world history and artifacts, yet, as I argue elsewhere, she also maintains rigid cultural boundaries in her descriptions of Moroccan culture—including, as just one example, reductively describing the women she meets in harems as figures from a “fairy tale” reminding her of women in European art—and thus she is unable to fully achieve a cultural intimacy or empathy that would allow a truly cosmopolitan experience.12While a “pure” cosmopolitanism is difficult to achieve, as Bruce Robbins and Kwame Anthony Appiah have shown,13 Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando argue that Wharton's cosmopolitanism is made even more complex by “the conflicting and uneven attachments [she] demonstrates in her approach to the multiple worlds of difference around her.” Cosmopolitanism suggests a degree of intimacy between the self and Other that both Wharton and Newland find challenging. In relation to The Age of Innocence, Goldsmith and Orlando observe that Wharton imbues Newland with the same kind of delicate balance between an attraction to difference and the harboring of nativist and elitist views that sometimes trouble her own life and writing.14 Coming on the heels of her problematic portrayals of travel and othering in In Morocco, Wharton's representations of Newland's travel and mobility, especially as it coincides with his navigation of social and gender roles, echo her own ideological struggles. Ultimately, Morocco's “mystery,” which attracts Wharton during her time there, remains ineffable, and the divide between her own experience and the otherness of Morocco is not unlike Newland's vivid impression in The Age of Innocence that, from the vantage point of Ellen Olenska's “intimate” and “foreign” apartment (53), he seems to be viewing New York City as if from far off Samarkand (57), an allusion (anachronistic to the setting of the novel but not its composition) to James Elroy Flecker's 1913 poem “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” that elicits notions of travel to an exotic “Orient.” The reference suggests “a bold, sensual quest for knowledge and adventure,” Hermione Lee observes, “exactly what Newland Archer fails in.”15 From Samarkand/Ellen's room, Newland sees “the faint white figure of May Welland” as if through the inverted end of a telescope, distant and in New York City (59), an image that captures his inability to intimately connect with her. Furthermore, Ellen's drawing room causes him to consider what May's drawing room will be like, and he finds that his “imagination [cannot] travel” beyond the image of the conventional façade and entryway of the home he and May will occupy to picture such a room, although he is comforted by the idea that he will probably be allowed to “arrange his library as he pleased” (54).Of course, Newland is never able to bridge the cultural boundaries between the restrictive conventions of his world and his dream of an exotic, fulfilling, and far-off life in an imagined “Samarkand” with Ellen. Indeed, in his condescending assumptions that not even foreign travel will open May's eyes to the world, he is perhaps also implicitly acknowledging that the same is already true for himself, what Pizer identifies in the novel as a naturalistic irony that exists between characters’ “individual desire and destiny” and social constraints.16 Indeed, as Laura Rattray observes, Ellen's very drawing room points up Newland's limitations, for he is “bewildered by art works and arrangements that fall outside his knowledge, suggesting a Europe he does not know.”17 Furthermore, when he compares the faces of the women of his circle with Ellen's, he notes how they are “curiously immature” as compared to hers, and as he contemplates the trauma of her life experience, “It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes” (47). Thus, while he is attracted to Ellen's cosmopolitan and worldly ways, and eager to be able to maintain his own travel—thinking with regret how that will be curtailed when he is married—he is also intimidated by Ellen's vast experience. Yet when it comes to May, he retains an air of worldly superiority. He notes that if he had been brought up as May had, he too would be as naïve as she is, and he is annoyed by the creation of May's “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” (34–35). Newland attributes this false purity to the women of the society alone, but of course he and other men play a role in sustaining this charade. Later, he even imagines exclaiming to his sister, in response to her assertion that their mother “is not an old maid”: “Yes, she is, and so are the van der Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed by the wing-tip of Reality” (65). Newland's couching of this insult in the gendered language of the “old maid” is telling in terms of where he feels the real blame lies for the conservative sexual mores of his class. At the same time, in his musing about May's purity, he even seems to suggest that he wishes she had been allowed “the same freedom of experience as himself” (35), by which he seems to mean sexual freedom. However, such seeming broad-mindedness has its limits, and even in relation to Ellen. Takahiro Sakane observes that when Newland expresses his desire that Ellen be free, he means that “he seeks to hoard her without withdrawing her from circulation, thereby enacting, on her body, the capitalist imperative to hoard by means of circulation.” In the end, this means that Newland cannot possess Ellen “because he loves her for her ‘freedom,’ her refusal to be collected.”18Readers since the novel's publication have recognized this patronizing stance that Newland takes toward women and his hypocritical critique of their limitations. In an early review, Vernon L. Parrington, Jr., emphasized Newland's provincial mindset by aptly describing him as someone who has “played with books and ideas without liberating his mind.”19 In Orlando's words, we might think of him as “a voracious but inept reader,”20 and indeed, despite his thrill in opening a cache of books delivered from London (including works by Herbert Spencer, Alphonse Daudet, and George Eliot), in the end “he did not know what he was reading” (104), and his entrapment in his job and impending marriage eclipse any flights of mental transport that the books might facilitate. Newland's inability to recognize his own limitations in this regard is a function of conventional gender ideologies apparent even from the opening opera scene when he imagines how he will initiate May in the masterpieces of literature on their honeymoon as they “read Faust together . . . by the Italian lakes.” His mingled sense of “possessorship” and “reverence for [May's] abysmal purity” allows him to conflate this scene of their newlywed journey with “his manly privilege to reveal [worldly knowledge] to his bride.” The narrator tells us that Newland wishes May to be “as worldly-wise and as eager to please” (6) as the married woman with whom has carried on an affair for two years, but just how “this miracle of fire and ice was to be created, and to sustain itself in a harsh world, he had never taken the time to think out” (7). Newland's unthinking approach to his fantasies about the perfect wife reveals his self-centered and limited mindset about gender roles.Newland's ideas about his wife's deficiencies recall one of Wharton's other “unsatisfactory men,” Ralph Marvell, during his honeymoon with Undine Spragg to Italy in The Custom of the Country (1913). For Ralph, the Sienese air is “intoxicating,” and his artist's sensibility allows him to be susceptible to and hyper-aware of the color and sensations of the landscape, from which he hopes to receive inspiration for the book he is writing. Undine does not react in the same way, however, and one night during which Ralph has been especially aroused by his surroundings, he realizes that Undine is “insensible to the soft spell of the evening.” While his artistic process is nurtured when he is away from crowds and able to contemplate nature and places off the beaten track of tourist travel, he recognizes that for Undine, “a crowd was what she wanted—[and] . . . she was sick to death of being alone with him.”21 Ralph sees Undine's mindOn this particular night, even as Ralph wants to practice such “infinite patience” and open Undine's mind to the vision he has for his book—a vision inspired by his time in the Italian moonlight by himself—she says she is homesick and that Europe is not what she expected.23 He agrees to go to Switzerland, and the idea that they might find a more fashionable set of people there causes her to brighten. While, like Newland, Ralph relishes the idea of educating Undine about the marvels of Europe and the world, his reasons for doing so are connected to his commitment to the life of the mind and his artistic sensibility rather than solely to his notion of his husbandly privileges. Although Ralph's sense of cosmopolitan superiority is connected to his art and erudition rather than exclusively to his gendered role as a husband, the negative impacts on his marital relationship are largely the same as for Newland: because Undine will not take his perspective, and he considers hers inferior, intimacy in the relationship is impossible.Newland conforms to the conventions of his set, as May expects, and in contrast to Undine's disinterest in Ralph's travel and artistic pursuits, May feigns interest in all to which Newland might wish to expose her. Newland thus embraces his role as husband and man of the world to usher in May's worldly and sexual initiation through travel. Yet even though his “simple joy” in the idea of his “possessorship” of May brings him back continually to a sense of the supposed rightness of marrying her, he cannot shake the notion that she might be like the Kentucky cave-fish about which he has been reading, and because it had no need to develop its eyes, did not develop them at all (62). Newland's reference to the blindness of the cave-fish, as Paul Ohler observes, casts class ideology and social evolution in the terms of Darwinian natural selection.24 Newland assumes not only that he has the “seeing eye” of good taste and cultural training, to which Wharton also employs the cave-fish as a contrast in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919),25 but also that he can see through convention's façade while May cannot; that is, he believes he has somehow transcended the social evolutionary processes that have blinded May and her family. When he suggests that they might advance the date of the wedding, strike out for foreign travel, or even elope, and May praises him for his originality, Newland is smug about his self-awareness, recognizing that he was only saying the things that young men in his “same situation were expected to say, and that [May] was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make—even to the point of calling him original” (62). He assumes that he and Ellen see through these social performances more clearly than May does, but by the end of the novel, Newland's miscalculation is clear as May, through her understanding of the machinations of her social world, orchestrates the series of events that will end any possibility of Newland's and Ellen's romance.Wharton's critique here, as Edmund Wilson observed in 1921, is of “the tradition of the people of education and taste from the point of view of the artist and the citizen of the world,”26 represented by Ellen. Of course, Mrs. (Catherine) Manson Mingott also takes this critical stance and is someone more worldly and mobile than her daughter, Mrs. Welland, and thus aligned with Ellen; indeed, Lee notes that Mrs. Mingott is one of the novel's “individualists . . . whose actions and attitudes create ‘transitions’” and “gradually alter the behaviour of the group.”27 Although we learn when the novel opens that Catherine Mingott is rendered immobile and unable to attend the opera because of her “monstrous obesity” (5), she is also described as a young widow of twenty-eight “mingl[ing] freely in foreign society” and associating with dukes, papists, and opera singers, all while avoiding the taint of scandal (11). Even the location of Mrs. Mingott's home suggests her broad-mindedness and mobility, as she describes in the language of discovery and settlement: “When I built this house you'd have thought I was moving to California! Nobody ever had built above Fortieth Street—no, says I, nor above the Battery either, before Christopher Columbus discovered America” (114). Yet Wharton herself, while critiquing through characters such as Mrs. Mingott the narrow social rules of her world and its fatal implications for Newland, also occupies to some extent the same fraught position as Newland. She recognized as much years later in her observations at the end of her life in the posthumously published essay “A Little Girl's New York” (1938) about “how pitiful a provision was made for the life of the imagination behind those uniform brownstone façades” of her childhood. Wharton claims that because “the creative mind thrives best on a reduced diet, I probably had the fare best suited to me.” For “the average well-to-do New Yorker of my childhood,” which would include a character such as Newland, Wharton concludes that “[b]eauty, passion, and danger were automatically excluded from his life (for the men were almost as starved as the women); and the average human being deprived of air from the heights is likely to produce other lives equally starved—which is what happened in old New York, where the tepid sameness of the moral atmosphere resulted in a prolonged immaturity of mind.”28 Echoing Van Doren's argument that unimaginative women such as May “not only miss the flower of life themselves but they shut others from it as well,”29 Wharton here flips Van Doren's gendered script to note the tendency of men such as Newland to produce and reproduce lives equally as starved as their own. As the novel bears out, and Wilson insists, Newland hears “echoes from strange lands of freedom and romance” but then “marries some stupid woman, decides to make a great deal of money and lives and dies as a supporter of our commercial civilization.” The novel should have ended, Wilson notes, with the words “De te, fabula!” [“the story is about you!”].30 Thus, despite Wharton's claim that this starved moral atmosphere was good for her art (and her enduring critiques of characters succumbing to such social environments throughout her work suggests this might be the case), Newland's story of limitation and “tepid sameness” is also in some ways her story and implies the equally unsatisfying personal consequences of such a morally “reduced diet.”Henry Seidel Canby argued that even if we consider Wharton herself to be cosmopolitan, The Age of Innocence, like Ethan Frome (1911) before it, is thoroughly American and “fruit of our soil.”31 The American setting and subject of the novel thus further underscores the limits of Newland's mobility beyond the borders of nation, class, and gender. In fact, it is Newland's travel within the United States, specifically to Florida to be with May, more than any travel abroad, that is most revealing of how his (im)mobility sustains the white upper-class U.S. gender norms that ultimately render his life sterile and unfulfilled.Each winter, the Wellands travel to St. Augustine “out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes.” The family goes with him to “preserve an unbroken domesticity [that is] essential to his peace of mind” since he will not be able to find his hairbrushes or stamps for letters unless Mrs. Welland is present to help him (89). Although Mr. Welland refers to their stay in St. Augustine as camping, the fact that Mrs. Welland “improvises” a household there complete with servants (“partly made up of discontented New York servants and partly drawn from the local African supply”) suggests that they have many of the comforts of home.32 Mrs. Welland emphasizes the importance of the home atmosphere in relation to Mr. Welland's health when she explains to their St. Augustine neighbors that “The doctors want my husband to feel that he is in his own home; otherwise he would be so wretched that the climate would not do him any good” (107). Yet even in New York, Mr. Welland takes his health seriously—anxiously responding to a social invitation at three in the afternoon that it was “a very awkward hour,” for he needed to be home at half-past three to take his drops, and there was no use trying to follow his doctor's treatments “if I don't do it systematically” (164). That St. Augustine is a destination for those seeking health relief from, in particular, tuberculosis means it is an ideal setting in which Mr. Welland might indulge his health concerns, being essentially, in Thomas Graham's words, “one large sanitarium” where the nights are “punctuated with the coughing from a sad host of diseased lungs accompanied by the melancholy strains of flute playing—recommended by doctors for keeping bronchial passages open.”33 Beyond these health contexts, the novel's Florida episode also confirms Canby's insistence in his 1920 review that the “central figure in this story” is “the ‘family’ moral according to its lights, provincial, narrow—but intensely determined that its world shall appear upright, faithful, courageous, in despite of facts and regardless of how poor reality must be tortured into conformity.”34 The primacy of the family and its specific domestic identity and routine, and the pressure this exerts on all the identities and relationships in its orbit, occupies center stage during the Florida trip.The Wellands travel to St. Augustine for health but they also partake in the city's leisure activities, and this context of tourist culture and recreation is significant for the relationship dynamics, both familial and romantic, that play out in Florida, and which exist in contrast to Newland's concerns about adequately reflecting his commitment to work. St. Augustine became a leisure destination for the wealthy white upper class beginning in the 1870s, and travel to Florida for health, nature, adventure, and sport increased during this time.35 Newland does not initially travel with the Wellands because he knows it would be seen as frivolous to take such a holiday from his work in mid-winter, and he is “too bound by custom and conventions” to do so (89)—this is contrast to the fact, as Larry R. Youngs observes, that “affluent men and women put increasing value on the quality and meaning of their time away from work and home,”36 as the Wellands demonstrate by their holidays in St. Augustine. Newland has received a letter from May while she is in Florida asking him to please be kind to Ellen for, May insists, “I can see that you're almost the only person in New York who can talk to her about what she really cares for”—“wonderful music, and picture shows, and celebrities—artists and authors and all the clever people you admire” (90)—again suggesting Newland's place on a more cosmopolitan plane alongside Ellen. But Newland also recognizes that Julius Beaufort shares Ellen's cosmopolitan interests, and he shudders to think that Ellen would be “drawn to . . . [Beaufort] by all that gave him an advantage over the other men about her: his habit of two continents and two societies, his family associations with artists and actors and people generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt for local prejudices.” Although Beaufort is vulgar and uneducated, the fact that his “horizon” exceeds those of his peers who are “bounded by the Battery and the Central Park” makes him a threat to Newland (103). Thus, while May is in Florida, Newland starts to feel in New York his own potential boundedness close in as he senses the “elaborate futility of his life” (94) and “shivers” as he recognizes how “the green mold of the perfunctory” is “spreading over him.” He thinks of how, per May's letter, he has “tastes and interests” beyond those of his social set, and “he spent his vacations in European travel, cultivated the ‘clever people’ May spoke of, and generally tried to ‘keep up,’” but he wonders what will happen to “this narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived” when, after his marriage and like the other young men he has observed, he inevitably sinks “into the placid and luxurious routine of . . . [his] elders” (95). Indeed, his discussion with Ned Winsett about emigration suggests that the immobility of class convention already is a powerful force in his personality and life. His reaction to Ned's assertions that the upper classes should either get to work to affect change or emigrate causes him to think, “[a]s if a gentleman could abandon his own country!” (94), while at the same time he worries about how his desire to experience a larger life—perhaps even beyond the bounds of his own country—will be affected by his marriage to May. Similarly, Newland's admiration for Ned's intellectual and moral liberty despite meager financial means, and the similar liberty of M. Rivière, who helps Ellen escape her husband, is reflected in Newland's “vicarious envy” of Rivière's (and implicitly Ned's) having “fared so richly in his poverty” (149). In comparison, Newland has the sense that he is “being buried alive under his future.” As his evolving relationship with Ellen becomes increasingly complex in New York, he throws caution to the wind and “jump[s] on board” a boat bound for St. Augustine (105).When he arrives, his worries at first seem unimportant in relation to the sight of May and the related domestic tranquility of his impending marriage, both of which still his nerves: “Here was truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged to him” (105). Newland seems to experience that same “peace of mind” in an “unbroken domesticity” that the family maintains for Mr. Welland during their Florida trips (89). Indeed, Newland anticipates that the trip will bring him emotionally closer to May so that together they might fortify the heteropatriarchal domesticity that they have been taught to value. Jennifer Haytock refers to this false sense of peace in The Age of Innocence as the antithesis of the “great pool of silence,” a “reservoir of peace” on which a solid marriage is situated (Haytock draws this image from the Ramsays’ marriage in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse [1927]).37 Even though Newland and May's relationship is characterized by silence and unspoken assumption, this is a silence that portends manipulation and dishonesty rather than peace. Eventually, these domestic ideals will become as pointless fo
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