excerpted from, The
Pygmalion Project: Volume 3, The Idealist by Dr. Stephen
Montgomery
Copyright © 1993 Stephen Montgomery
Edith
Wharton sets the main action of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The
Age of Innocence (1920) in genteel "old New York"
of the eighteen-seventies, the fashionable, conservative, and largely Guardian
high society she knew so intimately from her own youth. Wharton looks
back at New York with some affection, picturing it as an innocent and elegant
world of lawn parties and black-tie dinners, of spacious landau carriages
and massive brownstone houses, a world secure in its old-fashioned institutions
and aristocratic traditions. But she also remembers New York with
a good deal of scorn as a hidebound world, intolerant of personal freedom
and almost cruelly inimical to the spirit of imagination.
In her own young womanhood Wharton chafed against the well-starched proprieties
and implacable rituals of this Guardian social system. Though her
family assumed that she would make her social debut, marry correctly, and
settle into her privileged life, Wharton was oddly enamored of books and
ideas, and she dreamed of exploring European culture and of living a more
liberated "life of the mind." Most likely an Advocate
herself, Edith Wharton invested all her own longings and ideals -- and
all her frustrations -- into the tragic story of Newland Archer,
a young New Yorker torn to his soul between two kinds of love: his "lawfully
wedded" love for his Guardian wife, and his forbidden desire for a
magnificent Artisan
woman he wants hopelessly to make his own.
From the first, Newland Archer seems suspiciously out of step with the
"carefully- brushed, white-waistcoated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen"
of New York society. His very name calls to mind images of far-reaching
apollonian discovery, and not the "dim domestic virtues (in Wharton's
phrase) of his tightly-knit social world. Apollo was the "archer"
god, remember, and Wharton tells us that, though only thirty years old,
"New-land" had "read more, thought more, and even seen a
good deal more of the world than any other man" of his Fifth Avenue
set. Without a doubt, Archer's intellectual interests are widespread
and ambitious for one of the idle rich. He reads literature and anthropology,
science and law, though it must be admitted that his reading appears rather
impressionistic and unsystematic, reflecting what Keirsey calls the Idealists'
"global and diffuse" imagination. In Please
Understand Me Keirsey notes that the Idealist "can be an intellectual
butterfly, flitting from idea to idea, a dilettante in his pursuit of knowledge,"
and Wharton sees a similar flightiness of mind in Archer, calling him several
times in the novel an intellectual "dilettante."
But Archer does keep up with new ideas, and some of his "modern"
attitudes are alarmingly irregular for his class. He ruffles "old-fashioned
Episcopalian New York" by not attending church. He spends his
vacations in Europe, attending art galleries and museums. He has
friends among the out-at-the-elbows New York poets and novelists (the "fellows
who write"), and he is also known to mix on occasion with musicians
and painters at Bohemian clubs. He is quick to take the part of the
"few black sheep" (inevitably Artisans)
in his family, and when pressed he lashes out at "the inexorable conventions"
that rule his world. Advocates love to be on the cutting edge of
society and to
champion avant-garde causes, and thus Archer shocks the "pleasanter
sentiments" of his mother and sister Janey (both gossipy Guardians)
by advocating divorce as a solution to a wretched marriage. "Well
why not?" he demands, and the very mention of "divorce"
fell "like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the
Archer dining room."
Just as earthshaking, Archer dabbles in politics. The official attitude
in polite circles is that "a gentleman couldn't go into politics,"
but Archer is not at all satisfied with his leisurely practice of law,
as a desultory junior partner in the eminent office of "Letterblair,
Lamson, and Low." His Advocate's nature gives him a stirring,
deep-seated sympathy with social "reforms and 'movements,'" and
we learn that after his marriage, and at the urging of Governor
Theodore Roosevelt, Archer spends one year in the New York State Assembly
trying to bring a new integrity to government.
He is not re-elected (the "honest man in American politics,"
he finds, is apparently not "what the country wants") and he
contents his Advocate's instincts by writing articles for "the reforming
weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of its apathy."
But Wharton conveys the natural discipleship of the Advocate when she describes
how Archer "glowed" at Roosevelt's appeal, "how eagerly
he had risen up at the call" of the "great man." And
she tells us that, even though his contribution to political life was small,
Archer never returned to "the narrow groove of money-making, sport
and society" so characteristic of his generation and his class.
He "had high things to contemplate," Wharton says, and in his
life Archer becomes the epitome of enlightened public-spiritedness, offering
his energy and guidance to "every new movement, philanthropic, municipal
or artistic."
Continued:
On matters of the heart...