The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”―Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
I have occasion to think about the above quote pretty much daily, and constantly while reading The Age of Innocence. Late in the book, one character compares a woman to a bird in a cage, and I did the Leo pointing meme in real time because I’d been thinking it all along.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921. (The prize was not awarded in 1920.) The Pulitzer Prize is awarded to works of “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” This is one of (at the time of this writing) 10 Pulitzer-winning books that are no longer under copyright and are available free via Project Gutenberg.
Plot summary: An uninteresting man who thinks about cheating on his wife with her cousin doesn’t.
Until 35%, it felt like nothing had actually happened, at least to Archer, the sole POV character. Ellen was dealing with familial, social, and legal problems (her entire family shunned her when she wanted to divorce her abusive husband), but we saw none of that in favor of Archer experiencing a whole lot of nothing. Feels like I’ve been saying this a lot lately: I don’t need a main character to be likable, but they do have to be interesting. Archer is neither. In Archer’s own words: “We’re damnably dull. We’ve no character, no colour, no variety.” Closest thing to an insight he had in the entire book.
Rich people are boring, and that is why they have nothing better to do than sit around and gossip about any hint of nonconformity in others. Get a hobby. Volunteer. Learn a skill.
Archer for no reason mused one of his relatives once said, “Dickens never wrote a gentleman.” Yeah, and Dickens wrote banger after banger, many of which are familiar to people who’ve never read them because they’re so oft-referenced even two centuries later. There’s a lesson there, perhaps, about the entertainment value of “gentlemen” like the ones this book is full of.
Archer talks about his wife-to-be, May, like she’s his child to be reared to his specifications. Then during the honeymoon, he complains that she’s “infantile,” as though that’s not why he chose to marry her in the first place. He thinks, “There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.” In other words, he got a bird that came in a cage, and that bored him, so he’s going to stash the cage in the corner until the bird dies while he chases the free one.
Wharton was obsessed with matriarch Mrs. Manson Mingott’s weight. Everybody else’s clothes will be lightly mentioned because all that matters about their appearance is whether they’re conforming to fashion laws, but every time this one woman is mentioned, there’s fixation on how ENORMOUSLY FAT she is. No single thing in this book has more description devoted to it. I have no idea what Ellen, the sole POV character’s illicit romantic interest, looks like, but I’ll never forget her grandmother’s fat bunched around her wrists like ivory bracelets.
Archer frequently makes eye contact with people and knows exactly what they’re thinking, which always aligns precisely with what he’s thinking. This could be fun if any of them ever said anything to indicate he’s wrong, but apparently they are a hivemind. Somebody should mash this together with Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
But then he also thinks “it would have been more ‘feminine’ if [May] had instantly read in his eyes why he had come.” I thought eye-reading was his special skill, but apparently it’s a feminine skill. If he wasn’t so obnoxious, this embracing of his feminine side might make me like him a little bit. Alas.
You know who’s actually going through some shit? Ellen. (Make her the protagonist of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers mashup, the lone outsider from the hivemind.) Why, then, is this entirely the story of an insufferable manchild whose greatest quandary is keeping his dick in his pants?
At one point, Archer is with Ellen when another man approaches, and Ellen’s reaction is “her face paled and she shrank back.” That’s unambiguously fear. Archer, because he’s a jealous manbaby, wonders if this is “because his importunities displeased her, or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist them.” He knows this dude is a threat to her, he knows she ran away from an abusive marriage, she has responded to the dude’s arrival with fear, and Archer thinks… she’s probably into it. And then he LEAVES HER with the dude she shrank away from.
Throw the whole man away.
He tells Ellen: “I’m the man who married one woman because another one told him to.” Dude, you were ENGAGED to the woman you married when you MET the other one! You made this decision yourself! Men (in these books, never in real life, that obviously never happens) do not hesitate an instant to blame women for decisions made by men themselves.
Now that I think of it, didn’t Archer, while representing Ellen’s lawyer, talk her out of pursuing a divorce she had initiated because if she became available, he’d have no choice but to cancel his wedding plans to chase her instead, and that would be really awkward for him socially? He’s out here actively taking steps to legally deprive her of agency and acting like the wronged party because he’s horny.
When he’s justifying why he thinks another man who cheats on his wife is a disgrace but it’s okay for Archer to cheat on his wife, he thinks: “Ellen Olenska was like no other woman, and he was like no other man.” However, when Ellen, shortly afterward, says she doesn’t want to join the ranks of homewrecking cheaters, he tells her: “I don’t profess to be different from my kind.” Are you a unique and special boy, are you a clone, or do you claim to be whatever’s most likely to get you your way at any given moment because there isn’t a principle to be found amongst all your guises?
Archer, who has a history of screwing around with married women, explains why it’s socially acceptable for married women to cheat on their husbands but not the other way around: “A woman’s standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.” First of all, get in the bin. Second of all, Pepperidge Farm remembers that Ellen’s “scandal” in the beginning was not that she left her abusive husband but that she left with the aid of his male employee, which had everyone clutching their pearls over her presumed adultery. Everything is a societal norm when Archer wants to do it because he is a child who believes the whole world is his personal toy. When he pitches the idea of running away together to somewhere less stuffy, Ellen asks him where, exactly, he thinks that is because “you bailed on all your responsibilities because you couldn’t keep it in your pants” doesn’t speak well of a person ANYWHERE. Not because of prudishness but because your judgment is so rancid you can’t be trusted to light a candle without burning down the house.
“But during the ten days which had elapsed since her return to New York she had perhaps guessed from his silence, and from the fact of his making no attempt to see her, that he was meditating a decisive step, a step from which there was no turning back.” Bro, any woman you gift with your silence and absence could only be RELIEVED. Imagine her dismay when he stops giving her the silent treatment.
That decisive no-turning-back step was especially chilling coming after he was chatting with his wife and thought “What if it were SHE who was dead! If she were going to die—to die soon—and leave him free!… Yes, May might die—people did: young people, healthy people like herself: she might die, and set him suddenly free.” Girl, you are in DANGER.
He “forgot” plans with May (he wasn’t actually listening to her when he agreed to them because he was distracted by thoughts of banging her cousin). May says only “I’m sorry you didn’t come to Granny’s,” and good ol’ Archer gets “irritated that so trifling an omission should be stored up against him.” Bro, you’ve been scheming to bang her cousin since before you got married. Is guilt devouring you from within or do you seriously envision yourself the innocent victim of *checks notes* someone noticing you didn’t show up where you said you would? Change your diaper and take a nap.
He tries to pull a gotcha on Ellen when she dares remind him his wife exists. “As on certain other occasions when he had expected to shake her out of her usual composure, she betrayed no sign of surprise.” She’s not surprised because she has experience with abusive men. If she wasn’t a saint, she would “accidentally” call you by her estranged husband’s name when you act like this.
Mrs. Manson Mingott (who, in case you’ve forgotten, is IMMENSE) had a stroke and sent for Ellen (who is her granddaughter). The shunning is over on Mrs. MM’s part (“the minute I laid eyes on her I said: ‘You sweet bird, you! Shut you up in that cage again? Never!'”), so much so that Ellen is going to stay and take care of Mrs. MM, and she’s resuming Ellen’s allowance. Archer notes Ellen’s financial situation without said allowance is “hardly enough to live on” and “would hardly keep two women [Ellen and her aunt] clothed and fed,” and yet he somehow concludes “If Ellen had consented to come and live with her grandmother, it must surely be because she had recognized the impossibility of giving him up.” Familial love/duty and financial desperation are trifling motivations compared to the allure of a self-involved child who wants to cheat on your cousin with you, am I right, ladies?
May tells Ellen she’s pregnant, and Ellen decides to go back to Europe (but not back to her husband) to prevent the manchild from abandoning additional responsibilities. At the farewell dinner, the manchild centers himself yet again with certainty the gathering is to punish him for impure thoughts that everyone knows about because the hivemind knows all. Your wife, possibly, is flipping you off with her eyes, but most people there probably are fulfilling a social obligation to bid adieu to a member of a prominent family. Nobody cares about you, Archer, because you have never done anything interesting.
Three decades pass after Ellen’s escape. May had three children and died. One of the boys has a job that involves going to Europe and invites Dad along. They end up in Paris, and the son tells Archer he sought out their relative, Ellen, and got them invited to dinner. It has been THREE DECADES since Archer last saw Ellen. He’s had time to grow up. And yet he sends his son up to the apartment alone and slinks back to the hotel because he’s too cowardly to face her across a dinner table. Or he wants to keep the image of Young Ellen preserved in the spank bank. Whatever excuse he made to the reader while scurrying away was blatant ego-propping nonsense.
Readers swooning over the “yearning” in this book need to read some genre romance (check lists specifically for yearning or pining because it’s not a universal feature). Archer said himself, many times, he didn’t know anything about Ellen. He didn’t like her. He didn’t love her. She just happened to come along when he was bored. What he demonstrated was entitlement, not yearning. (Kissing her shoe that one time might have been kink, but that’s also not yearning.)
Three books into the Pulitzer Prize Challenge, centering unlikable men has so far been the common denominator. Wharton leaned so hard into it I tried several times to view the story through a satire lens, but (perhaps because I don’t think hypocrisy, self-absorption, and fatphobia are sufficient to meet the definition) it refused to be perceived as anything but an earnest attempt to convince me I should feel bad for a character with not a single redeeming trait.
April’s prize winner (Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington) has a lower-middle-class Midwestern woman as its titular character, so fingers crossed we’ll finally get one that isn’t rage-inducing. (But since he also wrote The Magnificent Ambersons, I have my fire extinguisher ready for flames on the side of my face.)