Age of Innocence

In the early 1870s, Newland Archer's New York is a world of faint implications and pale delicacies, a place governed by the inscrutable totem terrors of Taste and Form. He is content in this world, perfectly satisfied with his engagement to the beautiful and correct May Welland, a young woman who is the very product of its system. In her abysmal purity, he sees the radiant goodness that will anchor his future. But on a January evening at the Opera, as Christine Nilsson sings in *Faust*, a new figure appears in the Mingott family box. It is May's cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, returned from Europe under the shadow of a disastrous marriage and a rumored scandal. In her dark blue velvet gown, cut with a theatricality that startles the eye, she is a disruption, a question mark in a society that permits no questions.

To shield May's family from the gossip surrounding the Countess, Archer persuades the Wellands to announce his engagement at once, an act of chivalry that binds his fate to Ellen's. The tribe rallies, but with reservations. When an attempt to launch the Countess with a formal dinner is met with a cascade of polite refusals, the affront is palpable. It is only the intervention of the van der Luydens, the city's supreme arbiters, that silences the dissent. They invite the Countess to a dinner for a visiting Duke, a command performance that New York society dares not refuse. Through this ordeal, Archer finds himself drawn to Ellen, not merely as a family obligation, but as a kindred spirit. In her shabby, charming house in a forgotten quarter, surrounded by books and foreign treasures, he breathes an air of intellectual liberty that his own world lacks, and begins to feel the profound hollowness of the life he has so carefully constructed.

He finds himself caught between two women who represent opposing worlds. May is the embodiment of New York's formidable innocence, a girl who has been trained to look away from the unpleasant and who believes her happiness can only be built on the foundations of tradition. “We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?” she asks him, her voice a gentle but firm reminder of the boundaries that enclose them. Ellen, by contrast, speaks a language of experience and emotional honesty that both frightens and enthralls him. She has looked the Gorgon in the face. When he is tasked with advising her against seeking a divorce, he finds himself pleading the case for a society whose hypocrisy he is only just beginning to comprehend, urging her to sacrifice her freedom for the sake of the family's peace.

Their unspoken feelings grow in the charged silence between them. He sends her yellow roses without a card; she asks if the hero of a play will do the same. In a hushed, lonely art museum, surrounded by the fragments of forgotten lives, they confess what they have long known. He tells her she is the woman he would have married, if it had been possible. “Possible?” she cries. “Isn't it you who made it impossible?” She tells him it was his own arguments for duty and sacrifice that convinced her to abandon her quest for freedom - for his sake, and for May's. It is a love born of a shared ideal, and in that moment, she offers him a choice: “Shall I - once come to you; and then go home?” But home means returning to her husband, and he cannot bear the price.

The family, sensing a threat it cannot name, begins to close ranks. A farewell dinner is arranged for the Countess Olenska, who has decided to return to Europe. The evening is a masterpiece of silent, organized dissimulation. The whole tribe has gathered to proclaim its unalterable affection, to countenance her past and irradiate her present, on the tacit assumption that no one has ever suspected a thing. As Archer sits at the head of his table, he feels like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp, understanding in a vast flash that to all of them, he and Ellen are lovers, and this dinner is their execution. He sees the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes and realizes, with a chill, that she shares their belief. As Ellen leaves, he whispers his desperate intention: “I shall see you soon in Paris.”

That night, in the library, he prepares to tell May everything, to throw himself on her mercy and ask for his freedom. But before he can speak, she stops him. With a face of tranquil radiance, she announces that she has suspected his unhappiness, and that she spoke to Ellen two weeks ago. She told Ellen that she was not sure, but that she had reason to hope she was pregnant. “You see, I was right,” May says, her eyes wet with victory. The trap, sprung with a weapon of unimpeachable innocence, closes around him.

Nearly thirty years pass. Archer sits in his library, a widower, a good citizen, a man whose life has been full of decency and honor, but who knows he has missed the flower of it. May has been dead for two years, having passed away in the unshaken conviction that her world was a harmonious one and that her husband was a pillar of its traditions. The world, however, has changed utterly. His son, Dallas, is about to marry the daughter of Julius Beaufort and his notorious second wife - a union that would have been unthinkable to Archer's generation, but is now taken simply for granted.

Dallas, on the eve of a trip to Europe, persuades his father to join him. In Paris, he announces casually that he has arranged a meeting with the Countess Olenska, a cousin his fiancée is fond of. Then, with the frankness of his generation, he confronts his father. He knows about Ellen. May told him, on the day before she died. “She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be,” Dallas reports, “because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted.”

Archer receives this strange, late message in silence. That afternoon, he walks with his son to the quiet square where Ellen lives. He looks up at the fifth-floor balcony, imagining the scene within: a dark lady, pale and dark, rising to greet his son. He feels the pull of a lifetime of longing, but he cannot move. He sends Dallas up alone. “Say I'm old-fashioned,” he tells him, “that's enough.” He sits on a bench in the thickening dusk, watching the windows. After a long time, a light goes on, and a servant comes out to close the shutters. It is the signal he has been waiting for. He rises and walks slowly back to his hotel. It is more real to him here, he thinks, than if he had gone up.