Making It New: 1900–1945 329realize that, as she puts it, “under the dullness” of New York life “there are things so
fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I cared for in my other life look cheap
in comparison.” He belongs in New York, she realizes, with its dull veneer and its
finely tuned spirit; and he proves this finer side by renouncing her and accepting
what he sees as his “obligations.” The paradox of a love of such a kind, and so intense,
that it both draws them together and sets them apart is caught in Ellen’s simple
declaration to Newland: “I can’t love you unless I give you up.” That statement takes
the measure of a society founded on notions of duty, the many shades of which are
caught in Wharton’s detailed portrait of old New York. It is also a register of
Wharton’s own, fundamentally bleak view of existence: that repression just might
render the emotional life more intense, that an experience unrealized but imagined
might be “more real” than one simply lived through, and that the denials practiced
in a closed society breed the suffering which in the long run breeds character.
That view, together with Wharton’s acknowledgment of the passing of old
New York society, is subtly underlined in the closing pages of The Age of Innocence.
Thirty years have passed. Newland, now a widower, visits Paris with his son. The son,
Dallas, is about to marry a woman who is just as much of a social outsider as Ellen
Olenska once was. But there is no problem for him in this, because the “little world”
Newland had grown up in, “and whose standards had bent and bound him,” has
faded away. Dallas belongs to a looser social dispensation, a freer, less constrained
but arguably less civilized order of things. Reflecting on his marriage, Newland
observes that there was “good in the old ways.” His “long years together” with May,
he concludes, “had shown him that it did not matter so much if marriage was a dull
duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty; lapsing from that, it became a mere
battle of ugly appetites.” These stark, stoical reflections continue as Dallas confides
to his father that May had known of his love for Ellen. Dying, May had told her son
that she knew her children were safe with Newland because, Dallas recalls her saying,
“once when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.” “She never
asked me,” Newland declares, startled by this sudden revelation of just how much
fineness of observation and feeling circulated below the dull, tranquil surfaces of his
married life. “No ... you never did ask each other anything, did you?” Dallas wryly
responds. “And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each
other and guessed what was going on underneath.” To Dallas, this is further proof
that his parents belonged to a “a deaf-and-dumb” generation: although, he admits,
“I back your generation for knowing more about each other’s private thoughts than
we ever have time to find out about our own.” For Newland, it is a demonstration of
the rightness of his – and, for that matter, May’s and Ellen’s – choice. Following the
logic of that choice, made thirty years ago, Newland now makes another one.
“The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to
get whatever they want,” Newland comments to himself on Dallas and his contem-
poraries, “and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t. Only,
I wonder – the things one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat
so wildly?” Dallas is going to visit Ellen in her Paris apartment. Newland, however,
decides not to go in with him. He sits on a bench outside the apartment block,GGray_c04.indd 329ray_c 04 .indd 329 8 8/1/2011 7:53:47 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 47 AM