I'll be honest - I didn't like the first 3/4 of the book. But the ending was so well done. It was almost like Edith Wharton had to spend the first 200 pages of the book building up this world that was really stuffy, annoying, old-fashioned ("innocent"). I think that is why I didn't like the book at first - all of the characters were annoying and never communicated and so pretentious and aristocratic and stuck in their ways. And then at the end - oh, the ending was so perfect - when Archer sits outside of Ellen's apartment, imagining what the scene will look like rather than actually going in, you realize that despite Archer's grandiose dreams about idealism and romance, he, like the rest of of his generation, is stuck in the same "age of innocence." He is too "old-fashioned" and he cannot change. He blames it on his generation but I think he is actually just too scared of himself and of Ellen.

I also think that his love of Ellen was one of those things that sounded better in his head than in real life. When he was actually with Ellen he thought multiple times about how ugly she looked and all of these things, and a few times near the end she seemed frightened by his outbursts and he seemed a little pushy and forceful. But his daydreams of her and by extension his daydreams of what his life with her could look like were what he got joy and energy out of. I think the "love affair" with Ellen was more meaningful to him as a daydream rather than as a reality. He liked thinking that he was thinking out of the box, that he was different, that he could break out of the "complacency" that his wife and his society represented, that he COULD be different, that he could have original thoughts and follow his own paths without following all of these societal rules ... And having a love affair with Ellen was the medium through which he believed (unconsciously) that he could achieve this. Unfortunately, though, once he "loses" Ellen he also gives up on his dream, because he coupled too tightly his intellectual freedom from oppressive societal norms, and his relationship with Ellen.

The last sentence he says kills me

"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

Indeed, only with Dallas, the only person who actually ends up going to see Ellen at the end, and by extension the whole new generation, is where hope lies.

Especially in relation to the following quote:

"She smiled dreamily upon the possibility; but he perceived that to dream of it sufficed her. It was like hearing him read aloud out of his poetry books the beautiful things that could not possibly happen in real life" (146)

OMG reminds me of the ending of the book... Archer is actually more similar to May than he thinks... For him at the ending of the book it also suffices him more to imagine his life with Ellen than to actually see her in real life

I'm glad I read this book. Wharton's style is very different from mine. This book felt like a test of delayed gratification. It wasn't until I got to the last two chapters that I really got the whole point of the book and what Wharton was trying to say and the story she was trying to tell and everything felt more poignant. The more so because the whole aristocratic society and world she took so much pains to construct over the whole book was torn down so quickly with the last chapter (in which twenty years pass, he has kids, May dies, travels to Paris, almost sees Ellen) ... representing that this is how his life must have felt to Archer as well, in which his youth and its rules, at the time when he was experiencing it, felt so important and all-encompassing. But once he is older his whole life feels like a blur and yet, the rules and etiquette from his youth still guide his entire life and decisions. And this is true even after his wife is gone, showing that it wasn't May holding him "hostage" to these social conventions after all, but himself.

Ch 34 (last chapter)

• "Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself were what his country needed... When he remembered to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked forward — the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which their vision had been limited — even his small contribution to the new state of things seemed to count..." (349)
• "Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter 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. Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways." (350)
• "But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things" (354)
• "The worst thing of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken." (354)
• When he finally goes to Paris as he had dreamed of for like thirty years, the dream of going to Paris and the actual possibility of seeing Ellen becomes a realistic possibility. And that scares him
  • "Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being..." (357) UGH SO GOOD
• And Dallas is so perceptive had has no trouble saying what he thinks about his parents: "You never did ask each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath."

Notes

• Product of the system
  • "the circle of ladies who were the product of the system" (6)
  • "The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies" (14)
  • "it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts" (35)
  • "such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern" (41)
  • "only represented by a set of arbitrary signs" (42)
  • "the real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!" (75)
  • "Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man, with no opinions but with many habits" (116)
  • "He had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which tradition and training had moulded her" (330)
  • "Lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth ... incapacity to recognize change ... joint pretence of sameness" (351) (about May)
• Hypocrisy

  • Newland Archer hates Ellen at first and is also super judgemental. But also he wants a "free woman"

  • "he wondered at what age 'nice' women began to speak for themselves ... It would presently be his task to take the bandage from tis young woman's eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault?" (80)

    • Typical man opening the woman's eyes...

  • He's so judgy to May... training her to laugh at his jokes and then later being like, she has no humor but my own

    "She smiled dreamily upon the possibility; but he perceived that to dream of it sufficed her. It was like hearing him read aloud out of his poetry books the beautiful things that could not possibly happen in real life" (146)

    OMG reminds me of the ending of the book... Archer is actually more similar to May than he thinks... For him at the ending of the book it also suffices him more to imagine his life with Ellen than to actually see her in real life

  • "But to love Ellen Olenska was not to become a man like Lefferts: for the first time Archer found himself face to face with the dread argument of the individual case. Ellen Olenska was like no other woman, he was like no other man: their situation, therefore, resembled no one else's and they were answerable to no tribunal but that of their own judgement." (309)

• Inexpressiveness
  • "bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate" (111)
  • Riviere - "Good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing ... to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? ... Sometimes I feel I must take a plunge: an immense plunge" (201)
    • In contrast to Riviere, Archer has trouble expressing himself
  • "It was hateful to himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary" (311)
• Love
  • "Each time you happen to me all over again"
  • "How little they knew of each other, after all! ... He could only helplessly brood on the mystery of their remoteness and their proximity" (289)
• Other sentences
  • "The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life" (182)
  • "He breakfasted with appetite and method" (230)