Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fall” – a modern “Lady with the Dog”

After the big braying dogs of the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s a curious turnaround that some of the most important people writing in Russian in recent years are women – Maria Stepanova, Tatyana Tolstaya, Ludmilla Ulitskaya, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. With the exception of Stepanova, who is from the generation after the other three, they came to creative maturity as the Soviet Union was collapsing, a fact without which much of their work would have been unpublishable, and are now in their seventies and eighties, living in self-imposed exiles. A blog post on Ulitskaya’s Big Green Tent may one day appear here. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, so much as that I didn’t love it. Long, meandering, it had something of Pynchon in its encyclopaedic portrayal of Soviet dissidents, but shared the American writer’s lack of warmth. Today, I am taking a different approach. Through a close analysis of a single four-page story by Ludmilla Petrushevskya, I’d like to make the case for her own brilliance.

Nothing Petrushevskaya has written has been very long. The three works collected in There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In (not Petrushevskaya’s title, nor those of the other Penguin editions of her work in English, as far as I can make out) are at the lower bound of a novella in length. Her more typical mode is the very short story. Not quite flash fiction, these are still only a few pages long. If you seek a modern Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, at least in form, you will be disappointed. Yet that is perhaps the only ground for disappointment, for these stories are innovative, especially in their narration, and far truer to my experience of the majority of Russian lives today than any ballroom or hunt from War and Peace.

Quotations from the story come from the translation by Anna Summers, found in There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. The quotes at the end come translated via The Moscow Times.

“The Fall” is a love story, told from the sidelines. “That summer we watched a transformation by the sea. We were staying across the street from a resort for workers; she was one of the guests. We couldn’t ignore her – she was too vulgar.” This beginning is shocking not through what it says, but how it says it. Immediately we have a narrative voice that wishes not one bit to settle into a kind of easy anonymity like a grand 19th century doyen – it wants to judge, and crush with that judgement. Even without the word “vulgar” there’s this persistent “we”, which begins three out of the first four sentences of the story. It seems to say that we don’t have a narrator, so much as an unquestionable judgement from the very voice of polite society.

Against this society, we have a woman, who is given by it the name of Carmen. “Just imagine her: a tight perm, plucked eyebrows, gaudy lipstick, a miniskirt”. Note the command to imagine – the narrator doesn’t just want to judge, they want to force readers into adopting their perspective – to picture the scene so that they can judge the same way. Carmen herself seems to be looking for love. Between the chops of the narrator as they try to destroy any worth that plan may have – “she strained, pathetically”, “a little womanly happiness (as imagined in soap operas)” – we understand that much about Carmen’s intentions.

Carmen has several admirers, from “a tall one in a heavy wool suit”, to “a skinny youth with hippie locks”. To the narrator, they are like animals – the word “pack” is used twice for them. By the next paragraph, “Number One”, the man in the suit, has come out on top. “Carmen and Number One walk about with dignity: she’s curbed her laughing; he carries her purse.”

“Dignity”? The narrator has shifted their tone from the total dismissal of the first page. The first sign of this comes a little earlier, when describing her laugh: “our Carmen laughs shrilly, but not as shrilly or loudly as one would expect – her laugh is not the war cry of some neighbourhood whore who invites all and sundry to her table; this Carmen laughs softly.” As a reader you can almost hear the frustration in the narrative voice – that “but not” that shows they would like to be meaner but cannot justify it, that reference to a “neighbourhood whore” so as to tar Carmen by association within the sentence, even if the narrator cannot call her such outright.

The next paragraph sees the two of them on a bus. Phrases like “those atrocious heels” let us know that Carmen is still in trouble, even if other remarks, like how “Number One gazes abstractly over everyone’s heads, looking out for his little lady”, suggest a seriousness to the couple and their “love” that the dismissive narrator, in their cruelty, lacks. “The biggest misery of all – a doomed love” – that’s the narrator’s assessment. But coming from such a meanie, whose only goal seems the tearing-down of others, this love, however doomed, shines like a light in the narration. Carmen, as a name, may refer to a fictional character, but she seems considerably more real and authentic than the woman staying in the hotel across the road.

The result of love, as it should be, is transfiguration: “Carmen has mellowed and acquired a golden sheen. Her ridiculous curls have loosened up and lightened in the sun”. The judgement “ridiculous” is replaced by the neutral statement that the curls have loosened up. The narrator changes tack, from dismissing her as crass to a kind of crushing, dismissive, fake pity that is even nastier. They are “trying to dance” as “a few days remain” before their “eternal separation.”

In the final paragraphs the time has slipped forward as “The new season has begun.” What happened cannot matter. Their love, like everything in this world, is washed away as a new wave of guests rolls in. The two of them have gone “back to their children and spouses”, and all that remains is a “long-distance call in a phone booth at the post office.” In the end, “They’ll shout and cry across thousands of miles, deceived by the promise of eternal summer, seduced and abandoned.” What a pessimistic ending! But note, though, the tense – we are now in the future. The narrator’s knowledge of other people has already been undermined by the time we get here – so why trust her suggestion of what the couple will do? There’s no need. In this shift to the future, there is a small gap for readerly agency – we can find hope where the narrator does not. But that is all we can do.

“The Fall” is Petrushevskaya at her best. It’s a story where the hard work is not in the language or images directly so much as in what lies behind it – the narrator and their voice. The narrator here is unreliable, but not in the sense of someone who conceals the truth. Instead, their prejudices distract them from it, so that they struggle to see the value of the love of poor Carmen. By seeing their petty prejudices, and following their interaction with what we take to be the reality underneath – a fairly average Black Sea romance – readers are led to see their own prejudices and how they might obscure their view of the world. At the same time, like a good character, the narrator is themself changing as they narrates – we hear their surprise at Carmen’s relationship, and there’s a certain commendable honesty in the way they belittles her without calling her something she is not, such as a whore.

It’s hard to read “The Fall” without also thinking about how it fits into the wider Russian literary tradition, because for one the comparison with Chekhov’s Lady with the Little Dog is so obvious. Both are Black Sea adultery tales, after all. Yet the texts are very different, despite their setting. Chekhov’s tale has a neutral, unobtrusive narrator. Instead, its focus is on Gurov, a serial adulterer who discovers that he is capable of true love after all. After the initial romance in Crimea, instead of just “long-distance call[s]”, Gurov actually follows Anna to her hometown to see her, and after that “the most difficult and complicated part” of their affair begins. As for Carmen, perhaps the same may happen with her too – as I noted, we don’t know. But what both works implicitly aim to do, is show the transfiguring power of love. Carmen becomes beautiful, and Gurov becomes good.

Love, though in adultery – it’s a little scandalous, even today. Neither narrator judges the relationship, only the romance. This stands in contrast to another great Russian work on adultery, Anna Karenina, which Lady with the Little Dog responds to. With the epigraph “vengeance is mine, I will repay”, Tolstoy is quite willing to be explicit about adultery’s evils when the other writers are not.  Out of the topic he wrote a huge novel, contrasting adultery to the good love of Kitty and Levin. Chekhov reacted to this by writing something much smaller. Adultery, he seems to say, is a thing to consider based on the specific case, rather than some abstract moral scheme. Gurov was leading a bad life before he met Anna, yet somehow this final adultery finally freed him from much in his life that was evil. Life is strange, but that’s why it’s wonderful. 

In “The Fall,” the narrator is like a representation of the forces of society in Tolstoy that ultimately drive Anna to her death, a figure judging and condemning. Yet just as Tolstoy himself couldn’t help but create in Anna a creature of vitality and excitement that readers have come to love, here too the narrator in “The Fall” has to admit the validity of the human as opposed to the ease of the casual condemnation. The dignity of Carmen and Number One is not just a thing they have, it is also a thing that the narrator, begrudgingly, grants them – they are in love, however doomed, and that makes them sparkle.

Like Chekhov, Petrushevskaya writes about the little folk. In that, her stories remind me much more of the Russia I knew than do those of any other writer. The dirt and grime and flaking wallpaper of a communal apartment I visited with a friend, the cramped kitchen of my ex-girlfriend’s family, with the same oily soups swapping pans day-in, day-out – such scenes Petrushevskaya brings to life. To them she adds, lit with a painful light, characters and events that I was lucky enough to mostly miss – endless stories of alcoholism, murder, and domestic violence. Chekhov is easy to read – he redeems the pathetic and largely innocent; Petrushevskaya is harder because the people she tries to redeem are often so obviously horrible even as she tries to save them.

The full extent of this badness is something she herself discovered to her horror only recently. In July 2023, she publicly announced she had given up writing, perhaps for good: “I’ve always written about my people. About the people who live in Russia. I felt sorry for them, the drunks and wretches… But now I don’t feel sorry for my people — invaders, thieves and rapists, murderers of children and destroyers of other people’s lives — or their hateful families, their wives and mothers… I will never write about them or for them.”

What are you supposed to do as a writer of a people who no longer seem worthy of redemption? If an author herself seems to turn on her work, should we still read it? If we spend our time looking through grime for chinks of light, that might make for good fiction, but isn’t it itself a bit hypocritical? Shouldn’t we instead get the damp cloth that will wipe the grime away?

I’ve been turning Petrushevskaya’s words over in my mind for months, and though I admire her stance, I think we should continue reading her stories and engaging with her characters. These stories are windows to a world – both through the flawed narrators, and through the grim narration – that exists. Without understanding it, with its prejudice and its meanness (in both senses, for after all these stories are unglamourously short compared to the great works of the 19th century), there is no way that the cycles of violence and trauma that characterise Russian life so strikingly can ever be stopped. Here in Petrushevskaya, there’s no wish fulfilment here for me to enjoy, but there is an overwhelming sense of seriousness. That, with fiction, is important too.

If you want to get started with Petrushevskaya, among the English language collections available, I’d say the collection this story comes from is the best – There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In is good too, but a little less approachable. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby I did not enjoy as much, but perhaps I’ll revisit it later.

Seven Years of Mostly About Stories

I have invested, perhaps foolishly, in a few friends’ startups, and my reward so far has been a few years’ worth of monthly updates that tell me that things are happening and people are working. Even if I don’t receive any money back, I still enjoy this sense of a joint journey, of being carried by the same wave. You, reader, are also an investor, albeit with your time rather than money, in me and what I make here, and to you I owe an update too. It doesn’t quite sit right with me to have a blog, which is inevitably personal in outlook and even features the first person singular pronoun at regular points, and yet to exist so shadily. One never knows, of course, whether you want me to exist as an independent entity, but I have my hopes on that score.

Indeed, I take as a vague principle that if you readers want properly academic writing, you head to Jstor, and that if you want the polished impersonality of a modern essay or review, you go to the New Yorker or LARB. In short, that if you are here, reading this, rather than merely stumbling on something on the internet while desperately trying to put together an essay for your studies, you must, in a certain sense, want this personal element, in other words, me. 

Life

Last year, I was entering the final stretch of a trainee programme at a large company and had moved to Germany. Over the course of last year, I finished this scheme and received a full-time position, also in Germany. This was a far from guaranteed outcome, and the high levels of stress associated with searching for a role in an unfriendly job market had a negative impact both on my reading and on my writing. All that is now behind us. The new work contract is permanent, and I have the full force of German unions and worker protections at my back to ensure any future moves will be entirely voluntary.

I have spoken before about my enjoyment of stability, indeed my great need for it. After my unplanned exit from Russia in early 2022, I have more or less lived without even a year’s certainty ahead of me. I am not a person who savours spontaneity or the absence of structure. “Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be fierce and original in your works.” This quote of Flaubert’s is one I have always admired whenever I have seen it, and I can say that it has proven true for my own case too.

And what stability! My work contract is permanent. My rental contract, in a spacious and well-located flat, is equally permanent. Never before has the future been so secure, even if the new risks of stasis and stagnation have appeared for the first time on the horizon. This is a great blessing.

Writing

I finished a first draft of a reasonably lengthy novella and was pleased enough with it, an unusual thing, to show it to a few friends in exchange for some helpful feedback. During the dark days of the job hunt and the brighter-but-still-stressful days of the apartment and furniture hunt, I did not succeed in writing creatively. I was, however, last year blessed with ideas for two novels of, I think, great potential. Unfortunately, one is historical in nature and requires a condition of personal leisure that is currently unavailable to me. The other novel is already in progress.

Now that I have this external stability mentioned above alongside an excellent work-life-balance, there is neither any practical obstacle nor reasonable excuse available to me not to focus with redoubled efforts upon my ambitions of becoming a great, or at least reasonably good, fiction writer. I see this as consisting of three elements.

First, I must improve my experience. This I can do simply by living and paying attention. In a favourite phrase, it means keeping both eyes open and noting things down. Observations, images, snatches of phrases. One of my tasks for this year is to do this in a dedicated volume, as my diary is primarily an emotion-regulation tool now and hence no longer the best place for such things. I am not fundamentally concerned about my chances in this development area: I have had a reasonable number of interesting experiences to call upon already – in Russia, growing up in Scotland, and elsewhere. What I must do now is become the kind of noticer that can identify and place the perfect detail to turn mere remembered experience into a rich vividness.

Second, I must improve my background knowledge. Mostly About Stories is, I hope, a storehouse of at least some value in this regard, but the fact remains that there are significant areas where my knowledge is, in my view, insufficient. Reading – history, philosophy, criticism, art history, politics, economics, religion, current affairs – and so on, in conjunction with discussions, where possible, with those who know better, should answer this need. While I have a reasonable amount of free time outside of work, I cannot afford the truly scattergun approach of a writer of leisure. Therefore, this reading does need to be somewhat targeted. Learning is a project, and projects can be managed.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, I must improve my technique. Many, many, writerly sins can be forgiven of people who know how to put together an incisive sentence in a style that is their own. Can’t do dialogue? Then give us the descriptive jewels of a Marquez paragraph, the chaotic mess of a Krasznahorkai, the hilarious brutality of Bernhard or the wondrous rhythms of Fosse.

Improving one’s technique is, of course, a matter of practice. It is also a matter of study. On this blog I have, I hope, provided the occasional example of the analysis of a wider work. Sometimes I even quote things, as if to inform readers that I have actually read the thing I’m talking about. But really, I am not attacking sentences enough. Increasingly, I contemplate doing blog posts on single paragraphs to really get to the heart of why they work. All this is necessary because while I am often pleased with what I write in my blog posts – there’s often a good sentence here or there, if I may say so myself – with my fiction this is almost never the case. Such focused study, getting closer to language itself, ought to remedy this. The late William Gass did this at times in his essays (e.g. “The Sentence Seeks its Form”), and I have great respect for such an approach.

These three areas are by and large how I think I can improve independently. Naturally, the criticism of trusted and untrusted persons on things I have written is also important, perhaps essential. But by and large, owing to my external situation, my focus is on personal development as it lies within my own hands. I am now 28 years old – a reality that at times strikes me as disappointing, but which is not objectively a catastrophe. I still view myself as being very much a journeyman or apprentice when it comes to writing. This is likely why I am so interested in style and technique. I view writing as a craft that I must work at before I can go around throwing pieces of paper in other people’s faces. Or rather, I want to say things, but I have enough respect for writing and readers to want to make sure I can say them well first.

Blog

Mostly About Stories, of course, has continued. I hope you have enjoyed some of the pieces. I know, and it pains me, that the quality can be variable. There’s always a tension here between my desire to give you something short, snappy, and polished, and my desire to note down in moderately organised paragraphs everything I possibly can about a book while still keeping the time I spend working on the posts reasonably under control. Since I read and write my posts primarily to learn, (and hope readers learn while reading as well), my natural tendency is always for a big baggy monster of a post. Occasionally, I do make unspoken resolutions for you to myself never to write anything longer than 1500, or 2000, or 2500 words. So far, this has not worked.

I have not posted as often as I had intended, annoyingly. I actually have a few posts stacked up which I just haven’t gotten around yet to posting, so it’s not even a dearth of reading or writing at my end which is to blame. I want, ideally, to put something out each fortnight. I do also, though I’ve said it’s unlikely, want to post things that are slightly more tightly written – though first it will be necessary to get through the backlog.

Numbers

When I started MAS, I looked around to see whether there was any information on how many viewers blogs like this actually get. There is a site that does a survey, linked here. Since I write about literature, an even less popular topic than books and reading in general, I still feel there’s value and interest in sharing my own specifically.

Anyway, last year’s total views was 103’546. As our first six-figure result this feels like a small milestone, even if it may just be the power of an accumulation of mildly interesting posts. While the majority of readers may well be people looking to write school and university essays about books they haven’t read, I am grateful for those among you who write comments that often make me feel you have read the book far better than I have, or who write me encouraging messages via the Contact form. And if you are just here to read and enjoy in silence, know that I’m grateful for your presence here too. It’s what I’d do myself.

Books

I would say that my greatest discovery this year has been the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. I had the impression that my post on The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea generated a lot of thoughts in readers – even the few friends who read the blog in real life mentioned it specifically when we caught up. I also enjoyed reflecting on Latronico’s Perfection, albeit slightly more than I enjoyed reading it.

Among the various things I read but did not write about, I received the greatest joy from Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty, about the relationship between ideas, life, and writing in the 19th century Russian novel, with a few forays into the Soviet period too. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves Russian literature and wants to know the historical interlinkages a little better, or perhaps just wants some new arguments to help articulate what possibly makes the literature special, if special it is.

Next

This year, I aim to write a first draft of the second of the novel ideas that came to me last year, the one that does not require months in a library. It is, however, at least in one sense, a novel of ideas. Hence, it does require plenty of reading – Camus, Sartre & de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, the Stoics, and the Christian Mystics, are all on my reading list and may appear here (in some cases again) later on. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m also going to read Dostoevsky again, for the first time since the 2022 Invasion. He’s necessary for the novel too.

I also aim to write slightly better blog posts and be mildly more consistent in posting them.

In general, I am excited for what discoveries lie ahead and for sharing them here, with you.

Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence

So much of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence is perfectly done that to write about it in a blog post becomes very difficult – it truly provides an embarrassment of novelistic riches. Such books are a blessing to a reader but a beast for the blogger. There is too much for me to say, even after a single (re)reading. Each word is a thread that can be followed, rather than merely plucked. Everything from flowers, to place (New York City), time (1870s), society, location, and language, works meaningfully to make this a supremely rewarding work for the analytical reader. And Wharton does all this with a prose that is clear and a story whose mysteries linger long after we finish it.

If I try to summarise it overmuch, the story might collapse into a mixture of predictability and familiarity. It is a question of the obligations owed to love in a restrictive society. Newland Archer, a marriageable young man of elevated social standing, gets engaged to May Welland, a pretty young lady from a good family who is ready for her husband to tell her what to do and who to be. Before the wedding, however, Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin and an old friend of Newland, returns to New York from the Old World without her husband. Older, wiser, ignorant of the finer rules of New York society, Newland finds himself falling quickly in love with Olenska. But New York is a powerful force within the novel, and Newland is “at heart a dilettante”. We wonder whether he has the strength to choose, or whether that choice will be made entirely for him.

With so many themes and ideas to select from, the one that strikes me as the best way into the novel is that of perspective. “Age” is in the title of The Age of Innocence, and while this might refer to either Newland or May at their stage of life, it also refers to their time as a whole. Furthermore, it can only refer to their time when we have the wisdom to look back from a time when that innocence is no longer present. It implies a multiple perspective. This multiplicity concerns the whole novel, which we can read differently, depending on how closely we wish to stick to Newland’s perspective. If we decide to step back, as I think the novel would like us to, then it moves beyond being a simple work of frustrated love and weak men and allows for a far more nuanced view.

Viewing

The narrator follows Newland throughout The Age of Innocence, with only occasional moments when they step back to give a kind of “society view” through reference to things like “the daily press” on the novel’s first page, or to the welter of names we as readers have to get used to. Indeed, one reason The Age of Innocence feels like a society novel is because there are so many people milling about that I began to suspect that Wharton’s intention was that I struggled to keep track of them all. Indeed, I soon began treating them abstractly in my head as “important” or “unimportant”, just as those same characters would judge those around them. Newland, our hero, is just another member of this mass when the book begins, and it is only as it progresses that he begins to find himself being able to view it from his own perspective.

This sense of massed perspective is established in the first scene, where we are present at an opera performance. To one on the stage there is only a mass of eyes staring down, undifferentiated, and Newland is up there among them. The opera is not so important, because it is Newland’s gaze we are interested in, emphasised by the repeated looking words like “contemplated,” “scanned”, and so on. Indeed, because he spends much time staring at May across the hall, we might notice and smile at the thought that her presence in her box is every bit a work of performance as is that of the person on the stage, something that becomes clearer and clearer as we learn about the New York of the 1870s over the course of the book. Newland does not actually do anything here, really, except look. This preference for observation over action proves one of the most distinctive elements of his character.

This early scene also introduces us to one side of the dynamic between May and Ellen, a comparison that exists in Newland’s perspective and develops as he observes both women. There’s a striking paragraph here which sets out his view on May and explains quite clearly why Ellen may prove alluring:

“He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the “younger set,” in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it.”

This is funny, albeit in a terrible way. Look at the verbs – “wish”, “meant”, “develop”, “enabling” – each and every one of them looks to the future and presumes May has nothing to value now except her beautiful emptiness, her state as a blank canvas. Indeed, “Mrs Newland Archer” annihilates the name of his wife and thereby makes it clear how substitutable Newland must view this person as being. This is Newland’s view of May, and really, it does not change much as the novel progresses. He comes to contrast it mentally with Ellen, who has a history through her failed marriage. Unlike with May, whom Newland believes he must form, (hence requiring effort, something mildly distasteful to the dilettante, however pleasurable the reward), the temptation of Countess Olenska comes from the opportunity to discover a fully-formed personality. Since she thinks for herself, she is unknowable in the way that Newland believes May never could be.

Flowers

The constant presence of flowers within the novel both expands this comparison while also deepening it. Newland sends May lilies-of-the-valley every day, an action whose regularity (though it is not done by standing order) seems to predict the very predictability and conventionality of their married life. After reconnecting with Ellen, Newland finds himself in a flower shop, where his eyes land upon some yellow roses. “Too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty” – rather than send them to his betrothed, Newland sends them to Ellen. Ellen receives flowers from many admirers, and her display of them – scattered here and there in her house, rather than kept orderly – is taken by society as yet another mark against her personality, a reminder of the disorderliness of the woman who has failed her husband by separating from him. The orderliness of May’s flowers contrasts with the personality of Ellen’s to evidence the seeming accuracy of Newland’s judgements of the two women.

Yet the flowers are not just a prop of this sort. Nor even does their importance cease at the obvious symbolic readings we can find in them – wastefulness, fragile youth, and so on. It is with flowers that we see, perhaps most obviously, some of the limitations of Newland’s perspective. Newland purchases the yellow roses he sends to Ellen “almost without knowing what he did.” Indeed, that Newland continues sending flowers to her at further points of the story is only brought to our attention after the fact some hundred pages later. It is as if the prose is conspiring to hide from Newland and the reader the fact that is increasingly obvious to anyone but him – the extent to which he loves Ellen. Newland might be discovering a life beyond society’s rules, but the yellow roses provide a potent symbol of the fact that in both cases he is carried by forces beyond his control – society in the first case, his subconscious in the second.

New York

New York dominates the novel – it is mentioned on near-enough every page. It is a totality, or at least seems to be. Yet this, too, is only a perspective that the novel seeks to shake. When May’s family go for a holiday to Florida, her father insists on trying to remake a little section of New York in their lodgings there. This is patently ridiculous – it makes New York look silly, shows how silly it is when removed from the environment that protects it. At the same time, it shows how important that environment was – how protective, to its inhabitants. When Ellen and Archer meet privately, it almost requires them to be somewhere else – a carriage or country estate, for example. In terms of the novel’s perspectives, one thing we might take from this is that New York’s restrictiveness actually works successfully to control everyone, so long as they are there. To me, the climax of the novel is when Newland tries to say goodbye to Ellen before she heads back to Europe, only to find that New York, in the figure of May, has already arranged for her to travel in a friend’s carriage. 

Limitations

We see through Newland’s eyes. We see the frustration of his life in New York, once he wants what it cannot give him. But just as we saw with the flowers, he is limited. Even the most powerful image of the book reveals that limitation: “He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?” Striking, but even when he thinks outside the system of his city, Newland is still taking the image from another, not quite thinking for himself.

We think May is like this, because Newland repeatedly considers her so – a mere “type”, absent of agency. But the novel’s penultimate chapter, where May sends off her rival without ever openly acknowledging it, is startling because it is here where, after noticing the importance of perspective as we read, Wharton makes it clear that we’ve only seen a fragment of the whole. May, her eyes “wet with victory” in the undeclared battle, has indeed acted independently to surprise Newland with the personality he hadn’t supposed she had. Even though that personality’s distinguishing characteristic is to ally itself with the existing powers of New York, it is still much more a something than the nothing he assumed. Hence his failure to achieve the conclusion with Ellen that he had hoped for.

The Final Chapter

In its final chapter, The Age of Innocence leaves us with a kind of mystery to ponder. I first read the novel over ten years ago now, and all I remembered in the years since was that the ending had left me feeling that there was something strange going on. That may well have been my total inexperience of romance, which meant I had no way of understanding Newland’s actions. Taking place nearly thirty years after the main events of the novel, this epilogue shows the consequences of Newland’s choice – if choice it quite was – of May over Ellen. He has achieved the worldly success that sticking in his place in society promised him, including professional recognition and beautiful children. He has also, in a way, come to terms with his life. “It did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty.”

After May’s passing Newland’s son takes him to Paris. It is here that Ellen now lives. She sends a note to the Archers’ hotel when she learns of their arrival, inviting them both to her, but on the street the father hesitates, in the end only his son goes upstairs to her rooms. “It’s more real to me here than if I went up”, is how he puts it to himself. And then he goes back to his hotel.

Young Angus could not understand him. Older Angus, perhaps, can take a slightly more appreciative view. But still, it’s another moment where the novel seems to be doing something with perspective that’s not at all clear. We’ve gone through the whole of The Age of Innocence watching Newland and Ellen restraining themselves, making sacrifices for the good of a society that neither quite likes nor believes in. That society has done nothing to commend itself to us. Now, both of them are free to be together, free of that society, but even now, Newland still chooses to remain with a memory, rather than a reality.

It is perhaps some comment on human desires. The way that we want until the moment we have. Perhaps Newland, whose first recorded thoughts about May in the book use the distinctive word “possessorship”, has decided that having something real is no longer worth the trouble. Better to enjoy the dream, undiminished. The next generation are much freer than he and Ellen had been – his son is an architect, a profession that would not have been acceptable in Newland’s youth for a man of his background. By choosing not to see Ellen, I suppose we can say that Newland is choosing to protect the idea of his life, even with its bad parts, as having been the right choice. Perhaps this sense of justification is fragile enough that meeting the countess might throw him off course. 

Perhaps the restrictions of the past – the absence of the telephone or relatively rapid transatlantic crossings – meant a heightened receptivity to what ultimately was perceived. The glance felt across the room back then was more keenly felt than the softest press of lip on lip is today. I don’t know; the novel does not know either. Newland’s justification seems rooted in fear. The novel’s portrayal of his world is too negative to redeem at the last moment. May may surprise Newland, and indeed us readers, when she steps up to ensure she gets her marriage and the life she wants, but her perspective is not enough to save the society. I came out of the book marvelling at its technical proficiency, which truly is worth studying; yet after writing this blog post, I’m marvelling also at this mystery, which still remains so to me, of what exactly it seems to want to say.

I suppose I’ll keep pondering these questions until the next time I return to it.