Essay Database

Edith Wharton depicts in her novel the 19th century life of the New York elite through the eyes of Newland Archer. The society is seen as suffocating its members by strict rules on behaviour and only the arrival of Countess Ellen Olenska begins to open Archer’s eyes to the narrow-mindedness of the society and its estrangement from reality. There are many references to suffocation and death in the novel. Most striking is the scene …

…within the constraints of the New York society, because he is in nature a dilettante. Archer would have preferred to have been like Ellen, but he sees that Ellen’s life which “had been spent in ... rich atmosphere” was “too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs” (p.362) and he both “honoured his own past, and mourned for it” (p.350). Notes All references are to the Penguin Popular Classics edition of the novel (Harmondsworth, 1996).