Newland could delete May’s number from his phone and unfollow her on Twitter. In modern-day New York, they could set up house together in Brooklyn, and no one would bat an eyelid. And so they are condemned to a lifetime apart, he to the prison of marriage to May and she to the dingy smallness of Europe. But Ellen, who has only just escaped from there, knows better: it ‘wasn’t at all different … only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous’. ‘I want somehow to get away with you into a world where … we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other and nothing else on earth will matter.’ Newland touchingly imagines that Europe might be such a world. We know that he has had a secret mistress in the past (‘poor silly Mrs Thorley Rushworth’), before his relationship with May, and he knows what clandestine squalor it entails. And yet, much as he wants her, Newland does not exactly want the married Countess Olenska to be his ‘mistress’. Newland’s impending marriage to the terrifyingly girlish May Welland cannot be anything other than ‘a sham’ it closes round him with all the stifling force of old, status-obsessed New York society. By this point in the novel, it has become obvious to us that Olenska and Archer are each other’s only chance of what Newland calls ‘a real life’. ‘Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress – since I can’t be your wife?’ Ellen Olenska asks of Newland Archer in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
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