The conclusion of The Age of Innocence

Reading the last chapter of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence my memory of my first reading of the novel - alas, not that many years ago – comes back to me: in part, because the final chapter is so unusual and such a surprise, in part because in all reading beginnings and endings are the most powerful and rhetorically significant, which is one of the principles that Strunk and White set forth in Elements of Style and which holds true at every level of composition, chapters, paragraphs, sentences, lists. The chapter is so striking because it jumps forward about 30 years in time, to 1910 or so (Wharton wrote the novel in 1920) and we see that the Archers have had a long and apparently happy marriage; previous chapter ended with revelation that May was pregnant, and we didn’t know whether Archer would abandon her for Olenska, and in final chapter we see how his fatherhood completely transformed his life: yes, he realizes that May is dull and conventional, but they apparently raised four children very successfully, and the children adore him. We find him now a widower of two years, who has become a public figure, even entered politics for a time at urging of T. Roosevelt, but is at times sad and wistful, not missing his late wife but missing his life, knowing it could have been so much more, or so he thinks. In last scene, his son takes him to Paris for a last jaunt before son’s marriage, and son arranges a meet with Olenska, whom Archer has not seen in 30 years and of whom he knows little. In final moments, son goes up to Olenska’s 5^th-floor apartment while Archer sits in a park on a bench and eventually walks back to his hotel. In a way that’s a very beautiful and honest moment: he realizes that it is better to hold the ideal image of Olenska in his mind than to confront someone so changed and so different from him, after her many years in an entirely different set. There’s also something a little odd and creepy about this scene: his sitting on a bench, an observer, almost to weakened to go up to the flat, he seems literally like a dead man or a ghost. And why does his son stay in the apartment so long, without checking on his dad? There’s something oddly sexual about that, too. Assuming Archer lives and moves on with his life, it is obvious he will marry someone from his “set” and forever regret the loss of a more adventuresome life, which he did not have the courage to pursue.