Age of Innocence as a novel in code

So in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence the protagonist, Newland Archer, marries someone that from day one he knows he doesn't love and never will and all the while he yearns to be with his spouse's cousin, but he can't because to do so would be entirely socially unconventional and disruptive, so they carry on a virtually chaste relationship, entirely furtively and by indirection, except for a few liaisons months apart, and Archer thinks no one is aware of this secret passion but he gradually comes to see that not only his relatives but even his spouse know - yet she can't or won't do anything either to free him or to free herself. Sound familiar? This is a 20th-century novel's take on 19th-century forbidden romance that challenges social taboos, and a 21st-century take on 20th-century romance would be Breakback Mountain or any of the many other novels and stories about a secret homosexual romance and its ruinous effects on both partners in a straight, conventional marriage. In a way you could even read the entire Age of Innocence as a coded novel, and imagine Countess Olenska as a Count Olenski and it still makes sense. Still, there are other elements that move this great novel well beyond the scope of a homoerotic parable: there is the whole issue of social caste or class, the way the Mingott family tries to pressure Olenska to go back to her philandering husband because divorce just isn't done among their set, and also perhaps because of their swooning over titles and European psueudo-nobility. Also, the back story of the suave swindler whose bank crashes, taking with it the fortunes of so man prominent New Yorkers, a prescient view of a Bernie Madoff scandal, but in this case among the white-show set (in Wharton's House of Mirth, the swindler was Jewish, as that novel bore a tinge of anti-Semitism, if not Wharton's at the leas the characters' accepted biases and prejudice).