Wharton's characters: The excellence of The Age of Innocence

One of the great things about Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is the way in which she manages to evoke, or perhaps provoke, contradictory attitudes toward her characters. Archer, the protagonist, is easy to dismiss as a spoiled rich kid who never had to work a day in his life, lounges around the law office doing very little, focused far to much on society and social mores and codes, indifferent to his wife whom he married because she was a "good match" and a beautiful trophy, to weak and afraid to make a bold move and pursue his wife's cousin, Ellen, the one he seems truly to love, expecting Ellen Olenska to sacrifice all on his behalf while giving up very little - and so on! - but then, we also realize, wait a second, we can also see him as a man of true feeling and intellect who is unfairly trapped and caught amid social conventions, misunderstood and unappreciated by all around him, the victim of a terrible mistake in marrying the wrong woman, unwilling, at least for a time, to abandon his wife and her family, torn apart almost literally by his conflicting emotions and desires, a man with so little emotional, romantic, and sexual experience that he doesn't know or understand love and makes a terrible mistake. He's far better than most of the men in his crowd - crude and narrow-minded, biased, anti-Semitic - in fact, it's hard not to like Archer, or pity him - he's an American tragic figure, a man who's wasted his life, an early incarnation of Willie Loman perhaps. We can hold both views of Archer in our minds simultaneously, or in oscillation anyway, because of Wharton's deft skill and penetrating observations. Same - duality of vision - with other characters, though maybe to a lesser degree: May Welland (Mrs. Archer) is frivolous and shallow, like most of the women in her set, but maybe that's just the role she's be relegated to by her society, as she does prove to be a shrewd manipulator of Archer and a formidable presence when her marriage is under threat. She turns out to be much smarter than we'd thought at first - we underestimate her. Olenska is both a femme fatale and a victim of fate, a threat to others (women) and a champion of sacrifice and self-abnegation. All of us have these dualities and puzzles and mysteries - who knows the complex things various people we know or know somewhat must think about us? Only a really fine writer captures all these nuances of character - it's the difference here between rounded and flat characters, as Forster described them. Wharton's are fully "round." Two additional notes: Is there even a possibility that Archer is a repressed homosexual (see yesterday's post), and his passion for Olenska is just a screen or a code, a way to step away from his passionless marriage and not be disgraced? And what's with the title? It's anything but innocent - even if things may have seemed simpler to Wharton back (50 years) in the past - I suppose the title may be ironic, but it doesn't quite capture the mood of the novel for me.