with commentary by Roxane Gay
Ellen Olenska arrives in old New York having done something almost no woman of her set would dare: she left a bad marriage. Her husband, a European count, was a serial cheater who physically harmed her. And for leaving him, the society that should have protected her instead closes ranks. Reading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence for Rebind Classics, Roxane Gay is unsparing about what that reveals. Ellen is punished, in Gay's account, not for the divorce itself but for her integrity: she declines to pretend in a world held together by pretense, and her refusal exposes the arbitrariness everyone else has agreed not to see. The novel, Gay argues, shows a world that would rather endanger a woman than disturb its own surface.
A Divorce Worse Than an Abusive Husband
The verdict on Ellen is delivered before she has done anything at all. Gay reads the response to her divorce as the novel's clearest moral exposure. The society around her, she says, would "prefer her to stay in an abusive marriage to an itinerant cheater than to be divorced. Like, that divorce is worse than an abusive husband." The reasoning is not really about Ellen. It is about the system. "They would rather put her in danger," Gay says, "so that they can maintain this facade of their lives rather than provide her with the care and love that she actually deserved and needed."
Integrity as the Provocation
Why does Ellen, specifically, become the target? Gay's answer is that her integrity is itself the provocation. "If anyone in this world has integrity, it's her," she says, "and it's sad because she is actually living with integrity and everyone else around her is resenting her for it. They actually want her to not have integrity." A community organized around pretense cannot tolerate someone who refuses to pretend, because the refusal makes the pretense visible. Ellen's clarity is a mirror, and no one wants to look.
That is the deeper mechanism Gay keeps returning to: Ellen is dangerous precisely because she declines to play along. "When she doesn't sort of stoop to their level," Gay explains, "she clarifies just how horrible they are. Because there's something now to contrast." A world where everyone follows the rules looks uniform and natural; nothing stands out. But the moment one person breaks from it, the arbitrariness becomes glaring. "When someone starts to break from tradition and start to challenge the status quo," Gay says, "all hell breaks loose. Because now you can see, like, oh, there is another way, there is an alternative." The threat Ellen poses is the threat of a visible exit.
Ostracism, the Weapon That Works
The weapon the community reaches for is ostracism, and Gay is precise about why it works. For people of this class, she explains, social exclusion "often also meant that you would lose the financial privilege and the social privilege that you had become accustomed to." But the deeper power of the threat is emotional. "We are always seeking family and community," Gay says, and so beyond the material losses, "you're also losing the emotional connections. People need other people... very few people can tolerate isolation. And so ostracization is terrifying. And that's why it generally works as a threat and as a tool for bringing about compliance." Ellen is being shown, in advance, exactly what defiance will cost.
What makes her punishment land hardest is that she is not even asking for much. Gay strips Ellen's desires down to their modest core. "She's been through hell," Gay says, "so anything that pleases her is heavenly." Unlike her peers, "it's only very simple things that she wants. She's not asking for a grand mansion. She wants a place that's warm, cozy, that she gets to decorate and live in all on her own." A woman who has survived an abusive marriage in a gilded cage wants a small room of her own. The society around her treats even that as insubordination.
Clear-Eyed and Punished Anyway
Gay refuses to read Ellen as a passive victim, though. She is, in Gay's account, the one genuinely clear-eyed person in the book, the one who "sees everyone clearly, including herself," and who remains "the least judgmental person in the group." Her tragedy is not that she fails to understand her situation but that she understands it completely and is punished anyway. There is a pointed asymmetry here that Gay keeps in view: the same machinery that crushes Ellen barely touches the men who run it. A wealthy man in this world, Gay notes, "had the means to do whatever he wants, however he wants, whenever he wants," with all the time in the world to entertain his contradictions. Ellen has no such cushion. Every choice she makes carries a real cost, and the society around her makes sure of it.
Wharton, Gay suggests, may have written herself into the Countess. Of the women in the novel, "if anyone in the novel reflects how Wharton saw herself, I would say that it's the Countess." Ellen leaves the marriage, sees the world for what it is, asks for almost nothing, and is sent away for all of it. That, in Gay's reading, is the cost of integrity in a world built on pretending.