Is Newland Archer a Hero or a Coward?

Newland Archer wants you to see him as the sensitive exception in a shallow world: the one man who reads more clearly than the people around him, who chafes against the rules, who falls into an impossible love and suffers nobly for it. Reading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence for Rebind Classics, Roxane Gay declines the invitation. Her verdict refuses both terms of the question: not a hero, because his rebellion never leaves his own head, and not quite a coward either, because cowardice implies a real choice declined. Newland's romance with Ellen Olenska, in Gay's reading, is "really just a mental vacation" — the indulgence of a man who was never going to act, and whose deepest loyalty is to being exactly the man his world expects. It is one of the sharpest verdicts in her whole commentary, and she will not extend him the pity he has spent the book angling for.