The Price of Knowing: James, Wharton, and the Women Who See Everything

At the end of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer sits on a bench in Paris, thirty years after the events of the novel, and does not go upstairs. His son is waiting. Ellen Olenska is in the apartment above. He has come this far, across an ocean, across three decades, and he does not go up. He looks at the window. A shutter moves. He tells himself it is enough.

Roxane Gay, in her Rebind commentary on The Age of Innocence, does not find this noble. “It’s not that he’s being true to May in their marriage. It’s not loyalty, even though on the surface it is. It’s cowardice. He didn’t have the courage thirty years before and he doesn’t have the courage now.”

At the end of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Maggie Verver buries her face in her husband’s breast because she cannot look at what she sees in his eyes. She has won: the Prince is hers, Charlotte is gone, her father has departed for American City, and equilibrium is restored. She has done everything she set out to do. And she cannot look at her own victory. Garth Greenwell, in his Rebind commentary on The Golden Bowl, reads the final sentence as tragedy in the Aristotelian sense: “pity and dread. No value without loss.” What Maggie has learned is that coming into the fullness of adult love requires looking that fact in the face.

Both novels end at a window. Both end with a person who has seen everything, and has paid for it.