Did Newland Do His Duty?

Roxane Gay takes the last stretch of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, where Ellen is moved around like a chess piece and Newland tries more than once to confess, and May won't let him, which Gay admits she admires. The newlyweds' first formal dinner shows May as she is: a woman who will protect what's hers at any cost. When she tells Newland she's pregnant, we learn she told Ellen first, and that news sends Ellen back to Europe.

Gay gives Ellen the novel's only genuine moral clarity, then reads the final chapter, 30 years on, as a novel unto itself. Dallas Archer questions everything his father never did, and still marries Fanny Beaufort at Grace Church like everyone else. May, it turns out, was never naive. And Newland, free at last outside Ellen's apartment, watches a curtain close and walks away. Gay's verdict: the true love of his life was his love of being exactly the man he was expected to be.