Should Newland Marry?

Roxane Gay says this is where Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence really gets good: two people with feelings they cannot or will not act on, conveyed in glances and yellow roses sent without a card. Then Newland bolts to St. Augustine, Florida. Gay reads the trip plainly. He isn't running to May, he's running from Ellen, and once there he presses May to move the wedding up to just after Easter. Is that a man desperately in love, she asks, or desperately afraid?

The thing you might have missed is May. She asks whether there's someone else, and Newland, in what Gay calls "a stroke of gilded gaslighting," reassures her. But when May relents on the date, the news reaches Newland through Ellen, because May wrote to her cousin before her fiancé. Gay treats it as a chess move: Newland is now in check. The film ends on the lovers' fraught declaration and Gay's verdict that doing the right thing for others here is noble and also incredibly sad.