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Roxane Gay on Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence

Episode 4

The Company Man

Featuring Roxane Gay

Audio episode · 14 min

Roxane Gay on The Age of Innocence

Ellen Olenska wants her divorce, and her own family assembles to stop her. In chapters ten through twelve of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Roxane Gay lays out the rules of this world as they actually work: binding for some people, optional for others, and hardest on the one woman refusing to fake her life. Then the family sends its lawyer, and the lawyer they send is Newland Archer; her reading of what he discovers in that office is the episode's sharpest turn. And once the verdict is in, the episode holds its breath: Gay the memoirist, on the childhood these two shared and what nostalgia actually keeps.

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The Scarlet D

Boston sewed Hester's A in cloth; New York pinned Ellen's D in whispers. Marshall and Gay show which mark a woman can work, and it isn't the polite one.

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The Cage, Not the Romance: Roxane Gay on The Age of Innocence

Gay argues The Age of Innocence is about the cage, not the romance: a status system everyone obeys because freedom costs more than anyone will pay.

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The One Who Learns and the One Who Doesn't

Elizabeth Bennet learns herself in time to change; Newland Archer learns too late to matter. Gay and Stein trace the same flaw to opposite ends.

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Is Newland Archer a Hero or a Coward?

Neither hero nor coward, Roxane Gay rules: Newland Archer's love for Ellen was 'a mental vacation' — a rebellion he never intended to act on, and never did.

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Marriage as Transaction: The Two Ways a Novel of Manners Ends

Austen and Wharton diagnose the same marriage economy, Gay and Stein show; one lets Elizabeth beat the house, the other closes the door on Ellen.

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Why Ellen Olenska Is Punished for Her Integrity

What if Ellen Olenska is exiled not for her divorce, but for her integrity?

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