excerpted from, The Pygmalion Project: Volume 3, The Idealist by Dr. Stephen Montgomery
Copyright © 1993 Stephen Montgomery

Continued from:

But this is only one side of the story. Archer's new-found criticism of May's character has another source as well, and one that he has barely admitted to himself: he is falling in love with another woman. Ellen Olenska is May's cousin, a darkly rumored countess who has fled a sexually abusive marriage on the continent (to the brutal Polish Count Olenski), returning home to nurse her wounds and begin a new life. Nearly thirty, she and Archer played together as children, when she wasn't roaming over Europe with her charming, footloose parents, or with her eccentric aunt Medora, all the while picking up an "expensive but incoherent education." Ellen had been a "fearless" child, Wharton tells us, fond of "gaudy clothes," and precocious in the "outlandish arts" of drawing, and of dancing and singing -- a brilliantly pretty little girl of "high color and high spirits." From all indications Madame Olenska is a vibrant Performer Artisan (an "ESFP"), and indeed, when Archer sees her again after so many years, sitting "gracefully" next to May at the opera, dressed "rather theatrically" in a low-cut, blue velvet gown, he is almost immediately enthralled by "something inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in her." New York society, worshipping the austere Guardian gods of Taste and Form, is severely taken aback by her daring neckline, and by her regal "Josephine" headdress; but, as usual, Archer is of a different mind, seeing in her audacity a
mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which...struck him as highly trained and full of a conscious power.
In nearly every way Ellen Olenska is the opposite of May Welland. If May is pale and fair- haired, Ellen is richly brunette. If May is modest and traditional in her choice of clothes, Ellen is daringly sexual: her docollete opera dress looks to one appalled observer "like a nightgown," and another evening dress -- a "bold, sheath-like" red velvet robe, with black fur trim and bare arms -- raises eyebrows with its sensuality. If May is discretely sheltered
by her family, Ellen is worldly and independent, choosing to live by herself in the dilapidated Bohemian quarter, in a peeling stucco house near Archer's literary friends. If May is socially and intellectually conventional, Ellen is decidedly original, deflating stuffy New York conventions "at a stroke," and scattering her quaint little parlor with fresh flowers, obscure Italian paintings, and avant-garde French novels. And if May is indeed content with "dull association," Ellen seems to court scandal, amusing herself of a Sunday evening at risque "common" houses, where (it is rumored) there is "smoking and champagne," and where a woman "got up on a table and sang" as in Paris.

As Archer is thrown together with Ellen on a number of social occasions, and later on, as he visits her on family legal business, he finds himself more and more "deeply drawn into the atmosphere" of her sensuous, impulsive Artisan way of life. He responds to her "perverse and provocative" clothing with an undeniably sexual intensity: he stares at her arms, "bare to the elbow," and when she brushes him with her plumed fan, "it was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress." He finds her little house full of "shadowy charm" and a "sense of adventure" -- the very air seems somehow "intimate, 'foreign,' subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments." Her free-spoken irreverence about "pompous" New York society delights him, and her radical taste in art and literature "whetted [his] interest." He even finds himself defending Ellen's "French Sundays" as innocent gatherings for "good music" on nights when, as he sees it, "the whole of New York is dying of inanition." More than anything, however, Archer is fascinated by Ellen's worldly, knowing Artisan eyes. Looking into her eyes, Archer can imagine that Ellen "had lived and suffered, and also -- perhaps -- tasted mysterious joys." And more darkly, Wharton tells us "it frightened him to think what must have gone into the making of her eyes."

Intrigued by Ellen's Artisan mystery and drama, and thrown dangerously off-balance by "the curious way in which she reversed his values," Archer struggles with his conscience to decide on a course of action. Keirsey observes that male Idealists often have a romantic or "storybook" idea of love, and that they must guard against "pursuing the dream" of perfect love from "relationship to relationship." And Archer is clearly playing out this scenario in his imagination, even to the point of projecting Ellen's face into a romantic novel he is reading: "All through the night," Wharton tells us, "he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of...Ellen Olenska." At the same time, Idealists are exceptionally sincere and faithful in their closest relationships, "the most loyal of the types," Keirsey calls them, "when committed to a cause." And so, feeling himself committed to May, not only as her fiance in society but also as her "soul's custodian," Archer determines to put Ellen Olenska out of his mind and to dedicate himself to saving his engagement. Unfortunately, but quite predictably, his plans take the form of a Pygmalion project.

Archer's first concern was ...