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

Continued from:

And so, as the months pass, and as Archer lives his "systematized and affluent" life with May, his imagination takes its own course, back into the romantic world of literature and art, and inevitably into thoughts of Ellen Olenska. At first, he thinks of Ellen with a kind of suppressed detachment, believing that "by force of willing" he can keep his distance and remember her abstractly, dispassionately, as "someone long since dead." But Advocates have helplessly romantic imaginations, and relatively little strength of willpower (a Rational forte); and after only one year of marriage, Archer's "carefully built-up" emotional fortress begins tumbling "about him like a house of cards."

Archer happens to catch sight of Ellen at her aunt's summer-house in Newport, and this glimpse of her standing below him on the dock, looking tragically at the bay, suddenly floods him with desire. Afraid of the force of his emotion, he keeps himself from going down to her, but his longing to renew their relationship becomes from that moment what Wharton calls "an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink." Archer fights this hunger for weeks, and tries to visit Ellen only in his imagination, almost feverishly following "the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the real one in the summer-house." But his feelings are far too strong for him, and "sick with unsatisfied love" he soon arranges a business trip to Boston to meet "accidentally" with Ellen, thus taking the first trembling step along a new path, one that will lead him into an extra-marital affair.

The events in Archer and Ellen's liaison over the next several months -- the secret meetings and the stolen moments, the passionate tears and the sorrowful kisses -- is unforgettable reading, all the more affecting because the love has such little room to grow, and is in fact never consummated. This crippling, typically nineteenth century dilemma -- of two people loving one another and yet not able to be together -- works itself out to a haunting
conclusion in The Age of Innocence, which I will describe in a few pages. But first I must discuss Edith Wharton's remarkable analysis of how Archer reconciles his forbidden love for Ellen with his Idealist's conscience.

Needless to say, none of the four temperaments is safe from the temptation of an illicit affair, but the evidence of literature suggests that the four deal with their unfaithfulness in vastly different ways. Artisans typically think of their "flings" as part of the generous experience of a full life; they "play" or "fool" around impulsively, with their eyes wide open, and they forgive themselves rather easily, with their usual generosity. Guardians are less ambitious and less joyous in their transgressions; they feel uncomfortably sinful until the episode is over, and then, after a short period of mortification, they accept their "straying" as a common worldly failing. Rationals, in contrast, don't try to excuse their infidelities much at all; they either control themselves in the first place, or they deal with an affair pragmatically, as addressing an emotional or sexual need -- though they can also reproach themselves severely for the weakness of their will. However, in The Age of Innocence Wharton shows us that, with Idealists, the issue is more complicated.

Continued: Let me begin ...