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

Continued from:

Let me begin by reiterating Keirsey's point that male Idealists can be rather easily swept up in the storybook idea of extra-marital love, "compelled to pursue the impossible dream of a larger-than-life...goddess, who will be madonna, mistress, lover." But let me add that, of the four temperaments, Idealists are also the most torn by the double life of an affair. With their need for "oneness" in themselves and "wholeness" in their relationships, Idealists find that such intimate duplicity strikes deep into the soul, cleaving the very foundation of their self-esteem: their personal integrity. Adultery, indeed, is nothing less than the betrayal of that integrity, and if they act on their fantasies Idealists put themselves into agonizing ethical conflicts -- between their sacred marriage vows, and their devotion to their lover; and also between their innate need for authenticity, and the lies they must tell to conceal their secret life. Trapped in such conflicts, wanting to be faithful and sincere to both spouse and lover, Idealists must take one of two courses: either they must find reasons for dissolving one of the relationships; or, if they persist in both, they must find irrational, even hysterical ways of convincing themselves that they are doing nothing
wrong.

The first option is the moral course, and just as earlier in The Age of Innocence Archer tried to separate himself from Ellen, this time he begins turning away from May. Archer starts to dwell quite cruelly "on the things he disliked in her," becoming intensely critical of May's personality, as if to blame his hunger for Ellen on what he now considers to be his wife's unforgivable shortcomings. Archer begins to see May's "tranquil unawareness" no longer as masking depths of feeling, but as an expression of stately superficiality: she looks to him now like a marble statue of "Civic Virtue," gazing out at the world with a blank stare. Further, May's "dreamy silences" (into which, he admits, "he had read so many meanings") now annoy him as an absence of vital spirit, "a negation," he calls it, with "the curtain dropped before an emptiness," and he fantasizes that May's veins are filled not with Ellen's "ravaging" blood, but with "preserving fluid." Although he still feels the "glow of proprietorship" when other men admire May's swan-like beauty, he has grown privately dissatisfied with her sexual timidity -- and with his traditional sexual duty: he confesses irritably that "he was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the temperature of passion yet with all its exactions."

Archer's underlying (and longstanding) complaint against May is what he now regards as the "deadly monotony" of her life, and the terrible predictability of her mind, particularly in comparison with Ellen's Artisan impulsiveness and originality. Ellen once promised him warmly, "I live in the moment when I'm happy," but May, Archer concedes, is a young woman whose "point of view had always been the same." And now, having "gone the
brief round of her" in the first year of his marriage, Archer sees her as utterly "incapable of growth," and his future with her as an "endless emptiness." Keirsey points out that, at times, when Idealists believe they "know all there is to know about" their loved ones, they can feel beset by "restlessness and a sense of boredom." And in a key passage, as Archer watches May at her needlework, he reveals all his disillusionment with her steadfast,
conventional Guardian character:
As she sat thus, with the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion. She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting...[and] now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland.
Archer's last comment accuses May, in essence, of starting up a Pygmalion project of her own, but it also suggests how determined the young man is to find fault with his wife in this tormenting time. Although Protector Guardians can be masterly Pygmalions, they are not overtly manipulative in their personal relationships, and Archer himself admits that May's effect on him is "mysterious," part of "the very process" of her own development as a person. In all fairness, May does little more in The Age of Innocence than use her Protector's "niceness" to try and wear away at the edges of Archer's passionate Advocate nature -- to settle him down into an ordinary, sedate Guardian husband -- but even this subtle coercion intensifies his disaffection. May's Pygmalion chisel might be dull and her
pressure light, but Archer, now with a desperate sensitivity, feels it "bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep."

While Archer thus begins to separate himself from May, hoping to work himself up to leaving her, he also turns to the Idealist's second option, which is to re-frame the reality of his deceitful behavior. In essence, Archer must find a way to give his immoral love for Ellen a moral justification, and so he romanticizes his affair into a "grand passion," trying to make himself believe the affair is not merely an "affair," but the soulful yearning for a higher and truer love. Indeed, on the train home from Boston, Archer sits in a "state of abstraction," his head swirling in a "golden haze" with thoughts of Ellen -- "his imagination," as Wharton pictures it, spinning "on the edge of a vortex." And over the next few months he virtually enshrines Ellen in his imagination, crowning her in his fantasies, and offering her an introspective homage that only an Idealist could conceive. Wharton tells us he builds
within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational [i.e. mental] activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions.
Notice that, as an Idealist, Archer considers his "real life" to be the inner life of the mind and the heart -- of books and ideas, of feelings and visions -- and not the outer life of society and propriety that May inhabits. In that outer life, as he well knows, his golden dream of love with Ellen is little more than a sordid and barely tolerated "hole-and-corner" affair; and on that social level, he feels a stinging guilt about his hidden meetings with Ellen, and the "precautions and prevarications" he must use with May. He confesses he feels "ashamed" when he thinks of "May, and habit, and honor, and all the old decencies." He blushes when someone mentions the word "mistress," he winces at casual gossip about "a wife deceived," and he describes his married life with a pounding self-recrimination as
a smiling, bantering, humoring, watchful, and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and every silence.
It is precisely to escape from such a relentless morality -- both social and personal -- that Archer must rise into his Idealist's imagination, envisioning that he and Ellen belong to a higher realm of ideal love where "they were answerable to no tribunal but...their own judgment," and where the iron-clad distinctions between "mistress" and "wife" can be forgotten. "I want -- " he sighs to Ellen, groping for words to express his yearning,

I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -- categories like that -- won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole life to each other; and
nothing else on earth will matter.

Keirsey comments that an Idealist's "real-life mate is not always able to measure up" to the romantic image of his lover; and certainly May is too simple a person -- too intellectually and emotionally prosaic -- ever to compete with Archer's dream of Ellen Olenska. But with a moral twist characteristic of her very best work, Wharton describes for us how Archer's passionate illusion ends up estranging him from the very object of his illusion -- from Madame Olenska herself.

As an Artisan, Ellen Olenska is a clear-eyed realist...