To reflect upon a past age is to cast that age in innocence. “It was thus… that New York managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.”

Newland Archer is an impassioned man ensnared by the age that bred him, and however advanced in mind he engages his own age, he fails to transcend it.  The Countess Olenska enchants his innermost being, but the shared attraction which evolves between them is only consummated by a few desperate clutches and kisses in the outlands of a West 23rd Street salon and winter carriage-ride from Jersey City.

Were the “early seventies” so innocent?  Janey Archer, Newland’s unmarriageable sister, is a congenital shut-in, but the girl harbors an imagination easily incited to luridness by the merest table gossip.  The family withholds scandal from Janey and have grown to politely ignore her strange exclamations apropos of nothing.

And Edith Wharton is unmerciful in the girth of naiveté she affords May Welland, Newland’s betrothed.  Newland is somewhat in awe of May’s prodigious ignorance of human despair and corruption, likening her perception to a certain eyelessness. “’And all the while, I suppose,’ he thought, ‘real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them…’” Only when May is near death does Newland sympathetically recognize the nuance of her untouched vision, and the force of an ancient sexism of manners, wondering “how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault?” There is something Absolute regarding May’s existence within the old Fifth Avenue habitat, as if the high fabrication of tradition which she is the corporal ideal is only its most realistic foundation, surviving by fittest falsehood.

Society is not without its interlopers, usually imported from Europe, like the decadently principled Olenski, and Julius Beaufort, who “passed for an Englishman” and lives with his wife (a South Carolina belle) in a stupendously opulent mansion.  The Beauforts are the first to roll a red velvet carpet down their steps for invitees come from the opera house, and the guests are tended by footmen in silk-stockings.  Newland is ingratiated by the site of Beaufort’s “library hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves.”

Newland knows well that scandal is vital to this world, and with Madame Olenska he commits a subterfuge of appearances, heated but unwilling.   But “there was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable?“  Beaufort carries on an affair with Madame Olenska that disgusts Newland however much to him it makes sense - Beaufort is bohemian in ways that Newland is not: “his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious.” For the Countess these Eurosleaze qualities are akin to those of Olenski, her “abominable husband.”

Beaufort may be a Madoffesque lech, but at least he is a liver of life among a community of naysayers to the human species.  This community is most severely exampled by Mr. Henry van der Luyden, whose New York genealogy, now “faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight,” is one of several family histories described by Edith in vivid circuitous colors.  The van der Luydens are “direct descendants of the first Dutch governor of Manhattan,” and Mrs. Louisa van der Luyden’s “mother had been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, of an old Channel Island family, who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland, after the war, with his bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughter of the Earl of St. Austrey.” Even in this esteemed lineage there is treason.

When Mrs. Archer arrives to the van der Luyden house Upstate seeking the help of Henry on behalf of Countess Olenska, Louisa is hesitant to disturb him – he is in his room upstairs reading the newspaper.  “She said ‘reading the newspaper’ in the tone in which a Minister’s wife might have said ‘Presiding at a Cabinet meeting’ not from any arrogance of mind, but because the habit of a lifetime, and the attitude of her friends and relations, had led her to consider Mr. van der Luyden’s least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance.”  Of course, Henry van der Luyden is charmed, too, by the Countess, as chastely as Beaufort is beastly, and his sanction gains Madame Olenska her re-introduction to Society.

Newland is a cerebral libertine, leanly heroic in his insistence to hold fast to a society which caused him, no matter how loathsome he grows of it. He dips eagerly into the books of Herbert Spencer, and Edith uses figurative language that evokes terms of evolutionary theory and molecular science.  Newland broods, “And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?”  And when faced with a certain alienation from his wife, “he shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?”

Newland’s acts of self-denial are steadfast, hurtful, complex. As a literary figure, Newland assumes mammoth sociological weight – the embodiment of a bridge between eras and the experience of being a first, lone walker of that bridge, while the dark and windy vistas of the old world recede in relevance, in reality. As a story character, Newland bears such weight with the artistry of one who equivocates the world’s pain at major psychic cost. In the end, a refusal to enter a French appartement summates Newland’s test in which the final turn of the key locks the experience of memory forever.