by James May • June 23, 2011
In Edith Wharton's novel published some 90 years ago, The Age of Innocence, the main character is Newland Archer, a man who resides deep in the societal bowels of 1870s New York's wealthy aristocracy; the equivalent of today's jet set.
Within that New York society which Wharton portrays, arcane and Byzantine rules apply to every mode of conduct and every little nicety is observed down to Archer's "duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole."
Archer spends much of the novel trying to establish an affair with Countess Ellen Olenska, a somewhat scandalous expatriate newly returned from Europe and a failed marriage to a Polish Count; Ellen is a cousin to his future wife May Welland and a woman Archer knew as a child. Paralleling this act is Archer's engagement and marriage to that beautiful May Welland who is a woman also deeply entrenched in the small and connected world of New York society.
Archer is enmeshed in the complex rules of his society that will sometimes allow a questionable love affair to be consummated while that society turns a blind eye. Unknown to Archer his new wife May is also scheming and using whatever wiles and rules that would benefit her to prevent her husband's affair with Madame Olenska.
On May 27, 2011 a Ninth District Democratic New York City congressman named Anthony Weiner, like Newland Archer also a member of New York's aristocracy and somewhat newly married to a beautiful and well connected woman, schemed after his own illicit affairs and sent a vulgar photo of himself to a young woman the length of a continent away; an equivalent, if a rather less elegant one, to the yellow roses Newland Archer sent to Ellen Olenska. In Weinberg's world, recherché rituals have been replaced by jeans and baseball caps and generic and impersonal miniature computers sometimes used to place phone calls. From Wharton's era, Weinberg's world is one of pure science fiction but with the humanity still prone to acting human.
Unlike Archer, in the case of Anthony Weiner it was not his own wife who was surreptitiously observing and countering his attempts at virtual love but apparently a political opponent who, like Wells's Martians, "drew their plans against" Weiner in a manner "cool and unsympathetic."
What happened in the case of Weiner is that he accidentally posted his vulgar photo to the internet in a manner where it was briefly but prominently displayed publicly instead of privately and in the end this proved his undoing. It was Weiner's undoing because he was virtually virtually bugged by those political analogues to May Welland and her familial accomplices and like Sherlock Holmes, Weiner's opponents, using computer forensics, undid Congressman Weiner by forcing him to lie about the original photo and other internet pecadillos that came to be revealed. Some three weeks after Weiner posted that misaimed photo he resigned from congress.
In the case of Anthony Weiner, his Madame Olenska turned out to be a few virtually anonymous women he dallied with by exchanging sometimes sexually blunt images and texted conversations and in the end, like Newland Archer, Weiner was unable to consummate his dalliances, clumsily though he tried. Although it seems Weiner's wife, the beautiful Huma Abedin, was aware of his sexual proclivities on the internet in the past, she was not quite as alert as was May Welland and so had no reason to resort to acts that might counter her husband's course as did Newland Archer's wife. In this instance Victorian passion would seem to have been replaced by "Victoria's Secret" but in the end weren't they really one in the same? How much can the word "indiscretion" encompass?
Since those who may have frowned on such behavior from Weiner came too late to the scene to circumvent his activities, the circle of influential persons who could affect Weiner's career mostly decided on a punishment based on the idea that Weiner's lies and misdeeds had advanced too far and most importantly, too openly for them to be ignored. Too let Weiner off the hook would impune the honor of the Democratic Party and so Weiner was left to hang out to dry but in the end, his fate and punishment are not all that different from the fate and punishment of Newland Archer. There were many around both Weiner and Archer who decided that it was a case of boys being boys but they were not strategically enough placed to make a difference other than to offer a perhaps future promise of letting bygones be bygones.
Like Wharton's tragic character of Newland Archer, Weiner seems to have craved the excitement an illicit affair would provide but perhaps in both instances, for reasons more profound than mere passion. Unlike Wharton's Archer, we have no insight into what drove Weiner to such risky behavior that, like Archer, threatened to throw over his entire life. Were both men driven to escape the imposed constraints of a future already known and set out for them, a world without surprise with a "chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next" as Wharton puts it?
Were Archer and Weiner both put out by a sense they had become victims of their own emotional prescience because they found themselves awake to lives they had no real stake in; had that happened because of the world they moved in rather than because of who they were? Was there a sense of being haplessly molded by duty and tradition and ambition for its own sake without a nod to an input from their own individual natures or a thought to where such a path might lead them other than to more of the same? This dull leash then perhaps became a threat to their own evolution as men.
In this sense we are reminded of the character of Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert's novel Dune, wherein Paul was subsumed in the oracular trap of a world and future already known and therefore inhabited by sheer monotony and constraint. Do Archer and Weiner wish to introduce a measure of chaos and unpredictability into their lives by destroying the path their feet are set on and once again introducing, as Paul Atreides son puts it in God Emperor of Dune, "the invention of free will?"
The consequence for Weiner is that he suffered the fate Newland Archer would have had he succeeded in leaving his marriage and following the forever distant and unattainable Madame Olenska to Europe but without ever having possessed his Madame Olenska which in the end for Weiner was nothing more than a cold piece of hardware. At the end of these stories both Weiner and Archer are unrequited in their fishing expeditions and both forced to remain with their wives, chastised off the scent.
Weiner's virtual affairs were not guessed at and secretly countered by his wife as was the case with Newland Archer but discovered and bruited about the world of blogs and then the mainstream press. Since May Welland was able to counter her husband's attempts at an affair and even leaving her marriage, we can only wonder what would have happened had Newland Archer not only succeeded in consummating his affair with Ellen Olenska but followed her to Europe and there started a new life with her. Would May Welland have piled disgrace onto her former and now fled husband and can we imagine multiple endings blossoming into alternate worlds as in The French Lieutenant's Woman? Weiner had to publicly apologize for his yellow roses whereas Archer had the dubious luxury of being privately outmaneuvered and circumvented by what he thought at the time was fate and with other lips silent and sealed as long as he behaved himself.
There are faint echoes of this alternate world of what might have been and the effects of changing societal values at the end of The Age of Innocence in the story of the 2 Fanny's who are otherwise characters who play no role in the novel. Fanny Beaufort's impending marriage to Newland's son Dallas at the end of the book and another Fanny in the story, Fanny Ring, combined into one Fanny in that Fanny Beaufort had been accepted into New York society despite scandal as Ellen Olenska had been only with distrust and the other Fanny in question, Fanny Ring, had stolen away with Julius Beaufort into the dream Archer himself had dreamed and failed at. That close knit New York society no longer bats an eye at Dallas marrying "Beaufort's bastards." For Archer, such changes are a generation too late and so his life had been "bent and bound."
What now will happen to Anthonly Weiner? Will his wife exact a private penalty for her husband's indiscretions or lovingly forgive him and stand by his side? Weiner's political career is in disarray, at least for now. But, like May Welland, the heavily Democratic Ninth District may after all forgive one of its sons for straying outside the rules since some adherents of the Democratic Party prominently display the fact that a Democrat is not held to the same standard as a Republican since Democrats make no bold assertions about "family values" and therefore have a far less distance to fall in the case of an indiscretion. This is rather analogous to the double standard Wharton portrayed in her novel where a man in an illicit affair had a far less distance to fall than did a woman because a man was simply not held to the same standards of conduct.
For now, Anthony Weiner will reside within a loveless relationship with his district, unable to move in any political direction but that which his former constituents and political party decide for him. In a sense Weiner finds himself banished to Europe but not in the happy embrace of a Madame Olenska to offset his flight but rather in a place where he has no trade off as compensation. As was the case in The Age of Innocence, Weiner was doubly pulled back from his dreams of romantic affairs and into reality by not only discovery but the news that his wife was pregnant; his dreams of dalliance was forever now beyond his grasp and at least for now, an "old fashioned" sit down on the same team bench in force as it was for Archer but not, like Archer near the "Invalides" but with a status of that of the "invalides". The cure and period of recuperation is unknown as may well be that of a lesson enforced rather than learned. Some of us may wonder at the scene of May Welland on her knees in the library telling Archer both that she was pregnant and how she had perhaps lied to Ellen Olenska 2 weeks prior about that same pregnancy in a case of purposeful and wishful thinking and "circumlocution".
In that sense, Weiner, like Archer, has been "asked" to give up the thing he most wanted but without ever being asked; the most polite, semi-private, yet firmest of coercions for Archer and a public humiliation for Weiner - but we wonder at the difference between what is wanted and what is a compulsion. Often we don't pursue that which we have or which is lovely but instead pursue that which is "different" and exotic and just perhaps, unobtainable - a thing we want simply because we can't have it, the love perhaps gone out of it and so immaterial in a sense or never having existed in the first place; or perhaps it is that a love from passion denied burns brightest and when consummated burns lows and gutters. What was it that Newland Archer was in love with really and can we be sure in portraying it as love?
We may come to find that Newland Archer is in the end lucky that he never attained to a relationship that might have devolved into, as Wharton puts it, "a mere battle of ugly appetites", because of the foundation on which it was built. Sometimes it is said that a definition of addiction is to continue to pursue a course of action regardless of the consequences but at times one may be able to say the same of love as infatuation or obsession and a face that launched a thousand ships and a vulgar picture that was worth far more than a thousand words.
Perhaps then the lesson for Newland Archer was that he only intellectually understood what his wife understood with her innate empathy and pragmatism when she declares "I couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong--an unfairness--to somebody else. And I want to believe that it would be the same with you. What sort of a life could we build on such foundations?" But that's what Archer sought to do, drawn to what Ellen symbolized to him which was something unpredictable and perhaps somewhat wild.
Since Archer didn't grasp at his freedom "he had once refused" when it is was offered him by May Welland before they were married he perhaps only defined freedom by first being imprisoned and so came to be without regard for the feelings of the woman who then became his jailer; freedom is not a concept that exists in a vacuum or is the same for everyone. Did Ellen Olenska sense that if Archer would abandon May Welland then at some point in time he might abandon her as well because she in turn would replace May Welland as the jailer that would hold back Newland from the thrill of the hunt? Ellen reflects May's own point of view when she says to Archer "you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before--and it's better than anything I've known."
It seems evident that Weiner only wanted some quick action but who knows what such a thing would have led to and who knows what Huma Abedin speculates about such knowledge and what she will do with it? In any event, both Archer and Weiner were reeled in by the eyes of society they had no idea were upon them or how dazzlingly they had been outmaneuvered until their fate was sealed and the curtain come down on their amorous dreams which revealed that love without values is only sex, "smaller and dingier and more promiscuous." That is why Ellen tells Newland "we're near each other only if we stay far from each other" and "I can't love you unless I give you up."
Towards the end of The Age of Innocence, Archer's society in the way of family and aquaintances conspire to shut down the affair they mistakenly believe is going on between Archer and Madame Olenska at a farewell dinner for Ellen that is actually meant to usher her out the door back to Europe by way of banishment and slap down Archer as a lesson and a warning. Anthony Weiner's press conference where he announced his formal resignation as congressman is perhaps analogous to this final dinner in Wharton's novel in that Weiner is forced to say out loud to those of his society that most mattered to him that which Newland Archer cogitates over with an inner voice, the only part of his dignity left to him given his New York society's penchant in such instances for "taking life 'without effusion of blood': the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them."
In this sense, with the scandal already out in the open, Weiner was forced to sit at the head of his own farewell dinner and salvage what he could which was little enough. In the case of the Archer dinner, it was tacitly assumed a vulgarity had expressed itself but with no internet and only the prying eyes and ears of close aquaintances, damage control could be confined to a small circle and proprieties observed after all and for Archer that implication "closed in on him like the doors of the family vault."
In Edith Wharton's novel, we read this passage in regard to wanting a thing all the more desperately simply because we cannot have it, or already have a thing and see a long and boring path, as Archer reflects on the past at the end of Wharton's novel: "The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder--the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?" Perhaps the shorter the leash the more some men lunge against it.
At the very beginning of Wharton's novel she writes of Archer "thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation." And at the very end, when Archer is sitting on that bench mulling over whether to go up to see the Ellen he hadn't seen in decades Archer says to himself, "It's more real to me here than if I went up." Archer would seem to live in a world of eternal anticipation and allusion where reality is never quite good enough and fantasy the sea he swims in but without ever getting wet. That theme and the vividness of Newland Archer's allusions is brought up again towards the middle of The Age of Innocence when Archer contrasts his real life with his fantasy parting of an unaware Ellen Olenska as Ada Dyas with a fireplace sunset as a backdrop at the Newport pier: "But now it was the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins." The anticipation of a thing that might never be became an acceptible reality and the propect of a reality already laid out a trap to be avoided, a thing difficult to do since the upper crust society of Newland Archer's New York treasures appearences over reality itself and thus Archer is a true son of his fathers though a most unhappy one since he perceives himself to be married to the antithesis of his dreaming self.
Apart from the reasons which prompted the actions of our two heroes one can think that perhaps the depth of Newland Archer's affections were in fact no more real than an affection attached to a vulgar photo blithely sent over the internet by Anthony Weiner. The result of exposure in both instances was the same: circumscription of circumvention and the punishment of being brought down to Earth, of a short leash, far away from Las Vegas, Texas, "India--or Japan" and "fresh horses that ride out of a green shade over a hilly and grassy rise."