Episode 290: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, Ch. 9-21

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast – Episode 290

"The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton, Chapters 9–21

Hosts: Angelina Stanford & Thomas Banks
Date: August 19, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this richly detailed discussion, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks dive deep into chapters 9–21 of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, exploring society’s unspoken codes, the pressures of convention, the symbolism of flowers and sporting culture, and the subtle artistry with which Wharton constructs her characters and their world. While the official focus is on the middle third of the novel, topics branch out into Wharton’s literary lineage, the significance of myth, and the ways in which technology and changing customs disrupt social patterns. Listeners are invited to read along, think critically, and delight in the many layers of Wharton's narrative and prose.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Old vs. New: Subtle Signifiers of Change

• The tension between “old” and “new” is central. Ellen Olenska, as a character raised in bohemian Europe, embodies the possibility—and limits—of personal freedom within rigid social structures.
• Thomas Banks (19:14): "The particular signs of Ellen's relative independence are communicated very subtly. ...I remembered her being a much more pronouncedly defiant sort of woman. And she's not."
• Ellen's difference is less about dramatic rebellion and more about small departures from norm, such as her dress color or directness in conversation, which are radical enough to shock 1870s New York society.

2. Types, Parable, and Allegory

• Characters serve as types: Newland Archer (the “New Land”) is the modern American divided between inherited tradition (May) and alluring newness (Ellen).
• Wharton’s technique is likened to parable—like Hawthorne’s—wherein facades, conventions, and domestic performances are always under question.
• Angelina (21:14): “We have to remember: Newland is new land. This is the new America… torn between convention... and this more bohemian freedom.”

3. Conventions as Imprisonment

• Archer repeatedly feels “trapped” by social expectations, especially as channeled through courtship and prospective marriage to May.
• Angelina (37:21): “This is the first of many, many references in the books to him feeling trapped and imprisoned and constrained.”

4. Mythical Allusions: Diana, The Hunt, and Names

• May is repeatedly described as a Diana figure (virginal, athletic, bow-wielding), while Newland’s own surname (Archer) points to hunting motifs and questions about who is the hunter/hunted.
• Physical activities like archery and tennis signify not only changing gender roles but also the ongoing negotiation between tradition and innovation.

5. The Language of Flowers

• Flowers serve as coded messages—leaving room for ambiguity, intimacy, and even potential scandal.
  • Lily of the valley (Archer gives to May): Purity, hope for future happiness.
  • Yellow roses (Archer to Ellen): Friendship but also jealousy, infidelity—ambiguous and risky.
  • Crimson roses with purple pansies (Beaufort to Ellen): Explicit message of passionate, even illicit, love.
• Angelina (52:39): "The language of flowers... became very popular [as] a way to send coded messages to people via the flowers. And they took a lot of delight in that. ...This book is using that big time."

6. Surface vs. Reality: Performance, Pretense, Innocence

• Nuanced discussion about the surface-level morality of society; “innocence” is identified with ignorance and refusal to confront unpleasantness.
• Main characters are caught between real emotion and ritualized “performances” of emotion and virtue.
• Angelina (90:07):

  "We see that innocence is equated with ignorance... rather than innocence and guilt or innocence and disillusionment."

• Desire for “real” experience is repeatedly contrasted with “the taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth,” and the worry of being “buried alive under his future.”

7. Divorce, Scandal, and the Role of Family

• The personal is always the social: Ellen’s quest for divorce is met with collective family pressure to avoid any public disgrace, even at the cost of her well-being.
• US divorce laws are more liberal than European, but social acceptance is minimal—separation is acceptable, remarriage is scandal.
• Thomas (64:21): “There are on the books more liberal laws where she could divorce and she could remarry... but it was going to be socially unacceptable unless the first spouse died.”

8. Technology, Modernity, and the End of an Era

• Discussions of early telephone and car culture underscore that Wharton is chronicling a vanishing world.
• New technologies will soon upend all these codes—Wharton (writing in 1920) is documenting a world already lost.

9. Character Portraits

• Newland Archer: Viewed by Thomas as self-pitying, with little self-awareness and an inability to act on his intellectual longings. He is both the hunter and the hunted, increasingly alienated by his own choices.
• May Welland: Not a mere ingenue, May is athletic, socially astute, and intermittently perceptive—though her “innocence” is ultimately an unwillingness to acknowledge unpleasant realities.
• Countess Ellen Olenska: Both worldly and innocent, her foreignness allows her to see the “labyrinth” of New York society clearly, but she cannot—or will not—play by all its rules.

10. Notable Minor Characters

• Mrs. Mingott: A “safe bohemian,” her eccentricity is tolerated because it does not undermine broader social stability.
• The Marchioness Manson: A comic figure, she is attached to a range of spiritualist and bohemian causes; her push for Ellen to return to the Count is seen as an “admirer from hell” moment—possibly echoing the play’s earlier Faustian themes.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Artistic Form:

  "Perhaps for the same reason that a stream or a river can only flow between banks."
  — Thomas Banks, 17:36

• On Innocence:

  "I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything. I don't want this unpleasantness... innocence is equated with ignorance."
  — Angelina, 89:50–90:07

• On Wharton's Subtlety:

  "She's not experimental. She's exploring new themes, but she's writing it in this very old-fashioned way."
  — Angelina, 16:38

• On Social Hypocrisy:

  "Every society has its own preferred forms of hypocrisy, perhaps."
  — Thomas, 49:16

• On Performance & Self-Awareness:

  “The things that had filled his day seem now like a nursery parody of life... all the while, I suppose, he thought real people were living somewhere and real things happening to them.”
  — Reading Wharton, 102:50

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:18–06:00 — Housekeeping, Patreon shoutouts, discussion of upcoming webinars and courses
• 12:15–14:57 — Correction about The Age of Innocence painting and artist (Joshua Reynolds vs. Gainsborough)
• 14:18–18:00 — Commonplace quotes from Mark Helprin & C.S. Lewis, themes of tradition/freedom in literature
• 19:14–23:09 — Character sketch: Ellen Olenska's subtle rebellion, social conventions, and religious context
• 30:18–32:02 — May as Diana, meanings in sports and names, archery as symbol
• 34:33–35:56 — Boyish May explained: athletic build as social signal
• 36:09–39:42 — Ellen's taste, home decor, and differences in respectability vs. fashion/fashionable address
• 40:16–41:36 — Gendered conventions: men visiting single women, sending flowers (transition to flower codes)
• 52:39–60:14 — The language of flowers: deep-dive into bouquets, codes, and their narrative function
• 62:22–70:43 — Divorce and scandal, legal vs. social codes, family pressure and stories from the era
• 78:54–80:22 — Awareness and self-deception: Newland’s inability to understand himself
• 84:03–85:07 — Technology and courtship: telephone, cars, and collapsing old social codes
• 105:46–106:25 — Marriage, convention, and “vacant corners” after the wedding
• 110:20–111:43 — Final reflection: All former realities now seem unreal; the scene on the shore is all that feels “as close to him as the blood in his veins”

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Episode Tone & Style

• Engaged, playful, and simultaneously rigorous—Angelina and Thomas blend literary scholarship with conversational asides, humor, and rich allusions. Their approach is highly intertextual, repeatedly drawing parallels to Austen, James, Wilde, and broader intellectual history.

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For Further Study

• Next week: concluding chapters of The Age of Innocence.
• In two weeks: the Scorsese film adaptation.
• Recommended: Pay attention to the recurring imagery of performance and imprisonment; symbolism in names and sports; coded language of both flowers and polite conversation.

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Final Thought

Stories, they argue, are laboratories for reality—“Stories will save the world.” Wharton’s world, though exquisitely furnished, is haunted by the specter of change and dissolving meaning; her achievement is to show how the smallest gestures and silences carry the heaviest weight.

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Poetry Segment

[113:38] Criterion by Hilaire Belloc
(See full poem at episode's end.)

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[Summary prepared to be useful for listeners who missed the episode or wish to review its key ideas, with attributions, timestamps, and ample quotations in the hosts’ own style.]

Transcript

[A]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I'm here with the man who is most definitely not my. My newlyn Archer.

[B]

No. No. Thank God.

[A]

Thomas Banks. Hello.

[B]

Hello, Hello.

[A]

We are Thomas Banks and Angelina Stanford of the House of Humane Letters, and we are discussing episode two today in our series on Edith Wharton's the Age of Innocence. We're going to be looking at chapters 8 through 21.

[B]

Not to overanalyze trivialities, but it's interesting how you just put my name first when you introduced us. AI does that too. If you type in, you know, what is the House of Humane Letters? But it's just.

[A]

Don't let it get to you.

[B]

I know this is like the most important I have ever felt. I rely on robots to make me feel important. That's how maybe I'm even more sad than Newland Archer.

[A]

Age before beauty.

[B]

Oh, gosh.

[A]

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, old versus new. One of the things that we are tracking while reading the Age of Innocence. You know, I got to give a huge shout out right now to our Patreon. You guys are killing it. Y' all are doing such a good job reading this book. We are having a fantastic conversation over on our Patreon forum. And I'm just loving the things you guys are noticing. You're noticing all the right kinds of things. They're tracking old versus new. They're picking up on lots of mythological references, like all the times May is described as a Diana, for example. We'll talk about that today. And then of course, this week we met with the fellows level of our Patreon for our monthly event. All fellows, Eve and we, we had a great conversation about the Age of Innocence. We looked at some paintings of the period and talked about how they were examples of the fragility of a woman's reputation. We talked about the operas we followed all kinds of fun rabbit trails with the Age of the Innocents. I read some. Oh, I read that letter by Mark Twain roasting Cornelius Vanderbil. We read some of the more hilarious passages of the Age of Innocence out loud together. So, yeah, huge shout out to our Patreon. You guys are just killing it with this book. And if you're thinking, wait, how do I get on this action on this one, you can go, of course, to patreon.com theliterarylife because this is an ad free podcast and we are 100% member supported. And so if you'd like these podcasts to continue to be available for free and you would like to support that work, you can do that there. And of course, we have some perks. Every level gets access to the Discord Forum that we have, the private forum, which, gosh, that forum is everything. The, the conversations, the deep dives on the things we're reading, on the things people are reading together. Outside of the podcast, we have multiple reading groups that meet with via video through the Discord Forum. We've read all kinds of things together, Boethius and Augustine and on and on and on. So that's a fantastic community. So shout out to them and if you're interested, go and check that out. We would greatly appreciate. But while we are member supported, we also run a business. This is a free podcast, but we offer classes for people who would like to go deeper. Last week I mentioned that we've got that Coleridge webinar coming up at the end of this month, August 27th, with Heather Goodman. I am so looking forward to that. She is going to just. I know she's going to kill it. I'm really excited about that. Coleridge is such an important figure and you hear us talking on this podcast a lot about what C.S. lewis calls the Great Divide and, and help us to understand both what we have lost crossing that great divide, and also how to get it back. And so I think her Coleridge webinar is going to be a really, really important.

[B]

If I can step in for a minute. Heather, by the way, just a personal recommendation, is a fantastically gifted lecturer. And I have been a teacher for a long time. I've watched other teachers in action. I have had more than my share of teachers in my life and I've been very lucky in my teachers. But it's not very often that you encounter a teacher who can carry a great weight of learning and wear it lightly. But I believe Heather Goodman can do exactly this. I was watching her biblical history lecture from this last week. And yeah, anyway, I found myself just delighted and instructed as well.

[A]

Oh, I completely agree with you. We, we, it's almost an embarrassment of riches the quality of teachers that we have working with us. And Heather is a genuine scholar in her own right and comes to us with many degrees and great knowledge of languages and all sorts of things. And like you said, she's very good at presenting that material. So I think this is going to be an important webinar. You heard me give the pitch for it last week. So definitely check that out at our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com if you're interested in going deeper in some of the topics that you is talking about. But we also launched something else this week which I must mention to you, speaking of gifted teachers, we have a new mini class coming up with Ms. Ella Hornstra who is a fabulously gifted teacher in her own right. And she did a just, I realize it sounds like just like you know, carnival barker here. It'll change. This was another mind blowing, change your life. But seriously, I don't let people give webinars unless I think they're going to be significant and paradigm shifting and mind blowing and life changing. But the webinar she gave in the late winter, early spring earlier this year on Nature really, really blew a lot of people's minds. I mean talk about a significant moment to try to understand what the imaginative universe of people before the great divide was like. She just took us that beautifully by teaching us how to the book of nature and people were just blown away. I think most of us walked away just feeling like we finally understand what it is, what we mean when we say our modern lives are reduced and surface level and shallow and just all of a sudden seeing that we are surrounded by these layers and layers of rich meaning that we're cut off from what used to be, you know, the language of everyone, the common inheritance of everyone and we've cut up from them and, and we're hurting because of that. So she did great job with that, that there was a huge demand for more. And so now we are going to bring to you a five session mini class in the month of September. It's going to be every Monday in September live or later, just like everything we do. But let me tell you a little bit about this class because really this, this is going to just, this is, I think this is going to be one that goes down in the books that everybody keeps coming back to. This class is called Grammar of the Natural World. Deciphering the discarded image. And the discarded image was the name that C.S. lewis gave to what we lost when we crossed the great divide, the image of reality, and we've tossed it away. And here's her description here. Once upon a time, the world seemed to move within the patterns of a cosmic game. The heavens danced to a music which resonated throughout the firmament. All the created world opened like a book written by a divine hand. And nature was a language. This is a vision that is now very unfamiliar to us. Are we separated from this world? In his preface to the discarded image, C.S. lewis describes the great divide that lies between us and the landmarks of understanding that marked ages past. He analogizes the need that we have for a map to orient us among the traditions of thought assumed to be so familiar to past audiences that they needed no explanation. Images deeply familiar to older minds are now foreign to us. We need a map of the natural world. In this class, we will journey towards regaining some familiarity with the forms of nature which infused ages of image and symbol. We will lay the framework for how the universe was viewed as a unified whole in the old model and what lay behind this view. Slowly we will begin to fill in the details of that model, from planets and their influence to the waters and their working, to the various symbolic natures that flora took on. We will look at the architecture of the world as it used to be envisioned and at the repetitions of those building blocks down into the minutest of details, such as the microcosmic vision of the egg. This is going to be fantastic. So again, this is Mondays in September, 7 to 8:30pm Eastern Time. Of course you'll have access to the recordings if you sign up. And you can find out more about [e-mail] I mean, how's that for an embarrassment of riches, Mr. Banks?

[B]

Yes, it is indeed.

[A]

Right, so now that we've taken care of that, let you guys know what we've got going on. You should definitely sign up to the newsletter. We've got all kinds of things. One more thing, this is a little tease for an official announcement. If you're on the newsletter, you're going to get the announcement. If you check out our socials, if you're on the Patreon, you're going to get this announcement. We had commissioned some very, very limited edition hand thrown ceramic mugs for the Lit Life podcast. These are beautiful. I am so happy with how they came out. I. I have a bit of a fetish for ceramic mugs as my Husband knows. And I'm very particular about them. And for a long time I, I was resistant to making a Lit Life podcast mug because I just don't like the way most of them look. They look kind of mass produced and they didn't look unique and beautiful.

[B]

But then you found this isolated community of Carmelite nuns in the Andes that specializes in this kind of work. Exactly.

[A]

Pretty. Pretty much. You know me well, shout out to Emily Rabel, who worked on this project with me and for me. And she did, she actually did find somebody and she, she sent me a lot of pictures and I was like, nope, nope, nope, nope. And then she sent me one. I was like, whoa, what, what, what do we have here? So we've been working with a company and we are going to open up pre orders for that this week and it's very limited run. When it's gone, it's gone. They're absolutely beautiful. But it's going to be a small batch so you're going to want to check that out. So if you Again, go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and you will see the button on the home page about how to pre order a mug if you're interested in that. All right, are we ready to jump into these chapters? I feel like we got to give a correction from last week, though.

[B]

Well, should we do common places and whatnot?

[A]

Oh, we totally should. We totally should.

[B]

Probably should. Stick with tradition.

[A]

We should. But I have to go through my list in order here. Should we. Let's do the correction. So last week when we talked about the Age of Innocence painting, you said.

[B]

I. Yeah, so I said it was a painting by Thomas Gainsborough. Who is not the 18th century artist who actually painted the Age of Innocence, Joshua Reynolds. And I should have known that because Joshua Reynolds, he was a very known, a very well known painter in his day. And I should also say he was a member of Samuel Johnson's club. So we hung out with Johnson and Boswell and Burke and Goldsmith and all those cats.

[A]

We looked at that painting the other night at All Fellows Eve with our Patreon. So you guys would definitely want to Google that. Don't feel too bad that you get Reynolds and Gainsborough confused. I get Reynolds and John Singer Sergeant confused. And they're not even in the century.

[B]

That kind of thing.

[A]

Yes, they don't even in the same century. But for whatever reason, my brain just.

[B]

I feel better now. I feel better.

[A]

Artwork kind of looks similar. I mean, I know he's American, but he's kind of doing the that all world portrait thing.

[B]

Maybe that painting, that particular painting could be. Yeah, the color scheme and the composition. Maybe that could be a Singer Sargent. Again, I'm not exposed. That's why neither you nor I teach visual art classes. Whenever I have to refer to any sort of artwork in my early modern history or medieval history class, it's always like the hardest lecture of the year because I just don't. That's not a language I speak with any sort of ease.

[A]

Fortunately, we do have somebody working with us whose language that is, Dr. Jason Baxter, who if you guys don't know, is teaching a semester long class that starts in a couple weeks on art. It's called Plato's Ghost. He's going to be kind of giving us a tour of art history. And you can find out about that class at where else? Houseofhumaneletters.com click on the classes tab and you can read the description there. It's not too late to sign up for that if you're interested. That's gonna be a fantastic class. I'm definitely gonna be sneaking in there. All right. Commonplace quotes, my dear. All right, so you go first.

[B]

Yes. Mine is from a contemporary or maybe near contemporary novel. I GUESS it's about 30 years old at this point. This is a novel by Mark Helprin called A Soldier of the Great War. And the narrator remarks, it was easy to be clever, but hard to look into the face of God, who is found not so much by cleverness as by stillness.

[A]

Oh, that's really good.

[B]

I thought you would say that.

[A]

That is my kind of quote.

[B]

I think you would like that book. Actually. It's a war novel, but it's not the kind of war novel that appeals only to men.

[A]

Yes. I think I actually have a few of his books on Kindle. I just haven't gotten around to it. But yeah, you've mentioned a few times.

[B]

I think you would like that one.

[A]

All right, My commonplace quote is another one from the C.S. lewis essay that I mentioned last week, a lesser known essay, Christianity and Literature. You guys responded really well to that one. And I thought, oh well, let me give you a few more. So in this quote, he's pushing back against modern, that is early 20th century literary criticism. And that actually this fits the theme of this book so much that we think art has to be new, revolutionary. Right. So we talked last time about how this is a 1920s book and yet it is written in the old style. It is written in the old fashioned. It's not experimental. She's exploring new Themes, but she's writing it in this very old fashioned way, which of course we praise because we followed the, the line of tradition through that. But Lewis is kind of poking here at the sorts of things that modern literary critics praise. And I think you're gonna. I think you're gonna recognize that this is still very much the language of today. What are the key words of modern criticism? Creative with its opposite. Derivative spontaneity with its opposite. Convention, freedom contrasted with rules. Great authors are innovators, pioneers, explorers. Bad authors bunch in schools and follow models. Or again, great authors are always breaking fetters and bursting bonds. They have personality, they are themselves. I do not know whether we often think out the implication of such language into a consistent philosophy, but we certainly have a general picture of bad work flowing from conformity and discipleship and of good work bursting out from certain centers of explosive force, apparently self originating force, which we call men of genius. You're nodding your head.

[B]

No, no, that's, that's all very good. I, Yeah, I. I'm gonna have to open that book again. I think I said the same thing last week when you, you read a commonplace from the same essay. Yes.

[A]

No, it's a great, It's a great essay. And I mean, you're somebody who writes old forms. You write a song, you write sonnets. You've told me before you're not capable of writing in free verses.

[B]

I've tried and I. I fail. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Well, historically, poets have thought writing in a form makes you more creative. Better than just having, you know, a blank canvas, so to speak.

[B]

Perhaps for the same reason that a stream or a river can only flow between banks.

[A]

Well said. That was quite poetic, dear.

[B]

Oh, was it? Oh, okay.

[A]

Quite poetic. Yeah, that's. That's a little.

[B]

I have my moments.

[A]

That's a tease for a conversation that we can have later about what. What does it mean to be artistic? And if not creative and original, then, then what is it? All right, let's take a look at these chapters. So we finished early last time with chapter seven. So let's pick up with chapter eight, because a lot happens in these chapters. One of the things that has surprised me is that the Patreon. I thought this might be a little bit of a hard sell book. I thought I was gonna have to say be patient. I know not much is happening, but there's a lot going on under the surface of the. But they are seeing it all. They're, they're talking about like, this is a page turner. Can't put it down. They're totally invested. So that was. That was a good surprise for me. All right, let's take a look at chapter eight. So this is the dinner with the Van der Leyden. So you recall from last time that the van der Leydens are helping to overcome Ellen's social snub. They're gonna. They're gonna have a dinner for her and the Duke, and this is going to introduce her into society. So it starts off the chapter talking about her bohemian upbringing, something that really gets fleshed out fully in these chapters. Is she, like, how is she going to be anybody else? She was raised by this very unconventional bohemian aunt. She's. All of this is a girl who wore a black dress in her coming out party instead of white. And everybody is kind of feeling like, well, what, you know, what chance did she have? She was always different.

[B]

Can I say, and we were talking about this before the podcast, that the particular signs of Ellen's relative independence, or whatever we choose to call it, are communicated very subtly. And I didn't. I don't think I'm picking up on all of them necessarily, but I had remembered her being a much more pronouncedly defiant sort of woman.

[A]

And she's not.

[B]

And she's not really. I mean, she. Like you said, she might wear the deliberately chosen wrong color dress at a coming out party, but she's not. Well, it's not even like her hair is down or something. That would have really shocked the audience of the time.

[A]

I think it shows just for wearing.

[B]

Gloria Steinem on a T shirt or something. I don't know. I don't know what I.

[A]

No, you're right. It's very subtle, and it fits this idea that these things are very fragile.

[B]

She's more direct in her conversation than most of the other characters in this book. I mean, you get the immersion. She's kind of the only one of this set who really means what she says most of the time. But other than that, her social mannerisms are not dramatically different.

[A]

Well, she's not affected and she's seems to be so unaware, like, all these small details about how bohemian and unconventionally she is. And then she'll have a conversation with Archer where she's like, well, we understand these customs and, you know, I just want to be like everybody else. And you think, oh, oh, honey, you're. You're blowing it. You're not. But she. But she's been gone so long that she doesn't have eyes to see all of these. Like, we find out in these chapters, she had no idea she had been socially snubbed.

[B]

And I. I think that I pick up on maybe even as much as I do. And again, this is more your novel than it is mine because. Because she's so obviously contrasted with Mae. They really do work as, you know, again, kind of Creative Writing 101 observation. They kind of work as foils to one another.

[A]

Indeed. Indeed. And this might be a good time to remind everybody and ourselves that the characters are types and that Edith Wharton is very much writing a parable of America. And so while, yes, we do have a love triangle here, it's not just that. I mean, if that's all it was, I mean, why bother like just pick up a Harlequin romance novel. It's got to be more than that. And so we have to remember Newland is new land. Right. This is. This is the new america in the 20th, coming up on the 20th century. And it. And it's torn between convention and. And rigid formal rules that he feels like are kind of hypocritical and a double standard. And this more bohemian freedom. But it, but it's not. It's not bohemian freedom. Like, you know, she's like a hippie and she's free love. I mean, she still has a very high moral.

[B]

She's not a scoff law or something.

[A]

No, not. It's not like. It's not like lawlessness. It's not law versus lawlessness. It's not that. But it's. Are we going to continue to be constrained by conventions that are not rooted in anything more than. This is just the way we've always done it. And that's why it's contrasted to Europe, which has its own convention.

[B]

It's interesting also, I had forgotten this how little religious principles or maxims or laws or, you know, strictures of any kind come into this. I mean, of course the characters are married in a church. That's kind of our.

[A]

But it is. I think it's a superficial gloss of Christianity.

[B]

Yeah. And it's not even. I don't think she's even trying to say that these people are religious hypocrites. They don't feel their faith, but it's. But again, I think that sort of serves to emphasize the arbitrariness of many of these social rules in which people, you know, try to. Around which they try to organize their lives because they. There's almost like an admission that these originate with us rather than a higher.

[A]

That's exactly right.

[B]

That's why, like, it really struck me. I mean, it sort of did a double take when Newland says, well, I am a Protestant, so in our country we do these things differently, talking about their relative respective attitudes towards divorce. But that's maybe the one time in the book that anyone, at least so far, has mentioned anything regarding a religious tie or allegiance of any sort.

[A]

Well, the other thing that comes up is when he suggests that they get married during Lent.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And I think what we want to see there is she doesn't come back and say, well, we can't get married during Lent because Lent has this religious spiritual significance and we need to honor that. She comes back and says, well, it's just not done.

[B]

Does that stand? I wanted to ask you, because this is exactly the kind of thing that you would know. Is that the reason why even in today's very commercialized wedding industrial complex industry, whatever we choose to call it, there are so many June weddings? Because that's. That's about a couple months, I guess, after Lent.

[A]

You're correct.

[B]

So it's not just a question of the weather.

[A]

It doesn't fall on a feast day, June, even in the Orthodox Church.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Which follows a different calendar.

[B]

Because I, I figured that that's a commercial habit which must have a religious origin.

[A]

That's exactly what it is. Because you're not supposed to get married on any fasting day.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You and I had a June wedding.

[A]

We did.

[B]

We followed the convention. Yeah.

[A]

We accidentally.

[B]

We are nothing if not followers of convention.

[A]

Ms. Stanford, you nailed it. That's exactly what I am. Now. We did that for total pragmatic reasons. We needed to get married after the school year.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Yes. I'm such a conventional. June 29.

[B]

Totally.

[A]

Who didn't wear white? Oh, the scandalous. No, I wore gold brocade because I wanted a Harriet Vain dress. Yes. So sorry, boys and girls at home.

[B]

The Vander Loyden would not approve my desire to be.

[A]

We got married on Dorothy Sayer's birthday and I wanted a Harriet Vain dress. So there's that. Okay. So. Right. I don't think what we should. Don't interpret this as a bucking of convention and law for lawlessness. That, that now that kind of thing is going to be introduced into American society in the 19th century, 60s. But that's not what's going on here. He's raising questions about are these conventions rooted in anything more than just habit? And he's described at quite a few places as feeling imprisoned by these. By these conventions and finding these more European frankness, a breath of fresh air. I mean, not just in his dealings with Countess Olenska, but with the young intellectual man he meets on his honeymoon, Riviera. And he's like, you know, I want to go to dinner. And May's like, I don't think so.

[B]

Also, it's interesting, but he feels he.

[A]

Can actually talk to this guy.

[B]

Whenever Nuland is described reading a book, or almost always, it's a critical darling of the time, the 1870s and 80s. And it says that he. It mentions Huysmans and Paul Bourget. And if you don't know who they were, they were fond de seal French authors who were both kind of daring and dangerous. Huysmans is an interesting case. So he was. His name doesn't sound like it, but he was French. He was a French author with a Dutch last name who wrote a very, very important book at the time, very popular book, a successe du scandal called Aribour, which means against the grain or against nature. And if you've ever read the Portrait of Dorian Gray, there's a scene in it when Dorian is given a yellow book whose title is not mentioned. And the book corrupts him even more than he is already corrupted.

[A]

You should do that book.

[B]

And anyway, that is. That book is Against Nature by Heusmann. So that's probably, you know, what Newland is reading himself these days, which is, again, not quite appropriate. Like Newland himself has. He's not an adventurous guy by nature, but he has a.

[A]

You.

[B]

He always seems to be wondering how much he could sort of push the boundaries himself. Not that he would, but he likes.

[A]

To know intellectually push the boundaries. And so does Mace. Remember the scene when she's more than happy to sit there and imagining breaking social convention and getting married during Lent?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

But she doesn't gonna act on it.

[B]

Wouldn't it be fun to be a little bit bad? But no, I would never do that. I'm much too much of a gentleman.

[A]

Right, right, right. So we have lots of subtle things going on in this dinner party. Small ways in which she's not following customs, though. So she doesn't wait for a gentleman to come to her. She goes to them. He excuses. That is saying, well, that's probably how they do it in Europe. So we shouldn't see her as. I mean, she hasn't done anything immoral. No, she just doesn't quite know how to fit in with this American society. The other thing I think I want us to see, and this speaks well to Wharton's artistry, is that this isn't a Simple. America bad, Europe good.

[B]

No, no more than Henry James does that either. I mean, some people will say that, yeah, Henry James was really just, you know, assuming that because he moved to Europe and left America behind. And eventually, I think it's the very last, very last year of his life, renounced his citizenship because America did not immediately join World War I. Yeah. That's why Henry James ultimately became officially an Englishman. But no, in his books, it's not like, yeah, the Europeans are swamp mauve and sophisticated and civilized creatures and the Americans are boorish rednecks or something like that. Because, let's see, that's not.

[A]

We have the Count himself portrayed very negatively. And the Duke in this scene is wearing very shabby clothes. It's hard for my allegorical mind not to jump on that immediately and see that, you know, English aristocracy at the late 19th century and certainly in the 20th century is. Is kind of shabby. It's holding on to things that the aristocracy doesn't even have any kind of out at elbows. Yeah, I mean, this duke, like. Well, first of all, we know from the whole dollar princess thing that the aristocracy is on the decline and dukes are there to be, you know, infused with money. And so he's shabby because he's broke. But this is not a, this is not a romantic portrayal of English aristocracy. And like, oh, if only America was like this, we would, we would be better. We also see in this chapter that she has forgotten how marriages work and she's surprised that their marriage is a love match. Surely it was arranged. Okay, so then May arrives and I want to see how she's described here. The drawing room was beginning to fill up with after dinner guests. And following Madame Alinsa's glance, Archer saw May Welling entering with her mother in her dress of white and silver with a wreath of silver blossoms in her hair. The tall girl looked like a Diana, just a light from the chase. This is the first of many, many references to May as a Diana. So let's talk about that. A lot of people were asking questions. What is going on with that? So tell us about the goddess Diana, our artist.

[B]

Diana is the goddess of the moon and the hunt and virginal. She has no male consort or lover or husband or anything like that.

[A]

And in Victorian literature, in particularly, that if you're described as a Diana, that's a virgin. Original thing. Jane Eyre and Diana, that's like a big thing in that.

[B]

I think Diana became a popular name in the English speaking world in the 19th century. You don't hear of many maybe hear occasionally. But you try to think of any Diana, you know, apart from the goddess in mythology prior to the 1800s. And I think you'd be hard pressed to name too many.

[A]

Also. It was trendy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Yeah, it's a good name.

[A]

Of course, Diana is also. She's Artemis, Roman mythology, Greek mythology, and she's the goddess of the hunt. And of course, later in these chapters that we read, we see that Mae is very involved in the sport of archery.

[B]

Oh, very good. Yes, yes.

[A]

So there's. There's something to that. We're gonna have to see how she does that. Of course, his name himself is Newlyn Archer. So archery was an up and coming sport. We're gonna talk about that. And his name is Newland Archer. And I have been wondering what's going on. Archery, Cupid's Arrows. It's kind of an interesting. The hunted or the huntress? There's a lot of things. I'm very curious to see how that's going to be resolved.

[B]

I think in the 19th century, women of, you know, good standing in society and, you know, good families, that was an outdoor sport. You could actually do without it being too mannish or.

[A]

It was newly popular. And Edith Wharton describes in the chapters we read that ladies could play archery at social functions because they could still look pretty and not break a sweat.

[B]

And that's the thing. It's a stationary sprite.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And it's not physical. Physically exhausting.

[A]

I'm sure you guys picked up on the fact that women are to be seen that that's it. You're. Because. Because her grandma says, why did you buy her all these fancy clothes if she can't go to Newport to show them off? So the idea is. And. And a man's status is reflected by that his wife is. Is beautiful and has all these clothes. And this is sending a signal to the world that I'm successful. I've made it. And so she's. She's. And it said that archery had taken the place of croquet. So that's another. I'm not going to break a sweat. That's a very. That's an earlier lawn sports thing.

[B]

Lawn sports are mostly 19th century.

[A]

Okay, that's a little earlier. That's Alice in Wonderland. And now we've moved into archery and lawn tennis, which, I mean, I'm. That's okay. We'll just talk about these things as they come up, even though I have them written down in order as we meet him in the chapters. So lawn tennis was A popular thing at the time. And here's what's going on with that. If you were confused, tennis has been along around a long, long time. And like Henry VIII was nuts about tennis, tennis has been around. However, 10 was much more like racquetball. It was a room with four walls. You're nodding, that doesn't want air. And so lawn tennis is much more like what we think of tennis now. It's, it's outside and you've no walls and you've got the lines written, you know, like Wimbledon. And so that was becoming a sport and that was becoming something that women were getting involved in, although they do.

[B]

It was a much, much slower paced kind of tennis.

[A]

Yeah, that's not Venus and Serena Williams. Sure, it's much more dainty. It's probably a little more like badminton, but still considered a little too rough to do at a social event because it's gonna necessitate a different outfit and she's gonna get sweaty and kind of, you know, tousled about. So something else. Quite a few of you on Patreon asked, why is she so consistently May. Why is she consistently described as boyish? What's going on there? All right, So I did my research to find out about that. And you'll remember that Granny says, oh, her hands are going to be bigger than mine because it's these new sports. So I did some research on this and it turns out that with the advent of sports like tennis and we know on her honeymoon she wants to hike. So May is athletic. And so calling her boyish is saying she has an athletic build. So it's documented that women's bodies and their build actually changed after they started becoming more active and athletic. So even here with the old and the new Countess Alinska's got a more an older kind of beauty and May's got this kind of fresh, innocent girl next door. And athletic. She's athletic. So that's why she's consistently described as boyish. That means she's got an athletic build. She doesn't look like she's going to pass out on a fainting couch.

[B]

All right.

[A]

And at that time, that's called boyish. So of course we see her being sporty, doing the archery during the tennis and hiking her way through her honeymoon, which made me laugh because you and I may have so many inside jokes about dates, about hiking and that we don't want to do that we don't want to have hiking dates.

[B]

Yes, I like to hike by myself occasionally or take long walks and like when I lived in Montana. I mean, there are plenty of good walking and hiking places, but I don't know why that's. That doesn't appeal to me as a date, though. Like, when I. I mean, you know me. When I'm on a date, I want to be somewhere where you can just sit most of the time. Whether it's a restaurant or a theater or something like that. I know. Gosh, no, I. I really don't want to be Newland Archer. But, yes, sure, he wants to be.

[A]

In Europe and go to art museums and experience some culture. And she wants to hike.

[B]

See, I could be friends with Newland Archer even if I wouldn't want to be him.

[A]

Right? Yeah, right.

[B]

I. I find myself thinking that more and more that I could be friends with various characters in period novels, even if I don't really admire them. Do with that what you want.

[A]

That's very big of you, my dear. Magnanimous. All right. Chapter nine. He goes to the Countess Olenska's house, and she lives in a shabby part of town. She. And she says, I don't understand. Why does. People say, I have to move. This is respectable. And he says, well, it's respectable, but it's not fashionable. So, again, all these subtle rules, and she doesn't know how to fit in them. Again, it's not lawlessness. Because she's saying, isn't this respectable? Like, I'm living in a respectable part of time, A respectable woman. But it's not enough to be respectful. No, she has to be fashionable.

[B]

No, no, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion and all that kind of thing. And it reminded me a little bit of. Do you remember that line in the Importance of Being Earnest when Jack Worthington is telling Aunt Augusta where he lives, and he says, I live at such and such Grosvenor Square. And she shakes her head and says, the unfashionable side.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like even side of the street has.

[A]

The Patreon members have pointed out they. They feel a similarity here to Oscar Wilde. I mean, this isn't a satire, but these are characters.

[B]

Like, he would. He would turn them into caricatures. But, yeah, these are the people that you would find in his society comedy.

[A]

Be more obviously over the top making fun of the things that are going on in the book.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Whereas Newland is. He's being damaged. So here chapter nine begins. And Mrs. Wellen has just reminded him that, hey, you have not finished the social calls that you're going to have to do because you're betrothed and he says, parted from his betrothed with the feeling that he had shown off. He had been shown off like a wild animal, cunningly trapped. This is the first of many, many references in the books to him feeling trapped and imprisoned and constrained.

[B]

He's the kind of man who will have an especially undignified midlife crisis along the line.

[A]

Indeed. But let's go back to May being called Diana. Right. He's archer. But is he actually the guy on the hunt or is he being hunted? You see? Right. He. He feels like he's a wild animal who's been cunningly trapped.

[B]

Oh, that's very good. I. Yeah. Again, these are connections you make that I would not.

[A]

All right, so even her. He's kind of surprised and delighted by her bohemian arrangement. Like, she's not doing her arrangement for home. I should say her decor is not Hobby Lobby. It's not like everybody else. It's unique and different, and she doesn't see any reason to be like everybody else in her own home. Now, even though he does have a surface level. Oh, even the book she has.

[B]

I actually had a question about that.

[A]

Books.

[B]

Go ahead, Tell me if I'm wrong here. Is this about the first time in European and American history when you start finding, like, professional decorators, or is that a 20th century phenomenon that. That profession.

[A]

Century, yes. I'm not sure about the 19th century, but the 20th century for sure. Because Edith Horton writes it. A home decor book.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

One of the first things she writes.

[B]

Oh, yeah. I think it must be around the turn of the century or something like that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I'm guessing I should have looked it up. A precise date question.

[A]

I honestly don't know.

[B]

Because, I mean, these people clearly have, you know, very tidily cut ideas about.

[A]

I bet. No, because so many. This is so different for us because we're just like in a world of throwaway everything. We don't get married and inherit the family couch and bed, but. But that's how it worked for a long time. You would have just inherited things. You wouldn't have radically rearranged your home. So I'm gonna guess. No, that's a really good.

[B]

That's a good observation.

[A]

So even though he's got a surface level, good excuse. She's my engaged. My fiance's cousin, and I'm here to help out. He actually does know he's on iffy territory here. And he doesn't say anything to May about it at first. He knows that this is not appropriate for a man to go and See a woman, woman in her home this way. And he keeps pushing the envelope on this side.

[B]

Again, kind of the arbitrariness of some of these rules. When he sends her flowers. It's entirely fine that he sends her flowers for Does.

[A]

It's not.

[B]

And other guys are sending her flowers as well. But he mentions it to me. It's not like he has a guilty conscience about it, really. He's just like, oh, yeah, I sent her.

[A]

He does have a guilty conscience, though. Remember? He. He doesn't. He doesn't say it and he doesn't put his card and he doesn't say it. And then later he says. And he goes, oh, I forgot. I didn't tell her. I went to see her. And now I've outed myself. But he's still. But it's still very gray area.

[B]

But I would say it's interesting that, like, there's, like, certain customs that emphasize that, you know, one person is a man and the other is a woman. It's almost weird that in this society one or two of those can be exercised with more liberty than you could today. So, for example, let me do it this way.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

If you had a long, absent, unattached, hot female cousin who showed up in town and I sent her a dozen roses and also sent you a dozen roses because you're my wife and can't we mention. Okay, yes, I think I understand. Most women probably would, but it doesn't seem like that's really unorthodox when he does.

[A]

When he sends her about that.

[B]

So it's almost like he's wishing her well.

[A]

Talk about flowers in just a minute. Not, Not.

[B]

They have their own language yet.

[A]

Not yet. Because there is a language of flowers and was very popular during this time. And a lot of our Patreon members have quite correctly said, hey, there's a lot of detail about what these flowers are. What does it mean? And I'm going to tell you what it means. But so I kind of wonder. The May May's like, please be her champion for me. It's kind of that situation. So I think she's excusing a lot of it as you've did this kind.

[B]

Of gallant behavior even.

[A]

Oh, of course. You went to see her because I asked you to. Like, she's seeing it completely through those eyes. Eyes, sure. And I think he knows immediately that that's not entirely what he's doing, that he's drawn to her.

[B]

Okay. All right.

[A]

So there's a few important quotes, I think, from this. The young man Felt that his fate was sealed for the rest of his life. He would go up every evening between the cast iron railings of that greenish yellow doorstep and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood. So his only comfort, he says, when he reflected this is. So Mr. Bennet, is she'll let him keep the library how he wants. And of course, we find out that after they get married, he does do that. So he's already seeing his future marriage as a bit of an imprison. And. But then he contrasts that by looking around her room, and he says, you've arranged the room delightfully. He rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire to be simple and striking. So, again, so much language that these conventions are imprisoning him. And she says, oh, you know, what does it matter where one lives? And. And why do you have to be fashionable? Can't you make your own fashions? That is. Honestly, that's like a mantra for us today. And no one would even bat an eye about that. But you can see in the book, everyone responds to that. Like she said something very shocking, like, what do you mean, you make your own fashions? You have to follow convention there.

[B]

No, I think she's really good at dialogue. That's another thing I hadn't acknowledged before. But, no, she excels at dialogue and snappier. She's not just a hundred years later, Jane Austen. But I think that she and Jane Austen are two novelists who could have exchanged notes about their process, or whatever you want to call it, and understood each other if that had been temporally possible. Yeah. But maybe it's because neither of them. It would never occur to either of them to envision a character, whether male or female, high or low, who is not a member of a society with clearly defined rules of behavior in it.

[A]

That's very true.

[B]

They're both very much, you know, man is a social animal type of novelists.

[A]

Exploring that in terms of a very small social circle.

[B]

Correct. Yes. Yes. Also correct. Right. You don't meet servants in this, really.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And just shadows in the background from.

[A]

House to house in this small social set, even. Even town to town. Like, now we're in Longbourn. Now we're in Bath. Now we're in London. Now we're back to Longbourn. Now we're at Mansfield Park. Right. Now we're in Newport. Now we're in New York. It's still the Same Edith Wharton has.

[B]

A male protagonist, which Jane Austen never has. But that's like maybe the one major difference I'm seeing here. And also. Well, actually, no, that would be giving too much away. But I, yeah, I, I was thinking about that because Henry James sometimes is compared to Jane Austen and within like some severe limitations, I guess I can kind of see that.

[A]

But I think Edith Wharton, manners kind of stuff.

[B]

Yeah, they're both novelists of manners. But Henry James's narration, especially in his later novels, he got very experimental. He was he actually, his later novels, like I'm thinking the golden bowl or the Ambassador, there's some stream of consciousness type narration in some of those. And that be, I'll say 1900 to 1910 earlier stuff. Like if you read the Bostonians, Roderick Hudson, some of those books from the 1870s, then he's writing fairly straightforward third person omniscient Victorian fiction. But yeah, Henry James wanted to. And again, whether you like this or not, you know your business. But he did try to stretch the boundaries of what the novel could do as an art form. I myself, again, I'm old fashioned. I kind of like the earlier books, but that's just me.

[A]

And it's just me too.

[B]

Again, I'm not a Henry James scholar.

[A]

Okay. They have a very interesting conversation where he's like, well, the van der Luydens, you know, they have such influence. And she just sees right through them because he says it's a shame they don't use it more. And she says, well, isn't that the source of their influence, that they don't use it? And he.

[B]

That's a great line.

[A]

It is a great line. So not only is she unconventional, she sees through the conventions to how people really are. And she's not despising them or anything like that, but she says what she thinks and then this is shocking to him, but he also kind of likes it. So she actually gives him new eyes to see about New York. And he, he. And this keeps happening in a series of encounters. He's seeing more and more. And then he can't go back to this facade.

[B]

I think she's kind of an expression of the fact that sometimes it takes a foreigner or a quasi foreigner like she is to see a society or a social set for what it is to understand some of the principal dynamics at work there.

[A]

New York seemed much farther off than Samakan. And if they were indeed to help each other, she was rendering what might, might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look at his Native city objectively viewed thus, as through the wrong end of a telescope, it looked disconcertingly small and distant. So he. He's starting to change. I love the line, too. And she says, is New York such a labyrinth? All of the. All of the image and symbolism there of a labyrinth, and is there a monster in this labyrinth waiting to devour her? Okay. So they talk a little more. We get more examples of the pretense of society. This is going to be, I think, significant. So here's something she says. Oh, I know, I know. But on condition that they don't hear anything unpleasant. Antwell. And put it in those very words when I tried. Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kinds of people who only ask one to pretend. So this becomes something big in these chapters, the idea that at all costs we avoid unpleasantness. We don't want to say anything unpleasant. And she says, doesn't anyone know the truth? Later on we Hear, is it Mrs. Archer who says, or Mrs. Wellen? I think it's Mrs. Wellen who says. She tried to tell me about what, you know, what happened to her in her marriage. And I told her, I don't want to hear it. You know, nothing unpleasant. I. I can't have that kind of unpleasantness. So they. They are very much stick their head in the sand kind of people. And she. She doesn like the pretense there.

[B]

Do you think it's fair to judge the Victorians with unique harshness for that? I was thinking about that line of dialogue, and what she says is basically true. I think that. I mean, there's a lot. There is a lot of pretense here. And, you know, some of it is.

[A]

Very British, doesn't it? Stiff upper lip and all that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's. But what I was going to say is, do you think most societies, our own, not excluded, exist on a certain. A certain superabundance of pretense as well? And that's such a vague question. I know.

[A]

I mean, I think it's true.

[B]

Every society has its own preferred forms of hypocrisy, perhaps. Okay.

[A]

I think when I was young, I really railed against any pretense of any kind. If you did not explain to me why there was a social convention, I was not going to follow it. I needed to. It needed to be real to me because I've gotten older.

[B]

You were so sincere, though. Yeah, you're abnormally sincere. I think probably even more. When you were a child.

[A]

Yes. I think as I've gotten older, I've started to understand a few different things. One is that a lot of the social conventions do actually have a good reason behind them, and no one could explain them to me, but that didn't mean that they weren't good. And also, I think as I've gotten older, I've understood. I don't know how to say this. You've really put me on the spot a certain amount. Maybe I'll put it this way. We live in an age of raw authenticity, and that has caused us to kind of fall apart. We have to express what we really feel in any given moment. And I think I read older books or I even watch something like Downton Abbey and see how incredibly able they are to control their emotions and not have a shouting match and not freak out. Even if something really unpleasant is happening. They can kind of smooth it over and do damage control and make it less of a big thing than it. Than it might have turned to be if everybody was just, like, expressing themselves all the time. So I. I don't mean to say I'm for hypocrisy. I'm definitely not. I think that I'm getting older and understanding that not all social conventions are hypocritical.

[B]

That's a good answer.

[A]

I think it's interesting that Mrs. Welland. Mrs. Well. Land, right? So for the land to be, well, we're seeing, there has to be a certain amount of pretense. She starts to cry and he's like, don't. She says, does no one cry here either? And then at the end of this paragraph, far down the inverted telescope, he saw the faint white figure of May. Well.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Ah, the writing is so good. We see that the foreigners in general. It's not just her, but the Duke, too, does not understand social conventions. He's like, hey, listen, it was really inappropriate for him to stop by and talk to you, for him to invite you out. And she's like, why? I don't understand. Neither of them understand. They don't think they're doing anything wrong. There's no hint of suggestion of any immorality going on. It's just. This is not how these things are done.

[B]

The taboo. And she uses that word tellingly. I mean, you had mentioned it last week, and I think there's at least one. One or two other uses of it we've encountered so far. Yeah, the wedding ceremony, I think that it comes up and, and, and yes, it's. It's a no that we've struck a few Times.

[A]

Okay, should we talk about the flowers now or wait until we get to.

[B]

Talk about the flowers? By all means. Because you've been champing at the bit, I think.

[A]

All right. I know you guys have been waiting to find out about the flowers. I wasn't quite ready to think you.

[B]

Composed a book of notes larger than the book, actually, that we're reading.

[A]

Don't I always? Don't I always? Okay, so I love this. So the story goes that there was an ancient Persian custom said to have been brought back to England from Turkey by the 18th century Woman of letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the language of flowers.

[B]

He was also one of the first English writers to. Or English women to be inoculated also in Turkey. That's where inoculation actually was developed.

[A]

Okay. So it became very popular. And they. People would publish books. You can still find these on the language of flowers. And it was a way to sin coded messages to people via the flowers. And they took a lot of delight in that. This. And this book is using that big time. So it could send a message of things that were unspoken, but it could also send a message, as it does often in this book, of things that can't be spoken. All right, so let's start, by the way.

[B]

Continue. But I have a hilarious story about the things you can't say with flowers that I'll share. Okay. I had. I'll just say I had an acquaintance who. There was an older woman in his life who had been like kind of a. I think she had been his land lady or something like this. She had. She. He was living in Europe. And when he was leaving the apartment or the, you know, guest room in the house that he'd been staying in, he wanted to thank her. So he got her a bunch of crimson roses, I think it was, or something like that. And that meant something much more forward than he had intended to say by it. And this was a woman who is old enough to know well, to be acquainted with the language of flowers, and was sort of confused by this offering from this, you know, very young guy who gave her.

[A]

Anyway, he gave her, funny story, Beaufort flowers.

[B]

Some Beaufort flowers that needed to be thrown out.

[A]

Okay. The thing about the flowers, too, that we need to understand is that they were coded enough that many of them could be read in more than one way. So, you know, you could always fall back on the more innocent one. But there was the suggestion that perhaps there wasn't an innocent one. As we're about to see lily of the valley, flowers that he sends her every day. That one's not hard to figure out. This is the Easter lily. This is Mary's, the mother of our Lord's flower. This is. This is virginal. This is white. This is pure. So, you know, this is definitely how he sees May. There's also the. The suggestion of future happiness. Yes, right, so that makes completely sense. It turns out Edith Wharton carried those in her wedding bouquet.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[A]

Okay. So. So that.

[B]

Do you find things like that out?

[A]

Footnotes. Footnotes. Footnotes. Okay, so she carried that, and so that's completely, you know, a no brainer that he's sending these to May. This one doesn't make sense. So what about the yellow roses that he sends Countess Alinsky? Because he kind of does that on a whim. He goes in to buy maze flowers. He sees these, and he says they make him think of her, and he sends it. But then he takes his card out. I think taking the card out is an indication that he knows there's definitely a double meaning in these flowers. Of course. And he ends up getting jealous because she doesn't know it's from him and she thinks it's from another man. All right, so he says he's getting it to her because of their fiery beauty and it reminds him of her. So while roses signify beauty and love, yellow roses, according to various floral lexicons, may mean jealousy, infidelity, adultery, decrease of love, love that will not last, and more rarely, friendship. So he can tell himself it means friendship, but it has all these other connotations. Love that will not last, jealousy, infidelity. And the interesting thing about the infidelity here is it's kind of vague who the infidelity applies to. Is it him? Is it?

[B]

This is getting worse and worse. My gosh.

[A]

Right, so him giving her the flowers, is that him being unfaithful to May, is it? Him being unfaithful, Is it? Is it? Well, he thinks the Countess Alinska may have been unfaithful, and he's going to find out that that wasn't true. But it's definitely iffy there. Okay, the. If we're on the flowers, I'm gonna talk about flowers. All the flowers that we covered in this set of chapters through chapter 21. So Newland Archer on his wedding day is wearing a gardenia, and that means transport or ecstasy, but also widely understood to signify secret, untold love. Love. So there's a double meaning there, too. I think everybody else would think the secret, untold love, like, is for his Wife. Like, I can't. I can't say all the things about her that I want to. But it's going to have the double meaning as he's of course looking around his bride saying, is Ellen here? Did she come? Yeah. No, you're not new, little marcher. I will punch you right now in the face for even suggesting such a thing.

[B]

See, I'm really happy I denied it at the beginning of this episode.

[A]

You did. You're so safe. You deny. Okay, all right, so let's talk about foolish Countess's stash. Right? Okay, so we see through these chapters his increasing jealousy every time Beaufort is mentioned. And Beaufort is obviously pursuing her and she's running away from him. She doesn't want his pursuit. He's not offering anything honorable. And, and everybody knows that. And she doesn't want anything to do with him. And then she gets very, very insulted in those last chapters when she sees the flowers and says, throw them out. Out. Okay, so let's talk about what those mean. This is quite scary. She was right to be very angry with these. Okay, so he gives her crimson roses with a knot of purple pansies at their base. And these are shockingly explicit. So whereas the yellow roses. There's. The double meaning. Could be friendship, could be something else. These. There's no double meaning here. This is extremely explicit. It. While red roses signify passionate love, an emotion that was too visceral to be acknowledged in most floral lexicons of the Victorian era. The knot of pansies leaves the unsaid said, completing this message of passion by signifying thoughts of. You are thinking of you. By the way, this is bad.

[B]

She mentions floral lexicons. I mean, there were several of these. Yes.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

I mean, we talk about the language of flower. The language of flowers. That's actually the title of a book originally. Yeah, I think actually my mother might have inherited a copy of that or something because I remember that on a bookshelf in my parents house. Though it's the kind of book like no one would have ever read for any reason.

[A]

You didn't even.

[B]

I, I admit, like, that was not.

[A]

The book that flowers all the time. You don't look it up first in a floral lexicon.

[B]

Oh, to see if I'm sending her something insulting or something like that. I. I admit I have not. Maybe I've been insulting my mother with flowers all these years.

[A]

No, she had that.

[B]

Yeah, she can.

[A]

Look, we apologize. We apologize. Okay, so for.

[B]

Actually, I think she. I think she probably credits you for like the good Taste any tasteful bouquet.

[A]

And then you. You get the critic, I get the credit, you get the criticism. And said, marriage works out.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What a partnership we have. That's so good. So for a married man to send a married woman who's estranged for her husband, some thinking of you. And my heart's full of passion flowers. She is 100.

[B]

That's not.

[A]

Okay, that's not definitely.

[B]

That's definitely, like a little bit over the line. Okay. Again, like I said, this is more your book than mine. I'm a stranger in these. In these territories.

[A]

All right, so that's why. And she is correct. Now, the fact that she gets so insulted tells us she's not immoral. She's bohemian and a little unconventional, but she's not lawless.

[B]

Yeah. She's not a libertine.

[A]

She's not a libertine. Thank you. That is the word that I was looking for. All right, I know that our Patreon members are, like, writing this down. I knew the flowers meant something. Yes, you were right. The flowers absolutely meant something. All right, chapter 10. He has a conversation with May. And it's so conventional. It's completely contrasted to the previous conversation with the Countess Olenska. And. And he can. She's so conventional, he can predict everything she's gonna say. Every maidenly blush, even down to her saying, you're such an original. Is a convention.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So just a huge contrast there. And he recognizes that he is supposed to love about her, that she is a conventional girl, that. That's supposed to be praiseworthy. And so he's struggling a little bit with that sameness, sameness he. He utters to himself. Okay. And then, of course, they talk about, you're not just marrying her, you're marrying into a family. And recall, of course, we talked about how the main character of this book is actually family. And we'll see this. Let's see. I'm looking at the time. I can't believe we've been, like, in two chapters and an hour is going by. So let me flip through this.

[B]

As soon as the Language of Flowers came out, you know, this was doomed to become a nine hour podcast.

[A]

Know it. Watch for my upcoming webinar on the Language of Flowers. Actually, that would be fascinating. I would totally do a webinar on that. Madame Olenska. The. The women are talking to him that she's, quote unquote, behaving scandalously. And he's like, but she's not doing anything. She's just not acting like you expect her To. All right, chapter 11. Things ramp up because she wants a divorce and the family wants to stop it because this is going to bring scandal on them. And of course, that is going to bring some intimate conversations between him and Madame Alinska. So let me just talk a little bit about divorce laws here, just to us put the context in here. And this is, I don't think, the way we're going to think of it. In the United States, the divorce laws were more liberal than in Europe.

[B]

That doesn't surprise me at all.

[A]

That doesn't surprise you. Okay. And part of that is because Europe is Catholic and the United States is more Protestant, and so the laws here are more Protestant. And that's why they keep saying, well, I'm a Protestant. Why can't I get divorced?

[B]

We should say that even in the Protestant countries of Europe, often the laws governing the divorce dated back to their Catholic medieval past and had, in some cases, not really been modified that much.

[A]

Yes. So in Europe and England, this is also true. In England, a man can divorce a woman. A woman can't divorce a man. I don't really know when that changed, but that is certainly true in all the Victorian novels. So a man can divorce a woman for adultery. A woman can't divorce a man for adultery.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

If a woman leaves her husband, so you see this in Anna Karenina, she will lose custody of the children. So if. If let's. So let's say it's just a terrible marriage in Europe or England, and the. The wife convinces the husband, please let, you know, let me get a divorce. She would. She would know that if she got the divorce, she would have to lose her children. There is no scenario in which you get a divorce and the woman gets custody of the children. So what tended to happen, and it happens in this book as well, is people just live apart.

[B]

They're functional households and. But they're not maybe live with separate lovers and all that kind of.

[A]

Yes, Right, right. And so as long as you stayed married and named. And that was okay. Of course, some of the reformers later are gonna, you know, complain that this is just social hypocrisy, that you let them live apart, but you don't let them divorce. And, you know, basically you're. You're encouraging adultery at the state level instead of letting people remarry. But that's. But that's the situation there in the United States. And they actually make this comment in the book, the divorce laws are more liberal than the social conventions are. So she's right. That in the United States, you're allowed to divorce legally, but they're right that socially, that's your death.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

So there are on the books more liberal laws where she could divorce and she could remarry there. Well, it kind of varied from state to state. So in some states you couldn't remarry until the original spouse had died. In others you could remarry, but it was going to be socially unacceptable unless the first spouse died. So everybody in this society. Well, we've already seen, okay, she's kind of iffy, but. But the van der Leytens have worked toward getting her socially acceptable. That can work if she's willing to just be separated from her husband. He's a black guard. No one expects her. Well, we see that's going to change, but nobody really expects she's going to go back to this horrible guy. But if she wants to get divorced now it's a scandal. Now it's a scandal. And they fear because the husband's saying, look, I know some stuff, I'll cause trouble. And Archer actually believes, incorrectly, we find out that she has a lover and she's planning to marry him. And now that kind of thing. Nowhere could you find that. Nowhere could you find if there was even the suggestion that the person that you were going to remarry had been an adulterous lover with you, that that would have never. That never happened. So she's finding out there's a lot more constraints than what she thought with regard to divorce.

[B]

Can I make an observation here? And you have investigated this, I think more than I have. Do you think in America at this time, in the latter 19th and going into the earlier 20th centuries, that the divorce laws in the Western states, which are still kind of frontier or quasi frontier territories, are more lenient than in the more established and, well, you know, morally conventional Eastern states or Southern states, perhaps?

[A]

I actually don't know because I'm thinking.

[B]

Of like in an old Hollywood movie, when someone gets divorced, they go to Reno, Nevada to get a divorce. And I mean, it was also some of the Western states that gave women the right to vote first. I think it was. Was it Wyoming or Colorado?

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Yeah, it's. I don't know. I think, you know, maybe the fact that, like, they're kind of creating, you know, new ways of living while they move out there for, for good or for evil might have. I, I would think that the, some of those laws and conventions might have been less set in stone. Perhaps that makes total and most, most of what I've Just said by the way, is speculative aside from makes a.

[A]

Lot of sense because old New York with its values is very limited. It's not even the whole east and it's not necessarily the South. This is a very specific thing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the Dutch would have been reformed. Right. So this would have been a kind of puritanism.

[B]

Yeah, I, I don't know if. Well actually we don't have time to get into that. But, but yeah, all of this is, you know, the history of divorce. A dismal and also kind of an interesting subject if I may say so.

[A]

I want to make sure our listeners understand the kind of tensions they're in. So no one, Archer, the boss, her family, no one is suggesting that she doesn't have every right to be separate from her husband. But why divorce? It's unthinkable that you're going to remarry, so why have a scandal? And she says well what I want is freedom. Which he to mean freedom to marry my lover. But that's not what she means. He's going to find out later. She just, she doesn't like the pretense. She doesn't want to pretend to be married if she's not really married. And this family pressure, I did some research on this too. There are some really sad stories. This is absolutely true of family pressure of women. I mentioned that Alva Vanderbilt. So about, you know, mid-1880, she gets a divorce and gets remarried. But it is scandalous and it's going to ruin her. But she has incredible money and really pushes to, to get divorced women accepted back into society. But divorced women wouldn't have been invited socially, anywhere. No balls, not to people's houses. You'd be completely disgraced. But if you're still married, you know, then, then it's just, well, she's estranged from her husband but she's still married. Like it's not, it's not the same kind of scandal. But I read stories of some of these dollar princesses being in horribly physically abusive relationships, escaping to America to get a divorce only to have their family try to stop the divorce and force her to go back. Because rather her be beat up and possibly killed than to bring a scandal on the family with a divorce. I read some really heartbreaking stories of that. Even down to people going to the divorce hearings and testifying on behalf of the, the husband against their own family member. So, so Edith Wharton is kind of just subtly dealing with things that were, were headline making stuff that you have to understand that people would have gone to great Lengths to prevent somebody from introducing to their family the scandal, divorce. And again, it's so hard for us to understand why people are saying, newland, you have to stop this because you don't want to. Scandal, the divorce hanging over the family you're marrying into. She's a cousin. None of us would think twice. I mean, if your sister got divorced no one's going to be like, well, I guess she can't marry her now. Like, it just. We're so far removed from that. But. And she doesn't understand because, see me, there's something very. There's something very innocent about Countess Olenska because she doesn't have pretense. And she's like, but I have been wronged. He was the black guard. Sure. I'm a Protestant. Protestants are allowed to divorce when the spouse is committing adultery. My husband committed adultery, so I should be able to get a divorce. Like, that's how she's thinking. And she's not thinking social nuances and scandal. Right. So he's got to go to her then and explain, you can't do this. And so for him, she's willing to not, not do it. And we also see that he's. He's. He's jealous when he sees Beaufort there. We also see lots of little references to changing.

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's in relation to Beaufort or in reaction to Beaufort that he loses his sense of self collection. For almost the only time in the novel that we've seen so far are. He's not the sort of person to lose his cool too easily. But he does.

[A]

All right. So he convinces her. After getting mad, he does convince her and she says, okay, I'll do it. And he. He kisses her hand to leave. And her hand is cold and lifeless. I mean, hello. Symbolism, right? So this is a death for her. Okay. For you and for me, I will make this sacrifice. I will not get a divorce. And. And. But. But this means I'm just going to sort of. Sort of die. All right? This is also when she tells him I want to just be like everybody else. And he says, you'll never be like everybody else. Okay, looking at the time, we can do this. Chapter 13. So this. He goes to the theater only to have that scene in the play remind him of his leave taking with Ellen. When, you know, it's. It's at a tearful parting and, you know, kissing the ribbons and all of that. And he says, well, now where. What. What am I thinking of? Because Archer and Madame Alinska are not two Lovers parting in heartbroken silence. Which, of course, this is foreshadowing, because that's exactly what does happen. So May is off in Florida with her family, and he finds out that she knows about the roses. Alinska does. All right. So they start to get a little bit closer. And it's really interesting, too, that it's convention that prevents Archer from going to Florida.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because he had this. Is that pretest. He has to pretend he actually works, which everybody knows he doesn't work. This also his sisters who keep saying, you poor thing. Are you being overworked?

[B]

Yeah. But this. This is the first reference I have ever encountered to Florida as a vacation destination.

[A]

That was so interesting. But St. Augustine is the oldest.

[B]

The oldest. It was. There was the Spanish conquistadors, I think, who established the first European settlement. There's something that probably not a lot of.

[A]

He's going to Florida.

[B]

Yeah. Or snowbirds here. But not a lot of people know this, I think. But the first Thanksgiving celebrated on American soil was actually in St. Augustine, Florida. Yeah, it was a massive Thanksgiving for, I think, safe passage of the Atlantic Ocean. And it was, I think, a good bit before the more famous Plymouth Thanksgiving with the Puritans.

[A]

And we should point out just a bit of trivia here, the reason that there are two different pronunciations. So the man, the saint, the author of Confessions in City of God is St. Augustine, but the Florida town is St. Augustine.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

There you are. We've cleared that up for you.

[B]

Actually, you can say St. Augustine about the saint as well. St. Augustine.

[A]

Not if you're me.

[B]

Fine, fine.

[A]

All right. We find out that Ellen is lonely, but Archer doesn't think, as an engaged man, he should play too much the role of her champion. So he knows he's on dangerous ground here. But he's so drawn to her. He keeps coming back. He keeps being jealous of men giving her attention. But then he also knows this is. This is not a good. This is not a good line. All right, chapter 14, he runs into his shabby bohemian friend, Ned Wincent, who asks after the Countess, and Archer feels annoyed. Then he finds out, oh, she was actually being really kind. And his heart warms. Now, in that chapter, so this is chapter 14, they're kind of teasing him a little bit, and they call him the Portrait of a Gentleman. So this is an obvious allusion to Henry James is the Portrait of a Lady. And that character is named Isabel Archer.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And he's Newland Archer. Do you have any thoughts about what this. Why he's being Called, you know what?

[B]

He's obviously signaling some reference to that, to that book. But if I remember rightly, Isabel Archer's dilemma in that book is, I mean, you know, her reputation and all that kind of thing. In some ways running some similar, though not identical risks to Countess Olenska in this book, though it's been so long since I looked at it that I couldn't be more specific than that Thing.

[A]

I ran across was Henry James somewhere saying, it's called A portrait of a lady, but it's not really a portrait of a lady, it's a portrait of a society.

[B]

Okay. That, yeah, that stands to reason. I, I think I, Yeah, that really.

[A]

Tracks with this book.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Okay. He also, we kind of talk about the pretense here. Like he, it's a literal pretense. He pretends to work and so he can't go on vacation with his fiance because he has to pretend to work.

[B]

I know. Some men are just martyrs. Do you think he's a self pitying character?

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

I've talked about how my reaction to this book has changed and that by itself really doesn't matter that much. But one part of my reaction that has not changed. I really disliked Newland Archer the first time I read this. I dislike him still. And it's not even because he's a really evil or despicable character. I really just do not like him. I don't think he has much of a soul. I don't think he has much of a spine. Find I find him dull. Like I said, I would probably hang out with him and we could be friends because I share some of those qualities. Really.

[A]

But you have a soul.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, that's good.

[A]

And you are not dull.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's so hard for me to answer because, you know, I never think about whether I like characters. I, I always look at it.

[B]

That's right. It's not. You don't.

[A]

I don't think like that. I'm like, I have to. I don't know.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't know if I like them or not. I feel like that's such an irrelevant.

[B]

Yeah. I say, I say. Yeah. And also I would say say it's critically irrelevant. It's critically irrelevant whether we like characters or not. Unless an author has presented a character meaning to make them winsome and charming and lovable. Unless they abjectly fail or something like that.

[A]

But if you're like, I think Dickens really blew it with Mr. Macabre. I don't find him comical. Right. I know what you're talking about. Yes, right. We can say if we think it's poorly artistically drawn or something like that. Yeah. I don't think about whether I like him or not or May or the Countess. I'm looking at this, perhaps you're better. And I'm looking at him literally be torn between these two worlds. It's not just these two women, it's these two worlds. And so every time he keeps saying, may is everything I'm supposed to want. What's wrong with me? He's really saying, I don't fit in with old New York anymore. That's what it's really about. So again, the idea of when I get married, this is going to be a prison because I'll be locked into this old New York mark. Once he was married, what would become of this narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived? He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though perhaps less ardently and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders. And of course we see in the upcoming chapters after his marriage, this is exactly what does happen to him. And he's like, what happened to all of my broad minded views when I was a bachelor? I have just fallen into a routine. All right, chapter 15. He knows that she's gone to Cidercliff. And he gets that note from her. Help me, I'm, I'm running. And he gets over there, okay. And so he finds her. This was really interesting. He, he could. He, he sees her walking. He caught sight of a slight figure in a red cloak with a big dog running ahead. That is very Red Riding Hood. And in fact a wolf is after her. And that wolf is Beaufort. He is, he's after her. So again, these images of hunter and hunted and who's the hunted and who's the hunter and all that kind of stuff. And it's really interesting because she says, I, I came here because I'm being followed by a wolf. And he said, he thinks, am I the wolf? Did you, did you leave because of me? And then he realizes she's talking about Beaufort and he's kind of disappointed.

[B]

And again, it's so frustrating. Perhaps because he's an intelligent man in many ways, but it seems that he, he goes about life with an altogether imperfect knowledge of his own motives in it.

[A]

Oh, I would say that that's really true.

[B]

I think that, I think it is.

[A]

Like, because I don't see him as being duplicitous or deceptive.

[B]

No, not at all.

[A]

It like, you know, I just bought her flowers as a win. I think he is largely unaware of his own.

[B]

And he's not the first character. Again, Jane Austen in comparison. Do you think Emma Woodhouse, a similar criticism. Again, they're very different. One is a man, one is a woman. You know, they belong to different classes really. But she has no self awareness. But. But, yeah, it's like.

[A]

And that's intentional.

[B]

Both of them are even kind of do gooders in a way who have the admiration of every. They're kind of worshiped by everyone around them.

[A]

She ends up in what turns out to be comical but some love triangles and people falling in love with the wrong person because she's so.

[B]

And not understanding. Oh, my gosh, he liked me. I didn't know that yet. Yeah.

[A]

And I spent all this intimate time with him because I'm trying to set him up.

[B]

Newland Archer. It's kind of hard to pinpoint the place in the book where he falls in love with Countess Olenska. But it happens, right? And you get the impression it happens even without his really noticing.

[A]

It kind of reminds me of when Lizzie Bennet I asks Darcy, when did you fall in love? And he says, I couldn't tell you a moment. I was already half in love before I realized it was happening. And there's something like that happening here, I think.

[B]

And again, that's true to life. I mean, I think that's probably true for.

[A]

And there's a little. I think there's a little irony in the storytelling in that we, the audience, I think, are much more figuring out what's going on than he does because he. He never comes out and says, I'm jealous. He says things like, I feel annoyed, I feel angry. Right. And he. But he doesn't confess to himself that what he really feels is jealousy. So I think you're totally right. I think you're totally right. All right. He even has that moment where he imagines she's gonna put her arms around him. And then she doesn't.

[B]

And then she doesn't.

[A]

Yeah. Then they have a very interesting conversation about old versus new. So. So Buford comes up and he's like, oh, wanted again. He's using an excuse, a pretense again. I'm. I'm your realtor and I'm helping you find a house. And unfortunately, we don't have telephones yet out here. If we did imagine I could have just called you and just imagine the craziness. One day we could be in different states and Talk. And they laugh and say, this is like something out of a Jules Verne novel. So it's old versus new again. Now, of course, when Edith Wharton is writing this, we're in the age of the telephone. We're in the age of the call car. And what's interesting is the telephone and the car together radically change all of these rules of courtship. Like, radically. So again with that Elysiac tone that things are passing away. You know, sending coded floral bouquets to each other to say, hey, I'm into you. Like, once the phone comes up, you can have private, intimate conversations with somebody you're not married to, and nobody thinks twice of it because you're not in the same room with them. Them. It. It just changes all the rules of courtship. It's kind of like what happened when we had chat rooms on the Internet and suddenly all these people are committing adultery because you're right there in the room with your wife, but you're talking to, you know, another person somewhere halfway around the world. It's the same sort of thing happens. So she's. She's cluing us in on that. This is a world that's not going to exist when this new technology comes. The same thing happens with cars. The car culture radically changes. You know, you can. You now you can. You can really have private conversations with somebody.

[B]

I know we've mentioned this at some point in another episode of the same podcast, but bicycles. If you look at a lot of early ads for bicycles from the, what, late Victorian, Edwardian period, often it will be a couple, a young couple riding bicycles together or kissing against a tree with bicycles parked in the background. So the sexualization of the bicycle, it's a ridiculous thing to think of, but actually, this was seen as kind of a threat to parental authority in some circles, both in America and in Britain and presumably other countries, because, I mean, it makes it easier to get farther away from home quickly, from chaperones, from adult supervision in ways that were not, not easily possible before, unless you had access to a horse or something like that.

[A]

20S, the time period she's writing in, like, in a lot of ways, it's very similar to what happened once you have the Internet age come, like, you know, all of a sudden, your kids in what you think is a safe chat room, but a predator has lured them to run away. You know, like, like. But no parent thought, this child who's in my house right now, I can literally look at my child across the room. How could they be being exposed to a predator? Like, we just didn't realize the dangers that would come. The same sort of thing is happening in the 1920s. You have the rise of the car culture. You have teen culture rising. So, you know, this is the first time that teens have their own slang and their own way of dressing and the different music that they listen to than their parents.

[B]

And the first time in commercial enterprises and corporations are trying to sell different products to people of different generations.

[A]

Have you ever read the book Cheaper by the Dozen? They do a good job of showing that, like the. The. This is the first time you have a generation gap in the history of the world was the 1920s. So everything does radically, radically change. But just as a kind of funny thing, the idea that cars are potential for immorality, because I know we have a lot of children who listen to this podcast. Cars is an opportunity for immorality. Like that. That idea and that being a parental concern holds over for a long time. You're going to laugh.

[B]

It's adorable how careful you are. I just said the sexualization of the bicycle and I'm repeating it now, so you can. You can.

[A]

Yeah, okay, well, okay, so no need.

[B]

To be self conscious.

[A]

When I got my first car in 1987, okay. I had been asking for a car and my dad, this is 1987, said, I'm not giving you a car. That's a hotel on wheels.

[B]

Oh, I heard that cliche growing up, I think. Yeah, I think I heard that one growing up.

[A]

Yeah. So. And I've given all of my children cars and didn't think once that I was giving them a hotel. I was thinking, oh, thank God I don't have to show first you around anymore. You can drive yourself and all the moms out there, like, correct. We're just. You can be a bus driver and drive all the kids around now. So he still, though, in this chapter, is struggling to figure her out. Is she innocent or is she not? Does she have a lover? Is she encouraging Beaufort? What is going on? He can't get a read on her. And then he goes back home and he looks at his books. And I had to laugh because one of the books he's reading is Middlemarch.

[B]

I noticed that too.

[A]

Okay, so Middlemarch is about another love triangle here. So all of these operas, the play, the books he's reading, love triangle, love triangle, love triangle, love triangle, thwarted love.

[B]

And of course, he doesn't really see the significance of this. It's like, oh, yeah, I'm reading another book about possible adultery here. That's just a Coincidence.

[A]

Thwarted love to the wrong person. And here you see that his sister and his mother live under a delusion because they're like, you poor thing, you're being worked to death. They're not overworking you, are you? He's like, I literally pretend to have a dog job. He's like the George Costanza, right?

[B]

He works for. He's a lawyer for the Human Fund.

[A]

Yes, I'm Art Vandelay, Exports and imports. Yeah, yeah. He's just pretending to have a job. And they're like, poor thing. But. But you notice that the language really ramps up as these chapters go on.

[B]

I don't mean to dwell on it, but, I mean, his job is a. It's not just a cynic here, right? I mean, he does real work for the law firm, but.

[A]

Okay, so my.

[B]

But he's not dependent on his job. If he lost it.

[A]

My understanding of what's going on is he is a gentleman, and gentlemen do not work. And being a lawyer is one of the few professions you can be. So he's like, technically a lawyer. He's probably, like, kind of a junior partner and just gets paid to be. But doesn't actually really do much of anything.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

We don't actually.

[B]

Doesn't have a heavy caseload.

[A]

No, he doesn't have any case. We don't see him doing anything. Thing.

[B]

Well, he convinces, you know, he takes counters not to get divorce. Yeah, like that. I know, man. Really some heavy lifting right there.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[B]

That would be hilarious. Yeah, I'll. I'll bill you later. You'll get an invoice from me.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, lawyers, okay. But this whole, like, I fear I'm going to be imprisoned in my future life, the language here is ramping up quite a bit. So the more that he's with her.

[B]

Her.

[A]

He comes away each time affected. Here we go. The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth. And there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. So first he was a hunted animal who was caught. Then he's in prison. Now he's like, I. I taste ashes in my mouth and I'm being buried alive. This is.

[B]

That was a great. I wrote that in my commonplace book. What was that? The. The usual. Tasted like cinders in his mouth. Mouth.

[A]

So good. So good. Now, the interesting thing here is that. So she sends him that note and he flees. He flees, just like she fled from Beaufort. I thought that was really interesting. Okay, so they talk about the new lawn tennis We've already talked about that. All right. So he gets over there to Florida and they're all talking about Ellen. And there's an interesting conversation with Mrs. Wellen about how Europeans think Americans are pro divorce and eat dinner at 2 o'. Clock. And so there's just this Europe and America don't understand each other. And then he talks, she talks about how, like Ellen seems like she was just doomed as a child. Like poor Ellen. What's. What's going to happen to her? And so he's looking at Mrs. Well and I think we're going to get some insight here onto the nature of innocence. Like what is this age of innocence we're in? So let's take a look at this passage. So she thinks, poor Ellen. She says, poor Ellen. She always was a wayward child. I wonder what her fate will be. Well, we've all contrived to make it. He felt like answering, if you'd all of you rather she should be Beaufort's mistress and some decent fellow's wife. He's certainly gone the right way about doubted. He wondered what Mrs. Wellen would have said if he had uttered those words instead of merely thinking them. He could picture the sudden decomposure of her firm, placid features to which a lifelong mastery over trifles had given an air of factious authority. Traces still lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her daughters. And he asked himself if May's face was doomed to thicken into the same middle aged in this image of invincible innocence. Ah, no, he did not want me to have that kind of innocence. The innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience. And then Right after that, Mrs. Wellen says, I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything. I don't want this unpleasantness. And she said we were upset that our girls could even know such a thing was possible. So I think we're seeing that innocence is equated with ignorance.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, he contrasted. He contrasts innocence and imagination.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Rather than innocence and guilt or innocence and disillusionment or something like that.

[A]

I'm gonna stay innocent. I don't want to know. And we see that he's very much being constrained by conventions. So this is where he asks May to get married and lent. We already talked about that. And her response is very conventional. It's just not done. But then she. She comes so close to guessing and he has a heart attack. She says, is there someone else? And he really starts to panic. And then he realizes she's talking about the married woman he had been involved with.

[B]

Yeah. Mae is in some ways a more observant character than I originally would have credited her with being, I suppose.

[A]

Right. So Countess Elizabeth.

[B]

And again, I think. I think it's good taste on Wharton's part because it would have been really easy just to make May frankly stupid. She's not that. I think she has a bit more. She gives her a bit more dignity.

[A]

And I don't think it's going to be America versus Europe and America. It's not going to be like, you know, these kind of paper thin cardboard contracts.

[B]

Oh, no.

[A]

And May and Ellen, it's the same thing. So one of the things I think that's interesting here is that Countess Olenska is kind of this, you know, experienced married woman, woman of the world, bohemian. And yet she has this innocence about her he keeps figuring out. Like she. She's just very innocent. Like, I'm not doing anything wrong. Why would anyone think I'm doing anything wrong?

[B]

She thinks that she goes into life with the expectation that most people behave with the same kind of. I won't say purity, but I guess the same candor that she does and is frustrated repeatedly to find that that is not the case. But never changes her perspective accordingly.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Is that fair?

[A]

I think. Oh, I think that's completely fair. And then May, on the other hand, on the surface is very little Miss Innocent. Right. But then this is not an innocent thing to not just allude to, but to be directly speaking about her fiance's former lover. That. Absolutely. Because remember, he keeps talking about how the pretense is we're going to. Every man has a past and he pretends he doesn't have a past. And the girl acts like she doesn't know about it. And that's the pretense all these marriages are under. And she has broken that pretense. And he's actually glad that she does. And he respects her for. And he feels like for a moment there, there they can have a real relationship. And they have broken out of this pretense. And she says, don't give her up for me. And he says, you've completely misunderstood. There's nothing going on with that woman. And for he gets really excited only then to see her put the facade of innocence back up over her face at the end of the conversation. And he feels disappointed. He feels like we almost had a real moment. We could have been real with each other. And then you just went right back to the pretense. All right. Chapter 27. Mrs. Archer declares that May is her ideal, not the Countess Olenska. May is an ideal. Again, so much attention to the Countess's dress. She's dressing foreign. She doesn't dress like the other people. M. We see Mrs. Mingot here and. And again. And she's bohemian, but only so far. She also thinks it's ridiculous for Ellen to want to be divorced.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. She surprises me as well, that. That minor character that I had entirely forgotten.

[A]

So I think the idea is this culture, this society, has room for sort of a safe bohemianism. Like, you know, you can dress up every society.

[B]

Well, any society worth its salt can afford a few eccentrics. Unless it's utterly brittle and decayed.

[A]

Right. But her eccentricity doesn't threaten any real social.

[B]

Well, no, because she's an old woman.

[A]

Right. She's right. So, you know, they would see it as. Any divorce threatens all marriages. And. And so, you know, it's one thing to invite artists to your house who maybe are a little shabby or even to live in a shabby part of town. It's another thing to open the. The floodgates of divorce to. To society. So Mrs. Mingot's a sort of safe bohemian. And obviously, yes, she's older, but she. I think she'd been considered safer even when she was younger. But she does say it's really a shame Ellen's life is finished.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that startles him. I think it startled us too. She also says that weird thing. Why in the world didn't you marry my little Ellen? I think she can see that they would have been.

[B]

She's perceptive. Yeah.

[A]

Then, of course, Ellen comes in and. And he. He very abruptly changes the subject when Mrs. Mingo says. Hey. What? I was just.

[B]

We were just talking about you. Of course, you.

[A]

So she's going out with Mrs. To Mrs. Lemuel Struthers. He feels jealous again. He goes to her house, very bohemian in crowd. And of course, the Marchioness Manson has come. Her. Her aunt, who's her surrogate mother. And this character is hilarious to me. She's, like, in all the crackpot stuff. So she's hanging on to a spiritualist and, like one of these commune guys.

[B]

Yeah, like some sort of transcendentalist or theosophist or something like that.

[A]

Yes. Yes.

[B]

What was it? The. The Society for Deeper of Love.

[A]

Community.

[B]

Community, yeah. Tell me you're a cult leader without telling me that you're a cult leader.

[A]

So, yeah, that was definitely based on a lot of those kinds of, like, hippie communes. Christian socialism.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Transcendentalist stuff. Yeah. So she's. She's full bohemian, and she wants to marry this guy because she just apparently can't stop getting married. And so the guys are saying, well, we're going to really miss her when she moves. Our corner has been brighter with her here. And she says, oh, well, she's moving away, but she's not going to stop having poetry and art. That's. That's the breath of life to her. And then all the other people leave, and she has a. The Marchioness has a very intense conversation with Archer and says the Count wants her back and she's going to go back. I'm going to have her go back to her husband, and that's the best thing. And he argues with her, like, are you a messenger from hell that you want to come and drag her back to hell? And she says, and I wondered. Okay, so I wondered if she. If this wasn't a parallel to F at the beginning. She's the messenger of Mephistopheles.

[B]

That's the only time we've seen that kind of image or language since the beginning.

[A]

I think then the picture there would be Ellen torn between the Count and Nulin, and. And he's saying, you would put her back in hell. And she says, yes, but she would get attention and celebrity and Jewel.

[B]

It would be hell, you know?

[A]

Yeah. Like she. She could. An admirer. She could just have this amazing life. And of course, he thinks for a minute, because he just doesn't know her, he thinks, okay, she's going to do it. She's going to sell her soul just like, you know, f. For this material gain. But. But she's not. Okay. And that's where she gets the reference with the. Oh, so you prefer that to her going back. And she points to Bert's flowers and his obvious signal that he would be interested in an amorous affair. It's interesting because that parallels. That doubles what he said earlier about the divorce, that you would rather her be in an adulterous affair with Buford than to. To marry some nice fellow. And now the Marchioness has exactly said exactly the same thing. All right, let's see. Getting. Okay, get. Coming up to the end. All right, chapter 18. All right. We talked about why she's so mad about the flowers. Everybody leaves and they have an intense conversation, and he reveals his feelings. Okay. And. And she shuts him down.

[B]

This scene, it, I think, was about as close to this book because. Comes to becoming a melodrama.

[A]

But it doesn't cross the line.

[B]

No, no. And again, I think she's.

[A]

Because he doesn't actually try to seduce her. Maybe she's gonna win her over.

[B]

He's too dispassionate a narrator for that to happen again.

[A]

Like Jane Austen.

[B]

But. Yeah, like you could imagine. Yeah. This. This being. This seeming overwritten by a lesser writer.

[A]

Right. So we don't have long drawn out declarations of love. It's very subtle. And then she's like. Like, what's the point of talking about this? It can never happen. And he's. What do you mean? You're not married? You're about to get a divorce. I'm not married. And she's like, you convinced me to stay married. I did this for you. And there's no way you're not going to marry May. So this is a ridiculous. There's no universe. And he even later says, I don't know what I thought was going to happen. Like there. She's right. There's no universe in which we're going to be together. But he does say, I. I loved you. And then he kisses her, and she kisses him back. But then. And he's like, that's it. I'm not going to marry May. And she says, it is too late. It's too late. So they talk about temptation here. So again, back to that f. Language. Let's see. She's talking him here about how she didn't know that he had championed her cause behind the scenes. Means. She found that out, of course, that that made her turn her affections to him. Just imagine, she said, how stupid. Actually, why don't you hear? You read this paragraph. You haven't read anything in a while.

[B]

Just imagine, she said, how stupid and unobservant I was. I knew nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day. New York simply meant peace and freedom to me. It was coming home. And I was so happy at being among my own people that everyone I met seemed kind and good and glad to see me. But from the beginning, she continued, I felt there was no one as kind as you, no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and unnecessary. The very good people didn't convince me. I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew. You understood. You had felt the world outside tugging at one with all his golden hands. And yet you hated the things it asks of one. 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.

[A]

All right. And then he says, oh, oh, is Beaufort gonna replace me? And she's like, don't. Don't be ridiculous.

[B]

Yeah, I know he's.

[A]

But he feels. He feels jealous.

[B]

That was the scene. Sorry, I was confusing two scenes of the book. I said said earlier I had said he comes close to losing his cool. That was the scene I was actually thinking of, though.

[A]

Yeah. And if he could have got her in his arms again, he might have swept away her arguments. But she still held him at a distance by something inscrutably aloof in her look and attitude and by his own odd sense of her sincerity. So he's begging her at the end, and she says, no, no, I'm making this sacrifice. I already did that. I made the sacrifice not to get divorced because of you and me, May. And now you're gonna. You know, I'm not gonna stand in the way of this marriage. So he says no. And then the servant comes in with a telegram. It's from May. Thank you for convincing my parents to let us get married early. And I've already. I've already sent it to him. And he goes home and sees it and crumples it up and then asks his sister about the calendar and realizes he's going to be married in a month. And that ends. Oh, he laughs when she says it's a month. And he just. He's laughing thing. Talk about an ambiguous response. And that ends it. So book two, his wedding. And it's described as a hundred percent conventional. Every moment. This is what every bridegroom has done. So he has a completely conventional wedding. And he's looking for Ellen the whole time. But he goes through it. But he's thinking some very interesting things. The things. He's thinking this at his wedding. He's thinking, this is a performance. I'm a performer. Everybody's watching this, this play out, this performance. This is all pretense. The things that had filled his day seem now like a nursery parody of life. This is big, okay? It's not real. Or like the wrangles of a medieval schoolman over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood. A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding present should be shown had darkened the last hours before the wedding. And it seemed inconceivable to Archer that grown up people should. Should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles. And that the matter should have been decided in the negative by Mrs. Welland saying with indignant tears, I should as soon Turn the reporters loose in my house. Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with worldwide significance against. And all the while, I suppose, he thought real people were living somewhere and real things happening to them. And then that thought gets. Gets interrupted with, they're here. They're here.

[B]

That's one of those rare reflections that almost kind of makes you feel sorry for him. It's like he realizes he's not a real person. Yeah, yeah. That he's. He's a.

[A]

And all his characters. Not real.

[B]

Okay. Bit of T.S. eliot, kind of a hollow man.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah. Yes. Written about a very similar time period. Okay.

[B]

Actually, yeah. The wasteland in this book must have been published within a year or two of each other.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. So I love that all the details, the flowers are conventional. The music is conventional. Ev. Everything is a convention. He's playing a part. And he realizes this. All right. So they get married. May was still in look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to compare notes with him as to the incidents of the wedding and discussing them as impartially as a bridesmaid taking it all over with an usher. At first, Archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an inward tremor. But her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil unawareness. She was alone for the first time with her husband, but her husband was only the charming comrade of yesterday. So nothing, nothing changes. He even says about her face that her. She looked representing a type rather than a person. She might have chosen to pose for Civic virtue or a Greek goddess.

[B]

Yeah. It's like the honeymoon phases over with. On the honeymoon. It's really sad. Yeah.

[A]

Because he looks over and thinks it's looking at a stranger and a type.

[B]

Darling, you look like such a type today.

[A]

And then he hears the words Ellen. He has the word Ellen, the syllables Ellen, and, you know, feels a frisson pass over him, which continues to happen through all the chapters. Actors. And then, of course, he ends up having his wedding.

[B]

Excellent use of the word.

[A]

Thank you. Thank you. He ends up having his wedding night in the house where he met Ellen.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. That's. That's almost hitting you over the head right there.

[A]

A little bit.

[B]

A little bit.

[A]

A little bit. Then they travel abroad. We see more of things about the Americans and the English don't understand each other. She is. May is described as a Diana. Again, she's more Diana like than Ever. We already talked about that. She doesn't much like traveling. She just wants to go hiking. Here's another great paragraph. Okay, we're getting close to the end. I feel like this episode is so long. Read this part here that I've underlined.

[B]

Archer had reverted to all his old inherit inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free. And he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.

[A]

All right, so there's all this convention, right? He goes on to say, too, she became the tutel.

[B]

Tutelary.

[A]

Tutelary. Thank you.

[B]

It means protective.

[A]

She became the tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and references. So again, she's a type. And she represents all these old traditions and conventions. He had no fear of being oppressed by them. For his artistic and intellectual life would go on as it always had. Outside the dark domestic circle. And within it there would be nothing small or stifling. Coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the Oath. And when they had children, the vacant corners in both their lives would be filled. So remember, too, that when he says earlier, I wonder if my future life is going to be just living a conventional life with my wife and I'll have life.

[B]

This man's life consists mainly of vacant corners.

[A]

That's well said. But he does get his library. There's talk about clothes as armor, which is very interesting, too. Okay, and then we already talked about how on their honeymoon they meet that interesting guy and he started. Brought back to life, but she doesn't want anything to do with it. And then, chapter 21. Okay, we're at the end here. His views have completely changed. It is now a year and a half later, after they've gotten married. And he does not like the old. He doesn't want to go to Newport because that's what everybody does all the time.

[B]

He didn't even make it to sleep seven years before feeling the itch.

[A]

That's right. He. He feels completely constrained. She's playing the new sport of archery. And she wins the archery competition. Like the good Diana Sl. Artemis. That she is. And of course she did win the artery competition because she shot her arrow and she caught her man, who's ironically named Archer. So everything's stifling. He doesn't like it because everything about Newport is for show. His just like his wedding, everything's a performance sense and he thinks he's doing fine. Then he hears the name Ellen and he fears his heart jerk. We find out a lot more about Bert's money and he's been spending money extravagantly. May is again called Diana and. And Beaufort makes a comment about, oh, she won an archery competition, but that's the only kind of target she'll ever, ever hit. Archer felt irrationally angry. His host's contemptuous tribute to May's niceness was just what a husband should have wished to hear said of his wife. The fact that a coarse minded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another proof of her quality. Yet the words sent a faint shiver through his heart. What if niceness carried to that supreme degree were only a negation? The curtain dropped before an emptiness as he looked at me returning flushed and calm from her final bullseye he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that curtain. So she's the surface ideal, but he's not terribly interested. Then they go to visit Mrs. Minkot, only to find out Ellen is there. And he sent to go fetch her. And he has not seen her since they declared love for each other in that earlier scene, a year and a half earlier. He immediately remembers the scene in the theater of the guy kissing the ribbon. So that means he's thinking about their cheerful parting and he sees her from behind and he can't bring himself to go talk to her. He says, if she turns around, I'll go. And she doesn't. So he comes back and then May says something like maybe it would have been better for her if she had gone back to her husband. He says, I never heard you say something so cruel before.

[B]

Wow. Yeah.

[A]

So that's. That's very interesting.

[B]

That's the closest. I think that's the closest they've come. Really lead to an argument. Y Is that about right?

[A]

Yep. And so I want you to read these last two paragraphs here. Or just maybe this is the last paragraph. No, no, the last two. This closes out the chapter and I think gives us his head space here at the end.

[B]

The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of a curious reversal of mood. There was something about the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the Welland Atmosphere so, so charged with minute observances and exactions that always stole into his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks. I love that line.

[A]

Yeah. So good.

[B]

The perpetually renewed stacks of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next next, and each member of the household to all the others, made any less systematized and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. 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. If he wants to move out, I'll take the house. I mean, I was thinking the house, Gus. That sounds ideal. Yeah. But again, tyrannical clock.

[A]

He feels like everything he thought was real now feels unreal to him. So this is a very interesting place to leave them. I can't believe we went two hours on this episode and I was. I was actually worried we weren't gonna.

[B]

Have probably too much here. Yeah.

[A]

Thanks for hanging in there with us. Next week, we're going to finish this book and then in two weeks, Atlee will come on and we're going to discuss the Morton Scorsese film of the age and innocence. So you guys might want to check that film out out and join us for an interesting conversation about that and just in general about how to translate books into. Into film. Some people do it really well and some people don't. So we'll talk about all of that in two weeks time. Again, you can find [e-mail] you can find [e-mail] literary life. Also, just a reminder, we have a publishing house that we launched, cassiodoruspress.com go there to check out Dr. Baxter's book, why Literature Still Matters. And very soon we're going to be having an announcement about a second book book coming out. So make sure you sign up for the newsletter for Cassidor's Press as well. Stick around till the end. Mr. Banks has got a poem for us. And until then, keep crafting your literary life friends, because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast, brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more and keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[B]

Criterion by Hilaire Belloc. When you are mixed with many, I decry a single light, and judge the rest thereby. But when you are alone with me, why then I quite forget all women and all men.