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Bohemian Rhapsody
Lecture Seven
The Age of Innocence
TOPIC
‘For all his aspirations and fantasies, Newland Archer learns nothing of reality.’ Comment on the ways in which this view bears out in the novel.
Bohemian Rhapsody Lecture Seven The Age of Innocence TOPIC For - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Bohemian Rhapsody Lecture Seven The Age of Innocence TOPIC For - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Bohemian Rhapsody Lecture Seven The Age of Innocence TOPIC For all his aspirations and fantasies, Newland Archer learns nothing of reality. Comment on the ways in which this view bears out in the novel. A R C H E R S Q U E S T F
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MATURITY
A R C H E R ’ S Q U E S T F O R
B E G I N S W I T H I N T E N S E D I S S A T I S F A C T I O N SLIDE 4
POWERFUL ENGINE
H E RECO G N IS ES T HE OF O L D N EW YO RK AND ITS COLD, ‘BURIED’ EXISTENCE SLIDE 5
UNIFORMITY
PATTERNS
CONFORMITY
BROWNSTONE
H E T H U S T R I E S T O B R E A K F R O M I T S SLIDE 6
NOVELS
W E C A N ’ T B E H AV E L I K E P E O P L E I N WH Y CAN’ T YOU AND I STR IKE OUT F OR OUR SE LVE S? SLIDE 7
It would be unfair to say that Archer will learn nothing of his
- reality. We see his growing
understanding of his social environment and his place. Yet, his dilemma does bring him further from accepting his reality as he sinks deeper into his childish fantasies. He may well be a ‘failed Archer’.
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Archer’s Flame
✔ FREEDOM ✔ MYSTERY ✔ ADVENTURE ✔ PASSION
To him, Ellen comes to represent everything outside Old New York SLIDE 9 A W H O L E N E W W O R L D O F
EMOTION
‘thrill of a caress’ words ‘touched’ him ‘the blood rose’ ‘his spirits rose’ ‘heart beating insubordinately’ ‘magically created’
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VISIONS
R O M A N T I C
A S S I G N S O F I N N O C E N C E3
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On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding him—he could not have said why—of his leave-taking from Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier. WHEREIN THEN LAY THE RESEMBLANCE THAT MADE THE YOUNG MAN’S HEART BEAT WITH A KIND OF RETROSPECTIVE EXCITEMENT?
THE INTRUSIVE NARRATOR SLIDE 12
client lawyer
AND SEPARATING AFTER A TALK’ ‘THEY WERE
Narrator
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felt
imagined thought
HE HE HE
Archer’s
DELUSIONS
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For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck. While he waited, soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come, his eyes mechanically received the image
- f... Julius Beaufort.
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FANTASY
REAL LIFE
I S T H I S T H E I S T H I S J U S T
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My Hero!
An important part of this fantasy world is the conviction that Olenska is necessarily a helpless ‘damsel in distress’; Archer MISREADS her as such, despite her inherent independence and her resistance to the code - EMILY J ORLANDO.
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The conditions from which she had fled were intolerable, past speaking of, past believing: she was young, she was frightened, she was desperate—what more natural than that she should be grateful to her rescuer? He felt himself drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her dumbly- confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing her.
4
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imagination
A R C H E R ’ SV I C T I M
TRAGIC PITIFUL
VULNERABLE
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HERO
R O M A N T I C
E L L E N ‘ A T [ H I S ] M E R C Y ’ A R C H E R A S SLIDE 20
LITERARY
C O N C E P T I O N O F L I F E A R C H E R ’ S SLIDE 21
Literary Allusions
Alphonse Daudet Dante Rossetti Emily Dickinson Robert Browning
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IDEAL
A P U R S U I T O F T H E B E A U T Y O V E R R E A L I S M SLIDE 23
breathed
suggests that it is only ‘in books’ that Archer finds life or what he wants from life. Archer’s reality is no reality at all: it is surreal, imagined, ‘haunting’, ‘enchanted’ and filled with ‘passions’, ‘tenderness’. Reality is ‘the face of Ellen’. THE WORD 5
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a
He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions. All through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen Olenska (Ch 15).
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E N C H A N T E D
PAGES
A L L T H R O U G H T H E N I G H T H E P U R S U E D T H R O U G H T H O S E T H E V I S I O N O F A W O M A N W H O H A D T H E F A C E O F E L L E N O L E N S K A SLIDE 26
Warning
Signs Signs
XIV-XVII
wharton`s narrator, ned winsett, mrs mingott, mrs archer, medora manson
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Here was the truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged to him; and he, who fancied himself so scornful of arbitrary restraints, had been afraid to break away from his desk because of what people might think of his stealing a holiday!
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Ned Winsett
AS CHARACTER FOIL
‘down and out’ ironic name? literary aspirations
‘abandoned his real calling’
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RELINQ U I SH H I S
DESIRES
A C C E P T H I S
REALITY
THE ROLE OF THE NARRATORFOREWA R N O F
FAILURE
6
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AKRASIA
ACTING AGAINST YOUR OWN WISDOM YOU ARE WRONG AND YOU KNOW IT
heart
OR
OVERhead
OVER SLIDE 31
pursued
HIS ‘UNREALITY’
vision
sanctuary fire
thought
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...he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions.
7
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HERO HEROINE
CONTINUING TO MISREAD ELLEN AS HIS OUR REFUSES AN ‘AWAKENING’ WHO TREMBLES AND CRIES ‘LIKE A CHILD’ WHEN IN FACT ARCHER IS SEEN AS THE CHILD. SLIDE 34
ellen’s
wisdom & maturity
“I shan’t be lonely now.’ ‘how stupid and unobservant I was!’ ‘I knew nothing of all this till...’
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8
“Your vision of you and me together?” She burst into a sudden hard laugh. “We’ve no right to lie to... ourselves.”
Ellen’s
REJECTION
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a
As we infer from the use of high-modality verbs, it is Ellen who realises how one ‘must’ and ‘mustn’t’ and ‘had to’: she understands one’s obligation to society. Ellen has learned her lesson; she has accepted ‘reality’.
sacrifice
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NOT AT VISIONS
We’ll look but at realities.
Archer denies his fate up to the very end: ‘I don’t know what you mean by realities.’
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Reality
May and Archer will be married before Easter. Will he ‘submit’?
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...this piece of fiction is an urgent, encouraging appeal for its readers to abandon unrealizable fantasies for the actual, deep pleasures that “real life” can afford. Newland Archer is Wharton’s quintessentially American hero... [who] can learn about himself and his native land only an encounter with the perversions of ancient European civilizations - Ellen - can.
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q
The End