Silveryjessica’s Comments (group member since Aug 20, 2015)

Silveryjessica’s comments from the Classics Without All the Class group.

My name is Jessica.
My favorite beverage is horchata, but I don't drink it often. For everyday, a nice selzer.
PIE.
I am from NJ. We never, ever, ever say "Joisey". Ever.

I know this discussion is a few years old, but I just came upon it and wanted to add my two cents. I think most of the conversation has been insightful and interesting, but as some of the others here have said, I think it is a mistake to categorize Newland as a "coward". In today's world, by today's standards, I would be willing to consider his actions as "cowardly", but in 1870s New York, he was trapped. I am not necessarily a Newland defender, but he isn't a villain. If anything, he is to be commended for staying with May. Deserting her after learning she was pregnant would have been far more cowardly, given the standards of the day.

As far as ruining two women's lives, how can you lay that at his feet? May is described numerous times as being the capable of seeing only what she wanted to ("...hard bright blindness..."). She lived in exactly the world she wanted to. She wasn't unaware of his passion for Ellen, and she gave him opportunity to act upon it. She never stopped them, until she suspected she was pregnant, and then she acted forcefully to remove Ellen from the scene.

Ellen cautioned Newland several times that he was not suited for infidelity and duplicity, and removed herself from his orbit intentionally several times out of consideration for May, the family and for Newland's honor, even if Newland didn't appreciate it at the time. She could have gone back to Europe, to her husband or not to her husband, but she didn't, by her own choice, preferring to be peripherally within Newland's world, until, again, May delivered the (premature!) news she was pregnant, whereupon Ellen did the right thing and left.

As far as his inaction at the end, again, you have to have an appreciation for the person he had become and the times that shaped him into that person. Societal strictures were rigid. He sounds ossified, and paralyzed, and frozen, and perhaps a little bitter. Throughout the book, he waits too long to act, and he waits for her to initiate things. She knows him better than he knows himself, and she makes it easy for him at the end, by lowering the blinds. He is too old and trapped. That's why his son Dallas goes to see her; a younger, more accepting and more modern version of himself, with similar passions and interests but of far more tolerant times. The perpetually modern Ellen meets a more modern Archer and perhaps a new relationship is formed. Don't forget, Dallas marries the daughter of Julius Beaufort and Annie Ring. Such a thing would have been unimaginable a generation previously. Fanny Beaufort is the daughter of two pariahs, and she is the one who initiates the overture to Ellen ("...Fanny made me swear to do three things while I was in Paris: get her the score of the last Debussy songs, go to the Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska. You know she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent her over from Buenos Ayres to the Assomption. Fanny hadn't any friends in Paris, and Madame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays. I believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort's. And she's our cousin, of course. So I rang her up this morning, before I went out, and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to see her."). Newland may just be overcome with so much revolution in his limited world.

It's very easy to judge Archer by today's standards, but you're doing the character and the book a disservice if you do, because it is 100% about the societal strictures of its time and the effects those have on one's life. I see Newland as a victim and a brave one. May's life would have been ruined if he had left her. His family and her family would have been disgraced. He sacrificed himself for honor.