Character Analysis
The Age of Innocence might begin with a performance of Faust,but it's only when Ellen Olenska appears on the scene that you feel that the novel really begins.
Good Girl Gone Bad?
Granddaughter of Mrs. Manson Mingott, Ellen was raised by the flighty Marchioness Manson in Europe. She had an unconventional education, meaning that she learned to draw from the nude (gasp!) and played music with real musicians (the horror!). She married the fabulously wealthy Count Olenska, a Polish nobleman, at which point she should have lived happily ever after. But she did not— the Count turned out to be a boor, and rumor has it that she ran off with his secretary and lived with the secretary for a year before finding her way back to New York City.
Ellen's arrival causes quite a stir in New York society, and frankly, without Ellen, there wouldn't be much to talk about. Her very existence challenges everything society thinks is right and proper. With her European upbringing and her European ways, she threatens New York society with the prospect of change. We may think it’s weird that a European can signal change for New York— New York is new, right?— but New York is stodgy-town compared to Europe in the 1870s.
She crosses class lines by living in a bohemian neighborhood with artists and writers, and going to parties hosted by "common" women such as Mrs. Lemuel Struthers. She goes against everything that the society expects from a chaste woman: she ain’t no May Welland. She refuses to return to her husband, and there are rumors that she and Julius Beaufort might be lovers.
Different Strokes For Different Folks
For Newland Archer, Ellen's being different is precisely what attracts him. Her appeal, he reflects, is in her
mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities outside the daily run of experience. She had hardly ever said a word to him to produce this impression, but it was a part of her, either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something inherently dramatic, passionate, and unusual in herself. (13.7)
If May represents spiritual death and the status quo (see her "Character Analysis"), Ellen is life, passion, drama, change, the wide world out there. And when Ellen leaves his life for good, Newland goes back to the "daily run of experience," enveloped in May's bubble while the world passes him by.
Despite being different, Ellen helps Newland to see what is worth keeping in American culture. She associates being American with fairness, honesty, integrity, and a respect for others. It's the American side of Ellen that comes out when she refuses to run away with Newland— she doesn't want passion if passion means hurting May or her family. It's also the American side of Ellen that refuses to be bought by the Count's wealth. Funny how Ellen’s super-moralizing family seems perfectly fine with her going back to a scumbag husband, but hey! That’s the double standards of Little Old New York at play.