How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done. (2.23)
Archer's duty to protect his fiancé's family's good name is implicitly understood by everyone. They don't even have to talk about it; they just know.
Quote #2
In the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits were exchanged. The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such matters […] (4.1)
Archer and May undergo a series of visits following their engagement. Such visits emphasize how much a part of New York society they are.
Quote #3
"I hear she means to get a divorce," said Janey blindly.
"I hope she will!" Archer exclaimed.
The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the Archer dining room. (5.49-51)
Marriage is a duty that is unquestioned in New York society, so the word "divorce" has about the same effect as uttering an obscenity. Maybe they called it the 'd-word.'
Quote #4
"[…] But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands— and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. […]" (18.98)
So, yes, there are a lot of duties that seem ridiculous (like all those bridal visits). But the duty to not hurt a human being, the duty to keep your promises, the duty to care about your family— these are all good things, no?
Quote #5
"…if it's not worthwhile to have given up, to have missed things, so that others may be saved from disillusionment and misery— then everything I came home for, everything that made my other life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took account of them— all these things are a sham or a dream." (24.25)
Archer's sense of duty is attractive to Ellen Olenska. She wants him to keep hold of it, even when he wants to throw it away in order to be with her.
Quote #6
It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquilized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her faltering showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. (25.2)
Archer and Ellen try to find compromises that allow them to have their cake and eat it too— to fulfill their duty and to maintain their relationship at the same time. Ultimately, both realize that there are no such compromises.
Quote #7
"[…] You're so unprejudiced about some things, so used, as you say, to looking at the Gorgon, that I don't know why you're afraid to face our case, and see it as it really is— unless you think the sacrifice is not worth making." (31.81)
Ellen called her previous life with the corrupt Count as "looking at the Gorgon." With the Count Ellen observed some of the horrible things people do. Archer seems to suggest that their love affair can't be as bad as all the awful things she witnessed in her previous life, and that it is worth sacrificing duty for love.
Quote #8
As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind, Archer felt like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp […] a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault. (33.43)
Archer finds it difficult to sacrifice his love when he feels all of his social duties keep him a prisoner.
Quote #9
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen. (34.26)
Twenty-six years later, an older Archer seems to have accepted the fact that he is an old-fashioned creature of duty who would never leave his wife. It doesn’t matter how much he loved another woman.
Quote #10
"The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder— the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?" (34.33)
Archer considers his son Dallas's attitude: Archer grew up in a time when he had to sacrifice love for duty, but Dallas's generation seems to believe that everything is possible and that sacrifice isn't necessary. But does liberty quash passion? Does love need to be impossible in order to be passionate?