Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1789]

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. There was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his table, sat marveling at the silent untiring activity with which her popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1789

Note

The farewell dinner as the tribe’s instrument of expulsion disguised as homage—‘eliminated from the tribe’ is the cold truth set against the warmth of the occasion. The series ‘retrieved… silenced… countenanced… irradiated’ charts the collective re-scripting of Ellen’s biography in real time.