Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [210]

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter’s engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents’ tent. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 210

Note

Wharton’s explicit statement of the anthropologist’s thesis — the social world as arbitrary signs, with the ‘savage bride’ simile making the pretended reluctance an actual rite. Every element of the reader’s analytic frame is here in the text itself.