ered, while the society depicted in the film operates to stifle such flowering and to prevent love from flowering anywhere except where that society determines is right. The fact that the first true image from the film itself is of a plot of flowers from which a hand plucks one continues this irony, especially in tat the flowers are not real and the event takes place on stage in the middle of an opera. Indeed, the opera itself represents what all operas do in some degree--the overt expression of raw human emotion, again something that those in the audience for this performance would decry if they found it in their own family. The camera makes clear that there is a connection between such a flowering of emotion and the character of Newland Archer, for the camera moves from the stage to the flower in Archer's lapel.
Archer will indeed be the young man who will discover that he has feelings for a woman he should not and who will wrestle with this fact, ultimately losing to the po
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