Summary The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton Themes (Quotes, Context, Analysis, Scholars)
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Comparative and contextual study
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The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton Themes (Quotes, Context, Analysis, Scholars) for A* results.
Themes include:
- Love and Relationships
- Marriage
- Divorce
- Class
- Society
- Social Mobility
- Social Code
- Rumour/Gossip
- Family
- Europe
- Foreignness, Race, Immigration
- Innoc...
The Age of Innocence Themes
Love and Relationships
Love in General
o Singing “Faust” – Opera dealing with cursed love and loss of innocence (apt background for the
beginning of the story (p.3)
o About Beaufort – “He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had only
object in view in his pursuit of pretty women.” (p. 86)
Newland and May
o “It was only that afternoon that May Welland had let him guess that she ‘cared’” (p.6)
Courtship rituals work through unspoken understanding
o “The young man was sincerely but placidly in love.” (p.29)
o Kissing May is like “drinking at a cold spring” (p.88)
o Newland feels like he is dead because of the stagnancy and imprisonment of his situation and
wonders what would happen if May died “to die soon – and leave him free!” (p.178)
Horrible wish, foreshadowing.
o May reveals (without ever saying pregnant or baby) that she is pregnant (p.205)
She tells Newland that she told Ellen two weeks ago despite being uncertain, and as she says
this, “her blue eyes wet with victory” (p.206)
o Throughout their early marriage, May often encouraged Newland to go see Ellen or take her a
message, in the hopes that he would refuse and so when Newland considers May’s calculated
Europe trip that missed France entirely in the interests of time and her offer for him to visit Paris
alone, she was delighted when he replied – “We’ll stick together” (p.210)
Newland and Ellen
o Ellen describes how they played together as children: “You were a horrid boy, and kissed me
once behind a door; but it was your cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me, that I was
in love with.” (p.12)
o Archer “chose to call on her cousin without telling her” (p.44)
Newland is already making excuses for seeing Ellen without May’s knowledge, suggesting
that he feels guilty about it. On some level he recognises his attraction to her.
o He imagines May’s reaction if she was to call on Ellen – “What would she think if she found him
sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone in the dusk at a lady’s fireside?”
(p.45)
o When sending May her “lilies-of-the-valley” that he “found he had forgotten that morning”
(suggesting unfaithfulness) (p.51)
He sees yellow roses which “did not look like her – there was something too rich, too strong,
in their fiery beauty.” (p.51)
Yellow roses are associated variously with jealousy, infidelity and love that will not
last.
o The next day he tells May about the yellow flowers (which as he had anonymised the card could
not have otherwise be traced back to him) but not about visiting Ellen. This “gave the affair an air
of mystery that he disliked.” (p.52)
o Newland watches the hidden love playing out in “The Shaughraun” and finds it reminds him of
visiting and leaving Ellen Olenska when they spoke about divorce. (p.73)
o Newland is sitting with Ellen when she asks if the character in the play “will send her [his love
interest] a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?” (p.74)
Connects their lives to the romantic scene on stage and essentially putting them in the role of
lovers through allusion.
Newland thinks about how he has sent her roses twice – the readers only knew of one
occasion and so this suggests Newland is withholding key information from readers as well.
o Chapter 14 includes explicit flirting between Ellen and Newland
Ellen’s words hit Newland “like a temptation” and so he “moved away from the hearth”
(p.84)
, He imagines her “stealing up behind him” to hug his neck (p. 84)
o Structure of text conceals information about Newland and Ellen’s relationship – Newland
imagines Ellen hugging his neck, then Beaufort arrives and Ellen “shrank back” and stopped
holding his hand – first time reader is told they were holding hands (p. 84)
Like the affair of Gatsby and Daisy, it becomes more real and Newland is able to describe it
when it is prevented.
o About Beaufort – “He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had only
object in view in his pursuit of pretty women.” (p. 86)
o Newland tells Ellen that May thinks he loves another woman but he doesn’t “mean to marry
anyone else” but he does love another woman (p.104)
o He then sits next to her, taking her hand without the gloves (as if preparing to confess his
feelings) (p.104)
Ellen shuts this down: “don’t make love to me! Too many people have done that” (p.105)
o Ellen mourns that she can not be with him but he says they still can and “She gave him back all
his kiss” (p.106)
o But Ellen still shuts it down – “We’ve no right to lie to other people or to ourselves. We won’t
talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying May after this?” (p.106)
o Once married, having not seen Ellen, Newland considers her merely “the most plaintive and
poignant of a line of ghosts” (p.126)
o Newland asks for a “private room” at the inn with Ellen, considering that this is the site for a
“clandestine couple” to meet (his view of their relationship) (p.145)
o Newland to Ellen: “I’m of your making much more than you ever were of mine. I’m the man who
married one woman because another one told him to.” (p.147)
o Newland tells Ellen: “Each time you happen to me all over again.” (p.172)
o Ellen tells Newland “You ought not to have come today” and then “pressed her lips to his”
(p.173)
She withdraws when the carriage moves and a flash of light hits the carriage as it goes on.
o Ellen becomes a force of reality in their relationship, bluntly disrupting Newland’s delusions and
asking, “Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress since I can’t be your
wife?” (p.174)
o Newland considers why his affair with Mrs Thorley Rushworth was somewhat socially
acceptable when an affair with Ellen would not be.
He realises that then he was “a free man who was accountable to no one for his actions”
(p.183)
And that it is easier for a wife to deceive her husband as “A woman’s standard of
truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower” (p.183)
o Newland tells Ellen to meet him at the “Art Museum – in the Park” (p.185)
o There they talk and she tells him she can’t destroy her family – “destroy their lives, when they’ve
helped me to remake mine?” (p.187)
o Dallas asks Newland about Ellen – “Wasn’t she – once – your Fanny?” (p.213)
Times have changed and Dallas can now marry the person he wants, the outsider who he is
attracted to because she is an outsider.
o Dallas tells Newland about May: “She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would
be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.” (p.214)
o Newland, like Gatsby, is unable to reach the one he desires, but unlike Gatsby does not try
He stays where she lives and looks at the light from the dome of Mansart and “that golden
light became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived” (p.215) (Like Gatsby’s
green light)
o Newland chooses not to see Ellen – “It’s more real to me here than if I went up” (p.217)
Like how Nick notices that something about his presence makes Gatsby and Daisy feel more
real.
o Novel ends with Newland getting up and walking “back alone to his hotel” (p.217)
, Marriage
Failure of Marriage
o Mrs Mingott is always wearing a “miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott” yet he is never
mentioned (p.18)
General frailty of marriage
o Medora Manson points at the bouquet and asks if Archer “prefer[s] that” as “After all, marriage is
marriage…and my niece is still a wife…” (p.101)
Medora recognises the bouquet implicitly suggests an affair – while bouquets were
associated with rituals of courtship, this bouquet would have been considered scandalous
(even as an offering from an engaged man to his fiancée) – red roses signify passionate love
and knots of pansies state the unsaid.
o Even at Newland’s wedding to May he imagines Ellen is there, mistaking a lady “laughably
unlike” Ellen for her (p.113)
o Newland realised over the years that “it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as
long as it kept the dignity of a duty” (p.208)
o 'A divorced woman, however wronged, is an anathema in this world' - Orgel
Marriage as a trap
o 'Social stability must override individual desire in guiding mate selection, and, and those who
threaten to destabilise this must be eliminated from the tribe' – Quach
o “the little world [...] is hermetically sealed against contamination” - Blake Nevius.
o May’s engagement ring is “a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws” (p.19)
Sapphire represents truth and purity but here it is trapped – marriage traps them.
o Mrs. Mingott encourages Newland and May to marry soon – “don’t wait till the bubble’s off the
wine.” (p.20)
o Newland and May “rolled from one tribal doorstep to another” (p.43)
He left feeling that “he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped” (p.43)
o “but for the Countess’ arrival, he might have been, if not still a free man, at least a man less
irrevocably pledged.” (p.44)
o Medora Manson to Newland: “marriage is one long sacrifice” (p.127)
o Newland feels a “horror” when noticing May’s youth – “For what endless years this life will have
to go on!” (p.161)
o Mrs Manson Mingott told the supplicating Regina “Dallas” that her name “was Beaufort when he
covered you with jewels, and it’s got to stay Beaufort now that he’s covered you with shame.”
(p.164)
Newland considers this “awful evidence of the indissolubility of marriage” (p.168)
o Newland feels like he is dead because of the stagnancy and imprisonment of his situation and
wonders what would happen if May died “to die soon – and leave him free!” (p.178)
Horrible wish, foreshadowing.
Control in marriage
o "The only vigor shown by the male characters of 'The Age of Innocence' is in their domination of
the female." – Louis Auchincloss, 1962
o Women “were stifled by a culture that groomed them to be ornaments to their husbands rather
than active participants in the life around them." – Nina Baym, 2012
o About Lawrence Lefferts – “As became the high priest of form, he had formed a wife so
completely to his own convenience” (p.29)
Consequently, she is blind to her husband’s marital affairs.
o About Mrs VDL “the habit of a lifetime, and the attitude of her friends and relations, had led her
to consider Mr. van der Luyden’s least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance.” (p.34)
o Newland thinks of the “simple joy of possessorship” over May (p.52)
o Mrs Mingott dismisses Regina Beaufort to Ellen as “the wife of a scoundrel” but Ellen answers:
“so am I, and yet all my family want me to go back to him.” (p.181)
Ellen reasserts differences between husband and wife.
o Written shortly after 19th Amendment in America in 1920 granted (some) women the right to
vote.
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