Society Wasn’t Built In a Day: Societal Structure in The Age of Innocence
1493 Words6 Pages
"In metropolises it was 'not the thing' to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not 'the thing' played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem errors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago"-Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence
Societies, like houses and businesses are built a certain way. They each have a certain way of functioning and placing some people above others. Throughout history, there are plenty examples of this concept, the best of which lies within the feudal system of Medieval Europe. Feudalism started with the Lords, who owned the land on which their Vassals worked and lived. The vassals did not run the place, and were seen as part of the base of the societal structure that supported the Lords by working their land for them. The same idea is depicted in the society Edith Wharton writes of in The Age of Innocence. In The Age of Innocence, the highest rung on the ladder that is high New York society is made up of those who are very wealthy and have people who work for them, or have people looking up to them for advice and/or help. Those below the top of the ladder, while still having some people who look up to them, also have people above them who they need to go to for help and other services, and so on and so forth as you go down the ladder. Now, the higher someone is on that ladder, the more “pure” they must be in order to project a good image to those below them, meaning they must be
The strict adherence to the societal traditions demonstrates the rigidity of people’s lives in this very structured society. The numerous traditions and formalities in New York’s society alludes to how little breathing room the people have when it comes to keeping traditions. One of these traditions is the tradition that “every year on the fifteenth of October, Fifth Avenue opened its shutters, unrolled its carpets, and hung up its triple layer of window curtains. By the first of November this household
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent: A Critique of Late-Victorian Gender Roles
February 15, 1894, was the most interesting afternoon in the otherwise dreary history of Greenwich Observatory. Earlier in the day, Martial Bourdin, a skinny anarchist, traveled by train from Westminster to Greenwich, concealing a small bomb. As he ominously ambled through Greenwich Park, towards the Observatory, something happened - no one knows exactly what - and he blew most of himself to shreds. The British, who
THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY
James Burke Jules Bergman Isaac Asimov
NASA SP-482
THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY
James Burke Jules Bergman Isaac Asimov
Prepared by Langley Research Center
Scientific and Technical Information Branch
1985
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Washington, DC
Library of Congress Cataloging in PublicationData
Burke, James, 1936The impact of science on society. (NASA SP ; 482) Series of lectures given at a public lecture series sponsored by NASA and