"The Age of Innocence" - Women's Struggle With Victorian Dogma

lthough one may think that residing comfortably near to the top of the Manhattan social pyramid guarantees inclusion, the protagonist of Edith Wharton’s Age Of Innocence, Newland Archer, comes to find himself on the psychological fringe despite his wealth and lofty familial status, isolated by the unique attitudes about life and love he develops after falling for Ellen Olenska. By presenting Newland’s emotional defeat at the end of the novel, despite his conscious attempt to diverge from societal rules, Wharton demonstrates the inescapability of high society and its nature as a hindrance to free thought.

What would one expect that two middle-aged women get together in the same place which is 25 years earlier, in Rome, possessing the same unforgettable history? All through Edith Wharton's two protagonists, Mrs. Alida Slade and Mrs. Grace Ansley in “Roman Fever”. These characters show the readers the confusions that they're facing up all through their life due to one another's misconception. Wharton unravels the complex relationship between women within the society to demonstrate how complicated it is for women to live up to stereotypical expectations in “Roman Fever”. Furthermore, it is noticeable that the idea of stereotypical middle-aged women, the concept of being ideal celebrity wives and the low dependency on mothers are scattered throughout Wharton’s short story.

Born in 1862, Edith Wharton Newbold Jones was brought up within the graceful, wealthy yet conservative, confining circle of New York society, which fostered sexual repression and prided itself on the innocence of its young girls. Edith Wharton herself was discouraged from expressing her emotions or developing her intellect which was supposed to be very unbecoming traits in a woman. This is the reason why she stressed in her fiction the need of growth, and has shown how painful and frustrating this process can be for a woman. This process of growth and development is revealed in her major works, Ethan Frome (1911), and Summer (1917) (Balakrishnan 1).

In her essay, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller discusses the state of marriage in America during the 1800‘s. She is a victim of her own knowledge, and is literally considered ugly because of her wisdom. She feels that if certain stereotypes can be broken down, women can have the respect of men intellectually, physically, and emotionally. She explains why some of the inequalities exist in marriages around her. Fuller feels that once women are accepted as equals, men and women will be able achieve a true love not yet known to the people of the world.

The Age of Innocence, written by Edith Wharton in 1920, is a novel about Newland Archer, set in New York in the 1870s. In the beginning of the novel, Newland is engaged to May Welland, however when her cousin Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, he begins to doubt who he really loves. Due to societal norms, Newland stays with May and never consummates his relationship with Ellen, despite their growing feelings towards each other. At the time of writing The Age of Innocence, Wharton was reading Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1914), a 14 volume work on anthropology, which consisted of myths, customs, and magical practices. This collection sparked interest for Wharton, potentially inspiring her to enlist many allusions to classical

Through choice of detail and diction, Edith Wharton justifies Frome’s adultery by juxtaposing the warm, charismatic nature of Mattie to the cold, barren one of Zeena. While his wife speaks in a “monotonous” (129) “flat whine” (32) her cousin’s “suffuse[s] him with joy” (44). Despite the fact that both women are frail and sickly, Zeena’s “puckered throat” and “protruding wrists” (47) disgusts Ethan, while Mattie is so “small and weak-looking that…it wr[i]ng[s] his heart” (106). Throughout the novel, Wharton’s choice of detail drastically contrasts the two women, one a vivacious, vigorous beauty, the other a walking, whining corpse. From their physical looks alone, Zeena is hard to love—sterile and dark—while Mattie—fertile and warm—is easy to. The author intentionally feeds this bias, allowing the readers to feel the same temptation that Frome has in the novel. However, he

Wharton's representation of the power of the social class of turn-of-the-century New York is expressed through the struggle between the individual and the collective force of society. The "rules" of society define each individual's place, and it is the group that reflects shared beliefs and dictates behavior. This dichotomy is multi-layered, reaching all the way down to the deep internal struggle of the individual human being. Lily's struggle with her individuality and the need to play by the rules causes her to commit social blunders and become an innocent victim of society's harsh cruelty.

In the beginning of the novel, Archer acts according to the molded product he is supposed to be. Archer was proud to be a New Yorker, someone in the upper class with refined taste and morals. This ended when Countess Olenska returned to New York, in want of a divorce with her husband in Europe. The New York family wanted to prevent this divorce because of propriety. They send Archer, a lawyer, to convince Ellen against it. As the story goes, Archer falls in love with Ellen because of her mysteriousness of unconventionality. By acting as the family’s messenger, Archer “sabotages his own quest”. Due to inconvenience, Archer wants to overthrow the principles he once lived by (Hadley 37). He suddenly realized “That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, is based primarily around the “Old” New York in the 1870s. She wrote the book around 1920s, in which she includes a love triangle which displays the character’s inability to make a decision. At first, the central character, Newland Archer, is in the midst of announcing his engagement to May when he gets introduced to her cousin Countess Olenska. When he is introduced to the Countess' problems, he views them as an annoyance. However, they prompt him to start looking at his own views and thinking in regards to May’s social set. He starts to view the cosmopolitan Ellen as an alternative to May due to her views and the way she doesn’t fear to say what she feels. His desire and view of Ellen raised many complications that shows innocence as more of an appearance than reality. In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton uses metaphors of sight to explore the relationship between innocence and how it appears to the average New Yorker during the Gilded Age.

Through Fitzgerald’s characterisation of the protagonists, the moral chaos within the society becomes evident, with a society of immense greed and wealth being born, revealing the dreaded materialistic trait within individuals in the society leading to drastic consequences. Similarly to the prodigious increase in wealth during the “roaring 20’s”, the luxurious society of New York revolves heavily around money, with “the rich getting richer and the poor getting children”. The materialistic trait is evident within the protagonist Daisy Buchanan - ‘a careless person”. We learn of Daisy’s materialistic behaviour through her decision to marry Tom Buchanan over Jay Gatsby “because she was

Edith Wharton wrote and set The House Of Mirth in the American Gilded Age. Wharton uses Lily Bart, the protagonist, as a symbol for a common unmarried women living in that time period. However, Wharton’s

Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize winning female author whose writing style was mainly affected by her aristocratic upbringing. Growing up Edith Wharton was friends with former President Theodore Roosevelt. The two were often compared and both were said to have been self-made ‘men’. Edith Wharton’s novels were often critically acclaimed until Ethan Frome was published. The novel was said to be cruel and violent by critics and casual readers. In my opinion, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a great book that reveals the harsh realities of failed relationships hanging on by a thread combined with the struggle of being poverty stricken. For my original piece, I will write a poem about Edith Wharton’s failed marriage that lasted 28 years, as if I were Edith Wharton after her divorce from Edward Wharton. I chose to do a report on Edith Wharton because she was a female writer that believed women were just as capable as men during a time when men were seen as superior in every aspect to women, and also because she achieved much more than most male writers of her time. I believe Edith Wharton’s aristocratic upbringing had the main effect on her writing style.

In twenty-century, women become more independent in the society. According to A Century of Women, Deborah Felder analyzes the history of women have their own rights through history. The book talks about the suffrage and events in women history. The book divides each chapter decades-by-decades basis, which gives clear information to readers to understand the events from the history. I chose 1917 through 1920, because those are the time when women started to have their right to vote.

Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist from the 1920s, takes us through the interesting and yet melodramatic lives of Jakes Barnes and his group of friends, as they travel through Europe. Though their lives seem quite simplistic, the group of friends are all survivors of World War 1, giving them each different aspects of vulnerability and desire for the one female character, Lady Brett Ashley. The dominant and taboo woman of the story creates drama throughout the book, something that seems to give her the most power in the story. Hemingway transforms Lady brett Ashley’s susceptibilities as a woman into the most strikingly influential role in the book. Between Brett’s charismatic ways with men, her maternal influence, and her sense of independence,

In 1878, Henry James wrote, Daisy Miller, a novella about a young American girl and her travels in Europe. Daisy Miller is a complex short story with many underlying themes such as appearance versus reality, knowledge versus innocence, outward action versus inward meditation, and Nature versus urbanity. In this short story, one is left to judge whether Daisy Miller, the main character of the story, is “a pretty American flirt” or a misunderstood, modern young woman. By probing into the complexities and contradictions of Daisy’s character, it is obvious that Ms. Miller is merely a misunderstood young woman.