The Age of Innocence | Analysis

The old age of purity AnalysisThe geezerhood of Innocence is the fiction of Edith Whartons maturity in which she contem abodes the modern York of her y out(p)h, a beau monde this instant extinct and even then under threat. She was born in 1862 into the exclusive, entrench and discerniblely immutable humans of wealthy New York families. It was a populace of structured leisure, in which attendance at balls and dinners passed for occupation, in which the women devoted themselves to find and to the maintenance of family and system and the men kept a watchful eyeball on the financial underpinning that made the whole process possible. It was a self-satisfied and philistine world, al unmatchable(a) one with inflexible standards. These standards and every offences against it lies at the pump of The Age of Innocence the sexual passion between Newland Archer, a marry man, and Ellen Olenski, nonconformist and separated from her husband, threatens conventional to a greater exten ts and family security the financial irregularities of Julius Beaufort require that he and his wife be ejected from society before they corrupt its close to love integrities.The form of the novel allows its author to examine, with the wisdom of hindsight, a world which was in the process of breaking up when she was a girl, and which she herself rejected in any case.She wrote with the enclyclopedic k straight offledge of an insider with the accuracy and selective power of a fine novelist and the insularity of a highly intelligent social and historical observer.From the opening pages of the Age of Innocence, when Newland Archer attends the opera at the Academy of music in New York, we see through his eyes the stage and the cast of the watchword. Her selection of points of take in of the twain substitution figures, Newland and Ellen Olenski, with whom he falls fatally in love, nevertheless Newland is allowed a voice Ellen is always seen through his eyes and those of opposites, and is thus given over a detachment which makes her both slightly mysterious and strengthens her role as the novels catalyst. Newland, on the other hand, by existence given absolute rendering of legal opinion and action, is laid out for inspection and judgement he has the photo of exposure, while Ellen is left with privacy and silence. One is ultimately trapped by custom and circumstance, and the other a free spirit, harbinger of the future.As the novel begins, Newland is about to announce his engagement to may Welland, a conventional alliance with a beautiful girl from a suitable family. He loves her, but sees her, even at this early stage, with a clarity that is prescient when he had gone the brief round of her he re acidifyed discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were nevertheless an artificial product. May, indeed, can be seen as embodying in her personality all the rigidity and implacable self-righteousness of the society itself A KIND OF INN OCENCE, but a dangerous and eventually self-destructive innocence.The novel falls naturally into two halves, before and after the labor union, and it is in the second half that we see the characters of the book Newland and May mature and conflict.In the prototypic give way of the book, Newland is allowed to appear as somewhat innocent himself, more sophisticated of course than his finance because he is a man and has been permitted both emotional sticks (he has had a brief affair with a married woman) and an mental range not available at the time to a youthfulness woman, but nevertheless conditioned and relatively unquestioning. He views the New York of his bear and upbringing with a degree of affectionate impatience. He bows to the dictates of convention silver-backed napped with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair never appear in society without a flower in his buttonhole and accepts a world in which people move in an atmosphere of empty-headed implications and p ale delicacies. entirely at the same time, he is capable of reproof and rebellion, and it is in the second half of the novel that we see this capacity strike out into active life by his feelings for Ellen Olenski and his assessment and understanding of her state of affairs and what is that is being done to her by the tribe.Newlands TRAGEDY is that in the conk resort he is unable to obey his own instincts nurture triumphs over nature.May is a more interesting character than she immediately appears towards the end of the novel she appears to be anything but innocent. Ellen Olenski is her cousin, returned from Europe to the family fold after the collapse of a disasterous marriage to a philandering Polish count. May, initially, has been graciously kind to her and has encouraged Newlands friendly instigate and advice over Ellens complex and precarious situation should she divorce her husband? But in the months after the marriage the passion between Newland and Ellen has become appa rgonnt to May (even though they dont seem to meet very much in the novel). We never know quite how but must assume that May is more astute and obser avant-gardet than she has appeared. With stealthy adroitness, she moves to save her marriage and exclude the threat to social tranquility the outsider cannot be allowed to strike at the heart of all that is sacrosanct and must be ejected. The family tacitly adjacent ranks around May, and Ellen is put under subtle pressure to return to Europe. In the final scenes, Newland realizes what is happening but he is mute and helpless because thither is nothing he can do about it because to protest would be to betray himself and Ellen, who is the challenge and the threat to the status quo. She fascinates the men and repels the women by her cosmopolitanism, her grasp for literature and art, her cooly am apply view (almost flippant attitude) of the world of her childishness Im sure Im dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven, she says to Newland at their first meeting, and from that moment he is doomed. From the start, it appears she has decided to sustain him, judging by her impromptu and unconventional assumption that he will visit her. The whole situation is very ambiguous because we as the reader are not behind to her thoughts and true intentions.Ellens family stands behind her at first and as a last resort they solicit the help of the almost fossilized and aristocratic van der Leydens, to ensure her acceptance. But Ellen is fatally tainted although Ellen is the one who is the innocent troupe in her failed marriage (her husband, the Count had eyes with a lot of mop upes to lash = discard his eyes roamed and when he wasnt chasing the women he was collecting china china plate = mates and paying any cost for both meaning he was a womanizer with both women and men and paid them handsomely as well, she is polluted on that point are even unconfirmed rumors that she has consoled herself. The double st andards on which that society functioned becomes most apparent here a woman must be immaculate but a blind eye is turned on potent sexual indulgence. Initial sympathy eventually turns to suspicion and then to rejection as it is realized that she is not going to conform that she is no longer one of them due to her freedom of mind and of spirit that is unacceptable in a woman. Ellen emerges as the victor, escaping to the freedom of a more expansive and imaginative society. The price she pays is her relationship with Newland Archer.Newland, Ellen and May are products of their time whatever their instincts and their inclinations, they are cause to obey its dictation.The author singles our Sillerton Jackson and Lawrence Lefferts, authorities respectively on family and on form.The unexpected ending is neither tragic nor happy. Archer has no hinders towards being with Ellen now, but chooses to keep her as a memory comparable a relic in a small dim chapel. She is now significantly olde r and perhaps does not want to be confronted with candor. She is hardly a regret of his youth. Wharton frustrates the reader with this ending, and even with Archers and Ellens frustrated love.One of the central themes in The Age of Innocence is the struggle the individual has with his/her own desires and the dictates of the clean-living codes and manners of the group of which one belongs. Several times, both Archer and Ellen are expected to sacrifice their own desires for what the family and societal desires and expectations.A profound understanding of irony is experienced in reading The Age of Innocence. The hypocrisy present by so many characters in the book, not least by the character of society, leads one to believe that Wharton must have had a facetious undertone when giving the title of the book. Also, Whartons style, with so many details that have meaning, such as the raised eyebrow or a substantive glance, communicates that many details have crucial significance, whic h came well to pass in the filming of the novel as well.The problems with making a film from an quick novel are many films can use visual images to their advantage, whereas un-illustrated books cannot. The literal nuances in the textbook get lost when being translated to film. A world of meaning in a glance, carefully analyzed by Wharton in the text, gets lost in its translation to film. Details of fashion in the text go unnoticed by modern readers. Scorsese dealt with this issue by having a voice-over narrator, telling us the details about things that were necessary to comprehend the written report and the various scenes in it.Summary of wordsI read the introduction to the book and I think I saw it as a accent to the story but did not summarize the introduction itself. I used the information, at the back of my mind, while reading the book and taking notes. perhaps it would have been better not to read the introduction first, but only after reading the novel itself.Pamela Kni ghtsForms of Disembodiment The Social Subject in the Age of InnocenceThere were many several(predicate) subjects dealt with in this article, but the part of it which most appealed to me (and which I believe I have use for in other areas of study) was the overall psychological and anthropological analysis of the novel. The quote that sums it upAny observation about an individual character about his or her consciousness, emotions, body, history, or language also entangles us in the collective experience of the group, expressed in the welter of trifles, the matrix of social knowledge, within and out of which Whartons subjects are composed where and how that entanglement extends is one of the novels questions.Nancy BentleyHunting for the Real Wharton and the attainment of MannersThe quote that sums this article isThe gap between reputation and reality here is provocative, for it hints at the complexity of Whartons relation to her cultural context and to the changing concept of cul ture itself, the subject at the heart of her fiction. And the historical turn to primitivism.This article is an analysis of Whartons style and the authors relationship to her puzzle out and her use of symbolism.Lawrence S. Friedman The pic of Martin ScorseseThis article discusses the irony in the novel and Scorseses interpretation of Wharton in two scenes and focuses on the frustration of unconsummated desire.Brigitte PeuckerScorseses Age of Innocence Adaptation and IntermedialityThis article deals with film understood as a medium in which different representational systems specifically those of painting and writing both collide and replace one another, but are always supplemental to each other . This makes film a medium congenial to the artistic concerns of Wharton (who was not particularly positive to film), because her work is very visual and multi-layered both imaginistic and verbal. The adaptation of this work was particularly challenging because of the aspect of being m ulti-layered and it was difficult to translate one medium to another.