![]() ![]() But his happiness is destroyed by the arrival of her cousin, the intriguing Ellen Olenska – a woman estranged from her husband, who is escaping Europe and hoping to find peace in America. His fiancée, May Welland is anything a man could wish for: blonde, innocent, and well-bred New-Yorker. Newland Archer is described as “never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.” He reminds one a little of the aesthetes described by Oscar Wilde in The Portrait of Dorian Gray. “But, in the first place, New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that 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 terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.” Here’s an example from the opening chapter ![]() The perspective gives her satire an almost anthropological angle. ![]() But I had been unaware that the plot summary I knew had stripped the beauty and refinement away from a truly elegant novel.Įdith Wharton writes about the New York of the 1870s from the perspective of 1920s. It had infiltrated by osmosis, or perhaps by means of our overly Americanized culture. I have been aware of the plot of The Age of Innocence for a while. ![]()
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