The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why does Archer neglect to tell Countess Olenska of his engagement to May Welland,
despite the fact that May has instructed him to do so?

2. Why does Archer suddenly realize that marriage is "not the safe anchorage he had been
taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas"? (p. 35)

3. Why does Archer feel "oppressed" when contemplating the "factitious purity" of his
betrothed? (p. 37)

4. Why is Countess Olenska a threat to the social order that claims Archer as one of its kind?

5. Why is the neighborhood where Countess Olenska resides a "queer quarter for such a beauty
to settle in"? (p. 99)

6. To what is Archer referring when he thinks about his peers that "over many of them the
green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading"? (p. 103)

7. What does Archer mean when he thinks that "it was wonderful that...such depths of feeling
could coexist with such absence of imagination"? (p. 154)

8. How does Archer feel about May's talent with her bow and arrow? Why does he so often
feel "cheated...into momentary well-being"? (p. 173)

9. When Archer, at the request of Mrs. Mingott, follows the path to the shore to fetch Countess
Olenska, why does he say to himself, "If she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock
light I'll go back"? (p. 177)

10. What kind of "code" exists between Archer and May? How does it work? What is its
origin? (p. 219)

11. Why does May decide to host the farewell dinner for the Countess Olenska? Why does
Archer think of the dinner guests as "a band of dumb conspirators"? (p. 276)

12. Why does Archer walk away from a potential reunion with Countess Olenska?

For Further Reflection

1. Must social and emotional security be purchased with the sacrifice of another individual or
group?

2. Is it moral and honorable to protect others at the expense of one's happiness? Is duty to one's
community more important than duty to oneself?
INFORMATION TAKEN FROM PENGUIN CLASSICS

The Age of Innocence is a title both ironic and poignant: ironic because the "age" or period of
the novel, the late nineteenth century, teems with intolerance, collusion, and cynicism; poignant
because the only innocence lost is that of Newland Archer, the resolute gentleman whose insight
into the machinations of aristocratic life comes late. The novel proceeds from a working
assumption that is best summed up by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "Self-Reliance":
"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Edith
Wharton advances this belief with a vengeance, and it gives tragic depth to the life of Newland
Archer, a life that might otherwise seem pedestrian and unworthy of close examination.

Wharton presents Archer as a man of refined sensibilities, well educated, responsible, alert to
expectations. He works in an old law firm just enough to achieve an air of respectability and
importance. He attends opera, keeps up with the galleries in Europe, and thinks "few things
seemed...more awful than an offence against 'Taste' " (p. 12). At the same time, Archer is a harsh
judge of his fellow man. He attributes to Ned Winsett "the sterile bitterness of the still young
man who has tried and given up" (p. 101). He thinks Sillerton Jackson a gossip, Lawrence
Lefferts a philanderer, and Julius Beaufort a crude scoundrel of business. He is perhaps most
judgmental—and incorrect—about May Welland, the debutante who becomes his wife, deciding
not long after their marriage "that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an
unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion" (p. 243). Archer also
criticizes himself, but he is not altogether thorough, and he turns a blind eye to his central flaw,
failing to recognize his own immaturity, his own naïveté about the ways of his world. He fails to
see himself as a "dilettante" (p. 4) making claims to intellectual and moral superiority. But it is
this characteristic that makes Archer a true innocent. In many ways, he pictures himself standing
apart from his milieu, believing that he is somehow a free agent, less susceptible to the claims of
the social world.

Archer possesses one other characteristic that contributes largely to his innocence—imagination.
This is not to say that Archer's contemporaries lack this particular facility, but rather that his own
turns of fancy tend toward the untried and the unorthodox. Having an after-dinner cigar with
Sillerton Jackson, Archer declares that "women ought to be free—as free as we are" (p. 34). And
when Countess Olenska, the woman he loves, asks if she is to be his mistress, Archer says, "I
want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that—
won't exist" (p. 238). Archer is something of a dreamer, a romantic, and it is his story of lost love
that makes him, if not a hero, then a sympathetic Everyman. Archer's imagination allows him to
see beyond his perfect match with May Welland, his prestigious but inconsequential law
practice, and the formidable social strictures directed against the Countess Olenska. But
somehow the plots and intrigues of high society—of drawing room and library, of wife and
friends—escape him, and when Archer finally understands his life as being subject to powers
outside his control, it is too late. Is there a social conspiracy against Newland Archer? Is he
manipulated to do what his community wants without regard to his desires or happiness? Or is it
Archer's naïveté and his romantic preoccupations that entrap him? Is a man of affluence and
position a master of his own fate, or is he mastered by tradition, expectation, and prescribed
morality? These are just a few of the questions that The Age of Innocence raises.
Few things in a Wharton novel can be understood as strictly black or white, this or that. The
demands and consequences of duty are laid out before Archer clearly enough, but how he should
respond to them, and how we respond to him, is complicated by the possibilities of social
conspiracy and romantic fulfillment. The decisions that Archer makes concerning his life with
May Welland and a life with Countess Olenska speak to his sense of obdurate responsibility.
Archer's son, recounting his mother's words, says to Archer, "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. 293). Must security be purchased with sacrifice? Is it moral and honorable to protect
others at the expense of one's happiness? Or is Archer a puppet, incapable of claiming morality
or honor because his actions are forced upon him by the designs of others? Is duty to one's
community more important than duty to oneself? Can and should any society determine the right
course of action for an individual? In the end, if we as readers feel safe with Newland Archer, it
is because he upholds his obligations, his duty to wife, children, and society. He manages,
through strength or resignation, to keep things in order. We pity him as well.

ABOUT EDITH WHARTON

Edith WhartonEdith Wharton (1862-1937), born to a wealthy and fashionable

New York family, was raised and educated by governesses and tutors as the
family moved between houses in Paris, New York City, and Newport, Rhode
Island. She published her first book, a slim volume of poetry, at the age of
sixteen. Wharton's patriarchal and socially conservative family disregarded her
literary work, thinking it an inappropriate, even embarrassing, eccentricity.

Wharton married Boston banker Edward Robbins Wharton in 1885, but the
marriage was not a particularly happy one. Wharton moved to France in 1907
and the couple divorced in 1913. After publishing a number of stories in
popular magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly and Scribner's, she set out
to write serious fiction. Following the example of her friend and mentor, Henry James, Wharton
took up the novel of manners, chronicling the customs and beliefs of her social class. Over the
next forty years, she published eleven collections of stories and sixteen novels, including The
House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920), the last of which
won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. She also published works on travel and interior design.

In Paris during World War I, Wharton worked tirelessly as the head of the American Hostels for
Refugees and wrote of her experiences in Fighting France (1915). For her work during the war,
she was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. She filled her later years with the
company of artists and intellectuals, a coterie that, in addition to Henry James, included Jean
Cocteau and Sinclair Lewis, who dedicated Babbitt to Wharton. She was the first woman to be
elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and to receive an honorary doctorate of
letters from Yale University. Wharton died of a stroke in her home in France, having lived as an
expatriate for much of her life.