Age of Innocence Flashcards
the Opera House was good at
‘keeping out the “new
people” whom New York was beginning to dread’
‘What was or was not “the thing” played a part as important in
Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago’
‘immense bouquet of
lillies-of-the-valley’
‘thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own
masculine irritation was mingle with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity’
which metaphor does Newland Archer describe the unreality of a women being pure and sexual?
‘miracle of fire and ice’
‘Archer entirely approved of family solidarity, and one of the qualities
he admired most in the Mingotts was their resolute championship of the few black sheep that their blameless stock had produced’
‘The Beaufort’s house was one of the few in New York that possessed a ball-room. […]
This undoubted superiority was felt to compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past’
‘An upper floor was dedicated to Newland, and
the two women squeezed themselves together in narrower quarters below’
‘silly business with
Mrs Rushworth’
‘Women ought to be free-
as free as we are’ […] making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences”
Lawrence Lefferts has
‘frequent love -affairs with other mens wives’
‘The New York of Newland Archer’s society was
a small and slippery pyramid’
how does Ellen describe the Duke?
‘I think he’s the dullest man I ever met’
‘Archer was proud of the glances turned on her,
and the simple joy of possessorship cleared away his underlying perplexities’
‘It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her to look forth on the world. But [..]
what if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness’
‘belief in the abysmal distinction between the women
one loved and respected and those one enjoyed- and pitied.’
‘when “such thing happened” it was
undoubtedly foolish of the man but somehow always criminal of the woman’
‘Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs Archers world lay
the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and “people who wrote”. […] They preferred to keep to themselves’
‘Mr Welland was a mild
and silent man, with no opinions but many habits’
‘[Beauforts] way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually
gave them a gave them […] a sense of invisibility, of non-existence’
‘He did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence
that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!’
‘Isn’t it you who made me give up divorcing-give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was,
how one must sacrifice one’s self to preserve the dignity of marriage … and to spare one’s family the publicity , the scandal’
‘All I feared was to bring notoriety,
scandal, on the family - on you and May’
‘you had felt the world outside tugging
at you with all its golden hands’
‘you hated happiness bought by
disloyalty and cruelty and indifference’
‘such radiance streaming from her that it
sent a faint warmth through his numbness’
‘there was no use trying to emancipate a wife
who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free’
‘but marriage is one
long sacrifice’
-Marchioness Manson
‘the pearl necklace which [Beaufort] had presented
to his wife on his return was magnificent as such expiatory offerings are apt to be’
what was Archers response to Beaufort saying ‘That’s the only kind of target she’ll ever hit’
‘irrationally angry’
‘the words sent a faint shiver through his heart’
‘May handling the reins and Archer
sitting at her side’
what was May’s reaction to Mrs Mingott asking about children?
how could this link to Wharton’s life?
‘colour flood to her face’
Wharton had a sexless marriage
‘the brief scene on the shore […] was
as close to him as the blood in his veins’
‘Professor Emerson Sillerton was a
thorn in the side of New port society’
the melancholy possibility of having to ‘kill time’ was a
vision that haunted her as the spectre of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist’
Mrs Welland
‘the longing was with him day and night, an incessant
undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten’
summer house had ‘a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow
and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim’
symbol of Archer and Ellens love
‘the parasol drew him
like a magnet: he was sure it was hers’
‘his whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and
passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man whom nothing was ever to happen’
‘they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition- somebody
else’s tradition - that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into another copy of another country’
‘we’re damnably dull. We’ve no character, no
colour, no variety’
‘all the strange weeds pushing
up between the ordered rows of social vegetables’
New York ‘never changed without
changing for the worse’
‘Once people had tasted of Mrs Struther’s easy Sunday hospitality, they were not
likely to sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted Shoe polish’
‘The disappearance fo the Beaufort’s would leave a considerable void in their
compact little circle; and those who were too ignorant or too careless to shudder at the moral catastrophe bewailed in advance the loss of the best ball room in New York’
‘It was Beaufort when he covered you with
jewels, and it’s got to stay Beaufort now that he’s covered you with shame’
‘the wife of a man who had done anything disgraceful in business had
only one idea: to efface herself, to disappear with him’
‘it did not hurt him half as much to tell May an untruth as to
see her trying to pretend that she had not detected him’
‘her eyes so blue that he wondered afterward
if they had shone on him through tears’
‘his wife’s dark blue
brougham (with the wedding varnish still on it) met Archer at the ferry’
‘(he was struck by the softness of her:
Poor Regina!’)
‘he kissed her palm as if he had
kissed a relic’
‘EACH TIME YOU
HAPPEN TO ME ALL OVER AGAIN’
‘her bows bumped against the piles of the slip with a violence that made the brougham
stagger, and flung Archer and Madame Olenska together.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is this.’
realities. The only reality to me is this.’
what is Ellens response to Archer’s ‘I want somehow to get away with you into a world where […] categories like that - won’t exist’
‘where is that country? Have you ever been there?’
‘you’ve never
been beyond’ [Archer thinks he’s beyond caring about reputation]
‘suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his
lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had frozen his tears’
“The real loneliness is living among all these
kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
“We can’t behave like people in
novels, though, can we?”
They all lived in a kind of hieroglyphics world. The real thing was never said or done or
even thought; but, only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.
She said 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.”
“I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that
-categories like that- won’t exist”
about the word “mistress”
He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and
sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.
With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull
association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
“its more real to me here
than if I went up”
“her blue eyes
wet with victory”
“those who were too ignorant or too careless to shudder at the moral catastrophe
bewailed in advance of the loss of the best ball-room in New York
“Something he knew he had missed.
The flower of life”
May has “the look of
representing a type rather than a person”
“New Opera House which should compete
in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals”
“a little more shoulder and bosom than
New York was accustomed to seeing’”
“He hated to think of May Welland’s being
exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless of the dictates of taste”
“this undoubted superiority was felt to
compensate for whatever was regreattable in the Beaufort past”
“What new life it was going to be, with
this whiteness, radiance, goodness at ones side”
Archers expectation of marriage
“laid a
fugitive pressure on her lips”
quotes that show Mrs Manson as a matriach
“everyone she cared to see came to her”
“she did not suffer from her geographic isolation”
quotes that show Mrs Manson as more progressive
about Beaufort contreverially inviting Mrs Struthers
“we need new blood and new money”
“great admiration for Julius Beaufort”
“absence of moral predujices”
“uncritical by the sense of their exaggerated
admiration, and by his secret satisfaction in it”
Archers satisfaction in Mrs Archer and Janey’s love for him
“Beaufort is a vulgar
man”
Mrs Archer
“once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe
anchorage he had been taught to think but a voyage on uncharted seas”
Lefferts had “frequent
love affairs with other men’s wives”
“New York has always been a
commercial community”
Mrs van der Luyden “struck Newland Archer as having been
rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy-life in death”
“the Van der Luydens were morbidly
sensitive to any criticism of thier secluded existence”
“Newland Archer rejected
the general verdict on her looks”
Ellen
Ellens house in bohemian quarter
“redeemed from the same appearance only by a little more paint about the window frame”
“at a stroke she had pricked the
van der luydens and they collapsed. He laughed and sacrificed them”
“a great wave of compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood before him as an exposed
and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate”
“he assisted in putting a gold fish in one visitors bed, dressed up
a burglar in the bath-room of a nervous aunt and saw in the small hours by joining in a pillow fight”
description of the weather on their wedding day
“lively spring wind full of dust”
May had the look of “representing a type
rather than a person”
“his hour with M Riviere had
put new air into his lungs”
description of pearl necklace bought for mrs beaufort to make up for affair
“expiatory offerings”
“magnificent”
professor emerson sillerton
“thorn in the side of Newport society”
“flout society in the face”
“if things go on at this
rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort’s bastards”
“How far they were from the
days when the legs of of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York’s only means of quick communications”
“no body was narrow minded enough to
rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her fathers past and her own origin”
“Dallas belonged body and
soul to the new generation”
