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’
