Age Of Innocence Critics

Question 1

‘Archer locks May in the virginal

Answer 1

Script he criticises’
Knight

Question 2

Archer is a ‘product

Answer 2

Of convention’
Ammons

Question 3

‘Archers egocentric temperament, […] prevents

Answer 3

Him from seeing May as a woman instead of stereotype’
McDowell

Question 4

‘Ellen and Archers passion can exist only

Answer 4

As it is unconsummated, but unrealised’
Orgel

Question 5

‘Wharton wrote about tribes…the way they

Answer 5

Bend, mould, conform and even break individuals’
Eby

Question 6

“Wharton’s novel depicts a society that

Answer 6

is very much the antithesis of war-devastated Europe”

Question 7

“a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America

Answer 7

it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914”
Wharton

Question 8

the novel “explores how that world

Answer 8

shaped the behaviour […] and conflicts of the people who lived within it “
Shari Benstock

Question 9

Archer “he is profoundly uncomfortable

Answer 9

trying to live outside a society he has always known.”
Griffin Wolfe

Question 10

Archer is an “armchair

Answer 10

feminist”
Katherine Joslen

Question 11

society is fundamentally “resistant to

Answer 11

change”
Hutchinson

Question 12

“Countess Olenska and May Welland represent

Answer 12

the conflicting forces in Newland’s psyche”
Bussey

Question 13

“Women are characters of seemingly

Answer 13

decorative and fragile beauty”
Parkinson

Question 14

“A momentary escape in going back to my childish

Answer 14

memories of a long-vanished America”

Question 15

“Society itself rests

Answer 15

on false appearances”
Hopkins

Question 16

“Archer’s egocentric temperament […]

Answer 16

prevents him from seeing May as a woman instead of a stereotype”
McDowell

Question 17

“May outwits both Ellen and Newland by

Answer 17

using the most primitive and distinctively feminine tool: her womb and sexual priviledges as a wife”
Alegre

Question 18

what does Bussey saw about alternative endings for the novel?

Answer 18

early drafts of the novel saw Archer running away with Ellen but Wharton was unable to figure out a way to create happiness for them as they had “so little in common”

Question 19

Archer and May’s marriage is “bonded by

Answer 19

the tribal code of the elite”
Herzberg

Question 20

what did Mill say about power in in ‘The Subjection of Women’?

Answer 20

“the love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism”

Question 21

“Ellen is simply

Answer 21

pretty and in trouble”
Franzen

Question 22

“Archer is an isolated misfit who is nevertheless inextricably

Answer 22

enmeshed in the societal conventions of old New York”
Franzen

Question 23

“new dreams are aborted

Answer 23

in order to preserve its mummified form”

Question 24

“it is the women in the age of innocence who have

Answer 24

to suffer betrayal and social punishments”
Lee

Question 25

“A society rigid in its

Answer 25

refusal to recognise the disruptive forces already in its midst”
Cooper

Question 26

‘The men most committed to conserving the social order through

Answer 26

sexual and marital discipline […] are hypocrites and fakes”
Blackwood

Question 27

‘she is the vague embodiment of all

Answer 27

that is lacking in his own life’
Cynthia Griffin Wolff; Ellen’s significance to Archer

Question 28

‘hermetically sealed

Answer 28

against contamination’
Blake Nevius