The Age of Innocence quotes Flashcards
Society’s rules
“New York code … he had been a good citizen in New York.”
Archer = It was less trouble to conform with the tradition
Few things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against ‘taste’.
Ellen being an outsider
“Some invincible repugnance to speak of such things to the strange foreign woman.” vs. “he was a New Yorker, and about to ally himself with one of his own kind.”
‘She was different’
“We need new blood and new money” – Lemuel Struthers = however, deemed ‘common’ as her husband made his fortune through the shoe polish industry.
Reaction to Ellen
“cruelly clear their determination not to meet the Countess Olenska.”
She’s so different …I suppose it’s the life she led in that fast European society.
Ellens reaction
‘It’s a miserable little country.’
“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
— link to Grapes and community
Ellen’s progresivity
“He hated to think of May Welland being exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless of the dictates of Taste.
“Her hand was ungloved.” = at a formal dinner event
Ellen + Archer’s affair
- “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.”
- “The woman you would have chucked everything for: only you didn’t.”
- “You are the woman I would have married if it had been possible for either of us.”
VS. Reason for Archer’s marriage to May = ‘steadying sense of an unescapable duty.’ - You gave me my first glimpse of a real life.Then you asked me to go on with the false one = Archer
Archer quotes
“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”
“Women ought to be free — as free as we are,’ he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”
“It’s more real to me here than if I went up there.”
‘Few things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against “Taste,”
May quotes
‘a young girl in white’
vs.
“her blue eyes wet with victory.”- when May and Archer confront eachother over her pregnancy
once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted = she tells Ellen she is pregnant so she leaves so Archer will stay with her
