The Age Of Innocence: A Character Analysis

Wharton demonstrates, by employing images of light and dark, how the individual cannot achieve true happiness due to society’s creation of oppressive social norms. Upon leaving a social gathering, during which Selden disillusions her to the realities of society, “the sparkle had died out of [Lily], and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her” (The House of Mirth 66). The author depicts Lily’s joy as “light” that becomes “blotted” due to the way in which society’s norms restrain her from achieving true happiness. In doing so, Wharton demonstrates how American …show more content…
What does interest her, and what provides the central focus in the novel, is the struggle experienced by those who do not unquestioningly comply with New York’s social code” (Dixon par. 15). Archer, the main character in The Age of Innocence, however, does indeed “comply with New York’s social code” and actually benefits from this societal repression at the expense of his wife May: “It was the weather to call out May's radiance, and she burned like a young maple in the frost. Archer was proud of the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship cleared away his underlying perplexities” (68). Here, Wharton uses images of fire and light to illustrate the intensity of May’s beauty, yet society’s oppressive social norms turn her beauty into a negative trait. Her physical appearance attracts Archer, who, due to the principles ingrained into him by the period’s patriarchal moral framework, rationalizes himself into thinking of her in terms of “possessorship”; this belief that May should act as nothing more than an object to Archer severely inhibits her