Tone Of Innocence

Wharton repeatedly highlights the somber tone of the wedding day scene and disappointed lives of the people who are supposed to have the perfect life, utilizing different scenes to prove how the mask the people of New York begins to wear on them, becoming who they truly are inside. The somber tone of the play attributes to the overall theme of conformity and lose of hope. The wedding day of Archer and May accurately portrays the loss of love and passion in the relationships, instead replaced with concern, uncertainty, and sadness. Wharton writes, “Everything was equally easy-or equally painful, as one chose to put it-in the path he was committed to tread”(133). Even though Newland was about to get married, he was still having doubts about whether or not this was what he wanted, …show more content…
The relationship between Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska depicts the struggle to truly be one’s self, instead living in a constant disappointment of not being able to do what makes one happy. While Newland and Ellen profess their love for eachother multiple times, they still never act on their affair, trapped in the bubble of old New York during the 1870s. In Margaret Jay Jessee’s, “Trying it on: narration and masking in The Age of Innocence”, she talks about the opposites throughout the novel, arguing, “The novel creates a series of binaries between old and new, virgin and whore, and fair and dark”(2). The text clearly indicates this claim, through Wharton’s use of May and Ellen to counteract each other, and act as the old versus the new. In the beginning of the novel Newland and Ellen’s relationship began as friendship, yet there was an immediate fascination from Newland about Ellen. During one of the first social gatherings with