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Age Of Innocence, By Edith Wharton

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This quote encompasses two very important aspects of Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton: pretending and unhappiness, two things that are directly linked. When Count Olenska arrives in New York after leaving her husband, the traditional society is startled, to say the least. Although her family is trying to help her get acclimated, they want her to follow all of their rules, despite her personal unhappiness that would result. Her family all want her to go back to European husband who was unfaithful to her, despite it not being what she wanted. Additionally, Archer marries May, even though he loves Ellen, to keep up appearances and be accepted in the old society. This decision causes him, and Ellen, to be extremely unhappy. This novel
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435 Words | 2 Pages

She is not only abused physically, but sexually, emotionally and is also neglected several times, by not only her father but other characters in the novel. One of the first signs of abuse in the novel is when Ellens dad threatens Ellen, she says “He would kill Me and my mama both with a knife” (Gibbons 9) when Ellen tries leave the house to find a phone to help her mother who has just overdosed on her prescription heart pills. Ellens father is the one to sexually abuse her. One night Ellen's father threw a New Year's party with “a whole pack of coloured men” (Gibbons 36) they talked about ellen when her father brings her up.

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A 9-year-old girl named Linda is drafted to fight in a war in Vietnam. She is trained for a few weeks, then flown away. The young girl is scared and confused; however, Linda must hide her feelings in order to be respected. After a few days at war, she is tragically killed in action. In truth, an experience like this is enough to frighten even a 17-year-old girl or young man.

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154 Words | 1 Pages

Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence offers a distinctive close examination of the Gilded Age's New York high society where critics have the opportunity to study and analyze several aspects of this exclusive American milieu, and as a result, the novel offers a glimpse of this society's social institutions of the time. In Age of Innocence, the elite of New York reside solely in their own sphere; they all live very close to one another, save for the van der Luydens, in a predetermined area, effectively shutting themselves from those outside their social circles. This isolation is shown with the uproar Ellen Olenska caused when she chose to place her home among artisans instead of other well-respected families, and it is further emphasized during

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940 Words | 4 Pages

There is a quote by well known author Ernest Hemingway, which states, "all things truly wicked start with innocence. "This quote embodies the theme innocence vs. age in the novel A Separate Peace very well. The theme reoccurs often, most notably in characters such as Leper and Gene, and even affects the entire student body at Devon. All of these characters experience a development from innocence and childhood to maturity and a more in depth understanding of the world.

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1384 Words | 6 Pages

As people mature and age, they learn from life and become more knowledgeable through experience. These experiences are not always wonderful and some do not have positive impacts on a human or on their psyche. Innocence is the opposite of having these experiences of pain and sadness in the world from which knowledge is gained. It is a purity that many people lose as they grow older.

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781 Words | 4 Pages

The time to Mature As the story of “A&P” unfolds, readers can see a change in the main character from the start of the story to the end. John Updike’s main character Sammy in “A&P” conveys the theme of growing up through making decisions based on how others are treated, and what he wants for himself in order to mature and find his identity. Throughout the beginning of the story readers can see that Sammy is still a very immature nineteen year old because he easily gets distracted by three girls who enter into his job in bathing suits. “The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece”.

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1623 Words | 7 Pages

The story, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is both a story of love and a story of war. But more than either of those types of stories, The Things They Carried is a story of losing one’s innocence. A war story is a story in which the characters go fight in war, there is much violence, loss of life and a sense of fighting for one’s country. On the other hand, a love story is a story where one or more characters feel love towards one another, sometime the love is not reciprocated by one of the characters, there is always strong feelings involved and occasionally heartbreak. Finally, the concept of innocence is the idea of not knowing the horrors of the world.

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973 Words | 4 Pages

This idea is represented in a quote from the Great Gatsby in which Daisy Buchanan and Nick Carraway are having a conversation about her baby girl at her house in East Egg. The quote reads; “I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (Fitzgerald 17). Daisy's expectation of women to be "beautiful little fools" demonstrates a desire to preserve her daughter's innocence for as long as she can. Daisy's quote serves as evidence for the idea that the loss of innocence is necessary for personal growth because, ultimately, Daisy knows that, just like her, she will need to lose her innocence in order to grow up. This idea of loss of innocence in order to grow up is represented in the Catcher in the Rye in a scene with Holden and Phoebe.

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1459 Words | 6 Pages

James Baldwin’s concept of the ‘innocent country’ is how America is in a position that permits discrimination towards people of color, one-hundred years after their emancipation from slavery (Baldwin 10). A permissible discrimination that has allowed people of color to be recognized as something lesser than a human being. Within Baldwin’s essay The Fire Next Time, he writes of a rhetorical concept of innocence, which can be recognized as the racist social norms of America (5). Problematically, this allows the mental perception of a person to commit a hate crime, and believe that their offence is permissible since racism continues to be normalized.

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1082 Words | 5 Pages

In the memoir Night, written by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist struggles with his initial important values while going through times of despair, urging him to abandon these morals for his own individual good. It is immensely imperative that he does not give in. Elie’s experience as a victim in the Holocaust threatens his loyalty to his father, relationship with God, and compassion with others to weaken. The main character is consistently pressed to discard these things, once the most meaningful matters to him, in order for him to stay alive. For most people facing the same situation as Elie, their one and only ambition is self-preservation, causing all of their other initial, now irrelevant, morals to go out the window in order for them to protect

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600 Words | 3 Pages

He is fully aware that the loss of innocence is part of growing up. One must eventually transition into a world of maturity because childhood innocence cannot be retained forever. In summary, the deprivation of one's purity occurs when they grow up. The loss of childhood innocence is the turning point in an individual's life. Those who find it overwhelming ignore reality so that they can obtain their childish ways.

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1008 Words | 5 Pages

The Age of Innocence takes place in the 1870’s around the beginning of the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age is a period of rapid economic growth and helped with serious social problems. The Gilded Age of Old New York is a time when society people dreaded scandal more than disease. But, the book proves the growth and acceptance of the society through the characters and setting (The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton).

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747 Words | 3 Pages

Innocence is a word used to describe someone 's purity. Children are prime examples of innocence, as they don’t have judgments and don’t understand mature topics. In the novel, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the reader can interpret innocence as the growing up of the children. Specifically, Jem Finch showed a loss of innocence as he grew up. He showed his loss of innocence by not playing games, his more mature use of words and body language, and his different view of the world around him.

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378 Words | 2 Pages

Stephen King’s The Body is a novella that well represents children coming to terms with the importance of childhood innocence. The story takes place in the 1960s in the fictional town Castle Rock, Maine. A young man named Ray Brower disappears and presumed dead. The main character Gordie Lechance and his three friends, Chris Chambers, Vern Tessio, and Teddy Duchamp set out to find the body; telling their parents that they are going camping.

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2131 Words | 9 Pages

Edith Wharton is an important, though neglected novelist in the history of American literature. Her novels study the status of the women and explore their relationship with men in a male dominated society. Again and again she presents the state of exceptional, rising, ‘New Woman’ of the turn of the century to break out of her compressible role and attempting a venture rebellion. The Age of Innocence is on the theme that deals ironically with the affluent social world of New York. The novel has a theme of entrapment and the struggle of the intruder, both to maintain an adult sense of self in a childish society and to rescue a trapped male from that society.

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