Gilded Age Of Innocence Research Paper

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).

In this novel, values are established and helps maintain this theme. The passing of values from a parent to a child has a civilizing influence. Order, loyalty, tradition and duty are the four main themes that are established through characters and the time period.

First, order is a socially mandated set of duties to perform. Newland

If ‘rules’ are broken, you risk being excommunicated from society. (Shmoop Editorial Team, The Age of Innocence). Society believes that women are only good for marriage and that one is to remain pure until then. Once marriage takes place, women can’t be granted with divorce, participate in marital infidelity, let alone think about sexual desires that didn’t pertain to their husband; yet, men could without consequences. “I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots...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.” (The Age of Innocence, pg 78) Newland Archer defends the right of separated or divorced women to make a new life with another man to seek sexual fulfillment outside a failed marriage. However, Wharton points out that he has not thought through the implications of his progressive view, perhaps with regard to his very own traditional marriage. “The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the woman one loved and respected and those one enjoyed-and pitied. In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts, and other elderly female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archers belief that when ‘such things happened’ it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman.” (The Age of Innocence, pg 80) Wharton notes that the double standards that applied to men as against women in the matter of illicit love affairs. Also, Society is rigidly structures with certain families on top and everyone else is below; the families on top were stuck up and very self absorbed.“Few things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offense against ‘taste,’ that faroff divinity of whom ‘form’ was the