The Age Of Innocence By Edith Wharton: Character Analysis

In the novel The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, the author creates characters such as Newland Archer, May Welland, and Ellen Olenska, who are each trapped or imprisoned by some sort of societal expectation. Newland Archer is trapped by his own need to conform to the upper classes customs to stay in the inner circle, May Welland is trapped by other people’s conception of her, and Ellen Olenska is trapped in an unhappy marriage to the Count Olenski. By doing this, Wharton criticizes the society of upper class New York City in the late 1800’s. Newland Archer, the novel’s protagonist and point of view character feels the confines of the society he lives in many times throughout the novel, and since the novel is written in third person limited,

He does, however, at times, wish that things could be simpler for him. After a long day of customary visits to family members to be congratulated on his engagement, Archer felt that he’d spent the day being “shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped” (43). He also imagines, with horror, the idea of being stuck in a routine life and a marriage to a woman who he didn’t love, and it clearly bothers him every time he thinks about it, saying that he felt “a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour” (54). Then, later in the novel, right before Ellen was sent away to Europe for good, when Archer finally realized that everyone in the family thought that he was having an affair with Ellen, Archer began to feel “like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp” when in the company

Her husband’s secretary “helped her to get away from her brute of a husband, who kept her practically a prisoner” and she runs back to New York, where her family lives, with the hope that they’ll welcome her home and help her get a divorce (26). Her family, while seeming to be kind and accepting, think of her as an outsider, and never really let her back into the inner circle, always referring to her as “poor Ellen Olenska” (8) in a manor that seems more condescending than sympathetic. Archer stands up for her, occasionally, blurting out progressive proclamations that he doesn’t really mean, like “Women ought to be free—as free as we are…” (27). Despite that, Archer is also the man who ends up convincing Ellen that if she insisted on getting a divorce she wouldn’t have the support of her family, tactfully saying, “Our ideas about marriage and divorce are particularly old-fashioned. Our legislation favours divorce—our social customs don't” (70), and Ellen ends up giving up on the idea of divorce because of what Archer told her. Later, when Archer tries to propose that he should go back on his engagement to May Welland so that he and Ellen could run away and be together, Ellen points out the impossibility of the situation, and shifts the blame onto Archer, yelling, “Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing—give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was,