What is the theme of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton?

One of the themes central to The Age of Innocence is the struggle between the individual and the group. Newland Archer has been raised into a world where manners and moral codes dictate how the individual will act, and in some cases, even think.

Why did Edith Wharton write The Age of Innocence?

In her autobiography, Wharton wrote of The Age of Innocence that it had allowed her to find “a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America… it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914.” Scholars and readers …

What is the first line of The Age of Innocence?

It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as “an exceptionally brilliant audience” had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient “ …

What does the end of The Age of Innocence mean?

By the film’s end, when Newland is granted a second chance of sorts to reconnect with Ellen in Paris after May’s death, he seems to have accepted the insurmountable distance between his idyllic image of Ellen and the possibly disillusioning reality of what it would take to forge an honest relationship with her.

Is The Age of Innocence feminist?

While The Age of Innocence is not overtly feminist, Wharton does an excellent job in expressing her own thoughts on the suffocating world of the upper class in the Gilded Age.

What is the white rose compared to?

White rose compared to Dove. Dove represents purity. Explanation: White roses are usually used at weddings, for their purity, youthfulness, innocence, young love, and loyalty.

Why did Edith Wharton win the Pulitzer Prize?

Wharton drew upon her insider’s knowledge of the upper class New York “aristocracy” to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, for her novel The Age of Innocence.