The Age of Innocence

“Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances ‘above the Forties,’ of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendor with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to.”

This passage firmly establishes the novel’s setting a generation earlier, predating even the Metropolitan Opera House constructed in 1883, a decade after the events of the novel. Wharton’s wry humor introduces us to a conservative elite which is “still content” with their small and shabbily inconvenient music venue that literally prevented new people from gaining social capital. Still, the fact that the city is drawn to new people as much as it dreads them, indicates that it is on the brink of change.

“Madame Olenska’s pale and serious face appealed to his fancy as suited the occasion, and to her unhappy situation; but the way her dress (which had no tucker) sloped away from her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him. He hated to think of May’s being exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless of the dictates of Taste.”

While Ellen’s face aligns with the apparent tragedy of her situation as an estranged wife, her revealing dress makes both her body and her person unnecessarily conspicuous. Archer worries about his impressionable young fiancée being exposed to such an irreverent woman. The capitalization of “Taste” indicates that good manners and appearances are almost a deity in New York society, capable of making “dictates” and personified in the same way the virtues would have been in medieval morality plays.

“Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the ‘unpleasant’ in which they had both been brought up.”

May’s discretion and adherence to the rules of social propriety are the traits Archer admires the most in her. There is something almost comic in her tendency to ignore “the unpleasant” to “the utmost limit”—this level of pretense suggests the cunning intellect underlying the simplicity and naturalness May projects.