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A response essay defending a thesis that you discover in your analyses of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Many authors used their voices to defend or reject the social norms of their time period, especially women writers during the turn of the century. Choose one to three of the following themes to explain what you believe Wharton was rejecting or defending.
The blind obeying of ridged social codes
Hypocrisy
Stability versus Change
Personal freedom versus social integrity
True love versus obligation
Divorce
The importance of establishing family traditions and values
Appearances versus realty

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A response essay defending a thesis that you discover in your analyses of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Many authors used their voices to defend or reject the social norms of their time period, especially women writers during the turn of the century. Choose one to three of the following themes to explain what you believe Wharton was rejecting or defending.

The blind obeying of ridged social codes

Hypocrisy

Stability versus Change

Personal freedom versus social integrity

True love versus obligation

Divorce

The importance of establishing family traditions and values

Appearances versus realty

With revolutionary transformation of social life, personal freedom, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, and many more our world now is nothing like it was in the beginning of 19^th century. It’s hard to deny a fact that The Age of Innocence is the timeless novel most important novel of that time. The Age of Innocence is a Wharton’s provocation of the free spirit and mind against social restrictions, obligations, and hypocrisy.

Nineteenth-century American aristocracy drew on social restrictions and norm. High-class society described by Wharton placed a clear behavior structure, disobedience of which would lead to family disgrace and expulsion from the tightly knit group of wealthy families. A great example of such punishment would be refusals of most of the invitations that Mingott family sent out for the Countess Olenska welcoming formal dinner. “ Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one had refused the Mingotts’ invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr. Jackson and his sister.”(Wharton, 30)

In the introductory first chapter, Wharton bringing as to the opera, where we first meet Madam Olenska. Ellen Olenska a woman who went through a horrible marriage, and stillforced to suffer. The events shows us how a woman who dared to try divorce her husband and be free and happy being punished by Old New York. Throughout the book we can see how Madam Olenska different from all other women – she is not shy in the conversation, she smokes in the presence of Archer, we see her in a public place, accompanied by a married man, she dared to ask for a divorce from her monstrous husband, she is a woman who knows what he wants and is willing to fight for it. And it must be crushed. All of New York shamelessly unites against Ellen’s sincere impulse to exterminate the villain.  “It was not the custom of New York drawing-room for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another. Etiquette required that she should wait, immovable as an idol, at her side” (Warton, 40).

2. Obligations versus ones personal freedom.

“The individual…is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest: people cling to any convention that keeps the family together – protects the children, if there are any’ he rambled on, pouring out all the stock phrases that rose to his lips in his intense desire to cover the ugly reality which her silence seemed to have laid bare” (Warton, 110).

“Everything was equally easy – or equally painful, as one choose to put it – in the path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the flurried injunctions of his best man as piously as other bridegrooms had obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the same labyrinth. So far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all hid obligations ” (Warton, 115).

3. Hypocrisy

Wharton engages the reader “In reality, they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (Wharton, 44).

Wharton enlightened conservatism was an effective response to the challenges and problems of modern world.

Demonstration of wealth and ostentation characteristic of the Victorian era, when the subject is eclipsed personality.

A black-and-white clothes men – two primary colors through which they view the world. No wonder as the story progresses Archer prefers gray suit.

The art of being a real woman

In the six chapter Wharton brining us to the opera

As the plot progresses

occurring frequently within this book.

Throughout the plot

There are crimes caused by passion, and crimes motivated by dispassionate logic. In the case of The Age of Innocence

Women were expected to dress well

Order, loyalty, tradition

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