The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Published 1921 · 382 pages · 101,254 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance

How hard is The Age of Innocence to read?

The Age of Innocence scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
Wharton writes in elegant, period-appropriate prose that captures the refined vocabulary of 1870s New York society. The language is accessible but carries the weight of social observation.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Sentences are controlled and ironic, building through careful description of social ritual. Wharton's syntax serves her satirical purposes while remaining readable.
Abstraction: 55 out of 100
The novel explores the tension between passion and convention, individual desire and social expectation. These themes are embodied in Newland Archer's impossible situation.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Old New York society, its rituals and rules, and the cost of transgression pack the novel. Wharton builds density through exhaustive attention to social detail.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
The novel follows Newland directly, but what Ellen feels and thinks must be inferred. The tragedy lies in what cannot be said or done within society's constraints.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
Ellen Olenska becomes symbolic of European freedom and passion set against American propriety. The drawing rooms and opera boxes become symbolic of society's cage.
Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
Wharton maintains devastating ironic distance from Old New York's pretensions while sympathizing with her characters' trapped condition. The 'innocence' of the title is bitter.
Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
Newland's choice is made, but the novel's coda reveals what might have been. Wharton provides closure while emphasizing the cost of convention's victory.
Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
The novel follows Newland through his engagement and early marriage, with the coda providing retrospective judgment. The structure is traditional but serves the ironic purpose.

How The Age of Innocence is regarded

The Age of Innocence holds a literary regard score of 82 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Age of Innocence sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (185 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Age of Innocence scores 68 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic (shading Ironic)
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
Symbol: Formal
what was or was not "the thing" played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony iv) (irony iv)
It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid, in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained.

Where the story of The Age of Innocence takes place

  • Old New York society, the 1870s (1870 to 1876), the main setting
  • Old New York and Newport, early-to-mid 1870s (1872 to 1875)
  • Wedding tour: London, Paris, the Alps, 1870s (1875)
  • New York and Paris, c. 1900s (Archer aged fifty-seven) (1905 to 1909)

6 things that are true of The Age of Innocence, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens with Christine Nilsson singing Faust at the Academy of Music on a January evening in the early 1870s.

    On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

  2. Archer declares in front of Mr. Jackson that women ought to be as free as men.

    "Women ought to be free—as free as we are," he declared

  3. May's telegram fixes the wedding for the Tuesday after Easter at Grace Church with eight bridesmaids.

    Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May.

  4. Dallas is to marry Fanny Beaufort, Julius Beaufort's orphaned daughter, on the fifth of June.

    Fanny Beaufort and I are to be married on the fifth.

  5. In Paris Archer says he is only fifty-seven, and he later tells Dallas to describe him as old-fashioned.

    "But I'm only fifty-seven—" and then he turned away.

  6. The book ends with Archer walking back to his hotel without going up to Ellen's apartment.

    Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

Scenes in The Age of Innocence that Frye would name

29 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing—give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was Archer discovers that his advice was the cause of their impossible situation and that Ellen's sacrifice was made for him.
Pharmakos, untitled
the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. Ellen's farewell dinner is a communal expulsion of a scapegoat, carried out with perfect politeness.
Anagnorisis, untitled
it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers Archer recognises that the whole tribe has read his secret and organised his captivity.
Alazon, untitled
Never had Lefferts so abounded in the sentiments that adorn Christian manhood and exalt the sanctity of the home. Lefferts, the adulterer, is the self-righteous braggart of 'form'.
Anagnorisis, untitled
She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted. Dallas's report reveals that May had known all along, a recognition that reframes thirty years of marriage.
Point of epiphany, untitled
It's more real to me here than if I went up The bench beneath Ellen's balcony is the place where the real and the imagined meet and where Archer chooses the vision.

Books that share these scenes with The Age of Innocence

About the author

Edith Wharton