The Age Of Innocence

“The Age of Innocence”
In the novel The Age of Innocence a man named Newland Archer finds happiness in the least expected place and because of this “discovery” he is faced with the dilemma of following love or the regulations of the Old New York society. In the other hand Countess Olenska who had left his husband and come to New York to look for refuge in his family is rejected by society andfinds happiness in an unexpected person. Both of this characters understood each other in many ways and that is what drew them closer to each other in the least expected ways "The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanationwould have done" (Wharton, 16). They were both prisoners in the New York society regulations but none of them realize it yet. May Welland is countess Olenska’s cousin and Newland’s fiancée. She is a very innocent person according to Newland and ignorant to her enslavement to society.

The very title in this novel The Age of Innocence describes the way society works in New York. People were notonly innocent but also ignorant to how they were slaves to their own society. The only persons that seems to realize this as the plot unfolds is Helen and Newland because they are faced with the decision of duty to society or love. May Welland’s actions and naivety help Newland realize that he does not really know much about May since she was brought up to say or do what society expected from herand not her true self. "That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas." (37). Newland thoughtmarriage was this safe place was a person could be himself but he was proven wrong by May’s actions and comments. After being introduce to each other during the opera by May, Newland and Helen begin a friendship in which Newland shows her that she had to think of others first that her own self; regarding her option to divorce the count. Ellen offers a fresh change to Newland’s monotonous lifestyle; sheshows Newland the excitement of going against the moral code and eventually they fall in love.

The relationship between Newland and May is changed throughout the story; we can see how they distance from each other and how Newland is the one who changes in their relationship. May is always described by Newland as an innocent girl whom he could not wait to mold into adulthood, but he realizeslater on that what is the point of molding someone and freeing them from society’s influence when they don’t even realize they are slaves themselves. "There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifelyadoration." (159). Their relationship was never real, their marriage was the “logical” thing to do because they were both from two of the most powerful families in the old New York society. They both cared a lot for each other but that care never developed into love, not even in their married life. "She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because theneed was past. Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland." (219). After they were married Newland feels May started to be like her mother and trying to make him a person he was not.

On the other hand Newland and Helen’s relationship was one of passion and real love for each other. Even thou they both...