Book Review
Apr. 10th, 2008 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariThe Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
My reaction to the society depicted in The Age of Innocence is that wealth is wasted on the rich. all of the main characters have enough wealth that they don't need to work for a living and can instead enjoy a very luxurious lifestyle without ever having to worry about money. Yet, despite the freedom that their wealth and leisure could give them, they instead live a confined life of rigid convention. And I'm not talking about being promiscuous or doing outrageous things. In this world, it's not considered proper to visit foreign acquaintances when traveling abroad. It's not quite proper to go beyond dilletantism in intellectual or artistic pursuits. People's behavior and activities must stay within a strictly defined physical and mental space.
This book is so wonderful - sad and beautiful, tinged with a golden glow of warm nostalgia and remembered passions. It's the story of Newland Archer, a member of New York high society in the 1870s. He marries May Welland, a woman who is truly lovely inside and out but a thoroughly conventional product of her society upbringing. Newland falls passionately in love with May's cousin Ellen Olenska, an unorthodox and independent woman. What really makes this situation so poignant is that all three of the characters involved are sympathetic , likable, and honorable. None of them are villains, none of them earned their suffering.
by Edith Wharton
My reaction to the society depicted in The Age of Innocence is that wealth is wasted on the rich. all of the main characters have enough wealth that they don't need to work for a living and can instead enjoy a very luxurious lifestyle without ever having to worry about money. Yet, despite the freedom that their wealth and leisure could give them, they instead live a confined life of rigid convention. And I'm not talking about being promiscuous or doing outrageous things. In this world, it's not considered proper to visit foreign acquaintances when traveling abroad. It's not quite proper to go beyond dilletantism in intellectual or artistic pursuits. People's behavior and activities must stay within a strictly defined physical and mental space.
This book is so wonderful - sad and beautiful, tinged with a golden glow of warm nostalgia and remembered passions. It's the story of Newland Archer, a member of New York high society in the 1870s. He marries May Welland, a woman who is truly lovely inside and out but a thoroughly conventional product of her society upbringing. Newland falls passionately in love with May's cousin Ellen Olenska, an unorthodox and independent woman. What really makes this situation so poignant is that all three of the characters involved are sympathetic , likable, and honorable. None of them are villains, none of them earned their suffering.
