The Age of Innocence Themes

The Age of Innocence focuses on the wealthiest and the most powerful in New York society in the 1870s, but we can't help but feel, well, sorry for them. The characters live in constant fear of bein...

Break out your best Marlon Brando-as-Godfather impression here: in The Age of Innocence, you do not mess with "the Family.” Each family is a sub-unit within society (see our discussion of the the...

The Age of Innocence may have just as well have been titled TheAgeThatKilledRomance. Characters don't get to enjoy the kind of romances they see portrayed on the stage. No matter how moving such sc...

In The Age of Innocence, the happiest characters are the ones who do not question social conventions and are content to conform. The unhappiest are the ones who see through all the social conventio...

In the world of The Age of Innocence, men and women have clearly defined roles. Men are the brains, the breadwinners, the movers and shakers. Women are raised to be perfect wives and mothers, with...

The Age of Innocence opens with a scene at the opera, and you could say that the whole novel is a consideration of the romantic world presented in the theater. All those romantic moments between lo...

We think of duties as moral responsibilities: we feel that we must do something because we believe it is the right thing to do. Some duties are religious duties, like celebrating a religious holida...

The Age of Innocence explores the love-hate relationship the United States had with Europe in the late nineteenth century. The 1870s New York society described in the novel is insular and independe...