Age of Innocence (Movie Tie-in)

Age of Innocence (Movie Tie-in)
Cambridge Literature is a series of literary texts edited for study by students aged 14-18 in English-speaking classrooms. It will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, travel-writing and other non-fiction. The series will be extensive and open-ended and will provide school students with a range of edited texts taken from a wide geographical spread.
Customer Review: Use Your Illusion
Edith Wharton is perhaps best known as a writer who never offered her readers a simple, quote-unquote happy ending. "The Age of Innocence" is her thorough examination of the strictures society placed upon its citizens in the late nineteenth century. It is a tale of a love that can never be lived, a life that can never be set free. It is, quite rightfully, one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Newland Archer is a young man about to be married to May Welland, a woman he admires for her beauty and for his ability to shape her future thoughts and dreams. When her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, reappears in his life, Arhcer's ideas about love and convention are shaken to the core. For he falls desperately in love with Ellen, but cannot admit it, knowing that any admission or secret life would be unacceptable in his society. And although Ellen returns Archer's love, she would never betray the trust of her family, and will not degrade herself to be with him solely as his mistress. Meanwhile, Archer's wife, May, is not quite as innocent and unknowing as he believes her to be, and Archer must choose between the reality of his life in an unreal world, or the illusion of happiness with the real love of his life. "The Age of Innocence" is truly an ironic title, for no character in the novel is innocent. In the society of Old New York, all secrets were known and hypocrisy was the order of the day. Wharton is an expert at laying bare that which truly goes on in the minds and hearts of human beings. This is a novel that will stand the test of time, for at its core are questions about loyalty and longing that are timeless.
Customer Review: A masterpiece of emotion and obligation
Newland Archer, the protagonist of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, opens this story as an almost haughtily optimistic and self-satisfied young man - at the top of New York society, about to announce his engagement to the beautiful and sought-after May Welland, with little to mar what seems to be a life of uninterrupted happiness and fulfillment. Wealth, industry, friends, family, a fiancé he loves dearly....what more could a young man want from life? He can even afford to have a few radical ideas, one of them being the opinion that women should speak their minds and be genuine in their deportment and self-awareness, shaking off - just a little, perhaps - the stringent and elaborate rituals of conformity forced on them by a well-meaning but ultimately hypocritical society. Despite the slightly smug impression we get of Archer at the beginning, it is this examination of himself that makes the reader realize there's more to him than most men of his age and class; that he possesses a sensitivity and longing for what is real, despite that reality's drawbacks, and it endears him to us. Early on he states, to the shock of his friend, that "Women should be free--as free as we are." Soon after, we get this insight into his mind as he reflects on what he sees around him in the marriages of his friends, parents, and relatives, which is precisely what he is determined to avoid between himself and May: "What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewed his friends' marriages - the supposedly happy ones - and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. .....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." So, this is where Archer is in life when May's cousin Ellen comes to New York from Paris, fleeing an illustriously-placed but disastrous marriage, and her entrance into New York society is tinged with scandal. When Archer falls in love with Ellen against all his better judgment and to what he knows would be the detriment of everything he deems crucial to his happiness, it's a torturous love that nearly drives him mad. That description may make it sound like a forgettable bit of romance, but forgettable bits of romance don't generally win Pulitzers, and the true heart of this story is about the decisions we make that shape our lives one way or another, and what kind of devastating emotional havoc the `wrong' love can wreak on a person's soul. Archer is forced down an emotionally-tormented path few of us would choose, I think, and in many ways it's both beautiful and tragic to watch his story unfold. I was incredibly moved by it. As mentioned, The Age of Innocence won Wharton the Pulizer Prize for fiction in 1921, making it the first time a woman had ever won the award.