The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton (1920)
“The most devastating love story ever written about a man who does exactly what society tells him — and spends the rest of his life wondering what he lost.”
Character Analysis
The novel's central consciousness and its most complex irony: a man intelligent enough to see the cage perfectly and unable to leave it. He is not a coward in the simple sense — he is someone whose entire identity has been formed by the world he criticizes. To leave would be to become no one. His love for Ellen is real; his failure to act on it is also real; neither cancels the other. He is the American reader's surrogate — educated, well-intentioned, morally aware, and fundamentally complicit.
Polished, literary, frequently hedged — he has the vocabulary of the self-aware but uses it primarily to analyze others. His interior thoughts are more direct than his speech; the gap between inner voice and public voice is the novel's central location.