The Other Side Of The Mirror--a Feminist Reading On The Age Of Innocence

The Other Side of the Mirror: A Feminist Reading on The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton(1 862-1937) was a significant woman writer of America in the first quarter of 20th century. Although she won great popularity and many favorable compliments from literary critics during her lifetime, Mrs.Wharton's fame declined rapidly and later was buried in oblivion after her death. However, her position as a distinguished writer recovered dramatically in recent twenty years. The rich feminist connotation of her fictions has drawn more and more attention today. Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar pointed out that "[Mrs.Wharton's] major fictions, taken together, constitute perhaps the most searching feminist analysis of the construction of emininity'produced by any novelist in this century."The Age of Innocence, the Pulitzer-winner, which had long been considered a mere "memory of a vanished America" was rediscovered as a conspicuous feminist text and has received a dramatic tide of study recently. This thesis applies a feminist analysis to The Age of Innocence. Seeing from the two sharply contrasted heroines'pilgrimages toward an ideal loving life and individual freedom, together with Mrs.Wharton's own dilemmas in depicting characters and telling stories, breaking the beautiful reflections in the Mirror and looking at the other side, woman's plight of being relegated to a subordinate position by the patriarchal society and their financial dependence as the origin of their oppression at the age are deeply exposed. The thesis is composed of five parts: The part of introduction states the current condition of feminist criticism on The Age of Innocence, the influence of the writer's personality and experiences upon her career, the theoretical basis and the critical modes of the thesis. Chapter Two discusses the two women heroes'different while both thwarted pilgrimages toward love and freedom. In a patriarchal world, the pure Diana and wild Aphrodite are both the Other, who are awakened to live as a loving subordinate but not as an independent human being with her own entity. Chapter Three focuses on the writer's dilemmas in facing the repressive wfrile somewhat genteel age in contrast with the current turmoil and her ,bitter choice between natural individual passion and hypocritic moral restrictions which are also reflected between the lines of the novel. Chapter Four deals with a special writing technique that Wharton applies in the novel---untold stories. The writer deliberately omits the stories happening after the climax and invites her readers to create an ending together with her. Probing into the reason, the strict restrictions laid on women by patriarchy is found even to constrain its most eloquent daughter---Wharton herself. The last chapter, the conclusion, makes an objective assessment of the rich feminist connotation of The Age of Innocence and Wharton's unfailing efforts in shifting woman's position from the Other to the Subject.