Trapped In Morality

As the first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in literature, Edith Wharton is acclaimed as one of the finest novelists and short story writers in the United States. Most of her works depict the lives and scenes of the leisure class in old New York society where she was born and brought up. The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, won for Wharton a Pulitzer Prize. In the fiction, Wharton has portrayed a fresh and unique old New York. Wharton's delicate description makes the seemingly ordinary love story more thoughtful and revealing. Though The Age of Innocence has long been considered a mere memory of a vanished America, it is rediscovered as a brilliant text that draws a dramatic tide of studies recently with the booming and popularity of feminist literary criticism.The thesis studies marriage and morality in The Age of Innocence from the perspective of feminist criticism. Apart from Introduction and Conclusion, the thesis includes three chapters. Chapter one investigates May's concept of marriage as a traditional woman. Chapter two examines Ellen's concept of marriage as a new woman. Chapter three explores Newland's concept of marriage as a New Yorker. This thesis argues that their different attitudes toward marriage and morality result from changing situation of economy and women's social status in the times after the first Industrial Revolution, and differences as such reflect the disappointment in "a unified whole" and give prominence to the role of individuality-a distinctive trait of modernity-in Wharton's novels.