| Edith Wharton, an American female realistic writer honored with the Pulitzer Prize for literature, displays and explores the experience of growth of the American young people in a specific historical period with her fine and smooth language and in a woman's specially penetrating insight in her novel The Age of Innocence.Youth is the crucial stage of both one's physical and mental development. How to extricate oneself from the ignorance of childhood and enter the complicated adult world is a severe challenge to every young person in his/her life. Literature is the learning of human beings, which decides literature reflects the reality of social life. A bildungsroman is a literary genre with the theme of young people's growth. Living in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, Edith Wharton put her impression of life into her writing and created The Age of Innocence, a bildungsroman of far-reaching influence. The research on this masterpiece of Wharton at home and abroad focuses on feminist criticism, naturalism, existentialism, style, theme and artistic techniques, etc. Based on inheriting the predecessors'excellent achievements, this thesis attempts to analyze the novel from the perspective of bildungsroman. By studying the protagonist Newland Archer's experiences in his incessant growth on the spiritual journey in an attempt to realize his dream of true love, we can understand the American social order and moral standards in the late nineteenth century and their restraints of an individual's growth.This thesis is divided into three parts: the introduction, the main body (including three chapters) and the conclusion. The first problem that is to be solved in this thesis is whether The Age of Innocence is a novel of bildungsroman, so the first chapter explains the definition and development of a bildungsroman in detail. The theme of young people's growth traces back to the remote human history. The story of Adam and Eve's being expelled from the Garden of Eden in the Bible supplies a great archetype for all bildungsroman novels. As an important genre of literature, the bildungsroman is rooted in Germany and it has developed into the American bildungsroman—the initiation story. This thesis continues to argue that The Age of Innocence is a bildungsroman, because it fulfills most of the essential features of a bildungsroman defined by Buckley and its theme is about the growth of the protagonist Archer. In the second chapter, the topic is shifted to Archer's growth. There are two reasons why Wharton describes Archer's growth on his spiritual journey. One is that Wharton's writing technique was to some extent influenced by her close friend Henry James, a modernist writer; the other is that Archer's psychological growth can be interpreted properly by the third-person selectively omniscient narrative, which was created by Henry James. Archer's growth is hard-earned. After several love affairs, Archer finds his true love in Ellen Olenska, so he tries his best to realize his dream of true love. As both the theme and the thread of this novel, Archer's gradual growth is arranged through the spiritual journey which contains three stages. The third chapter concentrates on the limitations of Archer's growth in the old New York society. In this upper crust of the society that Wharton herself belongs to, the social order is so strict that those"new people"who disobey the conventions like Ellen are hard to enter it. Wharton shows sharp contrast between the two female characters related to Archer's spiritual growth: May and Ellen. As a guard of the society, May's innocent appearance conceals the truth that she does her utmost to maintain the old order of New York. Thus, the love between Archer and Ellen is destroyed by May. On the contrary, Ellen, regarded as an invader of this society, is not accepted by those people. At the same time, Ellen acts as a guide to lead Archer to his maturity. Ellen guides Archer to understand the cruelty of this society. Though Archer cannot realize his dream of true love as a result of the limitations of the society, he is able to grow fully in spirit eventually.Every person is a person living in the society and the society is the condition for a person's existence and development, therefore young people's growth cannot cast off all restraints of the society. Archer's growth in Wharton's novel not only reflects the American social reality of the nineteenth century but also provides today's young people some lessons on how to deal with the relationship between the individual and the society. China also has a long history of the literary creation of the bildungsroman, but compared with the European and American countries, China lags behind them in the systematic research of the bildungsroman. By studying the American bildungsroman The Age of Innocence, we may make use of the related theories and methods in the study of the bildungsroman of our country.
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