The Conflicts Between Hebraism And Hellenism In Wharton's The Age Of Innocence

Edith Wharton is an "inheritress" of Henry James'earlier literary works in the nineteenth century as well as the first prolific writer to obtain the international reputation. Wharton's writings range from full-length novel, short story collections, poems, critical essays to travels. Her themes extensively and unambiguously reflect the radiance of feminism, naturalism, realism existentialism in addition to her viewpoints on religion, mythology, Hebraism and Hellenism. The male and female characters in her novel The Age of Innocence mirror the complexity of Hebraism and Hellenism, which are also closely linked to the writer's personal experience. People in the man-dominated Old New York even regard her works as a female literature and do not attach great importance to it, though some critics who study it are mainly confined to a minority of male writers.Despite bulky researches on the novel's textual features as well as its characters and background, there is as yet a surprisingly lack of in-depth analysis of this novel from the perspective of Hebraism and Hellenism, especially in relation to the religious, mythological and philosophical as embodied in Wharton's characterization of her protagonists. This paper places the novel in the background of the nineteenth Old New York of America, concentrating on the interdisciplinary perspective of the interrelation between literature, philosophy and religion. Based on a nuanced study of the characters' personalities, the thesis seeks to explore the conflicts between Hebraism and Hellenism as embodied in the male and female characters, arguing that the numerous conflicts in the novel derive from two outlooks of life and values, or two different philosophical concepts—Hebraism and Hellenism. Drawing from the insights of existing research, this paper develops the manifestations of the two philosophical conflicts into three areas:the conflicts between the spiritual kingdom and the realistic world; those between the humanity-centering and deity-centering and those between the spontaneity of consciousness and the strictness of consciousness. These three conflicts are surprisingly in keeping with the character traits of the male protagonist Archer and the female protagonists Ellen and May, along with their manners and their ways of dealing matters, indicating thereby a deeper relation between Wharton's novel and its religious and philosophical implications.