Interpretation Of The Age Of Innocence From The Perspective Of Archetypal Criticism

Edith Wharton is a prominent novelist of the twentieth century in Americanliterature. Her fiction, The Age of Innocence, which is deeply rooted in the old NewYork upper-class society in the late nineteenth century, depicts the conflict betweensocial and individual fulfillment, and woman’s tragic fates in the patriarchal society.As Wharton’s masterpiece, it presents the stiffness and hypocrisy of the "Old NewYork" with exquisite style, and lays out a vivid genre painting before us.This thesis adopts myth and archetypal criticism to analyze The Age of Innocence.Northrop Frye, representative of this theory believes that myth is a "structuralorganizing principle of literary form" and that an archetype is essentially an "elementof one’s literary experience" while "literature is a displaced myth". Archetypes arevehicles which recur in the form of characters, plots, and themes in different timesand various genres. Comprehending and elaborating the symbols and metaphorswithin myth and archetype in the specific context is one of the important ways tograsp the themes of literary works.This thesis makes a study on the archetypal elements in The Age of Innocencefrom three aspects: archetypal characters, archetypal images and archetypal motifs.The displacements of archetypal motifs, such as the quest, initiation and the sacrificialscapegoat, enrich the cultural implications of the novel. In terms of archetypalcharacters, May and Ellen correspond with Diana and Aphrodite in mythologyrespectively. Moreover, the novel is rich in archetypal images.By analyzing different types of archetypes in the novel, the author of the thesisconcludes that the reason why these characters are endowed with divinity is thatWharton pays great attention to women and their living conditions and has reposedher ideal in pursuit of the perfect social order and new type of woman.