On The Historical Narrative Of The Age Of Innocence

Edith Wharton (18621937), one of the famous female writers in the late19thand early20thcentury, is well known for her excellent description of the New York upper society of hertime. Her works mainly depict the status of American women at the end of nineteenth century,presenting their unfortunate fates and painful struggles. She is regarded as one of theforerunners in expressing women’s awakened consciousness, and her works have promotedthe American feminist activities.The Age of Innocence is one of the masterpieces of Wharton, which made her win thePulitzer prize in1921. By now, critics have been doing research on The Age of Innocencefrom different aspects like its feminism, naturalism, ideas on marriage, and its art features,etc.Besides, its similarities with and differences from the works of Henry James have also beentalked about. There are indeed some critics who have touched lightly on the narrative art ofthe novel, but the opinions are not systematic yet, for most of them are just limited to theanalysis of the rhetorical devices or the narrative strategies such as the narrative structure, orthe narrative perspective in the fiction. What’s more, few critics have paid enough attention tothe historical narrative in this novel.Hayden White, the famous contemporary thinker in the field of historiogparhy,philosophy of history and literary theory, has dominated the linguistic turn in the field ofphilosophy of history since the1970s and is a model of cross disciplinary study. White arguesthat any historical writing is composed of a deep poetic and linguistic structure. Thetropology and narratology theoretically support the deep structure of the historical writing. Inthe poetic act which precedes the formal analysis of the field, the historian both creates hisobject of analysis and predetermines the modality of the conceptual strategies he will use toexplain it. These explanory strategies include explaination by emplotment, explanation byargument, and explanation by ideological implication, which correspond to the four principaltropes of poetic language.From the angle of Hayden White’s Historical Narrative with the approach of close reading and reference studying, this thesis attempts to explore narrative art of The Ageof Innocence from four aspects of narrative modes: contextualist mode of argument, theironic mode of trope, tragic mode of employment and radical as well as liberal mode ofideological implication. The contextualist explanatory strategy presents the background of thenovel: one is that the rise of the new bourgeoisie threatens the established life of the Old NewYork; the other is that “New Woman” attempts to break the confinement of being “the angelof the house” and to live in freedom. The ironic mode of trope presents the New York soceityas experienced, worldly and hypocritical by the research of irony in theme andcharacterization in the novel. The tragic mode of emplotment proves the motif that under thepatriarchy to love is to leave by analysis of the tragic fates of May Welland, Ellen Olenska,and Newland Archer. The liberal and radical mode of ideological implication show a deepconcern for the change of class and the misery life of women in the male dominated societyby the analysis of the rebellion of “New Women” and the inevitable conflict between thenewly rising class and the traditional aristocratic bourgeoisie.Through the analysis of the class status and the gender ethics in The Age of Innocence bythe utilization of historical narrative, this thesis is supposed to enrich the study of The Age ofInnocence in China to a certain degree.