age of inncoence

ONY - opera

“it was not the thing to arrive early at the opera”

Newland disillusionment with ONY - wedding

“it seemed inconceivable to archers that grown up people should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles…yet there was a time when… everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with worldwide significance. And all the while, … real people were living somewhere and real things happening to them”

Ellen in musuam - change

“after a little while nothing matters…any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: Use unknown”

newland at the end - freedom and habit

“But Archer found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things” ”

Newland at end - freedom

“the worst thing about doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else”

may and newlands marrige - conformity and tradition

‘It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives’

newland thinking about may - freedom

‘There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free

newland - gender roles

‘"Women ought to be free—as free as we are."

duty and gender roles

“since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal

Newland’s son’s job - Change

“The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business”

newland personality

‘He was at heart a dilettante’

ellen talking to natasha - class

‘It was not usual in New York Society for a lady to address her parlour maid as "my dear one”’

newland at the end - change

“After all, there was good in the old ways… There was good in the new order too”

newland wondering at the end - change

“What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?”

newland - realness

“The real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs“

old oprea house

‘Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York was beginning to dread’

may - change

So incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of it

grace church - change

“The grace church wedding remained an unchanged institution”

marrige forshadowing

“If things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort’s bastards”

taste and form

'Few things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against "Taste," that far-off divinity of whom "Form" was the mere visible representative and vicegerent.'

the baufords

'not exactly common; some people said they were even worse.'

may describes new york as

heaven

may understanding old new york

Evidently she was always going to understand; she was always going to say the right thing.'

newland calls may

'That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything'

How does Newland reason his outburst on women's freedom?

'"Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them.'