Age Of Innocence Research Articles

Adapting Traditions: Lacunae Surrounding the 1934 Film Adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

Abstract Edith Wharton's status as a literary author and her relative disinterest in the processes of adaptation dovetail with the traditional subjects and cultural hierarchies that have shaped the field of adaptation studies. This sympathy of biases has produced curious lacunae surrounding RKO's 1934 film version of The Age of Innocence. While several scholars have analyzed Martin Scorsese's 1993 adaptation, few studies provide in-depth analysis of the 1934 version directed by Philip Moeller. Both versions are accessible to modern scholars, yet Scorsese's adaptation, made primarily from Wharton's novel, has received more scrutiny from Wharton scholars than has Moeller's version, reputedly adapted from the 1928 stage version by Margaret Ayer Barnes. This article combines archival research with textual analysis to challenge long-held understandings concerning this adaptation and to interrogate the scholarly traditions that produce and perpetuate gaps related to adaptations of literary works. Considering particular lacunae in scholarship regarding this adaptation demonstrates the potential that methods and subjects outside scholarly traditions hold for both Wharton scholarship and adaptation studies.

Ellen Olenska as the Abject in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence

The purpose of this paper is to define Ellen as the abject and explain how she was abjected from New York society with Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. To explain why New York society considered Ellen as the other, this paper first tries to define what the word, ‘innocence’ meant in New York in the 1870s and then relate its meanings to other-ness and abjection. To New York where truth, personal opinions, imagination and difference were not allowed, Ellen Olenska returned from Europe seeking divorce and freedom from her unfaithful husband. She ignored the tradition, violated social codes, talked about the unpleasant truth, and associated with artists. She was the other which disturbed the system, order, and identity of New York society in the 1870s. Ellen as the other was about to endanger the social order which was based on marriages between families by way of becoming lovers with Newland Archer. He was in love with Ellen and planned to leave his wife, May who has pretended not to know about their passionate love. May told Ellen that she was pregnant even before it was certain in order to force Ellen to leave New York. At the farewell dinner party at May’s house, it became evident that the party was a rite of excluding the abject who disturbed the order. This process of exclusion of what disturbed the identity is abjection, and the isolated and excluded other is the abject. (Kyunghee University)

Enamored With An Embodied Style in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence

Enamored With An Embodied Style in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence

The Regime of Memory in “The Museum of Innocence”: The Past as an Age of Innocence

In this paper, the regime of memory produced in The Museum of Innocence, a museum created and curated by the author Orhan Pamuk is discussed. The museum was opened in 2012 in Istanbul and it was based on Pamuk’s novel of the same title published in 2008. The intertextual novel-museum and the museum-novel blur the distinctions between fiction and reality, as well as the distinctions between individual and social memories and focus on everyday life and personal objects rather than the “monumental” national history. The regime of memory produced in this museum is discussed in this paper in relation with the process of modernization in Turkey. The understanding of time, space, reality and individual prevailing in the museum are evaluated in order to understand whether the museum produces a creative remembering that problematized the process of remembering or a regime of remembering that is based on absolutizing the past.

A Creative Letter Inspired by Reading Maria Campbell’s Notable Memoir “Half-Breed” (1973)

This creative letter (as set out below) was inspired due to reading Maria Campbell’s notable memoir “Half-Breed” which was published in 1973. I had the pleasure of taking a third-year Indigenous Feminist Literature class in September 2017 and our first reading assignment was to read “Half-Breed” and critically engage in the discourse in class discussions. I was assigned to read numerous Indigenous memoirs and to read a lot of Indigenous feminist poetry. With this explosion of literature, I was given the task to create a scrapbook presenting “Half-Breed” through creative writing, art work, poetry, and connecting it with a feminist and cultural lens. I thought it would be wonderful to create a response letter to Maria Campbell, explaining my thoughts and ideas surrounding her memoir. I wanted to create a letter that was open-minded, packed with critical thinking, and to challenge stereotypical notions of Indigenous literature – I wanted to break down those barriers and do my best to understand and appreciate this memoir because I fell in love with it after reading it. I kept returning back to vivid passages that had a lot of warmth, strength, and pride in families and communities. Youth is supposed to be an age of innocence, naivety, and adventure. Yet, for Maria Campbell, her time of youth and adolescence was very difficult and harsh – yet there were trinkets of wisdom and hope. Especially with the relationship and bond with her grandmother Cheechum – a powerful person and family anchor that held the family together in difficult times. Maria Campbell revolutionized the importance and preciousness of family in this memoir for me. Grandmothers are important teachers for children especially from an emotional stance for Maria Campbell. I believe building a strong emotional bond and community bond is what builds a person’s character, strength, and kindness. Maria Campbell illustrated these treasured qualities that cannot be taught in the academic classroom – but through her strong ties with her grandmother and community. Maria Campbell’s grandmother Cheechum bequeathed her strength and resilience to deter her struggles in a spiritual and emotional sense. This memoir was definitely awe-inspiring and the reason for why I wanted to create an artistic medium of writing a letter commentary to Maria Campbell.

Del viaje como arte: Travesías por España, Francia, Italia y el Mediterráneo

Del viaje como arte: Travesías por España, Francia, Italia y el Mediterráneo

Edith Wharton and John and Alice Garrett: Art and Ambassadorship in a Time of War

AbstractThis article examines a collection of sixty unpublished letters between Edith Wharton and John and Alice Garrett, seeking to understand what this couple meant to Wharton and how they may have influenced her writing. During World War I, Wharton became friends with the Garretts in Paris. John Work Garrett was a diplomat who later became the U.S. ambassador to Italy. He was also a distinguished collector of rare books, fine art, and coins. Similarly, his wife, Alice, was a well-connected patron of the arts who worked in wartime charities with Wharton. The Garretts seem to have represented a cosmopolitan ideal for Wharton, seamlessly integrating political influence, aesthetic cultivation, and tangible service to those wounded or displaced by the war. Their understanding of the history, culture, and languages of other nations was of a high order, enough to enable delicate transnational negotiations in the context of war, and they seem to have transformed Wharton's view of Americanness. Wharton's letters to them even express a rare happiness at being an American. The Garretts' friendship with Wharton lasted long after the war, and their influence appears in works such as The Age of Innocence (1920), “Her Son” (1933), and “Charm, Incorporated” (1934).

『エイジ・オブ・イノセンス』におけるエレンと肖像画

『エイジ・オブ・イノセンス』におけるエレンと肖像画

ReadingThe Age of Innocencein France

AbstractIn this article I discuss the ways in which Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence helps students think about the past, and more particularly the way it helps them to question their ideas about women's roles today and in history.

The Mythical Average in an Age of Individual Complexity.

The Mythical Average in an Age of Individual Complexity Peter V. Paul During the age of innocence in a world that is perceived to have been less complex than the present, I was an undergraduate elementary education major. Most of my professors pontificated that we needed to teach to the average student in our classrooms. In addition, we were led to believe that textbooks were actually written with the average student in mind at that grade level—that is, students who were reading at an average grade level or higher. The dictum seemed to be stated like this: The performance of an individual can be best understood when it is contextualized and compared with the average performance of a group. In accordance with this line of thinking, a teacher-made test was deemed to be effective if 68% of the students performed in the average range, with a few performing higher than average and—heaven help us—a few performing below average. I have a confession to make: My parents did not want me to be average, which was awfully close to mediocrity in their eyes, albeit they seem to have thought it was acceptable to be normal. Ah, I should be better than average, but it was justifiable to act and be normal—whatever that meant. When I was a student in a master’s program, the story was different—or, perhaps, had a slight twist to the construct of average (or even normal). With a major in the education of d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students, I was introduced to the mighty world of individualization, which, obviously, is not foreign to our Western culture—but has reached new heights in advertisements and in the social media of our present universe. In short, special education was all about catering to and understanding the individual needs of children and adolescents with disabilities (for examples and discussions, see Birsh, 2011; D. R. Bryant, B. Bryant, & Smith, 2017; Taylor, Smiley, & Richards, 2009). (Note: This was the case even before the passage of PL 94-142 in 1975.) Ironically, assisting children in special education to perform on at least an average level or even to be or act normal was considered a worthwhile goal—albeit incredibly challenging for a number of these children. Thus, in this case, being average, compared to the performance of typically developing children, was really fantastic; being an above-average person with a disability gave one godlike or goddesslike status. In my situation, I received compliments such as My goodness, you received your master’s degree despite your hearing impairment! Look how far you have come in spite of your impediment! You are going to make a great compassionate understanding teacher of deaf students! In retrospect, the political-correctness police would have been awfully busy if they had been in operation during this period. With respect to the construct of average, my entrance into a doctoral program is analogous to living in multiple universes. I was exposed to such a variety of mind-bending teaching-learning perspectives on epistemology and research that I thought my brain would implode. My doctoral adviser did not believe in qualitative research methodology, so I had to sit painfully through several quantitative research courses. He also did not fancy single-subject research because, in his view, behaviorism—especially radical behaviorism—was dead. Perhaps he had read some of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. (Try sinking your teeth into Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil [1886/1966].) Of course, my adviser was influenced by the debate between Skinner and Chomsky, which—according to a number of scholars—precipitated the waning of the popularity of behaviorism in the field of psychology and education (e.g., see historical discussions in Hunt, 1993; Mann & Sabatino, 1985). I was about to become a hardened group-analyst positivist until I took a reading seminar taught by one of my all-time favorite professors: P. David Pearson (who also participated on my dissertation committee). Now Pearson [End Page 239] was and still is a strong, respected literacy research scholar, who has composed and edited mouth-watering, mind-bending works on the history and development of reading research, including reading...

Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Lauren S. Cardon

Reviewed by: Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Lauren S. Cardon Allan G. Borst Lauren S. Cardon. Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. 232 pp. In Fashion and Fiction, Lauren S. Cardon asks readers to check their assumptions about the shallow consumerism and superficiality of fashion and instead consider how fashion choices—as they proliferate in the pages of the early-twentieth-century US literary canon, at least—tie directly to issues of socioeconomic mobility and identity. Toward this end, Fashion and Fiction traces the increased accessibility of fashionable clothing made possible through mass production and the corresponding growth of what Cardon calls "American democratic fashion" (10). No longer restricted by the rules or prices of the Parisian haute couture donned by upper-class elites, American fashion's increasing availability and affordability during the early twentieth century enabled, if not implored, Americans to freely augment their identities through clothing and fashion accessories. Cardon's close readings emphasize how characters do not wear clothes in simple obedience to fashion trends but strategically develop and deploy their "fashion knowledge" (6) in attempts to facilitate social mobility and craft personal styles. Fashion and Fiction calls attention to the frequency and nuance with which characters actively observe, contemplate, and discuss fashion choices of their own and of those around them in order to suggest that fashion plays an integral part in the ways literature—and by extension, US society—engages with matters of upward mobility, Americanization, and racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identity. Few readers will be surprised to discover that Fashion and Fiction begins with an opening chapter dedicated to Edith Wharton's Gilded Age classics, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Wharton's novels offer Cardon prime opportunities to illustrate how New York's upper crust, through its commitment to the exclusivity and expense of Parisian haute couture, used fashion to demarcate social barriers and dictate permissible behaviors and expressions of personal desire. In Cardon's reading, the socioeconomic and romantic difficulties of Wharton's heroines, which often play out in relation to their ability to correctly or happily dress themselves, signal the desire for greater freedom and self-determination that the rise of American democratic fashion would later oblige. Fashion and Fiction proceeds more or less chronologically in a manner that underscores Cardon's thesis that US canonical literature illustrates how "over the years, fashion extends to a larger demographic, transcends lines of class and race, and affords increasing opportunities to express one's personality and lifestyle through a [End Page 760] range of stylish garments and accessories" (181). Like chapter 1, subsequent chapters adopt something of a simplified cultural-materialist approach. Précis of pivotal fashion trends—the pages of Vogue and the designs of Coco Chanel supply most of the book's cultural-historical points of reference—serve subsections devoted to close readings of individual primary texts. This schema makes for tidy analysis, but it also reveals how Fashion and Fiction privileges literary close readings at the expense of more deeply researched, analyzed, and integrated cultural history and cultural theory. In chapter 4, for example, an Abercrombie and Fitch advertisement for women's sportswear in a 1922 issue of Vogue—discussed alongside depictions of the modern woman by F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway—does well to add to the reader's visual and rhetorical understanding of the "slim silhouette" (108) and the associated gender play at work in women's fashion at the time. Yet however much Fashion and Fiction works to explicate the various fashions appearing in its primary texts, the close readings funneled through fashion consistently lead to conventional conclusions. In chapter 2, the titular protagonists of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie still successfully pursue the American Dream and achieve success only to discover "loneliness and alienation, a modern malaise that seems a side effect of embracing the consumer capitalist mentality" (82). In chapter 5, which focuses primarily on Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, the Negro Welfare League dance remains a pivotal scene for the way...

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Contradictory Depictions of the New Woman: Reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a Dialogic Novel

Critical debate pertaining to the themes of gender and marriage in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) has often focused on May and Ellen as the representation of two contrasting images of female identity: “angelic” and “monstrous” respectively. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic novel, this article offers an alternative reading. In particular, it aims to examine the previously overlooked complexities in the novel’s decentered narrative, notably its dialogic form in which a multiplicity of contending voices and perspectives on women, marriage and divorce are juxtaposed. By adopting this theoretical and methodological stance, the article offers fresh analytical perspectives on the novel and argues that, by depicting Ellen’s performances of shifting subjectivities (the rebel who is seeking a divorce, the unfortunate victim of an unfaithful husband, the lover who desires a new life), the novel not only undermines the dominant ideologies of Victorian womanhood but also disrupts the image of the radical, independent New Woman who challenges social conventions.

A Compromise and Resist World Feminism Analysis of the Age of Innocnece

<p>Edith Wharton (1862-1937), a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a distinguished female novelist at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work <em>The Age of Innocence</em> contributes much to the formation of a female literary tradition. Wharton’s subversion of male discourse can be well traced in her novel <em>The Age of Innocence</em>. However, Wharton does not become a destroyer of her age due to the limitation of her time; instead, she shows an open submission and hidden resistance to the patriarchal system.</p><p>This thesis aims to analyze causes of Wharton’s duplicitous voice by the means of <em>The Age of Innocence</em> textual analysis in order to reveal her special strategy of text hidden behind this contradictory attitude.</p>

School-based evaluation to improve learner performance

The article focuses on the periods of program and school evaluation in particular. The article traces school evaluation through various periods. These periods are: Age of originality (1444-1700), Age of reform (Prior 1900), Efficiency and testing (1900-1930), Tylerian period (1930-1945), Age of innocence (1946-1957), Age of development (1958-1972), Age of professionalism (1973-1983) and Age of expansion and integration (1984-2000). From these ages, the article is able to identify as to how Whole-school Evaluation in South Africa has been able to draw important lessons towards ensuring quality assurance in education

Broken Marriage in Aristocratic Societies in Edith Wharton’s Selected Novels

Family is a bridge between individual and society. In my paper, I will survey broken marriage and individual dissatisfaction in two novels by Edith Wharton. The novels in question are The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920). Edith Wharton portrays her concern by the conflict between the individuals and the social groups which they live in there. Her treatment of the family is always in association with the bourgeois society, with the ambitious stock brokers from the west. This conflict can be seen in their attitudes to love, marriage, divorce, and remarriage. In the novels, Marriage, as an indissoluble matter and even an invariable failure, is main concept and sex outside marriage is meaningless. Wharton shows divorce in aristocratic societies in an old-fashioned lifestyle.

Dialogue in the Arts: Interaction of Languages of Painting and Cinema

Explores the object­language laws in visual arts and the interrelation of art signs that are employed in painting and cinematography. The author addresses the “Age of Innocence” by Martin Scorsese and analyses the cinema art speech as determined by the object­language of the painting styles, namely the impressionism, pointillism, Art Nouveau, etc. The artistic culture is described as a dialogue space where languages of various types of arts reveal their origin from a single source and make their capacity of general understanding messages produced in culture obvious.

Psychological Analysis of Serious Juvenile Violence in Japan

Although illegal acts by adolescents are widespread in Japan, serious juvenile violence is very rare. Such violence has a shocking impact on society because it is sharply inconsistent with people’s belief that adolescence is still an age of innocence. The purpose of the present article is to review studies conducted in Japan since 2000 that attempted to classify juveniles who committed seriously violent crimes, and then to propose a theory of three types of juvenile offenders. First is the antisocial type that includes juveniles who were brought up in disadvantaged family environments involving physical abuse or neglect by parents and who engaged in delinquent acts early in childhood. Later, in adolescence, they joined delinquent groups and increased antisocial activities and finally committed serious violence in the process of other offenses such as robbery. The pathological type is a juvenile who is characterized by distorted cognitive styles and unreasonable emotional reactions. They showed severe maladjustment in both school and family, such as school non-attendance and violence within the family, and engaged in serious violence due to deteriorated family relationships. This type also includes juveniles who were preoccupied by violent thoughts of murder or death and committed serious violent acts with incomprehensible motives, e.g., a wish to experience killing a person. Finally, the poor coping type includes juveniles who had neither a record of delinquency nor severe maladjustment problems. Their serious violence was a panic reaction to perceived threats such as pressure by parents to study or a breakdown of romantic relationships.

The Emergence of Sex Education: A Franco-Swiss Comparison, 1900–1930

A r o u n d 1900 , s e x e d u c A t i o n emerged as the focus of debate in western Europe and the United States, a phenomenon that can be viewed as part of the “discursive explosion” identified by Michel Foucault. In contrast to the salacious or even pornographic evocation of sexuality that had hitherto been dominant in literature and political pamphlets, doctors and philanthropists attempted to make discourse on sexuality respectable for the first time: they treated it as a legitimate object of knowledge, they used what Foucault called an “authorized vocabulary,” and they proposed an analytical approach to the study of sex. Although Foucault did not address sex education in his History of Sexuality, the subject provides an interesting development of the Foucauldian framework. Sex education implies considering not only the content of the message (namely, a scientific language that allows one to talk about sex) but also the identity of the recipient, children and adolescents. Providing sex education seemed to contradict prevailing tendencies to treat childhood and youth as an age of innocence to be preserved as long as possible from the necessarily corrupting realities of the flesh. The “repressive hypothesis” that Foucault challenged actually describes evocations of sexuality addressed to youth up until the end of the nineteenth century. An awkward silence prevailed at the expense of the dissemination of information; young people were forced to learn about sexuality through fragmentary information or abrupt revelations. Thus, talking about sexuality to young people and even teaching it in schools was a real innovation. Scholars such as Lutz Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, and Jeffrey Moran have begun to address this puzzling shift. Among the factors mentioned

‘A turmoil of contradictory feelings': money, women, and body in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

While Wharton criticism has addressed the questions of money, commodity, economy, or women as a form of property in The House of Mirth (1905), few have dealt with such issues in relation to The Age of Innocence (1920). By way of the reassessment of Wharton's use of the financial panic, this essay seeks to illustrate how The Age of Innocence is profoundly informed by Wharton's recognition and anxiety as to the growing liquidity of money in the early twentieth century. I argue that in the novel, women serve as the primary vessel through which the society seeks collectively to manage money's contradictory functions as a medium of circulation and an instrument of hoarding.