The Age of Innocence Gender Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #7

Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess […] her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure. (19.40)

May is constantly compared to a goddess, and one goddess in particular: Diana or Artemis, who in Greek mythology is associated with virginity and hunting. She also subjected a man to a gruesome death by his own hounds because he had caught a glimpse of her naked. Virginal and deadly— that's our May.

Quote #8

There was no use trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. (20.24)

Archer takes his superiority over May for granted; he never suspects that she's capable of out-maneuvering him until the end of the story.

Quote #9

The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet, was beginning to be discarded in favor of lawn tennis; but the latter game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions, and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and arrow held their own. (21.25)

One can only imagine what a nineteenth century audience would think of today's professional women tennis players.