A moral burguesa na era dourada nova-iorquina : uma análise do personagem Newland Archer no romance A época da inocência (1920)

Abstract

The American Gilded Age covers the last three decades of the nineteenth century and is marked by the fast industrialisation and country’s deep economic inequality at the time. For the bourgeoisie, it is synonymous with excess and prosperity. Being an heiress to old New York families, the novelist Edith Wharton grew up surrounded by this environment and, through her literary works, described the social problems, hypocrisy, rigidity of social conventions and the individuality repression that she observed beneath its gilded surface. It is in this context that the plot of The Age of Innocence (1920) develops, whose protagonist, Newland Archer, faces an inner struggle between his individual desires and the expectations of New York high society. According to Nancy Armstrong’s (2022) theories of bourgeois morality and the paradox of individualism, this paper aims to analyse how Newland Archer’s construction conforms both to the structural forms of the novel as a literary genre and to the norms of conduct of his class. Written in 1920, during the rise of modernist movements in art and the decline of the Gilded Age, the novel also presents traces of the turn of the century in its character, its setting and in old New York.