The Age of Innocence takes place in New York in the 1870s, with characters traveling at times to Boston, Newport, London, and Paris. During the 1870s, the United States was transitioning from the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era to the Gilded Age, moving from a state of war to economic growth (stemming, in large part, from exploitation of the working class).
While many Americans were living in poverty, the upper-classes were flourishing. The Age of Innocence focuses on the social dynamics within this wealthy elite class, specifically in New York City. Most of the men in this social circle were, as Archer describes, either in law or business, and their well-paying jobs allowed them to travel to Europe and have homes in upstate New York (as many characters in the novel do).
The title of the novel points to a critique that Wharton is making about the upper classes of American society in this time, as well as the United States as a whole. Wharton penned this novel in 1920 and her decision to refer to the decades before World War I as “The Age of Innocence” is significant. She had just lived through what was then called “the Great War” and witnessed catastrophic global destruction. In implying that her characters are living in an “age of innocence,” she is placing their lives within a wider context, encouraging readers to see how naïve they all are in the face of the true struggles to come. In other words, the constant fretting about which social events to attend and gossiping about who is having an affair with whom are the problems of sheltered people unaware of real suffering.
The “innocence” that Wharton describes has another meaning as well, one that is important to understanding the setting of the story. At this time in history, young women were expected to be “innocent” in the sense that they should be virginal and pure—even the smallest suggestion that a woman had been sexually involved with a man meant social ruin. May is the embodiment of this kind of naiveté in the novel.
