The Age of Innocence Gender Quotes

And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity. (1.11)

He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. "Women ought to be free— as free as we are," he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences. (5.53-4)

And he felt oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow. (6.6)

[…] all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. (11.29)

Archer remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by a new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the Salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with her chin nestling in fur. There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing. (12.13)

"You mustn't think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine. One hears and one notices— one has one's feelings and ideas." (16.49)

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)

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)

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)

Mary Chivers was as tall and fair as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested and slightly slouching, as the later fashion required. Mary Chivers's mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the twenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned. (34.15)