Trivia Quiz for The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920; winner 1921 Pulitzer Prize)
(with answers below)
For West Seattle “Classic Novels (and Movies)” book club, 4/24/22
1. Husband, Wife, Stranger? May Archer (née Welland) and her husband Newland Archer seem to understand and love each other in their own way. But they also find fault and misunderstand each other. What one trait does May not have, according to her husband?
a. she takes care of herself
b. she lets her imagination run wild
c. she is loyal and gallant
d. she prefers to ignore unpleasantness
e. she is a true New Yorker and knows how to act
2-5. Social Portraits. Familial, societal, and marital obligations loom large over the characters in The Age of Innocence; those characters who are unmarried or estranged from their families are seen as lonely outcasts. Yet even the most privileged seem pitiable. Match quote to the character. Characters include: a. M. Rivière; b. Newland Archer; c. Countess Ellen Olenska; d. May Welland
Quotes
2. “’Sameness—sameness!’ he muttered, the word running through his head like a persecuting tune…”
3. “I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody else here. … If you knew how I hate to be different!”
4. “You musn’t think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine.”
5. “Ah, good conversation—there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
6. New York, circa 1870: A Uniquely Historic Urban Setting. There are many famous and familiar places named in The Age of Innocence, where the action mostly stays in New York city. Which one of the following places is not named?
a. Grace Church
b. Washington Square
c. Metropolitan Museum of Art
d. a home on West 23rd Street
e. the Academy of Music
f. Central Park
g. the Empire State Building
h. Wall Street
7. Intimacy and nostalgia. Some of the most poignant passages endeavor to describe times past, longing, and how people who are otherwise intimate perceive life so differently. Which one of the following is not in the novel?
a. “You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath.”
b. “Odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought.”
c. “She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against.”
d. “My good father abhorred hurry. But now we live in a constant rush.”
8. Style and technique. With her mixture of omniscience and interior monologue, Wharton’s narrative provides readers with a feeling of listening to the characters’ most secret and changeable thoughts. Which one of the following thoughts occurs to the hero, Newland Archer?
a. “Don’t let us be like all the others!”
b. “Women ought to be as free as we are—”
c. “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
d. “It’s worth everything isn’t it, to keep one’s intellectual liberty; not to enslave one’s powers of appreciation, one’s critical independence?”
9. Keywords and thoughts recur in Wharton’s description of upper-class New York society. Which one of the following quotes is not drawn from Wharton’s book?
a. “keep out the ‘new people’”
b. “rather bad form”
c. “morbidly sensitive”
d. “low-toned comments”
e. “a naïve, generous country”
f. “it’s confoundedly dull”
g. “ritual was precise and inflexible”
h. “the occasion was a solemn one”
10-11. Maxims or life lessons. Similar to many of her contemporaries, Wharton peppers her novel with pithy bits of wisdom. Which two of the following are from The Age of Innocence?
a. “Living’s too much trouble unless one can get something big out of it.”
b. “The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”
c. “It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.”
d. “The children you don’t especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you.”
12. High tech and futurist scenarios. Which one of the following modern ideas and inventions is not in the Age of Innocence?
a. long-distance telephoning
b. 5-day Atlantic ship crossings, from the US to Europe
c. women’s suffrage
d. electric lighting
e. Debussy’s music
13. Age = wisdom? At the beginning, Newland Archer seems to be in his early twenties. How old is he at the end of the book?
a. 57 years old
b. 42
c. 78
d. 85
ANSWERS
1. b.
2. b.
3. c.
4. d.
5. a.
6. g.
7. b. (That quote is from Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.)
8. b.
9. e. (That quote is from Willa Cather, My Ántonia.)
10.-11. b. and c.
12. c.
13. a.
A special thanks to Carl and Daniel for the violets from their garden, featured in the nosegay seen above: a symbol of Wharton’s lost world and the nostalgia we all feel for long-lost times, places, and loves…
Daily Joy with Honey Girl 