Age of Innocence
Pre-experience life phase
The Age of Innocence refers to a period of naivety or sheltered existence before exposure to the harsher realities of life—childhood, early youth, or any time before disillusionment set in: Looking back, the 1950s seem like an age of innocence.
The phrase often carries nostalgia tinged with irony, since such innocence usually appears rosier in retrospect.
Edith Wharton's 1920 novel of this title depicts the stifling social conventions of 1870s New York high society, lending the phrase an additional layer suggesting that innocence may mask repression or willful ignorance.
- childhoodLife's earliest phase
- nostalgiaLonging for the past
- New YorkNortheastern metropolis and state
- societyOrganized communal human existence
- NewlandNewly settled territory
Edith Wharton · Ellen · May · lost love · corset · ballroom · propriety · repression · longing · forbidden · manners · opera · drawing room · period drama · scandal · duty · social conventions · marriage
- Classic BooksPride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, Moby-Dick, Great Expectations
- Gilded Age LiteratureMark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, The Gilded Age, Huckleberry Finn
- modernist literatureJoyce, Woolf, James Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway
Age of Innocenceworld-weariness
Jaded disillusionment with life
loss of innocence · disillusionment · coming of age · adulthood · jadedness
Age of Innocenceawakening
Return to consciousness
disenchantment · eyes wide open · rude awakening · street smarts
Age of Innocencefall from grace
Loss of status or reputation
fallen state · moral decay · the fall · broken spirit · original sin
aging, ageing, ageless, ageism, innocence, innocent, innocently, innocents