Writing The Age of Innocence in 1919 allowed Wharton to find “a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America [...] it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914” (Wharton 56). Here, Wharton implies that the First World War, with its enormous death toll and social reforms that empowered women and young people, demolished the rigid New York social world she had been brought up in. The reign of that society was nicknamed the Gilded Age (1870-1890)—a mocking term that implies that although the luxury glittered, it was not truly gold, but only a cheap and easily pierced veneer of applied gilding.

In the 1870s, Old New York society was on guard. The end of the Civil War in 1865 brought newcomers to their city in the form of European immigrants and wealthy Americans who had made their fortunes in the Midwest. Members of the New York elite were loath to accept them into their inner circles. Wharton’s novel shows the techniques used to keep new people out: Elaborate social “forms” (Location 102) created distinctions in manners and taste that could separate old money from new, while an inconveniently small and shabby opera house quite literally meant the inability to accommodate new people.