The Age of Innocence: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

On a January evening in the 1870s, the opera singer Christine Nilsson is singing in Faust at New York’s Academy of Music. Though a new and grander opera house is going to be built, fashionable New Yorkers still come to the Academy because it’s traditional and has good acoustics. The audience has come in private carriages or in Brown coupés, which allow the passengers to take the first one in line after the show, rather than waiting for their carriage to arrive.

Newland Archer arrives late. He could have made it on time, but punctuality isn’t fashionable, and he cares terribly about being fashionable. Besides, he enjoys thinking about a pleasure to come more than actually partaking of it. He arrives at a perfect moment, when Madame Nilsson is singing, “He loves me—he loves me not.” In fact, she’s singing in Italian, though it’s a French opera with German text in translation. This is simply a convention of opera that seems as normal to Newland Archer as all the other conventions of his life.

Madame Nilsson sings her line triumphantly, gazing up at the male lead playing Faust. Archer looks at the audience opposite him, where he sees the box of Mrs. Mingott, who is too obese to attend. Her daughter and daughter-in-law are there, and a girl in white is watching from just behind them. As she watches Madame Nilsson sing, she blushes and touches a bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee.

Archer turns back to the stage, which has been decorated beautifully even by the standards of European opera houses. The foreground is covered with green cloth. Beyond that are rose trees with giant pansies beneath them. Madame Nilsson stands in this garden listening to M. Capoul (who plays Faust) and pretending not to understand what he really wants as he tries to coax her into a villa. Archer looks back to the girl in white, thinking that she doesn’t understand the opera and treasuring her purity. He imagines them reading Faust together by Italian lakes on their honeymoon. That afternoon May Welland, the girl in white, agreed to marry him, and his imagination is running wild.

Archer wants his future wife to be sociable and witty enough to match other young married women. It’s fashionable for them to simultaneously attract and discourage men’s attentions. Though he doesn’t admit it, Archer also wants his wife to be similar to the married woman with whom he was infatuated for two years, though he doesn’t want her to be as frail as that woman was. He never considers how unrealistic this female image might be, but he doesn’t feel the need to analyze it, since he knows that all of the other New York gentlemen think in the same way. He thinks he’s intellectually superior to most of these men, but as a group, they represent a moral authority that he obeys without question.

Next to Archer, Lawrence Lefferts exclaims. Lefferts is an expert on “form,” partly through having studied it carefully, but also because it comes naturally to him with his handsomeness. He carries the highest authority about all matters of fashion. He gives his opera glass to Sillerton Jackson. Archer realizes that Lefferts exclaimed because another woman has entered Mrs. Mingott’s box, wearing a band of diamonds in her hair and a dress with an unusual cut. Mrs. Welland gives the woman her place in the front of the box.

Archer’s group turns to Mr. Jackson, who knows everything about New York families, such as who is connected to whom and the dominant characteristics of each family. He’s also an expert on all the scandals of New York society for the last fifty years, but he never reveals this knowledge due to his sense of honor and the fact that being trustworthy helps him learn about more scandals. Archer’s group waits with suspense for him to speak, and he says that he didn’t think the Mingotts would have done such a thing.