The Relevance Of Flowers In The Age Of Innocence

The Relevance of Flowers in The Age of Innocence In the book The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton shows the struggles of a man to choose between the safety that following social rules provides, and the adventurous dangers of choosing what is regarded as "morally incorrect." The purity and security of social conventions is represented by the lilies-of-the-valley. In the language of flowers these lilies are the embodiment of the "[r]eturn of happiness" (354), and therefore serve as a symbol for the life with no worries that a man would have if he accepted what society impels him to do. For this reason, it is not strange to see that Newland's betrothed is not given any flowers but these, because all the others "did not look like her" (51). In other words, we could say that May Welland, and Newland's decision to get married were nothing but the "product of the social system he belonged to and believed in," which was supposed to be the "safe anchorage" that was going to lead him to happiness (28), not by the joy that marriage itself represented, but because it was what "[society had] taught [him] to think" (28). The intense desire to break the rules that society has imposed on men is not totally represented by Ellen Olenska, the rebellious woman in the book, but by the yellow roses that Newland sends her. In the language of flowers these roses represented the "[d]ecrease of love" (357). This may be understood not as a decrease in the romantic affection that Newland professes for May, but as a decrease in his "love" to be restricted by the social codes that directed his life and his whole society. His disenchantment with these paradigms goes so far that at a certain moment "he found that he had forgotten" to send May her lilies-of-the-valley (51), meaning that he had almost broken his relationship with the already mentioned rules. In this moment he proceeds to send a "cluster of yellow roses" (51), action that is largely repeated during the story, and that marks the