The Role of Women In The Age of Innocence, a satiric account of the society of New York, women play a major role in the development of the plot. This novel, by Edith Wharton, is about a society that controls its individuals, particularly women. For many years, women have followed the same customs and traditions and have not been given the opportunity to develop new talents and encounter new experiences. The women have been carefully trained not to possess “the experience, the versatility, [or] the freedom of judgment” (Page 38). This conventional society ignores reality and pretends to act innocently. “In reality [they] lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (Page 39). Women are expected not only to be pure and innocent, but also to pretend to be oblivious of the unpleasantness of society. May Welland and Ellen Olenska, two of the main female characters of the novel, set the conflict and develop the story with their contradicting personalities. The protagonist, Newland Archer, is a wealthy lawyer that is happily engaged to the pure and innocent May Welland. May is the perfect model of a wife in that society. She is a traditional woman that has been pressured by her family to remain unimaginative and predictable. She is conventional and a typical conformist. Because society has trained her not to speak of unpleasantness, May ignores unsettling situations, particularly her husband’s secret affair with her cousin, Ellen Olenska. Instead of revealing her feelings and confronting her husband, she chooses to go with society’s habit of gossiping about other women and pretending to be ignorant of surroundings. Instead of facing reality, she prefers to be protected from it. Her role as a woman in the story is to represent the old traditional society that is a