He lives with his widowed mother and his unmarried sister, and is engaged to May Welland. He fancies himself erudite and well-educated, not realizing how much his own thoughts and experiences are limited by his immediate environment.

May:

May represents the sum of her New York society upbringing, and is beautiful, proper, and innocent. She is determined to be a perfect wife to Newland. May seems childlike and carefree, yet she is also knowledgeable about the complexities of relationships than Newland is

Ellen Olenska:

Ellen is May's mysterious cousin. She Returned to New York to seek a divorce and her situation is scandalous and risks the good name of her family. She represents sophistication, worldliness, and tragedy.

Edith Wharton’s Novel (Excerpt)

Chapter 1 : The Age of Innocence

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nillsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

        Through there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances “above the Forties,” of a new Opera House which should complete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

        It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the diary press had already learned to describe as “an exceptionally brilliant audience” had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient “Brown coupé.” To come to the Opera in a Brown coupe was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one’s own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of one’s own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was one of great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

When Newland Archer opened door at the back of the club box the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. There was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at seven, alone with his mother and sister, and has lingered afterward over a cigar in the library with glaze black-walnut bookcases and finial-topped chairs which was the only room in the house where Mrs. Archer allowed smoking. But, in the first place, New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was “not the thing” to arrive early at the opera; and was “not the thing” to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not “the thing” played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his fore-fathers thousands of years ago.

The second reason for his delay was a personal one. He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realization. This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were; and on this occasion the moment he looked forward to was so rare and exquisite that－well, if he had timed his arrival in accord with the prima donna’s stage-manager he could not have entered the Academy at a more significant moment than just as she was singing: “He loves me－he loved me not－he loves me!” and sprinkling the falling daisy petals with notes as clear as dew.

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.