Foil

Character Role Analysis

May Welland, Ellen Olenska

All girls are supposed to be sugar and spice and everything nice, but when it comes to girls in The Age of Innocence, May is the sugar and Ellen is the spice. Jeepers, they're even blond (May) and dark-haired (Ellen). One is a virgin and one is a woman separated from her husband (not a virgin, y'all). One is over-the-hill by the standards of the 1870s at (we meet Ellen at twenty-nine) and one is fresh-faced (May is twenty-two). When we meet May she's wearing white (pure!), and Ellen is wearing dark blue (mysterious!). Ellen gets yellow roses and May gets white lilies-of-the-valley.

The list goes on and on. We could spend pages detailing the hows and whys of Ellen and May's differences, but we'll boil them down to the one biggie: Newland loves Ellen, but he marries May. That's right: May and Ellen are never really in direct competition with each other the way most foils are, but they certainly compete in Newland's heart and mind.

In a way, the foil is between one side of Newland (the artistic one) and another (the conservative one). But these sides of Newland are so roundly characterized as Ellen and May that we're giving them the dubious honor of being called the foils of this novel.