In a single passage, a literary critic argues: "Wharton's narrators are often praised for their irony, but this praise mistakes the symptom for the disease. The irony in *The Age of Innocence* is not a stance the narrator adopts toward Old New York; it is a stance Old New York adopts toward itself, which the narrator merely transcribes. When Newland Archer congratulates himself on seeing through the conventions that bind him, the narrative voice neither endorses nor mocks his self-congratulation. It simply lets us watch him deploy, as the very instrument of his supposed liberation, the same fastidious discriminations by which his society polices its members. The reader who laughs at Archer for being trapped has merely traded Archer's blindness for a flattering one of her own."