As the masterpiece of Wharton, The Age of Innocence mainly concentrates on women’s fates in the strict restraint of the New York society. In the novel, Wharton portrays two contrasting female characters-May Welland and Ellen Olenska, who are regarded as the most progressive ones among the female figures she has ever created. Scholars, both domestic and abroad, have studied this novel from a raft of perspectives. Most of them have explored the feminist ideas, the conventions of upper-class soci-ety, and the protagonist Newland’s perplexity which are embodied in the novel. However, this paper aims to examine the diver-gences between two female figures-May and Ellen. The exploration of their divergences makes it clear that May is an ideal woman of the 19th century New York while Ellen is an ideal woman of modern society.