Julian Fellows' The Gilded Age is Warmed Over Edith Wharton

And Edith Wharton was Wrong. So was Henry James

This past week in HBO Max’s The Gilded Age, Julian Fellow’s dramatization of the upper classes of New York during the Belle Epoque, an ‘old New York’ alderman attempts to cheat a New Man. He fails and shoots himself in the head. This is the first departure from Fellows’ wholesale borrowing from Edith Wharton, with a black girl subplot stuck on.

The Spirit of The Republic 1893 Worlds Fair

To refresh the themes: the rich are snobbish adamantine evil, they despise the poor, cheat everyone and are only interested in consumption and status.

The series is seen through the lens of women, powerful and not. Their world consists of eating, receiving callers, walking in the park, going to dressmakers, writing letters, shopping at a charity bazaar. They have the basest of instincts: cringing survival, power over others or monstrous consumerism. Their motivations are suited to our brutalist age, where our entertainment is centred around increasingly grotesque forms of violent death, and an insistence that all people are either vicious, callous savages, or ignorant innocents who have to fight for survival against monumental odds.

This works to the advantage of our self-appointed elites who want us to despise ourselves, since it makes us so much more pliable. And it wants us scared. The repeated depictions of hideous violent death poisons our unconscious. How would you like your violent death tonight, madam? We have crucifixion, buried alive, gun battles, immolation on offer. No wonder people can’t sleep.

The Gilded Age is meant to be balm for our overworked adrenal glands. Instead, the series, like our entire cultural product, presents an entirely false view of the American Experiment and the human soul.

Here's another view. I am using simple declarative sentences, because the following is heretical to mainstream thinking.

Headquartered in New York City just prior to the Gilded Age, there was an organization called The Benevolent Empire. It was the result of the Second Great Awakening, an ecstatic religious movement that had roared through Upper New York State and southern Ontario in the 1820s and 30s along what came to be called the psychic highway. It had produced the systematic rescue of “fallen women”, addressed the very real plagues of drunkenness and dueling, and of course, extreme poverty. It sparked prison reform, public education, and improved the treatment of the handicapped. It was the beginnings of the institutionalizing of charity in order to more effectively combat social ills. It was headed by the leaders (the elite) of every town, village and city.

The movement also produced the Underground Railroad, the snowballing liberation of black people resulting in the Civil War. All through upper New York State and southern Ontario, along that psychic highway, the canal works were manned by people of the Second Great Awakening smuggling fugitives to safety in Canuckistan, where they were given land for their villages. This is not to diminish the very real terror and courage of slaves moving out of Tidewater to safety. But they were received and helped by people desperate to do just that, informed by their connection to what they saw and importantly, felt, as God.

The Protestant heresy started by Martin Luther is defined by the systematic overthrowing of one dominant priesthood after another, always reaching towards an individual’s direct contact with the divine, however he or she defined it. Every one of the Three Great Awakenings and the Puritan Revolution which presaged it, were about that: dethroning an elite which had abrogated to itself the power of life and death.

During the actual time of Fellow’s Gilded Age, the Third Great Awakening was roaring through American life. This one was even more powerful, more ecstatic than the latter. It produced the beginnings of women’s liberation, the birth of a formal safety net, social activism on all fronts. This was a muscular Christianity that outreached towards every sector of society. Christian Science, The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Society for Ethical Culture were formed to combat child labor and insist on compulsory elementary education. Every aspect of the culture came under the glare of social reformers.

The people of Old New York (Fellows’ Mrs. Von Rijn) in real life weren’t snobbish so much as they were entrained to the practice of virtue. Active virtue. They saw the conspicuous consumption of the fictional Russell’s, the Astors and Vanderbilts profoundly destabilizing (which is was and is) and they fought against it using every tool they had.  For the women, Fellows gets this right, it was exclusion and distaste.

Every single piece of theatre, film or novel, set in the American or Canadian past that does not treat the religious spirit of America as central is a lie. The will to the good was pervasive throughout the culture, and no one escaped it. Even if you were an atheist you went to church because everyone went to church. Or else. There, for an hour every week, you were forced to think of yourself as an ethical being.

And if you did not attend church you did not get a job, a promotion, a wife. If you were determined to fall through the cracks, here would come the women. They went everywhere in their white dresses like ministering angels. Their religious spirit determined the shape of the New World.

The Gilded Age is not only bullshit, it is performative bullshit focused entirely on the trappings of the wealthy, and their most superficial pleasures. It panders to our current envy, it panders to a dank fashionable political ideology, it increases resentments and above all, it does not model a societal-wide goodness which is the major accomplishment of the American Project.

There were no enclaves of rich women who tortured their servants and brutalized black people and spent their time eating and dressing up. All those rich women had no status and I mean ZERO status unless they worked for the good. Their status increased when they were successful in creating something that lifted people up. This word is key: successful. It wasn’t playing dress up down in the Bowery, it wasn’t going to “bazaars” and buying handkerchiefs. It was starting schools and running them. It was working on reform of the tenements, for the handicapped, for new immigrants.

Here’s a painting of the real leaders of society in New York during the Gilded Age.

This portrait which toured the US, is a John Singer Sargent wedding painting of Edith and Isaac Phelps Stokes. Edith was the model for the Spirit of the Republic at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1883, as in first image. She and her husband (to whom I am distantly related) stood astride society at the time Fellows is attempting to capture. They were the beaux ideal of their time.

And how did they spend it? Swanning around with aristocrats and Vanderbilts? No, they spent their time helping others. Edith’s husband was a pioneer in social housing who co-authored the 1901 New York tenement house law. He was a member of the New York Municipal Arts Commission for twenty-eight years and president for nine of these. At various times Stokes was director and president of the Phelps-Stokes Fund; trustee, New York Public Library; honorary vice-president, Community Service Society of New York, Fine Arts. He produced, after twenty years labor, a seven volume work called The Iconography of Manhattan Island, one of the most important research resources about development of the city. During his career he built many houses, St Paul’s Chapel at Columbia, and several urban housing projects. 

Edith started and ran a sewing school for immigrant women and was President of the New York Kindergarten Association. When she died young, Isaac fell into despondency and produced no more work. She was his partner in the fullest sense of the word.

If you look at Isaac Phelps Stokes siblings, all wildly wealthy, each and every one of them worked for others: writer, activist, socialist, sociologist, journalist, educator, clergyman. None of them would spend a second with the women that people The Gilded Age. “Mrs Russell” would not be currying favor with the timid fools in The Gilded Age, she would angling for Edith’s notice, and up to her elbows washing clothes down on the lower East Side. Edith believed in getting her hands dirty.

Equally out of notice of our frankly depraved cognoscenti another Great Awakening is sweeping the world. It is more powerful than any of the American Awakenings because it is world-wide. It is what Catholics call syncretic, it merges Buddhism, Christianity, New Age, and creates multiple variations on each. It has a plethora of leaders, none of them dominant, though many of them have a million followers and students. It is closely related to natural health, and has inspired a wholesale rejection of the medical system that destroyed the last two years. It is entirely benign, it practices forgiveness both personal and political. It is not in doubt about an afterlife. It rejects the punishment and guilt ethic of old line Christianity. It grows like kudzu on a geometric growth path. It is a reclamation of the past where every thought and action is put through a lens of virtue and goodness, as defined by the individual’s direct relationship with God. Which means is about mind training, taking back one’s autonomy from the combative, corrupt and frankly vicious hive. It is entirely out of sync with our brutalist culture of destroy or be destroyed. It is becoming, slowly, placed and over the next decade this awakening will transform the towns and rural areas of our world.

 What we see on premium television and in popular culture is the last gasp of 2,000 years of repression, war and hate. Turn the damned thing off.