Season 3/Episode 4, "Marriage is a Gamble"

Life through a Veil

Genna Duplisea, Preservation Society of Newport County archivist

Both New York society and viewers of The Gilded Age waited anxiously to see if Gladys Russell would emerge from her room and marry the Duke of Buckingham. Her plight in being controlled entirely by her mother directly mirrors the story of Consuelo Vanderbilt, forced to marry the Duke of Marlborough by her mother, Alva Smith Vanderbilt (later Belmont). Though Consuelo’s 1895 wedding took place over a decade after Gladys’s fictional wedding, the influences of history on the show’s narrative are clear.

The union of one of the foremost English peers and one of the richest American heiresses whipped up a media and public circus both in real life and on the show. Newspapers dedicated almost entire pages to the wedding in the days leading up to and following it and even reported on what the wedding guests wore. The newspapers reporting on Gladys’s trousseau was not a fabrication:  The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle described Consuelo’s lingerie, nightrobe, and bridal corset. The explosion of greenery in the church has basis in Consuelo’s wedding, too; the Vanderbilts even decorated St. Thomas’s with palm trees. The Newport Mercury and Weekly News reported that the flowers from the wedding were later sent to hospitals.

Throughout the episode, Bertha makes changes to the ceremony and her household by forcing them into more English shapes. For example, bridesmaids and groomsmen do not walk down the aisle in pairs, which she describes as the English custom. Bertha maps out the future of her daughter’s staff, too – Adelheid, her lady’s maid, heads to England with Gladys but only to train a replacement who supposedly would be more comfortable in an English castle.

Even though Consuelo, too, had to hammer her life and self into a new identity, the Buffalo News quipped, “As she was born in a modern palace no one doubts she will not feel out of place in an ancient one.” Perhaps for the average American, the difference between the upper classes of different countries was not so great as the gulf between the upper and lower classes within the United States.

Bertha’s sister Monica seems to recognize this. She comments on the regimented nature of life in the United Kingdom as described by the duke’s sister Lady Sarah – their regular trips to London “for the season” and Scotland “for the grouse” – but the criticism could apply to the social class of her sister, too. Monica is surprised that her sister changes clothes sometimes four times a day and by the general fussiness of life in the Russell household.

Drama regarding wedding invitations in the show also takes inspiration from real life. While Bertha tries not to invite her sister Monica, an unmarried woman of a lower class from Albany, Alva Vanderbilt declined to invite her former husband’s entire family. The Vanderbilts had divorced in March 1895, only eight months before daughter Consuelo’s wedding. Newspapers published selections from the list of wedding guests, and according to the New York Tribune, Alva did not invite any Vanderbilts other than her ex-husband and sons. Of the guests, supposedly four thousand could fit indoors and the rest would stand outside on the routes leading to the church. We see here the wedding as spectacle rather than as family celebration, an event for being seen and fomenting social connections instead of necessarily honoring the couple.

Perhaps the sole remnant of American style in the wedding is Bertha’s commission of a wedding dress from an American designer rather than using English designer Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895). The House of Worth was a monumental figure in Gilded Age fashion. Consuelo’s dress was American, too; the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that “The recognition of the American skill by Miss Vanderbilt in ordering her entire bridal outfit from New York firms is most gratifying to her home admirers, and that she has no preference for foreign-bought garments has been plainly evidenced.” Consuelo’s dress bore her mother’s stamp in point d’Angleterre lace created with design input from Alva and Consuelo herself designed one of the hats accompanying her traveling clothes for after the wedding.

Like Consuelo, Gladys cries on her walk down the aisle. An interesting shot from her perspective shows the crowd through her veil, the sounds of the wedding march muted. This moment emphasizes that the wedding and the marriage to follow obscure Gladys’s true self and drape her in the values of a society uninterested in her personhood. The season thus far, and the show as a whole, has been a tempest of marriages both unhappy and happy, both arranged and for love, both ending and enduring; what path Gladys’s will follow is unclear, and perhaps not even up to her.

The rest of the season’s subplots build small foundations during this episode. George Russell’s financial uncertainties come to a head when J. P. Morgan comes to him on the day his daughter is to be married to break off their partnership; we learn that Mrs. Bruce cannot marry Mr. Boden because she has a living husband who has been institutionalized; Peggy tries to hold her own against Dr. Kirkland’s mother; Jack Treacher receives a massive payment for his invention and has the opportunity to decide, for the first time in his life, what his future could look like.