The ‘American Downton’ has just hit our screens in the form of The Gilded Age on HBO, a busty, curtain-heavy romp through the moneyed boudoirs of late nineteenth-century New York starring Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski. Written by Julian Fellowes, the man who has done more PR for the upper classes than the Windsors could ever dream of, the drama sets its sights on that most nebulous of concepts, American aristocracy. But wait, they don’t have an aristocracy, I hear you cry. Oh but they do, retorts Fellowes. Just look at all the upstairs downstairs drama, sudden destitution of young fatherless women a la Sense and Sensibility, and bitchy sniping in earshot of the servants. It’s pure Downton on Central Park complete with all the one-liners you might expect from the man who gave us Mary Crawford.
Fellowes’ implication that snobbery is alive and well in America has unsurprisingly caused a certain amount of cultural whiplash. The reasons for this are two-fold. Firstly, because of the universal liberal capital of politicians like Obama and Biden and the long shadow of Thomas Jefferson’s dreams for the new Republic, America is perceived as a classless society. Second, schooled as we Brits are in the equation between hereditary privilege and old money, we find it hard to believe that nouveaux-riche families such as the Vanderbilts or the Astors could command the same amount of entitlement out of an earned living.
The myth of America’s classless society still lingers today. I lived in the US for five years as a PhD student at Penn in Philadelphia, now lamentably known as the ‘Trump Ivy’ thanks to Donald and Ivanka’s repeated, bloated tootings on the subject of their alma mater. For me, it was perfectly obvious that Americans had a class system. I only had to look around the neo-Gothic campus to see that the unofficial uniform of Penn-branded sweatshirts and the latest Nikes was the equivalent of wearing a large signet ring and red trousers. Or to see how the Freshmen that I taught grouped themselves together on the exclusive, bitchy basis of which private New York school they had attended or which camp they holidayed at. So far, so familiar I thought, albeit with a slightly different accent and better coffee.
And yet the real difference between our aristocracies – one moneyed, one hereditary – is that Americans feel no moral shame whatsoever in flaunting their privilege. Why would they, when they firmly believe that they are operating in a meritocracy? College, particularly the Ivy League, is a perfect example of this peculiarly anti-meritocratic ‘leg-up’ mentality. America must be one of the only Western democracies where it is still easier to get into a particular college if one of your parents went there. I was proudly told by plenty of students in my office hours that one or both of their parents had attended Penn and that they were ‘Legacy students’ (same sweatshirt for all, alas). In this country, if you happen to mention to a tutor in your Oxbridge interview that your parents had also been at the same college, your chances of a place would be considerably slimmer and you potentially risk being thrown to the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ cabal of tutors in the front quad. Whilst we Brits may cringe at the thought of public mention of privilege, liberal, upper-middle class Americans cheerfully broadcast it. Again, why wouldn’t they since it has nothing to do with the shady undertones of luck that our aristocracy holds.
As a drama, The Gilded Age is a watchable enough confection with its large brownstones and expensive bustles. But Fellowes has attempted too lazy a translation of British aristocracy into its American counterpart; are we really meant to believe, for example, that Christine Baranski’s Agnes Van Rhijn is New York’s Dowager Countess? The script wants us to make these links, but for me, part of Maggie Smith’s success in the role was her ability to convey the nuance of her class, as precarious and yet intricate as a house of cards. All Agnes can do is speak of her money imperiously; there’s no inflection of the American conflict between meritocracy and privilege. It’s clear to anyone who has spent time in the US, where seemingly every British person is taken for an aristocrat wearing a top hat, how poor the mutual understanding of our respective class systems is. Class in America is far from an imperial hangover, as Fellowes suggests, but a breed apart.
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