Atrium, Biltmore Mansion, Asheville, NC
To be genteel is to be polite, refined, or respectable, often in an affected or ostentatious way. We may like to think that a pretentious display of superiority and wealth is a remnant of bygone eras and best left to old-monied folks like the Astors and the Du Ponts or new-monied folks like the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers who jewelled 5th Avenue in New York City with glorious mansions and elegant soirées during the Gilded Age. We may like to believe that such a show of excess is repulsive, a flamboyant snub to all those who would never grace their marbled halls. And yet, many of us consumed the award-winning PBS Masterpiece series, Dowton Abbey and are currently binging the second season of Netflix’s Bridgerton, as well as impatiently waiting for the next episode of HBO’s The Gilded Age and PBS Masterpiece’s Sanditon. In truth, we appear to be fascinated with gentility. We can’t get enough of the satin gowns and kid gloves, the chaperoned strolls in manicured gardens. Ostentatious as this world may be, there’s something about the manners and the extravagance that we tune in for, season after season.
The world of the Gilded Age genteel was a world in which valets and ladies’ maids were essential. No self-respecting men or women would have been expected to dress themselves. Given the quantity and fit of their clothing items, it would have been largely impossible. Corsets and bustles, buttons upon buttons, gloves that were literally made to fit like a second skin–all of these required an able-bodied valet or ladies’ maid, an individual with nimble fingers and some serious upper body strength. We marvel at the ladies’ maids who dutifully brushed (100 strokes at least) the unpinned hair of their ladies, who unlaced and unbuttoned their extravagant gowns, who removed their satin slippers and–finger by finger–their custom-made gloves. Dressing and undressing were productions not to be rushed or taken lightly. Today, we can pull on a pair of elastic waist sweat pants and slip a t-shirt over our head with one hand. All in a matter of seconds and without fuss. None of us can probably imagine our dressing or undressing ever being seriously considered for a television audience’s delight.
Nor can we imagine our meals, our conversations with friends, our social gatherings as being of much interest to a larger audience. We’ve taken informal to a new and much-relaxed level. When I was working, I recall our high school dress code actually specifying–no joke–that pajamas and slippers were not appropriate school attire. We also had to clarify how much skin could show through jeans that were so ripped that it was a wonder they maintained any structure at all. Perhaps there is something in us that longs for structure–if not in our own clothing and manners, then in those we can read about and view.
Perhaps, in spite of the social levelling that has occurred in the last century, we’re closet gentility. That is, maybe there are those of us who imagine ourselves appearing, behaving, and speaking finely. Maybe we imagine sipping tea poured from a sterling silver tea service into bone china cups instead of slurping it from a Starbucks to-go cup. Maybe we can see ourselves carefully weighing our words and politely listening in conversation rather than dashing off a text message or Instagram post. Maybe, just maybe, we can imagine a nicer, gentler version of ourselves.
Clearly, there was a tarnished underside to the Gilded Age. This was an age in which there were many corrupt industrialists, bankers and politicians whose greed exploited the working class. These robber barons and financiers often held more power than politicians during this time. And this was a period of tenements and sweat shops, 12-hour working days and increasing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Viewers see little of this in the television series and films that profile the genteel because this, of course, brings us perilously too close to the ugliness of the real world–then and now.
There are those, then, who would argue that this gentility is really nothing but an emperor-with-no-clothes, a puffed-up, polished version of the lives of a favored few. And this is largely true. Still, I think it’s the lovelier aspects of the age we long for: the manners of regency courtship, the magnificent architecture and craftsmanship of the family estates, the teas and balls and coronations. We yearn for subtle grace, even if it’s only an imaginary veneer which lies over a cold, brash world.
In reading Denise Kiernan’s The Last Castle, a saga of the Vanderbilt family and the buidling of Biltmore Estate, I learned that in 1926, Thomas Beer nicknamed the 1890s as the Mauve Decade. While attempting to find an artificial way to make quinine, William Henry Perkins inadvertently discovered an aniline dye which resulted in mauve, a color so popular that it became a signature hue for an entire decade. Mauve is not quite plum, not quite rose, a rich yet muted color perfectly suited for the clothing and homes of the genteel.
I thought a lot about this and began wondering what color would best describe the current decade. I could think of many suitable colors, but none of them possesed the subtle, understated gentility of mauve. As a matter of fact, when I looked at my grandchildren’s big box of Crayola crayons, I found colors with names like laser lemon and electric lime. These don’t seem like colors with manners but rather colors with attitude which scream their presence. We have a considerable presence of such attitude today. It manifests itself in all sorts of unrefined ways (like an Academy award winning actor slapping and cursing a comedic host on national television). And maybe this is the biggest reason we thirst for the best of gentility: we simply want a respite from all that is not genteel.
