‘The Gilded Age’ season 3, episode 4 recap: wedding jitters
All railroads lead to the alter
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ALL RAILROADS LEAD to the alter – we’re now halfway through season three of The Gilded Age.
The dollar princess Gladys has now married her duke and shipped off to England. We’re introduced to cool Aunt Monica. Jack gets a windfall that he’s now able to pull an Eduardo Saverin and move to Singapore (or Florida). The show gets its version of Bridgerton‘s gossip-monger Lady Whistledown. And Marian is apparently not prominent enough of a match for Larry, according to his mother. But I think Bertha will have more fish to fry.
Below, we unpack the events surrounding the wedding of the 19th century.
Jack can’t speak money
How much is $600,000 during the Gilded Age in today’s money? About $21,195,500.
Larry and Jack (who is so forgettable that I’ve constantly referred to him as Billy in my notes) have finally sold their clock patent. No small sum, the duo will split the sale down to $10,597,750 each. I did find it cute how Jack couldn’t speak the language of millionaires that Larry was so fluent in, referring to every $100,000 increment as “three . . . four . . . six”.
What should Billy Jack buy with his windfall? Well, that officially makes him richer than Agnes Van Rhijn and almost as rich as Ada. Like any lottery winner, he’s going to keep it a secret for now. He also wants to keep working because he doesn’t know how not to. If his raison d’être is to keep inventing, that’s a solid start to keep building his wealth. My advice? Pull an Eduardo Saverin and move to Singapore, or maybe his closest thing: Florida (though I don’t know how cool the southern state was in the late 19th century).
Aunt Monica is a cool aunt
I remember when Deadline announced that the Merritt Wever would be joining the season three cast, I knew the showrunners really wanted to start cooking. If you’re unfamiliar with Wever’s delights, she’s starred in several other hit HBO properties, including The Walking Dead. More recently, she played Zach Cherry’s cheating wife, Gretchen, in Apple TV+’s Severance. So when I heard she was playing Bertha’s estranged sister, I knew the drama was coming.
Larry and Gladys invited their aunt to the wedding as a bit of a middle finger to their meddling mother. Not much is known of Bertha’s past, only that she’s a social upstart who married George at a young age, and so they came up together financially. Aunt Monica resides in Albany, New York state’s capital, and with her unfashionable curls and last season’s wardrobe, she’s certified provincial. For instance, she can’t fathom Bertha’s quirky routine of changing several times a day to so much as eat a meal. To Bertha’s shock, Monica planned on wearing one dress for the ceremony and dinner – a raised eyebrow I understand by today’s standards.
While this is the first time we’ve met Aunt Monica, she’s absolutely withering and an instant highlight this season. Holding the secrets to Bertha’s former life as a pleb, she has the upper hand to potentially sabotage, her sister’s social standing as the new society supreme. Wever’s delivery is hilarious: with her chin down and hushed tone, it reminds me of Elizabeth Debicki’s (in retrospect) camp-y take on Princess Diana in The Crown. Which is to say The Gilded Age needed Aunt Monica.
“The gall of that woman”
At this point, Mrs. Kirkland isn’t hiding how much of a racist she is. She does, however, join Mrs. Scott to listen to Peggy’s talk about Newporters supporting the Tuskegee school – she wants to see what it is exactly that her son sees in her. Unsurprisingly, she’s unimpressed (cautious, even) of Peggy’s career as a writer and journalist, as well as her opinions on politics and getting the vote. “I also want to be a mother and a wife . . . who has the vote,” Peggy says. Her beau William Kirkland should stand up more for Peggy in their condescending chats with his mother, because I don’t see how much their storyline will progress beyond Mrs. Kirkland being unsupportive of their union.
Agnes the pot-stirrer – we love it to see it
It’s the formula that made Bridgerton such a hoot: The Gilded Age just got its own Lady Whistledown. The anonymous gossip columnist in the papers is the newest addition to stirring the pot in the city’s upper echelons. Originally, people thought it was Bertha herself feeding the paper tidbits, building hype around her daughter’s engagement to the duke. In this episode, the columnist went as far as talking about Gladys’ newly embroidered underwear as a duchess, as well as revealing her dress designer and sketches of the bridesmaid dresses. So vulgar were the details that Bertha’s name is scrubbed from the suspect list.
Who could the mystery writer be? Some have speculated it’s a clothing designer listening in on her client’s conversations. Maybe someone from downstairs or a lady’s maid of a prominent doyenne? Ward McAllister, Mrs. Astor’s favourite ‘walker’, is another potential suspect, given how he’s wrist-deep in everyone’s business.
Anyway, Ada and Agnes keep eating up the gossip fodder. So much so that Agnes uncharacteristically approaches Mrs. Astor at the wedding about her eldest daughter’s rumoured affair in Europe, which her husband found out about and challenged her sidepiece to a duel. If Agnes was no longer going to be the lady of the house, the character just got more fun as a shit-stirrer. Being a ‘hanger-on’ suits her.
Marian isn’t prominent enough for Larry, says Bertha
Although she’s distracted with executing the wedding of the century, Bertha has become the main opponent to Larian, of course. When Larry brings it up with his mother, she reveals that Marian isn’t prominent enough. His sister, she says, is about to become a duchess, and he needs to deliver a match on par with that. Any hesitation Marian previously had about dating Larry seems to have simmered off: she just got made a bridesmaid in Gladys’s wedding. In her Aunt Agnes’s eyes, the appointment comes off as Bertha’s seal of approval. And with her sister in town and her fights with George, Bertha has more fish to fry – she might just let Larian slide. Here’s hoping.
Marriage looks scary as hell
“Wilt thou obey him and serve him, love, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keeping only unto him, so long as you both shall live?” Now . . . that’s a lot to ask. And I’d go as far as saying that sounds like a threat. I’m maybe too much of a cynic to marriage (and simply a modern person) to scoff at serving and obeying another person. But hey, it was the Gilded Age.
All railroads led to this very moment for Gladys to walk up the aisle and marry her duke. After watching the episode, a little rabbit hole afterwards helped contextualise the real-life inspiration behind Gladys’s character arc. The OG dollar princess Consuelo Vanderbilt (a relative of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, believe it or not), also married a beleaguered duke, also refused to come out of her room before the wedding, and also had to be talked into it by her father. One way the show differs from its IRL counterpart was that Consuelo was 5’8″ and her Duke of Marlborough an unprosperous 5’2″. You can imagine the headlines back then had a field day with this – nothing changes.
In saying all that, it was terrifying for Gladys to rationalise all the money spent for the wedding and her family’s social standing as “past the point of no return”.
In the front pew, Bertha basked in her great triumph, Mrs. Astor a few rows behind, conceding defeat, wondering how on earth Mrs Russell scaled the social ranks in a little over three years. “Let me enjoy this,” Bertha told her husband.
The episode ends with Gladys heading off to dreary England with her new husband. As they set sail, he went into her room to consummate the marriage. I hope Gladys goes on to become as much of a beloved duchess as her historical counterpart was: donating money to the people and keeping a sidepiece of her own. I also don’t think this is the last we’ll see of Gladys; marrying and shipping her off across the Atlantic would be a very 2010s way of killing off a character. Maybe this will open the show up to an England spin-off? Maybe the Russells visit her at Sidmouth Palace?
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