The key to understanding the Gilded Age lies in the period’s great novels, which refuse the comforts of culture. These run the gamut from Edith Wharton’s tales of desperate social climbers to the hammer blows of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane, who at the end of the century invented the brutal naturalist novel.
These writers knew the strength and crassness of human desire, the poignancy as well as the shallowness of bourgeois appetites, and the red-in-tooth-and-nail greed that the Gilded Age exposed. Norris lambasted William Dean Howells, the doyen of the literary world, for writing merely polite novels orbiting around card tables, tea parties, and artists’ studios, in which nothing truly disruptive ever happened. Instead Norris celebrated what he called a new form of romanticism, “this drama of the people, working itself out in blood and ordure ... unique, somber, powerful beyond words.”
Norris’ hero character McTeague is a hulking, oafish San Francisco dentist, frequently called “stupid” by the author. His 1899 novel, McTeague, is full of addled, obsessive characters who are fueled by greed and lunge after tattered bits of solace. The urge for gold especially torments them and cannot be stilled. The novel’s only antidote to the misery of wanting what you can’t have is the tedium of Sunday afternoon working-class leisure: family jaunts to the park with a posse of irritating children, or dozing in front of the stove after a few beers. Neither politics nor culture can help to better the human character: Norris lampoons the married McTeague’s effort to improve himself by wearing a silk hat on Sunday and drinking bottled instead of steam beer. In the end, McTeague murders his wife, the frail, miserly Trina (who in one scene rolls around naked on a bed heaped with gold coins), and then bludgeons his best friend turned enemy, Marcus, during the book’s stark conclusion in Death Valley, filmed on location by Erich von Stroheim in the director’s version of his monumental eight-hour Greed, most of which was cut by the studio.
Norris’ prose conjures the sublime emptiness of the Western desert that lures McTeague and Marcus to their combat over the dead Trina’s gold. Arriving at Death Valley, McTeague looks upon “primordial desolation”: “League upon league the infinite reaches of dazzling-white alkali laid themselves out like an immeasurable scroll unrolled from horizon to horizon; not a bush, not a twig relieved that horrible monotony.” McTeague dies in the desert, handcuffed to Marcus’ corpse. Like Cormac McCarthy, Norris finds the waste places of the spirit in the Western landscape, with no hope for resurrection, and scant chances even for survival.
The Gilded Age, so called after a forgettable novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, was characterized by the rapid march of technology and the accompanying unchecked power of the state that left ordinary citizens feeling adrift and created huge gaps between the rich and the poor. While spawning protest movements for Black freedom, women’s suffrage, and the rights of laborers, the period was also marked by a massive loss of trust in government institutions, which were, more often than not, in bed with the high-rolling fat cats of the day, like Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller.
Donald Trump’s America has been called a new Gilded Age, with real-estate moguls and Silicon Valley hierarchs replacing the railroad and oil barons of the late 19th century. There is a more exact historical analogy, though. The Obama-era Democratic Party, at least until it was capsized by Trump’s recent victory, better resembles the postbellum Republicans, who presided over the Gilded Age’s unprecedented expansion of state power and its melding of government and corporate interests.
Writers knew the strength and crassness of human desire, the poignance as well as the shallowness of bourgeois appetites, and the red-in-tooth-and-nail greed that the Gilded Age exposed.
The Republicans were at home with graft. They presided over the spoils system, which handed out cushy federal jobs to office seekers eager to make money by running fee-based government programs. Henry Adams, an unfriendly observer, described the start of Ulysses S. Grant’s first presidential term, when the shameless Gould manipulated a blindsided Grant so that he could corner the market in gold: “The worst scandals of the eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions and people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cess-pool of vulgar corruption.” The key question of the Gilded Age—whether the United States should adhere to the gold standard or opt for a looser bimetallism based on gold and silver—turned into a combat between the superrich and the masses who suffered from two financial panics, in 1873 and 1893, both brought on by massive snags in the money supply.
The class divisions of the Gilded Age stung most painfully in the burgeoning mining industry, which produced both metals. Men sometimes worked 16 hours a day in Carnegie’s mines. Absurdly, Carnegie set up libraries in factory towns to benefit workers who preferred to sleep after bouts of back-breaking labor rather than improve their minds by reading. Meanwhile, railroads, financed by J.P. Morgan and other international bankers, made fortunes for the robber barons, whose new wealth was dizzying, Silicon Valley style. A dinner at Delmonico’s might feature gold monogrammed bracelets hidden in the female guests’ napkins, real pearls in the oysters, or cigarettes made of hundred-dollar bills, smoked thrillingly over dessert.
The Gilded Age was also notorious for its adulterated, fancified version of culture. Culture seemed mere window dressing, part of a woman’s effort to acquire a wealthy husband, and her ornate reward if she succeeded. The sharpest critics of the age looked down on the heaps of paintings and statues that the newly rich hauled back from the Continent. In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James’ greatest novel, the most cultivated aesthete, Gilbert Osmond, is also the slimiest character. James’ heroine Isabel Archer must turn inward to wrestle with her desires rather than looking toward polished manners or European ceremonial niceties to save her.
The Gilded Age writers knew the bleakness of the American terrain, whether wilderness or urban, and the life of hard work this land demands. No one who has read Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) will forget the scene when the bone-tired, defeated Hurstwood becomes a scab and tries to hold down a job as a motorman on a Brooklyn mail car, desperately trying to master its controls, huddled against the freezing winter cold while union men throw rocks at him.
Work played a surprisingly crucial role for Edith Wharton, usually thought of as an aristocratic butterfly. In The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart finds herself reduced to toiling in a milliner’s shop, where she struggles to keep up with her fellow workers, working-class girls more adjusted to life’s endless drudgery. Lily yearns for a life of pleasure and ease just as Emma Bovary desires sensual excitement, an aim pursued with a stubbornness that Wharton honors. But stubbornness plunges over the edge into self-destruction when Lily rejects the marriage proposals that are her only remaining lifeline, including one from a Jewish businessman, Simon Rosedale, who is as humane as he is corrupt. She descends into drug addiction and death and would surely agree with Hurstwood’s last words: “What’s the use?”
Lily Bart, like Wharton’s dissatisfied, vindictive heroine Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, remains captivating not despite but because of her shallowness, which she is just deep enough to perceive. “People were tired of her,” she decides at a low moment:
They would welcome her in a new character, but as Miss Bart they knew her by heart. She knew herself by heart too, and was sick of the old story. There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.
Lily relishes her body’s “slenderness, strength and elasticity,” her “well-poised lines and happy tints,” but beauty cannot rescue her. She runs into gambling debts, and she refuses to be saved from her trouble by marriage to a man like Rosedale, who sees into her more accurately than she can bear. The Jamesian aesthete Lawrence Selden, who is ambivalent about Lily, eludes her, since neither Selden nor Lily is willing to surrender to the other. Wharton’s hardheaded grasp of Lily appears in a disturbing moment when she “read[s] in [Selden’s] eyes that no philosophy was proof against her power. It would be pleasant to have that sensation again ...” In the end, Lily is crushed rather than triumphant, and for Wharton, like Dreiser and Norris, these are most often the only two options for a person’s destiny.
The apparent reveling in failure, death, and destruction in these novels has a paradoxical vitality at its heart, though. Wharton, Dreiser, and Norris dig deep into the bedrock of human passions, and it is no accident that they look askance at the promises of progressive movements to improve our being. There is not one word in their books about ensuring human happiness through government bureaucracy. The soul’s discontent cannot be solved by social welfare tinkering but keeps showing up in primal impulses like sexual greed, the lust for comfort and ease, and the wish to dominate others.
By contrast, the Progressivism of the Gilded Age tried to impose culture on the masses via the elite do-gooder work of reformers like Jane Addams, who introduced immigrants to the fine arts at Chicago’s Hull House. Progressives wanted to elevate the working class by foisting the higher pleasures upon them because they needed to prove their worth as intellectuals with a mission. They burned for a “religion of humanity” and for an utterly new relation between the sexes. “She would reform the solar system if she could get hold of it,” someone says about James’ heroine Olive Chancellor, the feminist crusader lampooned in The Bostonians (1886), his wicked satire of Progressivism. “Almost everything that was usual was iniquitous” for Olive, James tells us: “Whatever is, is wrong.” James has more fun in The Bostonians than anywhere else in his work, delivering nasty Wilde-like barbs every few pages as he shuffles off the coil of reform-minded New England piety, which had become mere self-congratulatory cant.
The progressive offers no thoughts about facing death, human perversity, the terrific contrast between our hellish tendency to torment one another and our angelic urge to make peace.
The Gilded Age Progressive urge to correct, castigate, or improve the unwashed masses, which Christopher Lasch diagnosed beginning with his first book, The New Radicalism in America, had its resurgence in the 2010s with a newly fervent insistence on dogmas concerning climate, gender, and race. This manufactured religion of humanity spurned the working class and its hidebound prejudices, instead praising the enlightened few for their righteous feelings. Black Lives Matter knee-taking and yard-sign wokeness were vestiges of the New England abolitionist creed that lived on after the Civil War to serve a variety of causes, from temperance and women’s suffrage to eugenics. The religious cult was needed, then as now, because the all-encroaching capitalist forces that had joined hands with the government were insufficient to sustain liberal beliefs. Progressivism is a way to mask the loss of trust in the establishment, substituting drummed-up cultural issues, the minutiae of racial and sexual differences, for what we actually require: a hard-bitten analysis of a world subject to corporate control.
After the brief chaotic intermission of Trump’s first term, Obama-era America continued under Biden, aiming to cancel the previous American religion of self-reliance and substitute a reliance on the voice of experts who served the regime. There were the disinformation mavens, the COVID-19 experts, the Ivy League authorities who incarnated science, facts, and logic. With its claim that the establishment always knew what was best for you, Obama world represented the final stage of neoliberal hegemony.
The woke movement tried to supply what was missing in Obama’s corporate settlement, the spark of communal commitment that the Obama team’s globalist agenda lacked. Yes, wokeism swore fealty to establishment experts, even when they didn’t have facts on their side (see: masks on toddlers; transgender treatment for teens). But woke progressives needed more than Obama’s neoliberalism. They needed a religion. Neoliberalism, with its invasive technologies, had become a dire threat to privacy and personal integrity. Protesting George Floyd’s killing was the antidote. Waving cardboard signs to cleanse oneself of whiteness or purify the Middle East of Jews was a proudly homespun gesture, a bold adventure into real experience in a society where most of what you do and say takes place on the internet, the prime tool of global capitalism.
Wokeism came out of the need for religious belonging. While enjoying the blessings of belonging, you could freely revile the subhuman enemy—racists, transphobes, Zionists. The vanguard’s favored classes, BIPOC, Palestinians, and trans people, took on the role of the heroic workers under Soviet Communism. But neoliberalism was bound to win out over protest movements. The triumph of AI, the new technology that boasted it could replace the human, was already looming when Biden took office. Now, it has the sting of the irrevocable. Wokeism cannot defend human integrity against the godlike machine because it has never thought about individual dignity, only the status that comes with group membership.
The Gilded Age novelists remind us that progressivism, ascendant in their day and climaxing with the woke insurgency of the 2020s, peddles an impoverished notion of human nature. The progressive offers no thoughts whatever about facing death, about human perversity, about the terrific contrast between our hellish tendency to torment one another and our angelic urge to make peace. There’s no better response than returning to a literature devoted to our flesh-and-blood fears and desires, the hard yet invigorating realism of Wharton, Norris, and Dreiser.
David Mikics is Professor of English at New College of Florida. He recently edited The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain, and is also author of Stanley Kubrick.
