Season : A Social History of the Debutante (9780393608748) by Richardson Kristen

Author:Richardson, Kristen [Kristen Richardson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
ISBN: 9780393608748
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Published: 2019-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

The closed world of Edith Wharton novels was changing rapidly. By the early twentieth century, a society once led by aristocrats had definitively fractured into several smaller groups with differing, though sometimes overlapping, values. There was a group of families that resembled an aristocracy, who espoused privacy, attended private school, and made debuts together, but did not seek out publicity. Then there was something that resembled what we might consider society today. Its members might have some connection to the prior group, but they cultivated publicity. The people organizing these debutante presentations tended to court the press, but they did so behind the scenes, and the families knew to feign horror when the press showed up outside of events. Then there were the celebrities, and the people who were able to comingle with them because of their great success in business, sport, or the arts. These people did not yet have a debutante ritual, though soon their daughters would be sought after as debutantes. Traditional aristocratic values continued to hold some shabby glamour (especially for traditional aristocrats), and those values were invoked at key cultural or personal moments, to bolster one’s status, or keep another person at bay. Aristocratic values continued to hold a kind of glamour—an amorphous, unimpeachable authority—and were occasionally trotted out by people like the British writer Nancy Mitford, in her still-discussed essay on class difference in linguistic usage, in which she divided common words into the categories U and non-U (upper class and non-upper class) and set off a feverish discussion about usage and bias in English society. Occasional eruptions of this sort of class-consciousness became less frequent as time passed, and the social authority of power individuals waned.

There were no more Mrs. Astors. The great age of the arbiter in her style or Ward McAllister’s style had ended. The sheer force of will required, the mix of wealth, family, social ambition, fearless aggressiveness, and inside social information, research and originality, as well as the wise manipulation of publicity, was replaced by an organized social structure that in many ways had been created by Astor and McAllister but eventually devoured them whole. This structure followed the basic rhythms arbiters had championed. The system they created was replicable in every town, with smaller debutante systems paying homage to the prestigious one in New York. Many little fiefdoms fanned out, governed by now-nameless dowagers with no less sway in their area than Mrs. Astor, who made their small regional changes—changing punch to champagne and back again—but still acted as madams to get their girls married.

Observers would say that the final end of the old ways was World War I, which fractured traditional British aristocratic social structure not only because of the unrelenting death of young, marriageable men, but also because it was almost impossible to serve on the front with another man, facing death together, only to return and ask them to work in service. In this period, British aristocrats realized they could no longer afford to keep their estates and servants, if even available, nor the cost of modernizing.

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