Picture this: You’re all dressed up in your finest frippery to attend the opera with your beloved husband, but he’s late returning home. You naturally assume it’s simply because he’s been quite busy with work, but in fact, he’s been keeping a secret from you. When he finally does stroll through your gorgeous New York townhouse’s ornate doors, he’s not ready to usher you to the Met. No, he’s here to blow up your picture perfect life with the revelation that he’s not only been cheating on you, but he wants you to divorce him so he can marry his lover! It’s shocking, it’s upsetting, and it just so happens to one of our favorite side characters in HBO‘s The Gilded Age Season 3 premiere!
About halfway through The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 1 “Who Is in Charge Here?”, Charles Fane (Ward Horton) tells his sweet, doting wife Aurora (Kelli O’Hara) that he’s fallen in love with someone else. Not only that, but that he intends to marry his mistress, leaving Aurora a divorced woman, doomed to be completely ostracized by society.
“We wanted to deal with divorce. We wanted to use a character we had already invested in and not do that thing of just inventing a character to come in and be divorced,” Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes explained to DECIDER.
By foisting this storyline on poor Aurora, the audience can share the shock that Agnes (Christine Baranski) and Ada (Cynthia Nixon) feel. As Agnes’s niece by marriage, Aurora Fain has been a consistent presence in the Van Rhijn house over the years on The Gilded Age. She represents the best of “old” New York in that she’s always kind, courteous, and connected with the “right” people. The news that her husband is coercing her into a divorce isn’t just shocking to Agnes, but scandalous. The aunts even suggest to Aurora that while she can come over for dinner, she probably shouldn’t expect to dine with other guests outside the family.
Gilded Age stars Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski told DECIDER that Ada and Agnes’s comments to Aurora are indicative of where they fall in society’s pecking order.
“I think that we are people of standing and some wealth, but we are little fish in this big pond,” Nixon said. “Somebody like Mrs. Fish who is much wealthier, or obviously Mrs. Astor, have the power to change these rules, but we really don’t.”
“Right, if Mrs. Astor says it’s okay, then maybe it’s okay, but it’s unlikely she would,” Baranski said. “But I think Agnes is a realist when it comes to how the rules are played out in that society, and until they change, you play by those rules or you tarnish your own reputation.”
“So she says to her own niece, ‘Well, you may not be comfortable coming here.’ It’s clear that these are the rules, and sorry, but come to dinner alone or, you know…”
Nixon added, “I mean, even the ‘Come to dinner alone’ is going out on a bit of a limb.”
“You know, in their defense, what we would not want would be to have a dinner party, to have Aurora come, and to everyone suddenly, ‘Oh, you, know, I’m sorry, I left the oven on, I have to go,’” Nixon said. “I mean that would be worse, obviously.”
As Baranski and Nixon hint, attitudes towards divorce would begin to shift during the Gilded Age. It’s a topic that Fellowes and his co-showrunner Sonja Warfield were keen to explore in Season 3.
“We wanted to touch on the whole business of divorce because it was beginning to get going in America sooner than in Europe, and indeed it would be acceptable in America before it would acceptable in Europe,” Fellowes said. “We wanted to look into all of that, but the toughness of that society was that if you broke its rules, you know, there was no forgiving pat on the shoulder. You broke the rules.”
“In fact, in the end, it was Alva Vanderbilt who broke that and managed to get divorced women back into society,” he said, referring to the real life Gilded Age figure who is the main source of inspiration for Carrie Coon’s Bertha Russell.
“I think it’s been such a massive change in our behavior as a society that it seemed an interesting element to take up and and have a story around,” Fellowes said.
Okay, but can we all agree that we’d still want sweet Aurora Fain at any of our dinner parties? Divorced or not?
