Coming this fall
The Original Influencers
Roxane Gay on the Gilded Age rich, who made themselves their business and forgot to enjoy any of it.
It’s a strange analogy to make, but in many ways they’re like content creators today on social media who make themselves their business. And so they spend their entire day and night creating content about themselves, reading the comments about themselves. And that was kind of how the people of the Gilded Age were living their lives, and very little of what they did was actually for pleasure, including falling in love or having children or even having sex.
Gay has read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence about thirty times. That’s what a guide is for: they notice what you wouldn’t, and a love story becomes a study of performance, and of its price.
That’s one minute of Roxane Gay on The Age of Innocence, opening this fall at Rebind Classics.
The full series
8 episodes · Roxane Gay on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
- On the Surface, a Love Story. Roxane Gay has read this novel about thirty times, and her opening case says why: Wharton skewers the wealthy lovingly, from the inside, and the Gilded Age rich were content creators before content.
- The Scarlet D. A woman leaves a terrible marriage and discovers her real crime is making the family say "divorce" out loud; Gay names what old New York's antibodies are made of: blame, projection, and gossip, the one currency everyone accepts.
- Yellow Roses. Nobody comes to the party, and Gay reads the snub as a verdict delivered without a single rude word, and then one florist's box, dutiful lilies for May and unsigned yellow roses for Ellen, ends the love story's deniability.
Show all 8 episodes
- The Company Man. The family assembles to stop Ellen's divorce and sends its lawyer, who happens to be Newland Archer; Gay's verdict is the sharpest turn so far: he is not this world's exception, he is its case study.
- The Nepo Baby of Old New York. Gay notices the servants the novel spends nothing on, then does the math on the man it spends everything on, and delivers her verdict in two modern words: the nepo baby of old New York.
- The Performance of Being Newland Archer. He tells Ellen he cannot love her unless he gives her up, and is at the altar two chapters later; Gay tracks a man performing renunciation, happiness, even the life of ideas, until a poor French tutor exposes the act.
- Each Time You Happen to Me. Asked point blank why Ellen loves Newland at all, Gay answers "the idea of safety, not the man," then calls the snowbound carriage line one of the sexiest in literature and asks what he would actually do if Ellen called his bluff.
- Save Your Pity. In the last four chapters Gay shows you who was moving the pieces all along, and at the Paris bench she means her title: save your pity, or spend it on May, on Ellen, and on the people whose labor built the money.
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