615By controlling entrance into society, women such as
Mrs. Astor (and her imitators in nearly every city in the
nation) also determined the disposition, through marriage
and inheritance, of the nation’s largest fortunes. Society
women possessed immense power.
Although the system was created and supervised by
mature women, it demanded the compliance of adolescent
girls. The process began when a wealthy mother took her
daughter on a round of visits to society women, to whom
they would present their “calling cards.” If mother and daugh-
ter were judged suitable, they would be invited in for tea; if
the girl behaved with decorum (and if her father’s assets
proved sound), she would be invited to balls and other formal
events. At or near her sixteenth birthday, her parents would
hold a ball in her honor—in New York the event usually took
place at Delmonico’s restaurant—marking her “debut” into
society. She wore a white gown symbolizing her virginity. A
male relative presented her formally to the prominent
women. Now she could accept male suitors from “society.”
This highly stylized—almost tribal—ritual brought
young women to the threshold of womanhood. Marriage
awaited beyond the door. Many eagerly anticipated the
acquisition of adult status and the social power it entailed.
Others regarded this rite with terror. (Novelist Edith Wharton
remembered her debut as a “long cold agony of shyness.”)
In the early twentieth century, some young women began
to rebel. Elsie Clews, daughter of a Wall Street banker,
refused to wear corsets. When her mother wasn’t looking,
she took off her veil and white gloves. She subsequently
scandalized Newport—the fashionable Rhode Island sum-
mer resort for society’s wealthy—by going swimming with a
young man without a chaperone (but not without a bathing
suit). To her mother’s dismay, Clews delayed marriage and
went to Barnard College; eventually she became a respected
anthropologist (Elsie Clews Parsons).
Kate Winslet’s “Rose” was, like Elsie Clews, a prematurely
“modern” woman. But Clews tore off only her veil and white
gloves, not all her clothes; she dispensed with the rituals of
courtship, not its substance. Even in the waning years of the
Victorian era, few wealthy young women succumbed to
impoverished men, however earnest and appealing.
Victorian courtship was necessarily protracted. Young
women did not unburden themselves to strangers; and even
to friends, especially of the opposite sex, the process of
revealing one’s inner feelings unfolded slowly, often after a
series of tests and trials. One person’s tentative disclosure
invited a reciprocal response. Letters and diaries show that,
over time, these personal revelations often led to sexual inti-
macies. Nowadays many people regard Victorian marriages
as unfeeling and stiff, but many Victorians maintained that
their personal intimacies were the more delicious for having
been long delayed.
Cameron’s Titaniclooks like the past; but the heart of
the movie is Jack and Rose’s whirlwind romance. While Rose’s
story addresses some of the anxieties of young society
women, it more closely resembles the courtship patterns of
Hollywood today than the experiences of young people at
the beginning of the last century.A society couple of the new type: Edith Stokes, heiress to a shipping
fortune and her husband, an architect. The portrait was painter John
Singer Sargent’s wedding gift to the couple.
Source: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps
Stokes. Oil on Canvas. 85^1 ⁄ 4 " 393 ⁄ 4 " (214 101 cm). Signed and dated (upper
right): John S. Sargent 1897. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Edith
Minturn Phelps Stokes (Mrs. I.N.), 1938. (38.104). Photograph ©1992. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
Questions for Discussion
■Jack and Rose “hooked up,” to use modern slang. Why
was such behavior improbable among young women of
wealthy families in the late nineteenth century?
■What other behaviors in the film seem anachronistic?