63 pages • 2 hours read
Mark Twain, Charles Dudley WarnerThe Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1873A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Greed and the Metaphor of the Gilded Age
The book’s title later became a common nickname for the era in which the story takes place. Gilding refers to the process of overlaying non-precious materials with a thin layer of gold, enhancing the object’s beauty and perceived value. The novel spans roughly the second half of the 19th century, a period in American history defined by enormous growth in manufacturing, completion of a transcontinental railroad, and the social dominance of “titans of industry” like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, who made fortunes in oil and steel, respectively. These factors contributed to a new vision of the American dream characterized not by financial security but by immense wealth. This vision proved both pervasive and destructive. Just as gilding’s thin layer of gold hides baser materials underneath, The Gilded Age depicts the era’s promise of easy wealth as a facade, hiding greed, fraud, and high rates of financial ruin.
Many subplots in The Gilded Age revolve around greed, manifested in its characters’ desire for riches beyond what they need to live comfortably. Dissatisfaction with the riches they do attain results in risky efforts to get more. Silas Hawkins and Eli Bolton demonstrate this. In Eli’s case, greed is not the only problem. Another dangerous aspect of speculating, or making risky investments, is the necessity of investing more and more to prevent the loss of one’s initial investment. The possibility of losing money doesn’t dissuade Eli from investing in the first place, but once he has invested and sees that he is in danger of losing his investment, unscrupulous businessmen like Mr. Bigler can easily convince him that investing more will save him from ruin.
The Gilded Age portrays many examples of dishonesty motivated by greed. People like Beriah Sellers and Harry Brierly see honesty as a barrier to maximizing profits. Like every con artist, they believe they can make more money by lying. Chapter 5 opens with a French proverb that translates to “He would dry snow in the oven, to sell it for table salt” (21), encapsulating the idea of making money by dishonest means. Ruth’s observation that “a large portion of the world lived by getting the rest of the world into schemes” demonstrates a rare insight into the deceptive nature of the speculation economy (77).
Twain and Warner’s narrators portray the era’s economic boom as a false veneer, like a gilt surface covering base material: “much of the business prosperity of the world is only a bubble of credit and speculation, one scheme helping to float another that is no better than it, and the whole liable to come to naught and confusion” (275). This point is demonstrated most effectively with the revelation of the Columbus River Slack-Water Navigation Company’s fraudulent business practices, which closely resemble what is today known as a Ponzi scheme. The company uses funds from government appropriations, which are portrayed in the novel as schemes in and of themselves, to pay back losses from their mismanagement of previous appropriation money. Though the government is, in one sense, the investor and victim of such a scheme, ultimately it’s taxpayers who suffer.
The gilded age metaphor also suggests that the lure of easy wealth is so pervasive it has come to hold an entire society in its power. Describing the young Philip Sterling’s entitlement and lack of personal ambition, the narrators say:
He was not idle or lazy, he had energy and a disposition to carve his own way. But he was born into a time when all young men of his age caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old (275).
The metaphor of a fever conveys the infectiousness of this lust for profit, which spreads and takes hold of people’s minds, becoming an intractable part of the nation’s ethos.
In the novel’s resolution, Washington Hawkins realizes he’s been chasing wealth from the Tennessee land “as children chase butterflies” (336). Philip observes that “these days […] everybody seeks sudden fortune and will not lay one up by slow toil” (341). The disastrous outcomes for those characters who never gain such insight demonstrate a thematic message about the era’s false visions of easy wealth, which disguise greed and deception and most often lead to ruin.
Political Corruption in the Gilded Age
The time period in which Twain and Warner wrote The Gilded Age was characterized by political corruption. In one notorious scandal known as the Crédit Mobilier affair, two corporations involved in building the Union Pacific Railroad overcharged the government by $44 million. The excess was pocketed by company executives and used in part to bribe politicians. The era also saw profit-motivated Reconstruction policies, business tycoons accumulating massive wealth through dubious practices, and a westward expansion that led to displacement, land theft, and genocide against the Indigenous population. The government’s role in all this became a focus of Twain and Warner’s critique. The Gilded Age depicts legislative involvement in schemes for personal profit, unethical financial practices, and exploitation of oppressed peoples, as well as a shocking tolerance of bribery and nepotism, satirically portraying what the authors saw as a government overrun by corruption.
The Knobs University bill, which would use government funds to purchase the Tennessee land and build a university on it, is a prime example of how Congressional legislation can be enacted for personal profit and made to look like it’s for the good of the nation. Harry’s letters to Philip from Washington, DC, are facetiously said to contain “wise remarks upon the machinery of private legislation for the public-good” (219). The bill’s supporters only care about selling the land, but by focusing the public’s attention on a plan to offer greater educational opportunities for African Americans, they appear benevolent and noble.
The Columbus River Slack-Water Navigation Company provides the story’s prime example of unscrupulous business practices. The company’s president admits to spending $191,000 of an expected appropriations fund on bribes paid to members of Congress. Bribery costs will go down, he assures Harry: “All these people are in the next Congress. We shan’t have to pay them a cent” (153). In other words, those politicians are now in the company’s pocket. Harry and Beriah later help the company push new appropriations through Congress, which they’ll use to cover previous losses, keep themselves in business, and fund the executives’ lavish lifestyles.
The backstory of the Honorable Oliver Higgins, a congressional delegate from an unnamed US territory whose wife pays a social call to Laura Hawkins, provides an example of how greed and political corruption actively oppress and exploit Indigenous Americans. Laura learns that Higgins has engineered an appropriation through Congress “for the maintenance of” his territory’s Indigenous population, which would have made them rich “if it had ever got to them” (175). The authors make blunt use of vitriolic language in this scene, emphasizing the racist attitudes prevalent in society. By linking this language to Higgins’ corrupt actions, the authors denounce the government’s complicity with the ongoing subjugation of Indigenous populations.
Various subplots throughout the novel contribute to the impression of a government in which bribery and nepotism are the standard. They’re such an expected and inherent part of how things get done in the capital, in fact, that people get upset when someone renounces them. Virtue disrupts the status quo. When Mr. Bigler says, “I shall go in for reform. Things have got pretty mixed when a legislature will give away a United States senatorship,” (263), he’s referring to a Senate seat being filled by voters in a fair election rather than being bought. He considers it “giving the seat away” because they’re not making any money from it; a missed opportunity in his eyes. Laura’s conversation with Mr. Trollop, in which she reveals that she’s gotten many votes in favor of her bill through bribery, further supports the authors’ assertion of pervasive corruption in politics.
The fact that Congress is in charge of investigating its own corruption is treated in the narrative as a laughable absurdity. As an entity, Congress is self-preserving. The goal of these investigations is not to find truth but to uphold Congressional prestige and authority. Beriah recounts one investigation’s conclusion, which he sees as proving Congress does punish its members for unethical behavior. He tells Washington, “Congress intimated plainly enough, that they considered him almost a stain upon their body; and without waiting ten days, hardly, to think the thing over, they rose up and hurled at him a resolution declaring that they disapproved of his conduct!” (282). This humorous account of a slap on the wrist in the guise of a formal censure may still resonate with today’s readers.
The Gilded Age is far from subtle in portraying the American government of the time as rife with corruption. There is no shortage of examples illustrating profit-motivated legislation, fraudulent business activities, exploitation of Indigenous Americans, bribery, nepotism, and impotent regulatory procedures. Perhaps the book’s most succinct expression of this theme, however, is its reference to a town called Corruptionville, said to be named after Congress itself.
Building Castles in the Sky
Many characters in The Gilded Age see themselves as optimists, energetically pursuing their hopes and dreams. The authors portray these characters as delusional, as their optimism often has no basis in reality. This quixotic quality is described by the characters themselves as being “visionary.” When Beriah’s high hopes for the city of Napoleon are finally dashed, the narrators describe his “air-castles” crumbling to ruins (154). This alludes to the idiomatic phrase “building castles in the sky”: creating hopes or plans that are impossible or unrealistic. The follies of The Gilded Age’s dreamers carry a thematic message of warning: Chasing grandiose dreams without a realistic path to success or the will to toil and persevere in their pursuit is as foolish as erecting giant stone structures in midair.
Silas builds the novel’s first castle in the sky when he tells his wife about the Tennessee land he’s purchased and how it will make their children incredibly wealthy someday. At the time, he says “the whole tract would not sell for over a third of a cent an acre,” but a day will come when “people will be glad to get it for twenty dollars, fifty dollars, a hundred dollars […] a thousand dollars an acre!” (3). His assumption of the land’s exponential increase in value is a coping mechanism for dealing with the family’s current poverty, allowing him to maintain hope and feel heroic as a father.
The effect of Silas’s belief in the wealth this land will bring his children, however, sets his son up for failure. He instills in Washington a firm expectation of riches in his future, causing Washington to forgo learning a trade or committing to a career path. Instead, he spends his time and energy on useless inventions, unsound speculations, and reveries about the riches he’ll have when the Tennessee land money falls in his lap. After discussing the plan to sell the land to the government with Laura, Washington “got up and walked the floor feverishly during two hours; and when he sat down he had married Louise, built a house, reared a family, married them off, spent upwards of eight hundred thousand dollars on mere luxuries, and died worth twelve millions” (188). Washington pins his happiness on such visions, and their eventual disintegration throws him into despair.
The bustling future city of Napoleon is Beriah’s central castle in the sky. For this dream to succeed, the railroad would have to be rerouted miles out of its way and the Columbus River “improved” at enormous cost. Despite these impediments, Beriah builds the city in his mind and his heart. He envisions every detail: a public square, hotels, churches, jails, a university, and much more. He and Harry draw an elaborate map of the city and spend many weeks preparing a petition for congressional funding. The time, energy, and hope Beriah invests cannot negate the lack of any foundation supporting his sky-castles. When the river improvement project fails and the railroad route changes, Beriah’s castles crumble. By the end of the narrative, however, he’s building new ones, having learned nothing about gravity’s effect on castles and dreams. Reality can’t dampen Beriah’s visionary spirit, so his friends and family will continue to suffer his delusions and downfalls.
A comment Harry makes about the city of Napoleon helps explain the lure of building castles in the sky: “I suppose it’s as easy to build a University on paper as a Seminary, and it looks better” (119). For men like Silas, Beriah, Washington, and Harry, imagining the achievement of their goals is much easier than the work of actualizing them. Washington compares chasing his unrealistic dreams to chasing butterflies. The effects of these characters’ impractical aspirations aren’t as harmless as uncaught butterflies. They lead their families into poverty, an outcome much more like the crumbled heaps of castles that have fallen out of the sky.
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