MY DEAR!

HBO’s Most Buttoned-Up Show Stuns With Scandalous Sex Scene

Things are heating up. WARNING: Spoilers for “The Gilded Age” Season 4 premiere below.

Button up your geegaws, girls, it’s Gilded season! The Gilded Age kicked off its fourth season on Sunday night by taking a page from Bridgerton’s book with bona fide premarital sex!

While the actual scene is decidedly PG, especially for HBO (land of butts and incest), in the Gilded world, this is actually scandalous. The act in question is carried out by Larry (Harry Richardson) and Marian (Louisa Jacobson), who have had an on-again, off-again courtship for several seasons.

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At the start of the season, the pair have called off their engagement for mysterious reasons. However, after attending Oscar’s (Blake Ritson) lavender wedding and making heart eyes at each other across the aisle, they end up at a downtown club. Instead of resenting that Marian is suddenly on board with Moulin Rouge-style dance halls, Larry asks her to join in, saying, “It’s just a dance,” as if we haven’t heard that one before. The two spin and smile, and suddenly we’re in slow motion: their gazes turn serious, and their noses brush.

“Love is in the air,” Oscar proclaims.

Larry offers to escort Marian home in his carriage, and the two embark on a bumpy ride. Marian is thrilled by her evening and says everything at the dance hall is “easy and uncomplicated.” But before Larry can get intimate with her as a strings cover of Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything” plays in the background, à la Bridgerton, the carriage crashes and we’re thrown into a classic rom-com trope: Oh no, we have to stay in a hotel!

If this were a bodice-ripper, there would be only one bed, but even with separate rooms, these two end up in one bed together. Larry comes to Marian’s door and, scantily clad (her arms are showing), she answers, lets him into her room, and they kiss. Larry sweeps her off her feet and takes her to her bed.

As the camera pans behind a lacy white curtain, we hear swelling music. Even though it’s not a Taylor Swift cover by Vitamin String Quartet, the dulcet melody tells us that what we’re watching should make us swoon. But at the last second, lightning flashes and the tone shifts. Wake up! This isn’t a romance. Could it be a horror story?

Intercut with this storyline, across the pond, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) is trying not to die. Those of us with Downton Abbey trauma had a hard go of Gladys’ birth storyline (remember Sybil?), but it serves an important narrative function here. Juxtaposing the direct consequence of sex—pregnancy and birth—with the romantic plotline gives us the message that Gilded is decidedly not Bridgerton.

On Bridgerton, if the couple has premarital relations, the viewers know it’s going to be OK. Bridgerton’s plots are based on romance novels, which all have a happily-ever-after. But Gilded is a realistic prestige drama. Bad things happen here. Remember when Oscar’s boyfriend got run over by a carriage?

Marian’s story isn’t framed as a cautionary tale for impressionable young ladies at home (they’re not watching). We’re not supposed to judge Marian for her “sin,” but we are faced with a stark reminder that, by the light of day, sex before marriage, for a woman, can lead to death, destitution, or despair. Even Gladys, who successfully produces a male heir, almost dies in the process and has such a massive hemorrhage after giving birth that she can never have children again. Nothing easy or uncomplicated about that.

Another example of how life actually was for women in the late-19th century is Marian’s bestie Peggy (Denèe Benton), who is theoretically living her best life with a book coming out and an impending marriage to a handsome doctor, but who also has a tragic backstory tied to her first marriage and the death of her child.

The morning after, the audience watches Marian in the mirror as she pulls herself together, hands shaking and tears suppressed. She wakes up Larry, who, in his afterglow, launches into a version of Romeo and Juliet Act 3, Scene 5 (“It was the nightingale” “No, it was the lark”), and doesn’t understand why Marian is a) clothed, b) wanting him to leave so no one sees him, and c) not happy.

“Nothing about this is alright. I’m ashamed, and I’m probably ruined. Can’t you see what’s at stake here?” Marian says and leaves Larry to ponder his life choices and how his penis affects other people.

Back home, Marian’s fears are immediately reinforced when her aunts say her sleepover could “fill the gossip mills of New York” and ruin her reputation.

Marian could have rushed into a hasty marriage after their tryst, and by the look of him and his starry eyes, Larry would have gone for it. But our Marian is a rule-follower and told herself she and Larry weren’t suited for each other and couldn’t work it out, so they couldn’t be together.

Unfortunately for Marian, no one believed her, not even herself, and now that she’s gone and sealed the deal, she is going to brew an inner conflict that may end in tragedy, or might give Gilded viewers a romantic ending worthy of the couple’s wide-eyed love for each other.

Either way, nothing here is easy and uncomplicated.

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Laura Wheatman HillFreelance Writer

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