The New Victorians
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Then she opened her mouth, and it was if one had been transported back—oh, 150 years or so. “We had been talking about getting married since we got together,” Ms.—or perhaps we should write Miss—Miller said, describing how her friend Noelle had, early on, asked her beloved his “intentions”; how he had proposed last autumn, presenting the diamond ring that now glittered in the cloud-light on her left hand. “Ever since I met him, I felt like we’re a strong unit that would be a great foundation for a family,” she said demurely. “We’re very settled in and cozy; we’re like Hobbits in our little place.”
There was a time, not too long ago, when the young and the aimless hightailed it to New York City in pursuit of an altogether different urban experience than the domestic bliss enjoyed by Miss Miller and many of her bosom companions. High on a cocktail of recklessness and abandon, they came here to find their id, lose their superego, shake up the world, or simply shake their thang. Then they promptly chronicled these exploits in confessional sex columns.
But recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twentysomething nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in Middlemarch. This prudish pack—call them the New Victorians—appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations. While their forbears flitted away their 20’s in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie Reality Bites, or Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, simply wouldn’t make sense to them.
As one soon-to-be-married, female 26-year-old online editor who lives in Williamsburg put it: “It’s no longer cool to be a slacker and be living in your basement.”
“There isn’t a lot of … discussing ourselves,” added her friend, a 25-year-old Mount Sinai medical student (many New Vics asked not to be identified, befitting their ethos of propriety, modesty and caution). “In this particular cohort there’s not a lot of despair. I don’t have any friends who think they’re a cog in a wheel or are going to work at the Gap.” Heaven forfend!
‘Home and Hearth and Eating’
Eminent New Victorian couples can be found all over New York these days, puttering about their brownstones (original detail carefully restored), or pushing babies with names like Beatrice, Charlotte, Theodore and Henry in gigantic prams to the local playground. Some of them are famous. Actors Michelle Williams, 26, and Heath Ledger, 28 (himself named for Emily Brontë’s brooding hero!), swan about Boerum Hill with daughter Matilda; authors Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, both kissing 30, snuggle in Park Slope with son Sasha (with its turrets and trimmings, the Slope is a New Vic neighborhood preserved in aspic). Down in the West Village, we have Liv Tyler, barely 30, the daughter of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and legendary rock-star muse Bebe Buell, who’s now contented wife to Royston Langdon and mother of 2-year-old Milo. “I’ve always been super-responsible and hardworking and kind of a worrier,” she recently told Allure. Even former rebel Angelina Jolie has turned somewhat New Vic on us, what with her adopted brood and her causes and empathetic emaciation. Yes, the wasting disease! Next Page >
I don't fault people for wanting security, but I do for vapidity and lack of imagination. This rococo lifestyle shouldn't be confused with sophistication--it's just suburban materialism gone urban. That people claim it all as an ethos--instead of just doing what they do--is what makes it all so gag-inducing.
Hmmm... This is the Rebecca Miller quoted at the top of the article. Probably would have declined the interview had I known I'd be referred to as anything resembling Victorian, but there you have it. What I take issue with is the implication that my current lifestyle is a reactionary one, a flight from the insecurity of singlehood. I NEVER expected to be married so young (this was shared with Ms. Ratner upon both our telephone interview and in-person meeting, but clearly didn't fit with the pre-planned tone of her article), but I happened to stumble into an earthshatteringly fantastic connection with someone who I could immediately sense would be my partner for life. Though it might sound old-fashioned, it certainly felt nothing less than radical- we decided to move in together within a week, try explaining that to two Jewish mothers and see how Victorian you feel.
David and I have nothing resembling a "roccoco" lifestyle. Our days are filled with dayjobs, auditions, rejection letters, the constant struggle and meager material payoffs shared by all early-career artists we've known in the city; and the implication that the incredibly personal decision to merge our lives (and meager finances) can be reduced to New Victorianism... frankly it's pretty disheartening. I work WAY too hard everyday in a culture with zero support for people in my field to take on that label gladly.
We're getting married because we found each other and it works- we both have always been willing to wait for the right person, and would have happily foregone marriage forever, had we not met. THAT, my friends, is liberation and feminism at it's best. The fact that it didn't work out that way is just fate.
I think it's time that New Yorkers learn to be a little less obssessive about labels.
Thanks for the chat, Lizzy, I gleaned some valuable insight into the power of the press.
Loosening my corset strings,
Miss Miller
LR-
It's hard to accept this new tag as more than an understanding you and a limited number of people have constructed around the typical cycle of pairing off that happens in every generation. Like Ms. Miller says above, there is no evidence that this trend, should it exist, is reactive and there is certainly no direct statistical data that could support this wholly subjective take on what is a fairly normal way of life both in and out of the city.
Wrapping the current wave of very curated, very sophisticated cocooning (in Faith Popcorn's old words) in the imagery of the Victorians is a helpful tool for critique - no doubt. The current appearance of lap dogs in Baby Bjorns and outsize strollers for perfectly ambulatory children becomes even more laughable with a Victorian comparison. But it's hard to see young couples with the spending power of yuppies and the taste of curators as particularly Victorian or New Victorian. They've always been with us and 29 has been the time when singles became scarce for a while - perhaps it is only that you and your editors are experiencing this for the first time.
Nonetheless a fun read.
Incidentally, I've just trademarked "New Edwardian" in case social justice and communism become as popular dinner subjects as Trader Joe's and Moss in the future. No biting.
Ms. Miller,
I feel compelled to disagree with your definition of liberation and feminism (at it's best, no doubt):
"waiting for the right person"
"moving in together within a week"
"immediately sensing that someone is your partner for life"
These ideas do not illustrate "liberation" or feminism" for me.
Sounds pretty New Vic.
Wow... great points. Set and match. I'm just so glad that the Observer is in the business of defining my lifestyle, I was utterly lost without its guidance. And thank you, Lawyergirl! I'll immediately excise my life of emotion and interpersonal connection because surely, isolation equals personal power!
a settled life with children and career are not incompatible with feminist ideals. the common struggle is for adequate legal and political representation and the cultural acceptance of a plurality of choices. it is the same for gender politics, as it is for race, class and sexuality. all these struggles do hold out, however, for a day when these struggles cease to be.
feminists, rights activists, seem almost threatened sometimes when people belie any measure of contentment with their lives. the point is not to struggle forever, the point is to win a place within society!
although this article was a fun read, i do think it sort of negatively caricatures the new vics. they are after the rights things after all. we all want contentment like they *seem* to inhabit.
although, to be fair, Miss Miller- using words like earthshattering connection and partner for life are somewhat unambiguous and extreme for my tastes. you do know that connections are fluid and dynamic don't you? that some things last and some things don't? that life is complicated and that becoming complacent can be interpreted to mean you've stopped living and are simply going through the motions?
but i don't think that deserves the label of a victorian. i think thats just a little naivete.
This article identifies some bright young celebrity/socialite couples who've made or inherited a significant amount of money and find themselves interested in acquiring the accoutrement of an urban haute bourgeois life asap. Rather than heralding these expensively-educated twenty-somethings as the New Vics, why not call them the New Facile Nostalgics or the Bourgeois but not Bohemian or the New un-ironically Complacent? How is their lifestyle indicative of a Victorian "ethos" rather than "living like rich people at an early age"? To echo an earlier comment, unimaginative materialism in the guise of precocious sophistication isn't a value; it's still just vapidity.
Middlemarch is about disillusionment with marriage, wanting to transcend yourself, the Reform Bill, and the importance of empathy and social hope within a community. It is not about striving for "our parents' level of success right after school." Someone who bills enough hours to have organic produce delivered to his Upper West Side doorstep is not a "latter-day Pip." Pip is an orphan whose upbringing is financed by an ex-con; he is also tormented by a deranged, dessicated spinster. According to one New Vic, there's no longer an interest in "trying to figure out who we are and make mistakes" because "the world has changed." The world has changed, at the hands of a man who, like the New Vics, is very much interested in security, family values, and saving society, similarly uninterested in self-awareness and mistakes.
Dear Ms. Brown,
a) Never, never, never trust journalists.
b) Please learn to spell the possessive pronoun "its" without an apostrophe. An Ivy theater alumna should love her English language skills. Please:
Its news = The news that belongs to it.
It's news = It is news.
Best wishes for love & contentment in your marriage.
.
Dear Lizzy Ratner,
Our solidarity with new yorkers, who seemengly must invent new language skills to cope with this phenomenon, as your article does very seriously, and to imagine what Oscar Wilde would write on their behalf. Lacan warned us as early as in the 50s that make-believe is very akin to jouissance, "look how they enjoy", he said on the 1968 revolutionary students. Well, look how they enjoy.
Yours,
This article starts from a negative point of view, never explaining the derrogatory associations it makes. Why not open this article with an objective arguement and then go forth to prove it rather than making assumptions? The idea that these people aren't introspective, the generalizations, that they're trying to fit in, and are programmed is bullshit, or at least I don't see a coherent arguement for it.
Why not mention Judd Apatow recently discussing in his NYT magazine profile the trauma of the divorcing boomer parents of the 80s and 90s? Being programmed to acheive does not mean that stability was there as well. I think my generation is starved for a real revolution in intimacy instead of being required to put on a successful face. Making a family of your own is the best way to break with the one you came from, rather than dwelling on it in despair and slackerism. Or how about the persective that trying to heal a family is more revolutionary than detatching from it and creating more damage?
Or how about this as a reaction to the fear mongering of the Bush era? That the world is different than it was in the 60s, we feel we have less control, are more vulnerable to global insecurity and tyrannical leaders? That our votes don't actually count, no one is protecting the environment or soclai security, so you have to do it for yourself.
I could go on and on and on. I think there's a deeper meaning to this beyond the ridicule provided by this article. Picking and choosing quotes to make fun of people, not putting forth an actual arguement so you can examine things from all points of view just ironically propogates the insular selfishness that, I think, the author is obecting to.
Thanks, Lizzi Ratner! Now when people say to me, "Oh, singles aren't stereotyped or stigmatized or ignored anymore," I'll just point them to your article, esp those choice quotes (e.g., "Single people are to be pitied -- that is, if their existence is even acknowledged").
--Bella DePaulo, www.BellaDePaulo.com, author of "Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After"
Congratulations. This article is being talked about all over the net! Good for you!
The only thing I didn't like was your attitude towards the New Victorians. You might be someone who wants to party till dawn, take drugs, be a slacker - they're all things of a past generation.
Nowadays people do want hearth, home, food, home improvement.
People have grown up.
I think it's a good thing, too. I can not stand the boomer/hippie generation, with their multiple marriage, sexual excesses, and drug induced idiocy.
By your definition I am a New Victorian I guess. I think this article focuses on false negatives, trying to make a legitimate lifestyle choice seem like idiocy. It's just how certain young people have chosen to live their lives, not a pox upon the city.
As far as modern feminist ideals go, however, I feel quite the same way about my boyfriend as Miss Miller expresses, and I assure you these attitudes do not infringe upon my own independence and power as a woman. For example in my household I will be the primary provider of income while my (future) husband stays at home. This has little to do with gender issues, or even to do with income, but rather is what we have chosen for our family.
I doubt very much that Miss Miller finds anything less than equality in her relationship.
I'm a 41 yr old male, grew up in Brooklyn(the old one, the one that's still w/o brownstones). While people and couples like those described above always existed, back in my day they were considered the clear exception to the rule. Careerism may have ruled the day, but rarely couplehood. With notable exceptions, graduates focused on continuing the undergrad social circles and way of life for several more years at minimum.
Funny and interesting. Seems I've seen this somewhere before.
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What's so bad about a family and children?
Some of you act as if it is an either-or thing. Either you have a career, or you have children.
How did our parents ever do it?
I guess they had something lacking in today's young couples: maturity.
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There was a time, not too long ago, when the young and the aimless hightailed it to New York City in pursuit of an altogether different urban experience than the domestic bliss enjoyed by Miss Miller and many of her bosom companions.
Excellent article!
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This is hardly a new “trend.” Individuals who choose responsibility and commitment earlier in life than the hedonists do have always been around. But they’ve held little interest for the media. It’s the media that is the bore.
prudish pack—call them the New Victorians—appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations.
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Interesting but slightly offensive article here. I'm 25, live and work in New York, and I just got married to my boyfriend of nearly 7 years, because, well, I love the guy to pieces, we're happy, and I want to be with him forever (not for status or because I think we "work well as a unit" or have an "earthshatteringly fantastic connection"). Is that really so weird and fascinating? Am I not an individual, but rather some player in a generational phenomenon? My parents are baby boomer-hippie types who got married and started a family in their 20s, as did many of their friends. I'm not a prude, I hate Martha Stewart but I like cooking, I like to go out dancing at clubs sometimes but I also like watching movies and going to bed early. I love my cats but I don't want kids for a while. I like getting drunk and acting silly but I'm not fond of cocaine. I have both single friends and married friends my age who I love and respect. I did not grow up rich or privileged - I have had jobs since I was 14, went to a good college, and had no choice but to work to support myself through it and have worked since I graduated to maintain a comfortable (hardly lavish) lifestyle. I've been financially independent since graduation. So...tell me...what am I? ;)