64 pages • 2 hours read
Shana AbeThe Second Mrs. Astor: A Heartbreaking Historical Novel of the Titanic
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A 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
May-December Romance
Since medieval European iterations of the romance genre, the May-December romance has proven a popular trope. It generally refers to the love between a young, innocent woman and much older man. Typically, the age difference is seen as a problem, and sometimes the trope is used satirically to suggest that the older man, in the later seasons of his life, has been duped by lust for an ambitious young woman who encourages his suit to achieve higher status or other benefits. A famous example of such a romance is “The Merchant’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales (1392) by Geoffrey Chaucer. In this story, the young wife, May, deceives her much older and blind husband, Januarie, by dallying with her lover in a pear tree inside the garden that Januarie has built to both enclose and protect her. The Second Mrs. Astor subverts this trope by showing that Madeleine and Jack, despite the assumptions and judgments made about them based on their age difference, are truly in love.
The difference in their ages provides much fodder for the tabloids in The Second Mrs. Astor. Jack is 29 years older than Madeleine, and the age gap is exacerbated by Jack’s celebrity and his descent. It is not his father descended from a German immigrant, but his mother, Caroline, from whom Jack can claim his Knickerbocker status, which grants connections to the oldest and most established of New York families. In contrast, Madeleine’s father, William Force, has acquired his fortune through a shipping business, which makes him among the nouveau riche. Rising middle-class couples like the Forces may emulate the Four Hundred, but the Four Hundred like to police their number. The king of the Knickerbockers, as the Philadelphia boy tells Madeleine at the garden party, won’t marry outside his class; it isn’t done.
This boy is, of course, wrong, and the scandal of Madeleine and Jack’s courtship is rivaled only by the moral outrage about Jack seeking to marry again after his divorce. One of the reporters who confronts Madeleine at her house asks if she’s aware the terms of his divorce prohibit Jack from remarrying while Ava is alive. This claim turns out to be false; the only real barrier Jack encounters is finding clergy who will marry them in a church ceremony.
While outside disapproval presents a barrier, Madeleine and Jack navigate the differences between them more easily. When she first meets Jack, Madeleine is 17 and not worldly, but she is level-headed and knows her own mind. As she tells Jack when he expresses concern at her age, “Young is not an unpardonable offense. Young does not mean I cannot make rational decisions, nor abide by them” (95). This assertion of hers spurs him to make the decision to offer marriage, though, when he touches her arm after this declaration, it’s also hinted that sexual attraction plays a great part in Jack’s decision. On these grounds, in Madeleine’s mind, the two are equal, both feeling desire in equal measure. After their second kiss on the lawn at Beechwood, Jack “looked baffled and hungry, his breath tugging uneven. Just like hers” (105). Madeleine enjoys the intimacy of marriage and isn’t intimidated by desire.
The only difference that intimidates Madeleine is what others make of their marriage, and the social cuts that she receives. Dining with a party aboard the Titanic one evening, Madeleine reminds herself “to be correct, be the public wife he needs” (213). She has only just begun to understand, as her mother tried to tell her, that being the wife of John Jacob Astor is her job now. It is a role that requires effort and study. After Egypt, Madeleine finally seems willing to take on this role, but all too soon, the role she must learn is that of John Jacob Astor’s widow.
The loneliness Madeleine feels as a result of her May-December marriage and the resistance she encounters from some of Jack’s peers is offset by the society she is able to construct around her, composed of her birth family; her friendship with Margaret Brown; and the small group they form on the dahabiya, including her nurse, Carrie. The private world of their love is sufficient for Madeleine. In their bedroom on the dahabiya, with Kitty restored to them, Madeleine thinks of them as knitted together now, “husband and wife and child and companion […] Already a unit” (188). In private, away from criticism, she feels safe and content in their love.
In the end, it is Madeleine’s youth—once held against her—that changes public opinion toward her. With Jack’s death, she is no longer an enviable young woman, catapulted to celebrity and staggering wealth by the love of America’s richest man. She is a tragic widow, a pregnant teenager, bereft of her husband. In answer to the stories that circulate around and about her, Madeleine tells her own story to Jakey, in the form of the novel, so she might say for herself what she experienced and convey the depth and sincerity of her love affair. Whatever the other inequalities of her May-December marriage, Madeleine asserts in the epilogue that she experienced true love.
The Cost of Celebrity
Before he proposes, when Madeleine wades through a crowd of photographers outside his mansion, Jack warns her: “It’s going to be this way, you know. Forever and a day, we’ll be watched and followed, studied and analyzed. I fear you’ll know no peace with me” (95). Madeleine promises, “I won’t break” (94). She recognizes that the sacrifice of privacy is the cost of being close to Jack. Still, she resents the intrusion, the attention, and the appropriation of their private relationship into a public spectacle. Madeleine’s discomfort with this curiosity of the outside world is an ongoing source of tension throughout the novel as she deals with the drawbacks to celebrity.
The very first time she’s captured by a camera flash, backstage at her play, Madeleine doesn’t pay attention to the pop of light. Only later does she realize that a photographer captured her and Jack, stealing the image of their first exchange. Thereafter, attention from the press, at the Swimming Club and at the racetrack, progresses as the dark side of Jack’s courtship, the price of his attention. While it’s likely that all of Jack’s doings are of interest to the general public, his interest in a woman—particularly a much younger woman—is another scandal heaped upon the scandal of his divorce.
When reporters throng the Force residence after news of their engagement breaks, Madeleine doesn’t want to speak with them. She protests to her mother that they pick apart everything she does and twist what she says. The papers don’t portray what she feels is her real self but rather judge and analyze her, and moreover, she feels that the exposure takes something away from her happiness. When her mother instructs her, in the same scene, to give the press something so they’ll go away, Madeleine thinks, “I won’t, this fresh joy is all mine, and I won’t let them take it from me” (111).
Later, after Jack’s death, Madeleine will realize that she doesn’t have to talk to the reporters. The realization falls in line with her earlier feeling, before her marriage, that she wasn’t interested in the ceremony or the display; she was only interested in being Jack’s wife. The same will hold true for arranging Jack’s funeral; Madeleine has no interest in the public event, only the private feeling attached to it. To Madeleine, celebrity is a burden and an intrusion.
This perception makes Madeleine resent the suggestion from Jack and her mother that Jack’s fame requires a trade-off and that compromise might buy them some degree of courtesy. When the reporter steps in her way on her errand to the jewelry store, Madeleine is so angry she curls her hands into fists. This man is imposing himself into the progress of her love affair, and Madeleine is incensed. Later, aboard the Titanic, Madeleine is annoyed when Helen Bishop approaches and converses with her as if she is already acquainted with Madeleine, merely based on the information Helen read in the press and their shared status as newlyweds. While many public figures would take advantage of such exposure, either for their own benefit or the benefit of their philanthropic and charitable causes, Madeleine never learns to manage her public image. When the reporter’s wife approaches her about the Carpathia and asks Madeleine for a statement, Madeleine questions her for information about Jack.
Once Madeleine is transformed into “the tragic ‘girl widow’” (288), she finds that simply including her name in an article will sell papers. She gives Jack’s secretary, Dobbyn, a statement, but refuses to talk to the reporters herself. “There was no force upon this earth that could make me offer up my actual memories” (290), Madeleine says, continuing the idea that sharing her personal feelings depletes or tarnishes them.
Madeleine is validated in her sense of feeling harassed by one of the guests at her luncheon for Captain Rostron of the Carpathia. Mrs. Cumings, a fellow survivor, asks “Is it always like this? […] Those horrible people all around you?” (310). Mrs. Cumings shares Madeleine’s sentiment that the attention is an imposition. Madeleine herself has never accepted this as her job or even an obligation. She retreats into her private world of memories and Jakey, convinced that the sweetness and power of her feelings would be diminished by sharing them with the outside world. For Madeleine, who never wished for a role as a public figure, the cost of celebrity is more than she wishes to pay, and the loss of her privacy compounds her grief and sense of betrayal at being robbed of the man she loves.
The Insulation of Wealth
A quiet but persistent theme in The Second Mrs. Astor is the insulation that wealth provides from the ordinary world. One way this theme emerges is in the description of the lifestyle that Madeleine leads with Jack, evident not just in their entertainments but in the homes they inhabit. While the Force summer cottage in Bar Harbor is brick and sensible, Beechwood, the Astor estate in Newport, is a
fairy-tale translation: cream-and-butter chambers of rococo gilt filigree and larger-than-life mirrors, floors so thickly varnished it was as if one walked on water. Crystal chandeliers with curling branches and beads that dangled from the ceilings like prismatic, upside-down flowers. Frescoes of Poseidon brandishing his trident, bare-breasted Nereids, mythical creatures frolicking in waves. Marble statues posed in nooks. Palm trees grew in Satsuma pots, their fronds sharp as knives against the turquoise view (98).
The layers of ostentation and excess in the décor signal an overabundance of wealth, and the effect is almost otherworldly, creating a sense of walking on water. The mythical sea creatures reflect the beachfront locale while also foreshadowing the role the ocean will play later in the story. The knife-sharp palm fronds lend an inimical aspect to the scenery, as if Madeleine is in danger from the disapproval that awaits. But the overall effect is of being set apart in world and time. For Madeleine, the reality of life for most New Yorkers—work, income, paying bills, the struggle for health and safety—is never an issue. Her one occupation is to be attractive, of which she is aware when she attends Jack’s party at his Fifth Avenue mansion: “That was the sum and skill of her life now, it seemed. How to make herself alluring to this magnetic, just-out-of-reach man” (94).
This insulation is hinted at in ironic fashion in the chill the girls feel in their summer dresses when the season turns to autumn and society lingers in Bar Harbor because Colonel Astor is there. Their world centers on the fashion, and standards, set by the ultra-rich like the Astors. Their version of discomfort is shivering in their light gowns as the weather turns cool.
As in their large mansions, where she can hardly hear hints of the world outside, Madeleine is likewise insulated from the larger world when she is aboard ships, from Jack’s yacht Noma to their dahabiya in Egypt, the Olympic on which they sail to France, and the Titanic, which they take toward home. The struggles Madeleine wishes to escape are attention from the press and the snobbery of the Four Hundred, who think Jack has married beneath him.
Of course, during the sinking of the Titanic, this insulation temporarily shatters. None of Madeleine’s wealth or jewels can insulate her. Her feet, cold from the water leaking into their boat, demonstrate that she is no longer beyond the reach of the elements. On the lifeboat, status doesn’t matter; everyone must help row. Once aboard the Carpathia, as Madeleine’s rank restores her to special status, she strives to retreat from the trauma of having learned the limitations of her wealth’s protection. She is given the captain’s cabin and never thinks to ask where he sleeps, an oversight due to her youth, her grief, her class, or a combination of all three. Madeleine finds Margaret and Carrie helping steerage survivors, but when pressed, she allows Margaret to take her back to the captain’s room, to her small world cut off from that harsh reality.
Once back home in New York, Madeleine hides in the mansion for refuge, away from prying eyes. By this time, Madeleine has realized that her wealth can shield her only so far. She might be able to redecorate the entire house, have the limousine drive her anywhere she wishes, fill rooms with roses, and commission all the gold trinkets she likes for guests. None of it will restore what she lost. Jack Astor might walk—or bring his dog—where other men may not tread, but he is a mortal all the same. His wealth brought them ease, comfort, a measure of security, and the ability to float above common concerns, but it did not save him in the end. When she wraps Jakey in the lace Jack bought in Queenstown, Madeleine demonstrates that the best she can do now for her son is to encircle him with fine things and memories, small consolation for what is missing.
