"Nobody Knows What They're Doing When They Get Married": The Gilded Age Season 3, Episode 4 Recap
POOR GLADYS.
First off: I CALLED IT!! Two weeks ago, I wrote: “I had assumed the ‘Mrs’ in [Mrs. Bruce’s] name was just an honorific, as was the case for Mrs. Hughes on Downton, but might she have a secret terrible husband in an asylum somewhere? Fingers crossed!” While Mr. Bruce’s terribleness is up for debate at the moment, lo and behold, he IS in an asylum. I just knew it. (Apparently he has a terrible case of “acute melancholia” — i.e., he is clinically depressed — and is in an asylum in Larchmont, which does not seem to be a real historical asylum location, but the real asylums in this time period were generally awful. Perhaps we can hope that Mr. Bruce is in more of the sort of gentle sanitarium you’d go to for TB, where you get to take fresh air while wrapped in a blanket.)
Anyway, obviously my smugness at having predicted this plot twist is absolutely the most important development this week. But secondly: Gladys, like Consuelo Vanderbilt before her, does …