Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age

Abstract

In the initial chapters of Archie and Amélie, the author describes the couple's ancestry and social circles and thereby provides an elaborate portrait of the lifestyle of some wealthy Americans during the Gilded Age. In doing so, Donna Lucey furnishes food for thought about the status of women and marriages, the repercussions of wealth and fame, and the precarious legal standing of allegedly insane Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age * Donna M. Lucey * New York: Harmony Books, 2006 * xii, 340 pp. * $25.95

With this dramatic narrative, Donna Lucey vividly depicts the troubled metamorphosis of a "golden couple" who once "appeared to live in a cocoon of success and celebrity" (p. 4). A native of New York, "Archie" (John Armstrong Chanler) was a scion of the Astor family. When he was a teenager, however, his privileged existence was shaken by his mother's death in 1875 and his father's in 1877. Those tragedies did not prevent him from becoming a rich, well-educated lawyer. In 1887 at the fashionable resort town of Newport, Rhode Island, he met Amélie Rives, who enchanted him, and they wed the following year. "But," Lucey declares, "America was not ready for Amélie Rives" (p. 64). Beautiful, charming, ambitious, independent, manipulative, and audacious, she was also a talented writer. Born to a distinguished family in Richmond during the Civil War, she grew up near Charlottesville at Castle Hill, a family estate redolent of boxwood and tradition. Amélie gained national attention in popular magazines with her poems and stories, including a scandalously erotic one that featured a poorly disguised Archie as the protagonist.

The newlyweds were not destined for happiness. Burdened with complex interactions involving family members and friends, the couple moved repeatedly, shifting their locations from Virginia to New York to various places in Europe. Amélie's status as a celebrity conflicted with Archie's efforts to make his own mark in the world. The couple struggled unsuccessfully to develop a relationship of intimacy, respect, and sustained affection. In some respects "polat opposites," they were both "totally self-absorbed and moody and controlling," Lucey concludes (p. 122). Their volatile, controversial lives featured extravagance, sibling rivalry, jealousy, vindictiveness, romance, promiscuity, divorce, mental illness, and violence. Battling drug addiction and depression, Amélie still produced a number of novels, and Donna Lucey focuses on their autobiographical content. After the pair separated, Archie's eccentric behavior and a risky business scheme provoked family members to commit him to Bloomingdale Asylum in New York. After four years, he escaped and engaged in an extended, successful legal battle to regain control over all his property. In 1896, Amélie married Russian prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, but she gradually lost her luster as a potential literary star.

In the initial chapters of Archie and Amélie, the author describes the couple's ancestry and social circles and thereby provides an elaborate portrait of the lifestyle of some wealthy Americans during the Gilded Age. Although such a context is appropriate, the many details can distract as well as enlighten. Lucey uses extensive excerpts from personal letters, and her substantial research is reflected in her notes, bibliography, and acknowledgments. Still, academic historians will be frustrated by the comparatively sparse use of citations. Relating a lively story, the author paints with bold historical strokes that sometimes oversimplify. For example, New York City's Tammany Hall political machine was internally divided over Civil War issues and should not be designated as having "distinctly Confederate leanings" (p. 22). Rather than connecting her account to existing scholarship, the author permits readers to reach their own conclusions about the story's implications for its historical period. In doing so, Donna Lucey furnishes food for thought about the status of women and marriages, the repercussions of wealth and fame, and the precarious legal standing of allegedly insane Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century.