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It's time to get something off my chest, guys: I love Gossip Girl.

But Madeline! you exclaim, probably choking on a biscuit and dropping your teacup because you are one refined gentleman or lady, didn't you write a scathing review of the first Gossip Girl back in 2008 where you ranked it below goddamn Twilight on the scale of Books That Should Not Be Considered Books?

Ah yes, my little blueberries, how right you are. Gossip Girl, the book, is pulpy badly-written trash that fails to even fulfill the most basic requirement of trash lit - being interesting - after three books (I say authoritatively, having read eight of them in high school). But Gossip Girl, the show, is the motherfucking tits. It's the best kind of soap opera trash, and I spent a month last year ripping through four seasons on Netflix before I finally abandoned it when it reached what I considered to be the apex of its trashy-crazy-fun potential (if you're curios, it was that episode where Blair strikes a sex bargain in exchange for a hotel and paperwork was involved, and no, I did not make up or exaggerate a single word of that). I love the show because it's so weird and foreign it might as well be science fiction - the show is an in-depth look at a strange world with its own weird customs, rules, and language (and very pretty clothes). Like most people, I am fascinated by the obscenely wealthy and the tiny insulated world they inhabit, and Gossip Girl is a great outlet for that curiosity. There's even a episode in the show where the kids perform Age of Innocence at their fancy private school, so even the show is aware of the connection I'm making.

Age of Innocence is a better-written, better-plotted, probably better-acted version of Gossip Girl. It's about rich New Yorkers living their rich, socially restrictive lives and trying to convince themselves that they're happy in this absurdly structured society they've created for themselves, to the point where they'll deny their own happiness in order to maintain the status quo. And somehow, the fact that un-engaged couples aren't even allowed to kiss, much less have sex, made the romance elements that much more passionate.

Our main character here is Newland Archer, a wealthy young man who lives a charmed life: he's rich, is engaged to a wonderful girl, and believes that he understands the rules of the world he inhabits:

"In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old New York gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world, than any other man of the number. Singly they betrayed their inferiority, but grouped together they represented 'New York,' and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral. He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome - and also rather bad form - to strike out for himself."

Things change, however, when Countess Ellen Olenska comes to New York. The daughter of a prominent family, she's returned to the United States after escaping an abusive husband. Society shuns her, and her family is mostly concerned with getting her to go back to her husband, but there's an instant and very palpable attraction between her and Archer. Suddenly, he starts seeing his entire well-structured world in a whole new light, including his previously-perfect fiancee May:

"She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against...But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order than he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow."

Newland, in fact, starts questioning the entire damn system, and having some very unapproved and modern thoughts, most of which are too sensible to make an appearance on Gossip Girl:

"Newland reddened. 'Living together? Well, why not? Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn't? I'm sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots.'
He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. 'Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences."

Tragic, beautiful, dramatic, and scandalizing. I had so much more fun reading this than I expected to, and will definitely be looking up more Edith Wharton in the future. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch some more Gossip Girl. When I left off, Blair was dating a prince and Georgina had just lied about being pregnant with Dan Humphrey's baby.