The New York Observer: The New Victorians

[Odin2005]

I ran into this over at another message board and all I have to say is "What The Hell?":

On a balmy morning in June, Rebecca Miller, a petite 26-year-old actress and Brown University graduate, was perched on a wooden bench in the East Village, just a block from the apartment she shares with her fiancé, a theater director, and two cats. By the looks of her outfit, she was firmly grounded in the 21st century, just another hip lass with loose curls, a scoop-necked top and denim skirt with naughty front slits.

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.

The rest of the article is here: http://www.nyobserver.com/print/55828/full

[Rydz777]

1. Maybe they're preparing themselves psychologically for the

lean,retrograde years ahead. Bush will leave a wasteland behind.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Who'd have guessed it? There are Yuppies in New York

The city that's the centre of world finance. Wow, I'm so grateful to the New York Observer for telling me that. Apparently, there's been no-one getting married, and holding well-paid jobs, under the age of 30 in New York for the whole of the 20th century, so they've had to christen this amazing phenomenon "the New Victorians", because they've never heard of anything like it in living memory.

[depakid]

3. Perhaps they'd better read a little something about the era

They might find out a little something that this "journalist" left out.

Hint: there was a bit of a darker side to those romance novels.