ABSTRACT
It is only when we begin to consider the individual lives of the American women who married into the British peerage that the superficiality of the stereotype is exposed. It is, by its very nature, a generalization. By examining contemporary attitudes towards transatlantic marriages, as opposed to approaching the subject from a purely biographical angle, I have attempted to show that the relationship between the American heiress stereotype and the women who married peers or younger sons is a problematic one. Like the cliché of title for money, the heiress stereotype is more important in indicating the concerns and preoccupations of those who held the stereotype than in giving us any accurate representation of the women to whom it refers. The fact that transatlantic marriages were often a topic for discussion in newspapers, journals, private letters, memoirs, and social commentary or the subject-matter of serious and popular fiction would seem to suggest that they had a significance which went beyond the usual kind of interelite marriages. The most noticeable concern was, as we have seen, about money. American newspapers boasted or complained about the amount of money spent on dowries and other ‘extras’, while British commentators attributed the social success of Americans in London predominantly to their superior financial resources. The obsessive nature of this interest in the financial aspect is seen in the frequent description of the husbands as impoverished, the wives as heiresses, and the marriages as bartering dollars for titles. Thus, transatlantic marriages, by being represented as convenient financial arrangements involving a rich American and a peer heavily in debt, came to signify a clash not only between aristocratic and plutocratic values but between aristocratic and democratic ones too. 244Like the ennoblement of industrialists, they were, for the traditional landed elite in Britain, a highly visible and publicized way in which the social exclusiveness of the nobility was being undermined. Whereas, for the American public, they rubbed a sore nerve by seeming to acknowledge the prestige of hereditary titles in a nation which had renounced such things. On the other hand, they were also seen as an acceptance of Americans on equal terms in the highest social circles of European capitals.
