An international high noon divorce

Illustration shows the circus-like atmosphere of the divorce proceedings of Anna Gould, holding a handful of “Incriminating Evidence” against her husband, and Boni de Castellane. Accompanying text describes the event in language that would be used to describe a wedding celebration.

Comments and Context

At the turn of the last century, the American press and even satirical magazines like Puck — perhaps especially magazines like Puck — followed the doings and undoings of the socially prominent. The most prominent cartoonist of this genre was Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girls. His heroines were independent and assertive, and influenced a generation of women in turn. Ironically, in many of his cartoons and in real life, a number of American women, especially heiresses, were willing to trade their independence, and their fortunes, for the seductions of foreigners, titles, estates, and castles, even when many of the imported fortune-hunting dukes and counts were virtually bankrupt.

Adding further to the irony was that Gibson was of American aristocracy, with famous relatives hanging from his family tree. He also married one of the famous Langhorne sisters of Virginia, and thereby became related to the famous Astors of England.

However, Gibson and other cartoonists from the mid-1880s onward frequently drew cartoons about pretty American heiresses marrying old, fat, tired Europeans with a few medals and sashes lighting up the ceremonies. They always were cautionary tales: humorous (or grim) warnings about the vacuous lives that awaited.

Seldom did cartoonists or critics focus on the fulfilled predictions about inevitably unhappy marriages. Divorces were becoming less uncommon in the United States (in fact, a cartooning cliche was that Chicago was the divorce capital of the nation, just as staid Boston was not) and so too did cartoons seldom address the bitterness of divorce proceedings.

S. D. Ehrhart, the most “social” of Puck‘s pictorial commentators, focused on divorce in this cartoon, with its putative bitterness tempered by satirical exaggeration about a trial that made headlines.

Anna Gould was the daughter of the Wall Street mogul and scandal-plagued railroad owner Jay Gould. She reputedly inherited tens of millions of dollars from her father; and the wrinkle in her case was that her title-laden French husband, Marquis Marie Ernest Paul Boniface de Castellane, was wealthy too. However, that fact did not prevent him from burning millions of her dollars in social extravagances. She divorced him after ten years of marriage, and the case was replete with charges and counter-charges, witnesses, rumors, and gossip. After she was free, Anna married another hyphen-heavy titled French noble; in fact a cousin of “Boni,” as the public called husband Number One.

The attention lavished on the divorce proceedings, and the accounts of frivolities of the rich, were exaggerated in Ehrhart’s cartoon, but not by much.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1906-02-28

Creator(s)

Ehrhart, S. D. (Samuel D.), approximately 1862-1937

Period

U.S. President – 2nd Term (March 1905-February 1909)

Repository

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Page Count

1

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation