As Autumn comes around each year, I continue my tradition of rewatching “Gilmore Girls.” It’s a late 90s-2000s series comprised of aestheticized small-town charm, quick, witty humor, and about a million pop culture references per episode.
“Gilmore Girls” centers around a young mother and her 16-year-old daughter, Lorelai and Rory respectively, and their unique bond and dynamic resulting from their close age gap. This show also delves into family, relationships, generational wealth, and class disparities. Lorelai’s parents, Emily and Richard Gilmore, are wealthy, and she was raised in an affluent, yet strict environment until she got pregnant with Rory at 16 and left home. Lorelai came to Stars Hollow, the small town setting of the show and raised Rory, estranged from her grandparents and their wealthy lifestyle. Instead, Rory grows up around Stars Hollow’s quirky and endearing cast of characters as her secondary family.
In the pilot episode of “Gilmore Girls,” Rory gets accepted as a sophomore into Chilton, a prestigious preparatory academy. However, Lorelai can’t afford the tuition and is forced, as a last resort, to go to her parents for a loan. Emily and Richard Gilmore agree contingent on one condition: Lorelai and Rory will have weekly Friday night dinners at the Gilmore residence. As Rory’s grandparents become involved in her life and she is surrounded by trust-fund kids at the elite Chilton, she takes her first steps into the world of privilege and wealth. This marks the beginning of Rory’s character arc and the factors that played into her eventual downfall. How did we go from the personable, self-aware “High School Rory” to the mess that is “College Rory”?
In Season 1, Rory is characterized as an intelligent, book-smart, and responsible kid, which contrasts with Lorelai’s implied angst and rebelliousness during her teenage years. Lorelai often mentions how she got “lucky” with getting a kid like Rory. They get along more like best friends, and Lorelai never really needs to discipline Rory. When they meet with the Headmaster of Chilton upon Rory’s admission, Lorelai awkwardly quips, “Rory is not going to be a problem. She’s totally low maintenance, you know, like a Honda. You know, they’re just easy, just… nice office”(Season 1, Ep. 2). This decision to overemphasize Rory’s good qualities sets her up as a character without faults. This is a factor in why, as a viewer, I felt less inclined to pardon Rory’s later mistakes than I was with Lorelai, who was set up as a flawed character from the start.
Another likable characteristic of “high school Rory” is her humbleness. She’s aware of her newfound privilege and is modestly grateful for her grandparents’ generosity. In one episode, Rory asks her mom to critique her essay, to which Lorelai responds, “It’s an A-plus with a crown and a wand.” Rory acknowledges the bias in this statement and reprimands her lightly, saying, “This is not how you raise a child. You don’t send them out there with a false sense of pride, because out there, in the real world, no one will coddle you. I’d rather know right now if I’m gonna be working at CNN, or carrying a basket around its offices with sandwiches in it.”
However, when Rory goes to college, her flaws start to become more apparent, and this idealized, seemingly perfect character begins to fall apart. Suddenly, she becomes unaware of her class privilege. Rory wants to “eat the rich,” not willing to acknowledge that she falls into that category now. Her grandparents continue to pay for her college tuition, they donate a building in her name, and she has a trust fund just like the kids she makes fun of, but she still identifies as a scholarship kid from humble Stars Hollow. In one episode, Rory writes a scathing essay criticizing the networking she observed at a party among rich trust fund kids. In response, a character tells her, “Wake up Rory. Whether you like it or not, you’re one of us. You went to prep school. You go to ____. Your grandparents are building a whole … astronomy building in your name.” Rory argues the point, not understanding that she is one of them or showing gratitude for the privileges that she has grown accustomed to since high school. This shift makes her character come off as less relatable to the audience. She’s living like the wealthy while trying to keep one foot in the working-class world.
College is also where Rory experiences failure, both academically and in her career, which she finds difficult to cope with. It seems her previous thoughts about coddling were right, but now that it has become a reality, she takes it devastatingly, especially because the hopes of dreams of
Lorelai and the grandparents are riding on her—the savior child. She represents the traditional success story that Emily and Richard lost in their child and Lorelai lost in herself.
Overall, “Gilmore Girls” epitomizes an aestheticized comfort show on the surface, but it provides so much to dissect in terms of class privilege across generations and complex family dynamics. I think the way Rory and the other characters in this show are portrayed is realistic, and “College Rory” makes sense when her character is deconstructed. If this essay served its purpose, it might influence you to watch (or rewatch) “Gilmore Girls” this Fall… but maybe stop before Rory gets to college.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.