How It's Used

"Recently, Redstone Castle became a Monday-through-Thursday bed and breakfast inn. Suddenly everyone can share the magic: the Great Hall, scene of chamber music soirees and gala celebrations with acoustics said by musicians to be the finest between St. Louis and San Francisco. The sumptuous mahogany, ruby velvet and Tiffany-silvered dining room, voted by visitors the most exquisite space in the castle. The Alhambra-like library, with gold-tooled leather and Moorish accents. Light-flooded music and sun rooms. The downstairs gaming room, still fitted with baccarat, Vingt et Un and Brunswick pool tables for those who miss nights in Monte Carlo.

"Above, towers and turrets hold spacious guest suites fitted with Italian marble fireplaces and the finest in Mauve Decade baths. There are secret passageways (one reportedly used by Lady Bountiful's unknown lover) , cubby-holes and hidden closets. From a lace-curtained window in her grand bedroom suite, Lady Bountiful looked down into the Great Hall to make certain guests were prepared for her entrance - and that no other woman was wearing the same gown."

—Martie Sterling, "Mine millionaire's fantasy place of peace and plenty," The Globe and Mail, August 29, 1987, p. F5.

"The writer Tom Wolfe, himself no mean gauger of shifts in the Zeitgeist, and one of the few culture-watchers whose coinages, including the 'Me Decade,' have stuck, says there's nothing new about the effort to label epochs. When pressed for examples before this century, he pointed to the 'Gay 90's' (1890's, that is), to the term 'fin de siecle' and to 'the Mauve Decade' (which he's read about in the work of one Thomas Beard but is not sure what span of years this refers to). Mr. Wolfe went on to ponder the impure science of which he is a master: 'What does it mean to capture a decade? It means you're hitting on something that resonates with other people's impressions.'"

—Daphne Merkin, "Name That Decade," The New York Times, May 24, 1992.

"Contrary to what you might expect from its title and subtitle, The Reckless Decade is not merely a rewrite of Thomas Beer's classic study of the 1890s, The Mauve Decade. Where Beer focused on that fin-de-siecle period's cultural and social life, with a particular emphasis on some of its more flamboyant personalities, H.W. Brands has written a straightforward history of its more public affairs, ranging from the rise of the trusts to the watershed presidential election of 1896 to the coming of American imperialism. If The Reckless Decade has something of the air of the textbook, it is also a first-rate overview of an age that, Brands correctly believes, has specific meaning for our own."

—Jonathan Yardley, "This Time Last Century," The Washington Post, December 24, 1995.

"Feeling somewhat mauve after a long transatlantic flight, I revisited this week The Frick Collection in Manhattan to restore my spirits and stumbled on to an enchanting little exhibition devoted to the Mauve Decade in France, England and America.

"Called The Butterfly and the Bat, the show is based around one of the Frick's famous paintings: the portrait 'Arrangement in Black and Gold'. The painting is a depiction of the fin-de-siecle French poet, boulevardier and supreme dandy Count Robert de Montesquiou by the equally dandy American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler."

—Paul Betts, "When the Bat Met a Bright Butterfly," The Financial Times, January 26, 1996.

"It's the fin de siecle again - notoriously an era of decline, dissolution, languor and ennui. In fact, it's the fin de whole millennium. We're wrapping up a Mauve Decade for all time, mooning the ages with our ars gratia artis of platinum-card, bonus-upgrade dilettantism, high-yield neurasthenia and heavily leveraged degeneration of manners and morals."

—P.J. O'Rourke, "Goodbye To All That," The Sydney Morning-Herald, December 4, 1999.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
The Brown Decades

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the 1890's

Product Links
"The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century" by Thomas Beer