Gilmore Girls and Class Issues

Gilmore Girls is based primarily on two characters, Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory. Lorelai's parents are wealthy elites, and in an act of rebellion, Lorelai left home after giving birth to Rory and moved to a small town in Connecticut. She cut off all ties with her parents and with Christopher, Rory's father, who also was born into a life of privilege. This provides an excellent framework for commentary on issues of class, however, this is rarely taken advantage of, and when it is, it is used to further a disturbingly classist ideology.

Rory grows up alongside normal, middle-class people, however, from the beginning, it is clear that she possesses some innate qualities which distinguish her. When she reunites with her grandparents, they agree to pay for her to attend a prestigious college prep school for children the rich. The essential point of this is to say that because Rory was born from the elite class, regardless of the fact that she was raised as a commoner, she retains the innate qualities of the wealthy. These qualities entitle her to a life of privilege, attending the college prep school, and eventually the Ivy League school of her choice, while the friends that she grew up with stay behind in the small town in Connecticut and are eventually forgotten by the show.

Aside from the broad thematic elements, the show is filled with small insults to every member of the lower class, commonly disguised as comic relief. For example, there is a running joke about how Emily Gilmore (Lorelai's mother) constantly harasses, yells at, and fires her maids, cooks, and housekeepers for what the show deems as incompetence, while the other characters sit idly by, sometimes laughing at it. Another example of this is how Rory can't learn the names of the countless people who serve her, so she simply refers to them by their function, such as "gas station boy" or "cafeteria worker boy," etc. This implies that members of the lower class have no real identity of their own, and they are worth nothing other than their value as servants.

I can not recall a single example of a character who was born from the lower class who is considered to be on the same level intellectually with the Gilmores.

The show even manages to insult liberal intellectualism, when a popular student at Rory's prep school tries to bully the idealistic Rory into implementing policies in student government. According to the student, "If you have a problem, tell it to Noam Chomsky. I live in the real world." The student is not a positive character, but even so, this line represents blatant anti-intellectualism. In a sense, Rory is accused of being so idealistic that she lives in the dream world of well-know liberal intellectuals. Because the character is a bully, her statements do not represent the intended ideology of the show, however what is in question is only whether or not Rory lives in the real world. There is no question that Noam Chomsky still does not.