Just Gilmore Girly Things: The Three Generations of Gilmore Girls

Just Gilmore Girly Things is a blog series on my inexplicable obsession with the CW/WB series Gilmore Girls that aired from 2000-2007. This series explores the personal and social connections I’ve made in my repeated watch-throughs over the last 23 years that nobody asked for. 

At its core, Gilmore Girls is about the relationships between mothers and daughters. Obviously it’s about Rory (Alexis Bledel) and Lorelai (Lauren Graham), but it’s also about Emily (Kelly Bishop). 

Before I start: I can criticize Lorelai a lot, but I think it's important to preface it by saying that she was still a runaway single teen mom. She's basically perpetually 16 years old until the series begins, right before Rory's 16th birthday. Then she's confronted with all the parts of growing up she missed as she tries to guide Rory through the stages of her life that she feels she missed out on.

This is why all of her relatable anecdotes come either from junior high or fictitious pop culture references. And why it's implied that Lorelai and Rory’s relationship is pretty much smooth sailing until the series starts.  Once she runs away from her parents, she’s catapulted into the stagnation of adulthood while her whole life shrinks down to work and Rory. That's why, after Rory’s dad, Max Medina (Scott Cohen) is her first serious relationship.

It’s also why, in my opinion, Lorelai becomes a better person throughout the series. On the flip side, Rory becomes worse throughout (which I’ll get into more later), and I attribute that to Lorelai and Rory having to learn concurrently and the reintroduction of Lorelai's parents into their lives.

A lot of the relationship between Lorelai and her parents is played off for laughs but it belies a rather traumatic underlying childhood story. Once I started to understand how childhood attachment issues impact us in adulthood, Lorelai started to make way more sense. 

Her father, Richard (Edward Herrmann), was mostly physically absent, often travelling for work. When he was there, he was emotionally absent or overly critical. He embodies the colonial ideal of masculinity, which stems from his own unhealthy attachment with his strict and harsh mother (Marion Ross). 

Emily, on the other hand, was the proper colonial mother, keeping tight control of the family image because she doesn’t have much control over much else. It doesn’t help that she can never seem to meet her mother-in-law’s expectations, which especially stings because her mother-in-law is the only person her husband prizes more than her. As someone who’s been emotionally repressed her whole life, and does everything society tells her, when things don’t go as she expects, she projects all her insecurities on Lorelai.

Emily exists in this liminal space where her insecurities and genuine desire to be involved in Lorelai’s life can make her almost sympathetic, until you realize how terrifying it is how casually an upper class white woman pulls strings in as high of places as financial institutions in order to use her finances to bribe her child into spending time with her rather than just telling Lorelai that she misses her. 

So since it appears that Rory grows up estranged from her grandparents up until the start of the series, and Lorelai does her best to create the type of relationship that she craved as a child for her. Rory grows up only knowing secure maternal love. Which is why she has enough self-esteem that she doesn’t need to make bids for validation through popularity or conforming to social norms at the expense of her values or work ethic. 

That also means that Rory can’t grasp the emotional damage her grandparents inflict on Lorelai because she can only relate to Lorelai's attachment wounds with absent fathers, and hey, at least Richard still tries to be in Lorelai’s life. 

Which may also explain why she’s so eager to develop a relationship with him and values his approval. Her own father may not have technically abandoned her, but he also doesn’t make an effort to consistently be involved in her life until she’s mid-adolescence. 

The result: Rory ends up embodying centrism trying to reconcile the image of her loving grandparents with their class and values. 

While Lorelai grew up embroiled with the entitlement to control that’s at the heart of manipulation, Rory grows up middle class (which they’re careful to make the distinction they're not poor poor) and so she’s still enamoured by the upper class life. She can’t quite relate to the working class people her grandparents employ as "the help" but aspires to the freedom and adventure they reveal that money can provide.

In a way, this is how Rory becomes a surrogate for who Lorelai might've been if she hadn’t run away and tried to compromise her values in order to meet her parents’ approval.

Which brings me to my favourite realization. Lorelai, Rory and Emily are basically just different iterations of the same personality: They all rely on quick wits, using sarcasm, hyperbole and cultural references liberally, in order to navigate uncomfortable or tense situations; while also sharing an instinctive gravitation to leadership positions. 

Lorelai as a manager and event coordinator, then later as a small business owner, uses nearly all the same skills as Emily through her upper class housewife role as family estate manager. Rory then goes on to pivot between both when she joins the DAR and when she returns to Yale and becomes editor at the Daily News.

What ends up dividing them are their values. Emily tries to adhere to the traditional colonial values of order and control via repression that she grew up with. Lorelai, on the other hand, discovers the freedom of individuality and open expression. Rory once again seems to oscillate between both ends of the spectrum trying to find a place for herself in the middle.

However, Emily has no issues with being controlling or manipulative, while Lorelai tries to have the faith in the values she’s tried to instill in Rory in order to give her the freedom of making her own decisions, even when she disagrees. The more involved with her parents she gets, and the more Rory tries to get Lorelai to empathize with them, the less secure Lorelai feels in her own parenting.

When Rory starts acting out and making choices she doesn’t agree with, Lorelai sometimes takes more responsibility than she should and assumes it proves a fault in her parenting, not the values that mainstream society insists is mostly harmless. As a high school dropout, she hasn’t had a chance to become disillusioned by the prestige of college, especially the Ivy League. 

University would’ve been the ultimate symbol of freedom before Lorelai got pregnant. Regardless of what her goals were, Harvard, her dream school, would’ve been her ticket to get out from her parents’ supervision and control and be able to make her own choices. Having to completely sacrifice the comfort and safety of financial privilege to accomplish the same as a single mother would crystalize the idea of a fancy degree being the ultimate ticket to freedom. 

But also having never attended university and having moved to a community where most people couldn’t afford an Ivy League education, Lorelai hasn’t had the opportunity to be confronted with the reality that the values and privileges needed to succeed in university have very little to do with a desire and passion for learning. Once Rory enters university, Lorelai starts to see Rory as knowing better than she ever could. 

It’s something that I realized when it occurred to me that Lorelai’s disorganization and messy lifestyle may have less to do with undiagnosed neurodivergence and more to do with growing up only being taught how to maintain a household with the labour of a team of service workers that “the average” person would never be able to consistently afford. 

It’s also why both Lorelai and Rory internalize their struggles navigating Yale and small business ownership while Emily and Richard constantly criticize them for their time management and financial decisions, while neglecting to acknowledge that neither of them have had the experience of having to make decisions about their education, careers or social lives while cleaning their own homes while living paycheck to paycheck—especially when they both were graduated, married and able to own their own home before bringing Lorelai and introducing the labyrinth that is balancing life, work and childcare into their lives. 

That’s why it feels like even though Lorelai has experiences and a perspective that should, logically, radicalize her, she can never allow herself to fully get there because it would involve facing the consequences and privileges of their upbringing and lifestyle. 

I think that’s why it always feels like they’re so close to making a point about systemic issues but can maintain the sheen of palatability that keeps it from feeling “controversial.” Regardless if you want to view that as a strength or a shortcoming, I think it still provides a cautionary tale about compromising your values in order to maintain relationships with people who want you to believe that love and control can exist concurrently.