Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls

7. “You’ve Always Been the Head Pilgrim Girl”: Stars Hollow as the Embodiment of the American Dream

130 “You’veAlwaysBeentheHeadPilgrimGirl” Stars Hollow as the Embodiment of the American Dream A L Y S O N R . B U C K M A N In the series finale of Gilmore Girls, town selectman Taylor Doose states—in a nausea-provoking analogy that goes into excruciating detail—that Stars Hollow has “birthed” Rory Gilmore and is now sending the young woman on her way into the world, just as we, the viewers, must let go of our girls.1 Disturbing though Taylor’s analogy might be for many viewers, it is an apt one. Stars Hollow has functioned as a womblike environment for Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter, Rory, one that has sustained yet also sheltered the series’ protagonists for several years. Raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and giving birth to Rory there, Lorelai rejected her family’s aristocratic heritage and expectations in favor of this small hamlet located some thirty miles away, a community of eccentric characters that took in the sixteen-year-old single mother and her infant daughter and fostered the duo’s own eccentricities. Although viewers were privy to only the last seven years of Lorelai and Rory’s development (discounting 1. Taylor rhapsodizes, “We are gathered here on this glorious spring day pregnant with pride and anticipation. Preparing to birth you from our collective womb, fully gestated, and nourished, and so we breathe deep and with these last painful contractions , we push you out into the world, spank your bottom, and wipe the amniotic fluid from your eyes, as you issue your first independent breath.” This description rivals the one that occurs in “Let the Games Begin” (3.08), when a discombobulated Kirk says he is “shaking like a spastic colon” after losing his dance trophy. “You’veAlwaysBeentheHeadPilgrimGirl” | 131 the occasional flashback episode, such as “Dear Emily and Richard” [3.13]), the town of Stars Hollow beckoned to us as well. I am not alone among Gilmore Girls fans when I say that, throughout much of the show’s broadcast history, I wanted to live in Stars Hollow. And why not? After all, it had everything: beautiful landscapes, charming buildings, quirky townspeople, a sense of community, an intelligent populace that valued education and small businesses over monolithic box stores and sewage-treatment plants, and a predilection for pedestrian rather than automotive traffic. The names of such disparate authors as Dylan Thomas, Jane Austin, and Jack Kerouac are dropped into everyday conversations with the expectation that both community members and TV viewers will know who they are. Like Senator Barbara Boxer before her (“Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days,” 3.01), former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has passed through town, albeit in spectral form, as Rory’s dream incarnation of Lorelai in “Twenty-one Is the Loneliest Number” (6.07). A very real flesh-and-blood Norman Mailer visits the Dragonfly, just long enough for Sookie to scare him off (“Norman Mailer, I’m Pregnant!” [5.06]). Men are judged—and sometimes found wanting—according to their quickness of wit and their ability to make sense of pop culture and literary references, whether they are to the aforementioned Beat poet Kerouac, Hollywood writer and actress Ruth Gordon, Charles Dickens’s character the Artful Dodger, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–64), British alternative rocker P. J. Harvey, or that staple of Eisenhower-era domesticity, Donna Reed. Pedestrian traffic also is valued in Stars Hollow. Almost everything is within walking distance in Stars Hollow—everything except for Richard and Emily Gilmore’s palatial home, Chilton Academy, and the university that Rory eventually chooses, Yale. Unlike these latter comparatively distant spaces, Stars Hollow feels like a cherished home; it is friendly, supportive, community oriented, personality enriched, tolerant, and agreeable to the eye.2 2. Jill Winters likens Stars Hollow to a snow globe, arguing that the community is static and content to remain as it is; with the exception of Lorelai and Rory, the townspeople are “contented snowflakes” (2007, 103). 132 | RealandImaginedCommunities It is also rooted in place, deriving meaning from its material and social existence.3 Its history, geography, educational system, and political forms; its proximity to larger towns, such as New York and Boston, and Ivy League schools; its position on the East Coast; its demographics ; and its status as small town rather than suburb all create a very specific tenor for the town, one that, in combination with other narrative...