… Underground and Amazon Prime´s The Grey House
"Amazon Prime Video's recent Civil War drama series The Gray House presents a fictionalized account of Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew and her Richmond Underground espionage network. The ensemble cast features leading actors Daisy Head as Van Lew, Mary-Louise Parker as her mother Eliza, Amethyst Davis and Christopher McDonald respectively as historical spies Mary Richards and Thomas McNiven, and standout performances from Hannah James and Paul Anderson as the fictional characters Clara, a local prostitute, and villainous Constable Stokely Reeves. James also appeared in the PBS series Mercy Street (2016), which likewise told a complex story set in Civil War-era Alexandria, Virginia featuring multi-dimensional characters. However, unlike Mercy Street, HBO's The Good Lord Bird (2019) and Steven Spielberg's epic Lincoln (2012), the producers of The Gray House chose instead to film the episode series in Romania. This artistic license reflects the inauthenticity of the series, despite its efforts to remain faithful to the actual history.
While The Gray House borrows heavily from the historical record, it takes the usual filmmakers' liberties with the facts to an extreme degree. Although many of the stories told in the show are based on at least a kernel of truth, the series relies extensively on problematic historical source material that often obscures the complexities of the real history at hand. Still, the show cannot be easily dismissed since it presents a variety of realistic historical stories about Van Lew and her network in an entertaining if fanciful format.
Long forgotten, smeared, and erased from history by her contemporaries and writers of the Lost Cause, Elizabeth Van Lew and the Richmond Underground are now being reconsidered by historians in the twenty-first century. Late nineteenth- century myths abound about Van Lew. Created by vindictive former Confederates as a means of producing the popular narrative of a united South with well-defined gender roles and expectations for its elite women, Southern Unionists such as Van Lew were considered rare and dangerous outcasts. The misconception that Van Lew cultivated a ‘Crazy Bet' persona for her espionage efforts afforded Lost Cause and later mythmakers the ability to portray her as a committed Yankee in a plausible and easy to understand—and hate—narrative…."
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Armand
