Gillian Anderson doesn't grasp the covert scheming that was a woman's only tool. Bertha gives off the studied charm she learned at the knee of her mentors. Bertha, we know, will do anything to get what she wants, and does. Making her points with loud, strident warnings instead of gentle bitchery, she neither looks nor sounds like the master manipulator with unquestionable bloodlines that she is supposed to be. Ambition, money, and propriety -the ingredients of social power.
WASPs play the game with deadly calculation wrapped in good manners.
Perhaps the reason this American class is so seldom captured on film is that few of them venture beyond traditional professions to become the filmmakers who could get it right.