Edith (Laura Carmichael) having a hard time breathing as she realizes the humiliation in store right then
Letting go
Exhaustion defeat
Dear friends and readers,
So what was it? What had this character done wrong to have unleashed at her such a level of spite, of raw humiliation that I’ve never seen equaled in kind before — and I’ve been watching mini-series for some 40 years? Before the whole community, people she must live with, a fever pitch of rejection. The question to ask is, Why is this character scapegoated so?
Jane Eyre’s horror when Rochester’s brother-in-law interrupts her wedding to Rochester to say there is an impediment, Rochester had a wife now living, pales before this. Nothing to it.
I’ve long been puzzled at the way Lady Edith Grantham is sneered at, mocked, by Downton Abbey audience members. Fellowes, again knowing writer that he is (remember he wrote Gosford Park, one of the most intelligent of the great house movies I’ve seen, to expose the hypocrisies of professed motives), has been feeding this maw for three seasons. For three seasons I’ve seen it emerge again and again. In little things: Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Lady Grantham is directed to roll her eyes when Edith speaks; Maggie Smith as the dowager and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Princess grimace knowingly. In the first Edith gave away that her sister, Mary, had been in bed with one of the show’s several lout-lords who died at the abbey; in the second Edith drawn to, fooled by a man masquerading as a hideous cripple. I thought perhaps Fellows had decided he’d whip-lashed Edith enough when in 3:1 he had Robert Bathurst as Strallan courageously break the taboo which allows mean tricks and expose one played on Allen Leech as Tom Branson by another lout-lord.
I mistook. I should have realized that the intrusive domineering demand that Edith not consider this man by the Dowager was an important sign. I’ve never liked Lady Bracknell (Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest), a witty bully, upon whom (Edith Evans) Maggie Smith may intuitively have modeled herself. Amusing cynic yes, like one of the old women Anthony Trollope is ever defending. She has the crass nerve to get up and insist what is happening is right and thus disable Strallan further (he crumbled because he overheard her making fun of his prowess to the chaplain):
She’s one of many in the DA world who thinks she has intimate rights over other people subject to her authority (some behave as if many others have intimate rights over them). The dowager couldn’t stand Strallan so Edith is thrown away with him. So what is wrong with him? Aristocrat, monied, kind, perceptive, offering “quite enough happiness” for Edith to be going on with (Lord Grantham’s words).
This gives us our first hint: what is wrong? he’s said to be too old and he’s got a crippled arm, masks, masks for not saying for he’s not manly enough, not macho enough, weak.
He fails to perform masculinity adequately. There you have it. And Edith, why is she a butt? She fails to perform femininity adequately. Jim was telling me tonight that he reads a blog which argues that the real electric power of DA (for those who are addicted) is it’s camp, and tonight he read there the offhand comment that some ludicrous star, inexplicably wrong in her garments, was dressed in the Edith Grantham style. Not Lady Mary Grantham. Not Lady Sybil, now Mrs Bransom (Deborah Findley Brown). Though they all dress alike.
Tom all awkwardness, Sybil turned dowdiness itself
So this hint is not sufficiently explanatory. This is not the first time I’ve asked myself what fuels the need to ridicule this young woman?
As I have before I hunted in three very good books on women’s films I have: Tania Modleski’s mongraph Loving with a Vengeange; and edited collections of essays by Marcia Landy (Imitations of Life) and Christine Gledhill (Home is Where the Heart Is). This time I wouldn’t give up. In previous hints I’ve found Miss Sarah Obrien (Siobhan Finneran): the villainess, spiteful domineering old maid; in 3:1 and 3:2 I tried to ignore her reversion to this role but in 3:3 she is not only wearing the ugliest of thick-cloth witch-like dresses, her face made up to look like pancake, her hair terrible. She is all menace. Daisy (Sophie McShera) tells Moseley she wouldn’t want Miss Obrien to be angry at her. In this episode Miss Obrien was outwitted by Thomas (he has also returned to smirking bad gay guy, narrow envious gay man Rob James-Cellier) who foolishly thought he could make her lose her job by telling (the now trembling) Molseley (Kevin Doyle) she meant to leave and directly Molseley to offer a relative as new lady’s maid to Lady Grantham.
I found Anna — long suffering, self-sacrificing nurse type. Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan), everyone’s well-meaning mother.
Trawl, trawl, trawl and then I saw it. Tania Modleski had it: no heroine is allowed to admit openly she longs to marry.
Is not this Edith’s flaw? in the first episode she became a Lawrentian-style farm girl to allure a man (whose wife put a stop to that). She wanted to love the crippled man. And what does she say when lying in her bed afterwards: not that she has missed a dreamed-of precious life, but that both sisters are married, one is pregnant and probably the other is. We have enough to see she does like him, but that’s not the emphasis here.
She wore her heart on her sleeve. She was open. She is indiscreet. Worse: she is inept at manipulation. She breaks code & for that and her exposure of the game she cannot be forgiven. Loneliness is a laugh among Judith Butler-style performers. Did anyone in her family, anyone downstairs feel for her? Anna Smith Bates (Joanne Froggart), in some ways an alter ego; it’s no coincidence Anna is Edith’s shadow in the last we see of Edith in this episode:
She tells Anna she wishes she had another life (something Anna ought to wish for if she had any real value for herself and her time)
Score high for Fellowes. I put it to my reader this scene will be remembered and imitated. It’ll be spoken of. You thought Downton Abbey was running out of dazzle, did you?
*******************
Mrs Hughes and Lesley Nichol as Mrs Patmore hestitate before going into doctor’s office
I had meant to show how each separate episode in a good mini-series will have its own structure and set of themes. I showed patterns in 3:2. Here, then we are looking at themes. As it’s a hidden dialogue (overheard) that defeats Strallan so this is an episode rife with hidden information and lies which have power to hurt, often enough known by people who do not realize their power. Thomas lies to Molseley and inconsistently Cora, Lady Grantham does not give Miss Obrien a chance to explain herself (“I am very hurt by your behavior”) while being all fairy-godmother goodness to Phyllis Logan as Mrs Hughes (“we will keep you” if you should become too ill to work). Daisy alone knows that Lavinia Swine (Zoe Boyle) sent a letter to her lawyer on the day she was dying and blurts it out, thus enabling Lady Mary to pressure Matthew to accept a legacy the family needs. Mrs Bartlett (Claire Higgins) may know the truth of Bates’s wife’s last hours. In the prison a friend warns Bates (Brendan Coyle) that a weapon has been planted in his bed and the police told; he is able to wrest it out of his bedding and hide it before the police rush in to search.
And so it goes. Lies, secrecy, silence — central themes in women’s books ever since Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Preposterous scenes of virtue — central to women’s romance since heroic 17th century romance and rife in opera. So Matthew cannot bear to accept his legacy and when persuaded to, Lord Grantham will not take the money but share the abbey with his son-in-law who admits he likes living there. Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) teaching sleazy sarky prostitutes to use sewing machines while they jeer at her. Fellowes’s disdain and hostile depiction of the lowest vulnerable members of society is not compensated for by Ethel Parks’s shame when she comes in for help (naturally not for herself) and again flees rather than tell her secret.
What are men and women allowed to do is presented as a genuine question. Not reveal their appetite, as Anna tells Daisy that makes men flee:
The lobster is a part of the mise-en-scene — perhaps a joke version of vagina dentata?
Not take it upon yourself to criticize the arrangements of those above you Mr Carson tells Miss Obrien’s naive nephew, Alfred (Matt Milne).
Of course this is drivel as a serious investigation of how to live your life. It is really what you want that shapes your choices. Edith did want to marry Strallan and be mistress of his estate, have his children. Now she wants another life but cannot see her way to any other. Lady Mary wants to stay princess of Downton and Mr Carson her butler. Lord Grantham does not want to lose face or status. Matthew no longer seems to want the independence he once did, and Tom Bransom has begun to wear dinner jackets — they both appear to want to please their wives.
IN Downton Abbey we can measure the characters by what they want at this point. Miss Obrien wants to get back at Thomas for insulting her as someone who was never asked to be married (how does he know she ever wanted to?) and threatening her job.
As usual I warm most to Mrs Hughes who appears to want to live on, quietly, with dignity, as self-supporting as her world will let her be. I would warm to Isobel Crawley if (like Edith but for very different reasons) her work were not the subject of such ridicule.
What kind of life do you want to live is a serious debate found in Victorian novels. When Jane fled Rochester, she was forced “to build a life.” When Mrs Crawley is trying to reach Ethel, she wants also to be frank (like Edith is intuitively) and uses the word “prostitute” of how Ethel is surviving, and says “you should know this is true of every woman who has come here to rebuild their lives and I’m helping them, and is re-echoed mockingly:
(A camp picture?)
That’s right. Why not come in and help us rebuild our lives?
I understand the sarcastic laughter. People act in terms of particulars, of their own landscape, and if they don’t have access to a milieu that allows for fulfillment on middle class terms, they don’t get it. So Ethel says, “That’s not why I’m here Mrs Crawley. That is I am … what you said but I don’t want help, not for myself but … ” and unable to face whatever it is, she runs off again. It’s not so bad with Edith as say Mrs Bartlett (a laundress) or these unskilled women or Ethel. Isobel says over dinner what Edith needs is something useful to do.
But it has been a viscerally searing day for her, and my goal in this blog has been to investigate why Edith is the episode scapegoat.
Ellen
See “Edith and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, very Bad Day:
http://anibundel.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/downton-abbey-season-three-edith-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day/
E.M.
Me and Diana:
Missed the episode. What cruelty was it, you don’t say? Is she left at the altar or something?
Me: Read the blog. I do think he had Jane Eyre in mind and wanted to outdo it. He did.
Diana: I read the blog, but it didn’t specify how she was left at the altar.
Me: Oh: just as she was standing there he turned to her and said he should not do it. He had heard the grandmother mocking him and crumbled. She is devastated in front of all these people. The scene carries on with the grandmother coming over and Lady Bracknell like making it worse and worse. The effect is electrifying.
Diana: Thanks. Wish I had seen it, but I keep missing the episodes because I work Sunday nights! I couldn’t tell from your blog what happened, just that it was something cruel, and I don’t think the show is repeated. I gather you think this series is worth watching this season?
Me: It’s worth watching if you are interested in mini-series. (I’m up again as you see — about to go to the dentist, probably to lose a teeth — it does so derrange the nerves l… ) Fellowes is sophisticated. I thought the second season much much better than the first but the turn back to using Thomas and Miss Obrien in this degraded way — especially Thomas — is a bad sign: unless of couirse you agree the show is also camp, deliberately going over the top. That may be true. This excruciating scene at the altar goes beyond a norm.
E.M.
Kate: You don’t think that Strallan’s crippled hand and purported unmanfulness is a code for homosexuality, and/or that the dowager assumes this, and that is the real reason why she objects to the marriage?
Me: No I didn’t think so because he was married before. I thought perhaps the arm was a code for possible impotence, but then I think he would not have married her. He is presented as a really considerate person. The dowager is a primitive type and cares little for sensitivity. One can see her laughing at the idea of tender companionship. Fucking is not all there is to marriage. Not that I feel we should parse it this realistically.
Rather if so, what has Fellowes got against homosexuality. Consider what he did in Season 1 Part 1 and how he now presents Thomas. Why make it nasty in Thomas and suffering so in Anthony this way? Anthony looks dreadful with hurt as he flees. I am aware the show has a gay following — it’s they who see it as camp. Why antagonize this way? But maybe. This is the way I’d see it as symbols. So this season Miss Obrien is again the emotionally starved old maid. Can’t have that: women not marrying you see.
i suppose to me this is cultural study.
On the Dowager: Truly remember Lady Bracknell (Smith would have been very good at that; Dench was too solemn): remember when she says it’s one thing to be a foundling, another to be found in a handbag (eyes wide, hands up now). She a gay (homosexual sense of word included) satiric figure. People talk about the Victorian a wee bit too realistically too. .
E.M.
Humiliaton a comment motif in popular novels and films:
Since I don’t have television, I won’t see DA season three until it comes out on Netflix. I have watched the prior to seasons, but with mixed feelings, both enjoying the program on a superficial level but feeling annoyed that it is such a retread of so much else–at how canned it feels– and particularly annoyed at the “happy planation” ideology it promotes–if only we could get everyone to accept their “places” —or conveniently go away, as with the suspect socialist chauffeur–hierarchy would work, especially paternalistic hierarchy with all the power concentrated in the hands of one (in the case) literally “noble” man! It’s such hogwash, such silly idealization (despite the feeble attempts to have some of the servants express discontent) and yet I wonder what longing there is in the human psyche that keeps this faux nostalgia arising, from the myth of the Old South, to the Nazi myths of racial hierarchy to now, this myth of the
traditional British social order.
That being said, I’m not surprised the middle daughter is being singled out for ritual humiliation–as it sounds. There are too many strong women in the series–the grandmother, the oldest and youngest daughters, the mother of the man the oldest daughter is to marry (the one destined to inherit Downton Abbey). For some reason, in many males ,and perhaps females too, so much female autonomy and power raises aggressions, which need an outlet–I believe the middle daughter is the outlet or scapegoat. Rene Girard would be the source on scapegoating. I too agree that, for some reason, openly wanting the one thing women are told they must want–marriage–is suspect and must be punished. All along, the middle daughter is not quite getting the
“code” the others live by, symbolized in her being taken in by the false “heir,” and part of what she does is threaten to rip the veil of mystification from the code. Yes, I like and sympathize with her too, but understand that she would be come the victim.
Diane R.
Yes but why particularly this one? Middle daughters are not prima facie scapegoated; it could be the oldest or youngest. It does have something to do with her character that is seen as (finally I submit) susceptible to bullying, and probably Modleski has one facet: she is open, unguarded, let’s the world see she (among other things) wants to get married.
You are right here: humiliation the center of the game, and Austen falls in:Elizabeth Bennet, Emma, Marianne Dashwood (even Elinor in a second scene not sufficiently paid attention to), Fanny Price.
And let me stress how unusually strong, excoriating this one was. Barring things like torture and political narrative horrors, as a central core (alas) of women’s art I’ve never seen anything come close to raw brutality — especially the sequence right there at the altar. Smith made it worse and Fellowes at least understood that
I’m very interested in mini-series as art, it is TV art, and it is very much part of women’s art — cyclical is central to written texts to.
You need to watch — the second season is superior to the first. I don’t watch it on TV: Jim downloaded the British films from a BBC website.
Ellen
Fabulous article. Poor Edith. I had the same thought when Violet jumped up. Of course, in real life this act would’ve been met with rage “sit your punk ass back down and shut up!” But maybe, that’s just me.
Karen: She compromised the family by sharing Mary’s secret, because Mary was callous about the cousin’s death on the Titanic, but it’s portrayed more as jealousy, and being the 2nd daughter. I’ve not seen it yet, have it recorded at home.
Pam: Edith is a bitch but still. She didn’t deserve this·
Karen: Sounds pretty punishing and fatalistic. ·
Me: There: why is Edith a bitch any more than the others. Mary is just as cold. Who cares about this family? surely hiding a death is worse. And this is held against her as so many ugly things the other charaters do are not. It is true (as I saw in one of the comments ) that we are not to respond wholly realistically, so Edith stands for something it’s assumed women are hostile to.
Someone on facebook again calling Edith a “bitch,” & asked why, she dredged up Edith “compromised the honor of the family.”
I couldn’t agree more with Diane on the reactionary (indeed in the modern style of going beyond mere class war to want to re-structure society into permanents have-not ‘grateful’ peons] perspective and what this family stands for. I don’t think the person is sincere.
Those female types stigmatized, humiliated, murdered, made witch-like (like Miss Obrien) are significant because women watch these programs in droves. Miss Obrien is also probably meant to stand for a butch lesbian.
Ellen
Ellen, you misunderstood me, think Mary is a bigger and more shallow bitch than Edith. But Edith is a bitch no less. Still, I don’t think she deserved being jilted at the altar with the blatant approval of family. I do like lady Sybil. But even she bothers me with her disapproval of her husband while on the grounds at Downton. In real life, if I were to meet them, I would despise them all and hang with the servants.
Me: Ah I see. Thank you. Yes with the blatant approval of the family is a good point.
Smith did play Lady B, by the way: at the Aldwych for Nick Hytner in 1993. There’s probably a bit of it on YouTube somewhere. Arthur
Eileen: One could say that Edith is so caught up in envy and competitiveness that she makes bad choices, or chooses men who are less than she deserves, just not to be the unmarried sister anymore. She falls for a married man (wounded BTW), when she knows his wife as well as she knows him, she falls for an impostor (horribly burned and totally spooky, and she falls for an older widower, who seemed to be running away from her or pushing her away all along (wounded by the time they get together). Her betrayal of Mary was an enormously mean thing to do, with long lasting repercussions. I agree that it was an utterly humiliating jilting, but Edith has shown seriously bad judgement on many occasions. Certainly, I hope I’m not alone is rooting for her to find happiness, despite her bad behavior.
Me: Uou put it very well Eileen but I note you give the other two women a lot of slack and none to Edith. It seems to me you do blame her for wanting to marry openly. Mary is just as mean in other ways; and what repercussions? Mary’s just fine. Sybil awful to Tom &c&c. But thank you for putting the position in terms of taking the characters realistically. I noted in the second season Edith was often shown with books, and that in the first season the deleted scenes were mostly those of Edith with the father showing her appeal to him. (Can’t have that is what Fellowes might have decided.)
Actually Edith has the nicest smile of all three sisters, and she looks out of eyes that would like to be generous: that’s Laura Carmichael’s performance which I have not praised enough.
I got a good reply on Victoria to my blog on Downton Abbey 3:3. I answered it directly because it seemed to me Prof Albright was asking what is the attractive of this series, all the while refusing to pay attention (so to speak) to its aesthetic and premises.
Prof Albright wrote:
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:44:23 -0500
Subject: Re: [VICTORIA] Downton Abbey 3:3
On Jan 15, 2013, at 12:29 AM, Ellen Moody wrote:
> This one topped the scene in Bronte’s _Jane Eyre_ where Rochester’s brother-in-law interrupts her wedding to Rochester to say there is an impediment, Rochester had a wife now living. [ . . . . ]
I’m not sure how Ellen means “topped” here. From what I saw of the _Downton Abbey_ scene, it pales by comparison. The interruption of the wedding in _Jane Eyre_ was a momentous and dramatic event, and led to the revelations of “the madwoman in the attic” and Rochester’s duplicity, and precipitated Jane’s abrupt departure. It is melodramatic, with Gothic overtones, and propels subsequent events in the novel. Nothing of the sort takes place on _Downton_. An old man about to take a young woman as his wife thinks better of it and leaves her at the altar. Somewhat melodramatic, in a cliched way. It leads to the bride-to-be sobbing on her bed and her family clearing the champagne and flowers from the hall–not exactly shocking.
I continue to be amazed by all the fuss about this weakly written and acted, coincidence-laden, but lavishly produced and marketed series.
********
To which I replied:
n reply to Rick Albright,
I do think Fellowes had the Victorian motif in mind and perhaps the _Jane Eyre_ wedding. I have a vague memory of one of the actresses who played Jane Eyre in one of the now many movies wearing a dress very like Laura Carmichael in the wedding scene. I’ll put my argument first: that you need to really evaluate and understand _Downton Abbey_ as serial drama with all the key characteristics of what’s denigrated as “soap opera” before you can understand why it has this grip. I’ve argued that twice on these blogs and also written out a blog with all these key characteristics:
http://www.jimandellen.org/trollopeblog/810.html
and then that it is important to Victorian studies because Victorian novels are filmed this way, as this sub-genre.
I put it with my _Pallisers_ film materials because it belongs there too. What excited me about the presentation at the MLA I spoke with (with respect to Austen’s Emma and what serializing this tightly-knit drama does to it) was one of the papers compared Trollope’s multiplot art (which is Victorian) to _Northern Exposure_ as an example of modern soap opera (though the term was not used) at night (I believe it reached BBC America — at any rate many Americans seem to have seen it — perhaps through Netflix).
If you are willing to take soap opera aesthetic and its typology seriously, yes the humiliation of Edith over-tops that of Jane Eyre. Jane is also humiliated, shamed, and she too runs back and cries or some equivalent desperately and there are scenes like this in the _Jane Eyre_ films. The humiliation of the heroine is still a major scene in popular movies and it’s common in 18th century novels from Burney and Austen on. Elizabeth Bennet is humiliated in front of herself; Mr Knightley humiliates Ema after she humiliates Miss Bates. These are called “teaching scenes,” but they are much more than that.
So, tt’s the excruciating quality of the humiliation I’m getting at; I see that Rick Albright has taken on the family’s point of view (an “old man”) but that is not Edith’s and Anthony Strallan has consistently been shown to be not just ethical but brave about it. The climactic scene (placed in what would be the fourth act of a play as was the wedding scene) of Part 1 of Season 3 is the exposure of a cruel trick by the upper class young man who had expected he might marry Sybil. He puts a drug of some sort into Tom Bransom’s drink, causing Tom to lose his inhibitions, over-react and literally become sick (near vomiting). This sort of thing did happen in upper class households and is regularly found in 18th century novels presented as a joke (in Smollett and also in Burney’s novels), and is still used to ridicule some socially unacceptable people in Powell’s _Dance to the Music of Time. Fellows is too knowing a writer not to know this and when he has Edith’s lover, Sir Anthony Strallan (Robert Bathurst) a much older and (too) emasculated man, Fellows scores points in ethics. Many of the people at the table do not respect Strallan sufficiently because he’s not macho, and yet it is he who exposes the lout (for that’s what this guy really is). Breaks the taboo or code for allowing cruelty. This allows the family to understand this is not Tom’s behavior and allows Matthew immediately to condemn the man, and later ask Tom to be his best man, Sybil to lead Tom from the table, and prompts the man’s father to apologize.
What the family can’t take is (to use Butlerian terms) Strallan performs masculinity inadequately. His broken arm is a sign of his possible impotence or weakness in the area of physical sex. Edith has not cared about such things: she went for a cripple in Season 2.
Which gets me to what the blog was about: I asked why was Edith scapegoated. Edith has in fact been scapegoated from the first season on. Many of the actresses are directed to roll their eyes when Edith says something. She was made to do a mean thing out of jealousy in Part 1 Season 1 and the viewers all cite this solemnly, going on about how she hurt the family.
I came up with she performs femininity inadequately but that’s too pat in her instance and studying some studies of soap opera heroine types I came up with this: no heroine is allowed to admit openly she longs to marry.
Edith gives the game away. She is also open, unguarded. Thus a target for ridicule. She does it all the time and again and again.
The scene over-tops _Jane Eyre_ because every single of moment of it is milked, including having the dowager type an Anthony Trollope old lady type seen through a Lady Bracknell wit) come up and lengthen the scene, make it worse, and make it impossible for Edith to prevail. It was the dowager’s joke over Anthony’s prowess to the chaplain just before the wedding began that crumbled Strallan’s nerve.
I think the scene important. First of all it shows how weak are any of the in-roads of feminism in “high quality” women’s art.
It shows how marriage continues to be a key goal. Complains were made ni Part 1 when we did not see Lady Mary married — all we saw was the irritating fusses beforehand. That was deliberate.
I’ll leave it there. I hope I have enlightened Rick as to why _DA_ continues to draw and drip a large audience in the US and UK.
There are also the reactionary politics but I’ll set that aside as that was not was explicitly worked in the humiliation scene of a scapegoat.
I’m for these scapegoats by the way, every time. Men and women.
Ellen
An addendum: on the thought I didn’t make this strong enough:
Edith is open about her desire to marry not just once but again and again. In the first season we get Lawrentian type scenes where she is working hard with a farmer because she wants a man and his wife throws her out. In the second season it’s the crippled man who of course turns out to be “con man.” And little dialogues now and again show how indiscreet and bad at manipulation Lady Edith Grantham really is.
Read Tania Modelski, _Loving with a Vengeance_. You will find the typology for Miss Obrien there: frustrated, because unmarried and as to class status, thwarted (in governess-y outfits), a sure villainess.
And this typology is in Victorian and Edwardian novels even the later ones with their “new women.”
Ellen Moody
ellen.moody@gmail.com
Janis Susan May Patterson
I agree with your analysis of the Downton Abbey/Jane Eyre comparison wholeheartedly, and you have explained it much more lucidly than I ever could.
If I might add an observation, in most families there is always a scapegoat, especially when there are three children. Like three-handed card games, it seems that one scores high (Mary), one does middlin’ well (Sybil) and one pretty much tanks (Edith). Apparently Edith has a personality problem and one cannot help but wonder if her familial status is the cause of it or the result.
Also, in a society which puts such a premium on physical beauty, Edith is doubly damned. On another site’s discussion of the show someone characterized the daughters as ‘the hot one’ (Mary), ‘the really hot one’ (Sybil) and ‘the other one’ (Edith). Even Edith’s name is not as glamorous or feminine as her sisters’, which I personally think is a bit of overkill on Fellowes’ part.
In the self-denigrating way of Victorian heroines (Jane Eyre’s constant self-put-downs make me furious) Edith perhaps sub-consciously acknowledges that she can never hope to aspire to the heights her sisters can; this is before Sybil elopes with Bransom, of course, and even that elopement can be regarded as her sister’s superiority – she has given all for love.
Of course Edith is desperate to marry and the validation of a marriage itself is more important than the partner in that marriage. Marriage was really the only acceptable career for a woman in those days, especially for the daughters of an earl. Anything less was to be regarded as being a failure as a woman. After grasping at a married farmer and a hospitalized cripple, Edith must think she has hit the jackpot with Anthony Strallan. In spite of being crippled (his arm) and considerably older, and something of a weakling, he is a man, and a man of her class. To be so publicly rejected by such a less-than-perfect specimen is the ultimate denigration of her femininity.
It will be interesting to see which character arc Edith will follow – determined spinster, cap-over-the-windmill wild woman, or if she will persevere through humiliation and eventually triumph (a la Jane Eyre).
I do agree that the soap-opera aspects of Downton Abbey are almost classic embodiments of the Victorian sensibilities, though seen through the convulsions of that viewpoint’s death throes.
Susan
—
…always a good story!
Susan writes, “I do agree that the soap-opera aspects of Downton Abbey are almost classic embodiments of the Victorian sensibilities, though seen through the convulsions of that viewpoint’s death throes.”
Would someone spell out for me which Victorian sensibilities “Downton Abbey” embodies? I’ve only seen the first three episodes of Season Three, but I haven’t noticed any serious challenge to the snotty complacency of the aristocracy. They get to keep their huge house; the plot allows them to be rid of an inappropriate husband for Edith; only the rich American grandmother and her maid offer an alternate viewpoint, briefly.
The emptiness of this rich production is made clear by comparing it to “Gosford Park,” a brilliant film that doesn’t take much about the aristocracy seriously. This includes the revelation that the lord’s money came from his early days as a brutish factory owner. That’s the kind of healthy (critical) class consciousness I associate with the Victorians, not the over-valuing of wealth, family, property, and propriety that goes on in “Downton Abbey,” at least so far.
Bob Lapides
Thank you to Susan Patterson and Bob Lapides for your responses. To Susan: two other people have suggested to me that in a use of archetypes one often finds the middle daughter singled out as scapegoat. I’ve not looked it up, nor (I think another place that might help understand the pull of this series) a good study of satire. It’s been suggested to me too that the series is camp, that Fellowes knows he is camping it up. That would explain the slide from romance to satire, sort of like a mobius strip.
To Bob:I presume you know that Fellowes scripted Gosford Park and it is a gem. Its existence could enable us to assume that Fellowes is deliberately pandering when he does not undercut elements in his series, except that he’s on record as being, others are talking of his life, and apparently other of his serial dramas show him to be, a thorough political reactionary. There were such people in the Victorian age. I’d agree _DA_ does not at all undermine the economics of such a position, nor class relationships, nor what goes by the name of (pious) family values. And perhaps much of the change we find in Gosford Park can be put down to Altman’s presence. In the world of movie-house cinema the director is the key presence, while in BBC dramas often the script writer and producer collude together and then hire a director.
I think it does undermine the erotic and marital norms. The humiliation scene actually does that. It’s very gentle: we don’t see the actual wedding ceremony of Mary and Matthew (hot number? she’s got the anorexic look!). That’s been complained about on many blogs. Instead we get all the irritating fuss. Edith does in fact undermine the norms with her openness and inability to manipulate (but another thing she’s not forgiven for). Each of the top lords we’ve met has been a lout. Sir Richard Carlisle was 9we were given to feel) probably an abuser, physically too.
Fellowes seems to me without being able to pinpoint it so much steeped in Trollope. The obvious is Cora, Lady Grantham: Plantagenet married his Cora for her money. There is no Grantham in the Trollope corpus (apparently — from a hunt through the handbooks). But his understanding of Trollope is as a deeply conservative writer which is a popular or public media point of view of him. I think it’s wrong or inadequate, but there’s no denying politicians like John Major actually reads Trollope, all of him that’s available (including travel books).
E.M.
Tracy Marks:
Ellen wrote:
I was gripped by the raw cruelty of the humiliaton of Edith at the altar.
The scene beats Jane Eyre The question is Why is Edith so scapegoated? I
came up with two propositions:
–She performs femininity as inadequately as Strallan performs masculinity
–She is open about wanting to get married
I think you’re right on, Ellen, in your interpretation, and will here make your points in a larger context, based on my own psychological/religious background.
Perhaps it’s all about Eve. It’s a sign of our misogynistic culture – and our need for a scapegoat, our need to project qualities we dislike in ourselves onto others, and punish them. Somewhere, someone’s in the wrong, and that person is most likely female. The trouble is – not all chosen scapegoats are Lydia’s (P&P) who indeed merit the blame we place on them (though of course, in Lydia’s case, we could justifiably say that the fault, dear Brutus, lies in the parenting). So if there isn’t anyone on stage who deserves scapegoating, we of course must scapegoat the undeserving.
(Prepare now for a psychology lecture <-: )
When I was in training as a psychotherapist in the early 80s, I was very much struck by the significance of Nancy Chodorow's work, esp. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender which at the time was shaping feminist psychotherapy and which still is considered by many as one of the most influential clinical psychology books of the 20th century.
To summarize and simplify a few of Chodorow's points: In order to become mature adults, children have to separate emotionally from their parents. Because of predominant influence of the mother as parent (which may be less so than it used to be, but still is strong – though one way or another, we are carried in and born out of our mother's bodies, resulting in a deep instinctual bond), the rebellion/separation tends to focus more on the mother than the father. In other words, separation involves denigrating the mother and the gender and values she represents. This task is much greater for males than females because males (heterosexual, that is) form as their sexual preference, females. They have to much more forcefully break the initial tie with the mother in order to form sexual relationships than women do (heterosexual, that is), who only must shift their experience of the male.
So boys have to more radically resist the ties to the mother, emotional dependence, and their own "female" qualities. Even today, boys especially around 8-10 are overtly attempting to prove their macho, and put down anyone who is sissy, crybaby, weak etc.
Because we are a patriarchal culture (and even more so, I think then in a few decades ago — women may be more visible in the professional world, but that's largely because they play the male role not because the gentler values associated with the feminine are honored), women have bought into this anti-female mindset.
And in part due to the influence of Christianity for millennia, which which associates the darkness with Satan, and reinforces the natural human tendency to project what we don't like in ourselves, we often seek a scapegoat – someone to blame, to hate, to punish. In most cases, it will be a female — or "feminine" male. A particularly enlightening book on this subject is Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt by Sylvia Brinton Perera. And of course going back earlier in time, before Christianity, we had many religions based upon sacrifice – originally sacrifice of a person.
Now back to Downton Abbey — I don't think there's anything overt about Edith that leads her to be the specific target. One of the girls had to be —and perhaps because of Mary's hostility (sibling rivalry?) – or perhaps because in some ways we could speculate that Edith was more difficult as a baby (we after all, get to make up facets of her history not revealed to us) – she got the short straw.
And of course, once she turned against Mary by spreading the word about the death of the Turk in her bed — and that was an insidiously cruel act – she quickly lost the sympathy of the audience. (Her sometimes humiliating to watch husband-chasing may not have helped — there is that bit of Lydia in her). But Mary, after all, is our heroine. She wants what every good capitalistic young woman wants, a rich husband and lifestyle – HANDSOME is extra, dessert. Edith, on the other hand, apparently values love more than the money (as does Sybil, but that's another story – she may get to suffer for her choice in next week's episode). She also, heaven forbid, doesn't idealize youth, and isn't drawn to the masculine ideal. Her choice of a husband is even more unacceptable than Sybil's –Tom at least is masculine, assertive, actively goes for what he wants. Tom is the wrong social class, but at least embodies the masculine ideal.
But to take another approach — Downton Abbey is part soap opera, and has become our worldwide phenomenon, and so our sympathies must be milked and the plot guaranteed to trigger strong emotional reactions. So of course, someone has to hurt, and someone be hurt……
Tracy
Thank you very much Tracy or pinpointing the three reasons so clearly — and understanding. Sorry I didn’t get back to you until now.
I agree with Choderow’s book but it’s hard to see it working out neatly or directly in a serial drama; it’s easier to see the types first manifesting themselves in less built-up soap operas and then transferred into costumes in these elaborate dramas. The Christian stories seem to me a metaphoric way of discussing this and not get at the core. For that really aesthetic psychoanalysis of the Northup Frye (his book on genres) or ultimately Jungian sort is best, for these are not Victorian novels with deep realistic bases. Movies work on the surface and symbolically.
Someone else has suggested the middle daughter is often a scapegoat. Maybe. I was thinking looking also to studies of satire might enlighten us. It’s been suggested to me too that the series is camp, that Fellowes knows he is camping it up. That would explain the slide from romance to satire, sort of like a mobius strip.To me this also explains the appeal of Maggie Smith in the role she was given. In her life she has often played character actresses, among them Lady Bracknell in Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest.
When we write novels, we can prove anything as we get to invent the evidence. So too scripts. I can’t say how often Edith telling on Mary in Part 1 has been cited as the most heinous of evils, with solemn pronouncements about how this hurt the family too. Fellowes did that, knowing it would not be forgiven. Tracy calls it insidious: women are not supposed to tell about the hidden sexual behavior of their friends; alas they do, and to other women. And then the girl is ostracized. But Mary is never ostracized and no one finds out until very late in the episode and then it’s Mary who also tells. Much that the others do is forgiven so I dismiss that as a deliberate red herring to distract the core: let’s hit at this girl who is openly trying to marry and can’t manipulate very well.
You make a good point that Edith wants to marry for love as did Sybil. Mary is the status hungry, clothes-loving, materialist; she stands for every single reactionary value I can think of and often is paired in goal with the Dowager whose quips are said to so amuse people. They are merely cynical re-statements of the programs’ reactionary stance.
I don’t see Lydia as scapegoated After all she gets away with it and she has this rhineroceros skin; she pretends to be “perfectly unconcerned,” she has more anxiety in her than that. But not much. Scapegoats who are humiliated in front of other people and no one rises in their real defense (the family is blatantly on the side of the duchess, not one rushes up at that altar to back Edith up or inspirit Anthony once again). I can’t think of one as when someone is humiliated in public we are asked to be on their side (Elizabeth at the Netherfeld Ball over the way her relatives act, Fanny Price when her aunt excoriates her for not taking the role), or the other characters patently support them (Mr Knightley supports Miss Bates). Hers is not a cruel fiction – the way say Burney’s is. Burney has scapegoats. Madame Duval for one.
E.M.
Eileen: Edith is the only daughter who looks like her father’s side of the family, which they seem to think is an attractiveness deficit. Edith’s driving is interesting, since it was considered to be a male activity and not very aristocratic to drive oneself. Both she and Sybil are non-inheritors, so like Princes Albert and Edward, they can take more risks/be more modern. I don’t think I’m judging Edith for openly wanting to marry. Marriage has been assumed for all of them from the beginning. And Mary also creates quite a few problems for herself by making bad choices in regard to men, Mr. Pamuk being one of them. Edith’s letter ruins her reputation, nixes marriage with a large number of eligible men, who wouldn’t want her, and almost forced her to marry that Rupert Murdoch fellow. Perhaps Matthew’s rescue of her happened too fast?
Me: Your by-passing or ignoring or do not believe in what I’m interested in. I maintain Edith has been scapegoated from the first season in for reasons that have nothing to do with the particulars you cite or only as they embody the reasons (for example her letter shows her bad at manipulation) for this scapegoating. What Eileen’s written would be appropriate were what we are discussing a novel by George Eliot. She is deeply psychological, realistic, historical — but also symbolic too. Fellowes art may be best understood by watching Gosford Park.
Eileen: So, Fellowes has no interest or knowledge of psychology, just a social agenda. Sorry for trying to engage you in a discussion, Ellen. I wasn’t ignoring what you said, I was responding to it. However, this is truly the last time I will attempt such a thing.
Me: I think the details are brought by you into what is not there. The art of film doesn’t work this way. Sorry if I offended. Flms just do not have this kind of dense intellectuality; that does not mean they are inferior; but they are different. Analysis of mise-en-scene is where it’s at for example; that would be the kind of thing that is carefully studied or shots. Shots are the grammar of films like sentences the center of books or verse lines of poem. Films are surface art and the historical accurate details provided by the costumer and production designers are not the central core of meaning — rather the anachronisms are.
Ellen Moody and I will just have to agree to disagree here. While I don’t doubt that Edith is humiliated and that there is a considerable tradition of such humiliations, I’m not convinced that it “tops” (or in her amplification, “over-tops”) _Jane Eyre_. I was trying to make the point (apparently unsuccessfully) that the wedding scene in Bronte’s novel is considerably richer and more multi-dimensional–in both plot and character–than just a humiliated bride. My point was that Bronte’s wedding scene results in much more than Jane’s humiliation but propels a series of revelations and plot developments.
Whatever his past successes, I would submit that the statement that “Fellows is too knowing a writer” is not in evidence here. How does so “knowing a writer” manage to get class relationships, especially between masters and servants, so consistently and abysmally wrong, or create plots that are so implausible and at times anachronistic?
I don’t think my problem is with the soap opera aesthetic. I can read a Victorian melodrama like East Lynne and suspend my disbelief. Despite the novel’s improbabilities, the culture and the class relationships depicted are authentic, and the characters sympathetic.
Fellows clearly set out to create an updated and more expensively produced (and marketed) version of the original Upstairs, Downstairs. (No wonder Jean Marsh was so outraged by the obvious mimicry when Downton came out, just before her own sequel.) But what it may have lacked in production values, Upstairs, Downstairs more than made up for in its authenticity of the culture depicted and its class relationships. It also gave us plots that were plausible and realistic characters that we actually cared about–both missing from Fellows’ all-style-and-no-substance production.
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Rick Albright
Regarding Downton Abbey and Jane Eyre, I can’t recall if anyone has yet noted (apologies if they have) that Edith’s next love-interest (the editor) does in fact have a mad wife shut away (at least if I recall correctly). Fellowes certainly does seem to have Bronte on the brain, though I have to agree with Rick personally: the relative significance of the episode to Edith’s overall character arc doesn’t feel comparable to Jane’s. In part this is because Fellowes cannot use it for an explosive re-evaluation of the marriage state whilst the audience is rooting for Mary and Matthew. In part this is because the soap opera and the novel manage plot differently: the audience knows Edith will have another chance – this, after all, is how future seasons are ensured.
Thinking about Downton’s debt to “Victorian” literature seems interesting in general though – it’s always struck me as the work of a mad Wilkie Collins let loose on the works of E. M. Forster….
Best,
Mark
Very much enjoying this discussion of the neo-Victorian estate melodrama and its comparison with Charlotte Bronte’s novel.
For me as a modern woman, I also find Edith’s jilting to be less painful since her view of the marriage was that she was marrying not despite her fiancee’s injury but because of it. She longed to be his forever nursemaid (which, as in Jane’s case, is coded as an act of love rather than self-abnegation). That is something that Jane becomes to Rochester, something that has often been read as a means of leveling their relative power, but I had hoped that we had moved beyond that in our time to a moment when a man was an equal to a woman quite without having to be brought low first.
Also, I am less concerned about Edith’s welfare as I watch not necessarily because a future season will give her further opportunities to complicate the plot (although some viewers may find this consolation), but because Edith comes from privilege and is, if not the favorite daughter, guaranteed the support of a concerned family, a loving mother, father, and grand dame…grandmother. Jane is orphaned in the world, which no doubt struck a chord with Victorian readers because a private, social support system was so essential to one’s prospects (and one of means was very much to be envied — a fantasy that all of the recovered connections and inheritance stories reveal). Jane’s jilting drives her into the wilds, where she nearly perishes, until she is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers. Had she not come across the Rivers (they not only provide her temporary respite but a means of regaining some standing in polite society as an acknowledged class equal as well as a familial bosom in which to find sympathy — lost cousins!), her fate might have been death or perhaps what would have been figured, in a culture that elevated the martyr, worse than death as a ruined (in terms of reputation) or beggared woman (in terms of prospects) — at least until / unless she was found and her inheritance revealed. Certainly this seems much more melodramatic, and its underlying personal tragedy much more poignant, to me in comparison.
I can only imagine that Edith’s jilting would have drawn sympathy and interest from Victorian mainstream readers, who would have perhaps not understood the age objection quite as well (yes, the more romantic choice is the younger, handsomer object, but a kindly older and monied suitor would do). But I do not think that even then she would have been quite the same figure of pathos as Jane, who came so close to rising above her station illegitimately (in then-social terms) and then does rise to her deserved station, with family backing, and still gets the prize for patience in the man she loves.
Kelly Searsmith, Ph.D.
I with Rick and Mark in part now. No the scene is not multidimensional in the way of many great Victorian novels, and the mini-series is inferior to many in content, outlook, retrograde in areas that are important. Fellowes’ one good movie I’ve seen is Gosford Park, and probably we have Rick Altman’s strong presence to thank for the undermining of all the conventions there. I fear the very conservatism of the series is one reason for its popularity as well as (I maintain) the real ability of Fellowes to light upon central archetypes and produce absorbing multipattern serial drama. When we move to minor Victorian novels we have this same problem too: I mean the content of the books can be made palatable by “theoretical tools,” reading against the grain and other methods.
E.M
I do enjoy Downton Abbey and find many pleasures in its depiction of modernizing values over the course of seasons. The characters are rich and well acted, and there is that multiplotted storytelling that we associate with the Victorian novel. That, at least, does lend itself to the building of a social portrait of some complexity, even if it is not quite true to period because of the lessening of restrictions that would have been socially and so self imposed. Perhaps Fellowes has gone too far in appealing to modern sensibilities in that respect, as Rick and others have suggested. As always, however, you provide great insight through your analysis and conversation. I always enjoy hearing your thoughts.
All the best,
Keely
I agree on Edith: she is privileged and when Lord Grantham says “she’ll get over it,” in a way he’s right. She needs something useful to do says Mrs Crawley. She is not broke and will not fall into prostitution or become a servant.
I thought the episode made an explicit comparison with Ethel.
In Victorian novels we so rarely meet with prostitutes. They were everywhere. People will point to Trollope’s Vicar of Bullampton, but I think even more germane to the reality is Miss Mackenzie where she stays in a hotel in London where we are shown (however hintingly) the landlady is running an unacknowledged brothel where the women may have day jobs but they also make enough money for the rent by their gentleman visitors.
Ellen
Interesting post, Ellen. I wonder why Edith is the scapegoat sister too – what does she have or not have that her sisters do or don’t. Also, her hair is noticeably red – while her sisters are brunette – on purpose I’m sure.
My mom, who is not a regular viewer of Masterpiece Classic, has been watching the series and told me she is surprised it’s not more well-written. She also is irritated that the characters basically do nothing all day. I hadn’t thought of that, but while I guess I’m pulled into their upper class world, there are only a few of them who are trying to do anything for the good of the world, and they – noticeably Mrs. Crawley – are misguided. Truly, the servants have more heart, starting up the soup kitchen in the last season – sure Lady Crawley agreed to help, but why didn’t she think of it herself. The only one of
the family with any social consciousness is Sybil. The soap opera elements have been over the top, especially since Lavinia died. Problems arise and are easily solved – “We’re going to lose the house – oh wait, Matthew inherited money so we don’t have to go.” As it continues, I am less intrigued by it. I wonder whether there will be a season 4.
Tyler.
Me: I meant to say that your mother’s comment that the upper class characters do nothing all day is a good observation. In these 18th and 19th century novels we are not made to feel the do-nothingness of womens’ lives most of the time. An exception is _North and South_ where Margaret cannot stand the tedium of Edith’s life. But in Austen’s novels what do the women do? Up, dress, eat, visit, and sit, and back again, dress, eat …
That Fellowes brings this home to us is to his credit and shows it’s a modern take. He’s aware of it and also the long hard work of the servants’ lives.
The series is as well or poorly written as it’s been throughout. He tries for bon mots and now and again there’s an apt dialogue. It’s not the writing that sticks in one’s craw.
And season 4 is on the way. They even signed on Maggie Smith who has been wanting out. She’s getting old, tired and knows it. But the film-makers feel among the wider audience she is perhaps the most popular central character. That says a lot to me about what people take away from it :).
Ellen who nonetheless reads about it and will watch on … I do continue to be held and it’s my interest in women’s drama, the serial as well as gripped now and again by what happens. I was gripped last week by Edith’s nadir.
Ellen
Your comparison to Jane Eyre made me wonder: what if this not so much an echo of Jane’s first wedding as her second? Strallan is old enough to be Edith’s father, and he is without the use of a hand. Feminist debate has been rife for decades on whether Rochester’s crippling makes his marriage to Jane more or less acceptable. Though Strallan was never a Rochester, Fellowes seems to have decided that Edith needed saving from Jane’s fate.
[…] a wonderfully resonant word this has become) the climax-into-denouement position (just the place where Edith was humiliated in the previous part), we have the powerful encounter of Ethel again with her son’s grandfather who seems to […]
I don’t understand why Edith’s character is made so unempathetic and unrelatable to the viewers either. The scapegoating, as you call it, of her character by the writers might be to just give some variety. The one sister that everyone loves to hate, kind of like the despicable O’Brien character downstairs. The betrayal of her own sister seemingly enough to seal her fate forever. But one of the ways Fellows does it is by not only making her look different (though not exactly unattractive) but perhaps also by not developing her character enough. She comes off as more two-dimensional than her sisters. The viewers don’t know Edith too well and hence it is easy to not care for her enough to root for her as they do for Mary. I wondered why there were no scenes in which Edith and her Dad interact as Mary and Lord Grantham do. Which is way the cutting of the scenes that showed just that, as you mentioned, makes no sense . But I do think her being left at the altar might have been the last straw. That at long last at least people feel sorry for her!
We are not privy to why no one including her parents don’t think too much of Edith. Remember the scene where Lord & Lady Grantham discuss her future and say something to the effect that she might be the one who would be their nurse in their old age (her spinsterhood implied!) Edith herself sadly, seems to have bought into that too. Remember when she is arranging Lavinia’s gifts; and she muses out loud whether she might end up being the one who is perpetually doing this for her pretty relatives. Prompting her granny to quip, “Don’t be so defeatist, dear. It is so middle class.”
Speaking of the DCoG, her biting one-liners notwithstanding, with regard to Edith and AS, I believe like LG, she means well. She genuinely believes that Edith was going to be an old man’s drudge and wishes she would be spared it. I also think the withering statement that she made about Strahlan is sotto voce and not heard by him. I believe his longstanding misgivings and doubts which were not exactly abated by LG’s initial objections came to a head when he stood at the altar and realized the magnitude of what was happening and crumples. At least that’s how I interpreted that scene. If on the other hand your scenario is true then it makes AS even weaker that he would allow someone else (even if it is the matriarch of the clan) to intimidate him so much as to leave his bride at the altar. I also disagree with you on the way his rejection of Edith was handled. I couldn’t agree with the DCoG more, that Edith should let him go. The statement that he couldn’t marry her was already made. Everyone there had already heard it. They had reached a point of no return. If at that point AS was persuaded to change his mind either by Edith or anyone else’s pleading or reasoning, there would be forever doubt in the minds of everyone including the two principles whether he in fact wanted to be married to Edith or was just cajoled into it. On top of every insecurity plaguing her Edith certainly did not need that. Not to mention even a lot more pleading might have still ended up yielding the same result, so the clean break and letting him go made the most sense to me..
The special bond Mary has with her Dad; reminded me of that of Mr Bennett and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. Edith’s character actually reminds me of that of Kitty or Mary in P&P: in that it is not as developed as Jane’s or Lizzy’s. Unlike Edith, least those girls were so silly and vapid that their father was annoyed by and couldn’t be bothered with them. But with Edith we are left to wonder why she feels the need to ‘take’ Mary’s castaways. In that regard she kind of reminds me of yet another character from P&P: Charlotte Lucas. Though Strahlan (who is nothing like the odious Collins, either) is not one of Mary’s throwaways.
I do agree with you that Edith wanting to be married seems to be disproportionately demonized. My point of contention is that while her desire to be married is understandable especially at that period in time, the desperation with which she goes about it comes off looking unattractive and unladylike. And through it all she constantly seems to sell herself short. This might be because of not being valued by her family that she does not value herself as she should. Remember how happy she is the day before the wedding when she comments that for the first time something was going to be all about her. But the line about her loving him not in spite of his disability but because of it and that he will be her life’s work (or something to that effect) sounds somehow hollow and too idealistic and naive even for someone as young and from that time. Which is why I believe with Strahlan she was basically ‘settling’. Though she claims that most men she grew up with are dead in the War (when her other grandmama teams up with her to help change her dad’s mind) and that AS is everything her dad would have wanted for her monied, titled etc (except for his age, which is usually not that big a deal, at that time anyway; and a slight disability) the story woven is that no one gentleman or otherwise comes calling for Edith. Why not? She is not unattractive. But the implication is she is somehow inexplicable undesirable. And even AS is a hesitant and eventually reluctant (remember he refers to her as Lady Edith almost at the eve of the wedding) suitor. With Edith doing most of the pursuing which is a bit anachronistic. And also a bit incongruous, in that at the same time that she is the strong woman who pursues and seemingly gets her prize: Strahlan, she is portrayed as the victim, unwanted except by a doddering old man (unlike Mary’s older suitor: the dashing, debonair and virile, if dastardly Carlisle)
Personally the development of Edith’s character over the second and third seasons makes her more likeable. But her likeability has been greatly diminished by some ‘flaws’ in her character like her jealousy towards her sisters fueled no doubt by her own insecurities. Which seems to make her value herself so little. One scene that brings her jealousy to the fore is when she is grieving after the jilting at the altar and her words that Sybil is pregnant and Mary probably is and the fact that she couldn’t bear to even see them. Which made me wonder if she really thought she too would attain that blessed state when her stated aim was to just be the caregiver to her husband to be. Especially considering the fact that passion and physicality was entirely missing (except for an occasional chaste peck on the cheek) in their relationship till that point. One more reason I felt Edith deserved better than Strahlan. Her father who never stands up for Edith the way he did for Mary in overlooking/’forgiving’ Mary’s shameful indiscretion and giving his blessing for her breakup even if it brought scandal to his name and home. Even telling her to go to America and to bring back a cowboy from the middle west of America to shake things up a bit at Downton. One of my favorite and heartwarming scenes of the stories between Lady Mary and her dad, btw. But to be fair he is driven by concern for his daughter’s well being both in his objection to Mary’s as well as Edith’s choice of partners. Although why America was never shown to be an option for Edith as well both before and after the altar scenario is puzzling.
Not to say that Mary is equally if not even more ‘flawed’. Her obsessive adherence to tradition, like her dad, for one. And her love of status and even money (her persistence in getting Matthew to take Reggie Swire’s money, so he could in turn to help her Dad and Downton with it, no matter how much she made it seem like loyalty to her and her clan, is quite mercenary) above almost everything are some reasons why. And Mary’s dismissive “I doubt it” when Edith extended the olive branch to her saying she hoped they would be closer now that Sybil is dead. Before she conceded they have to take the opportunity to be sisters when all three of them (Sybil dead in her bed) were in the same room together for the last time. That might be Mary being Mary but it made me dislike Mary’s character more than ever and feel for Edith’s even more than I had till then.
Without meaning to insult at all, I find what you write shows you do understand why Edith is scapegoated, that you repeat the anti-wowmen (misogynistic, distrustful) talk about women that unfortunately this mini-series encourages in many women viewers. When you justify the Dowager for that egregious scene, you are kissing the whip. I suppose you would justify what she does to Ethel too? I thank you because you show me my guesses on why Edith is disliked were right. E.M.
I’m afraid your response is too simplistic. It is not at all misogynistic to analyse a female character realistically any more than a male one. And how is championing Edith’s cause in saying she deserves much better than Strahlan, especially since her wanting him (or rather wanting the state of being married with him just being the latest object of her interest) seems to be fueled by the fallacy in her mind that no one else would want her, anti-woman? As a woman (albeit a discerning one) I find it ludicrous to be accused of misogyny by someone who scarcely knows me.
As for the Dowager, she did overstep the boundaries in the altar scene. But coming from the above premise regarding Edith and Strahlan, I felt it actually helped Edith’s cause ultimately, though it was not the DC’s motivation to do so. For Edith’s character to evolve from a needy woman without to much self worth to one who sees she is worth a whole lot more than anyone gives her credit for, she needed to let Strahlan go. And the quicker it was done the better, so I did like the fact that the DC stepped in and aided that. The fourth series is said to make Edith a career woman whose reason for living is not necessarily bound to a man. I certainly look forward to that.
With the Ethel situation, I think Fellowes wanted some kind of neat tying up of all the loose ends. And with her being shipped off far away from ‘scandal’ for the Crawley households and from her ‘scarlet woman’ situation locally, he did that all in one swoop. The storyline that she would live close to her son with the possibility of being in his life (never mind how unrealistic it is for the grandfather of her son to have a such a drastic change of heart) is pure gravy, I suppose. Of course the Dowager is at her manipulative best in not only deciding what is best for Ethel but taking it upon herself to take charge of Isobel’s household. But that is so in keeping with her character: rather cold, calculating and her loyalty only to her immediate family. And even that only as long as they toe the line!
The way you talked about all the women was hostile, just about every on. The stuff about sisters’ is what all repeat: it’s silly; sisters betray one another all the time, and Mary was as foolish as Edith. Indeed the program discounted that it was rape. You bought into the Duchess’s support of the narrowest grounds for marriage: how it looks to others. She cares nothing of inner life, only externals. And to talk this way is to say that Edith’s humiliation didn’t matter. It is precisely the point of my blog that it did and should continue to do so (though I know Fellowes has made Edith sufficiently pious that she does not dare bring it up to her grandmother and when she does she gets very nasty reply: “don’t whine.” How the dowager treats Ethel is hideous. I agree Ethel kowtows absymally finally too — that’s Fellowes again. Maybe the word I should have said was you took away the reactionary warning lessons and took as real what is manipulative.
You can prove anything if you get to make up the story.
But you did show me how many think about these things which cause them to support the present establishment which hurts women very badly. Perhaps I should not have used a specific word or pointed to a specific issue but suggested that generally the worst betrayal of intelligence is finding justification for the world as it is.”
The stories told of homosexual do seem charitable at first but when you think about it it’s a very narrow view. Why should it be set up that Thomas is nasty and then told he is revolting and then have to be grateful for a don’t ask don’t tell policy. It’s not just making witches out of unmarried women (Miss Obrien).
The mini-series has decent strands in this mix; if it did not manifest ambivalent it could not get away with what it does. It’s a celebration of today’s plutocracy and keeping the poor invisible and subservient.
Ellen
I not long ago belatedly finished watching DA, season 3. I suddenly recognized that when Lady Edith throws herself at older man, she doubly offends the social order. First, as is underscored by Anna, the maid who represents the moral center of Downton–blond, pretty, exemplary as a servant in her ever competent, wise, deeply respectful and loving care of her masters, as well as perfect in her understanding of her female role–a woman should never, as she tells the scullery maid, Daisy, (in the same episode, lest we miss the point) throw herself at a man. Second–and we must not miss this–it violates the Downton code for the young and healthy to mix with the old and/or infirm, a “morality” constantly articulated by the grandmother, Lady Violet. Thus, Lady Edith’s punishment must be severe –and it is–the humiliation of being left at the altar. Afterwards, Edith emphasizes her renewed understanding and acceptance of the social order when she insists on getting up and going downstairs for breakfast–breakfast in bed, she says, is for married women, not spinsters. Such details are not throwaways.
I think I find the social Darwinism–I don’t want to say Nazism–of being supposed to keep away from a man not even infirm but possibly soon to be so more disturbing than the punishing of Edith for openly pursuing a man. That the man himself upholds this cruel ideology may confuse but in no way negates the message of “strong with strong.” I believe too that we are supposed to see something similarly “off” in Matthew’s first fiancee’s dogged faithfulness to him when he is disabled.
Diane R
Thank you, Diane, for that insightful posting. Nothing more stultifying (with the accent on the Latin “stultus” in that word = fool) than the long-winded explanations I got on my blog about the raw cruelty show Edith about how Edith deserved what she got as someone who had betrayed her sister way back in Season 1 or how the grandmother (endless are these justifications for the Dowager’s social cruelties) was right to keep her from an elderly man. All these accompanied by assertions of how the person liked Edith and yes could not understand why others didn’t.
I was seeing the incident strictly from a local perspective: the despising of the vulnerable non-macho male, the mockery of him. After reading yours I begin to wonder if I over-read Fellowes’s remarkable making Strallon the outspoken exposer of the lord who played a cruel trick on Tom in the first episode. Maybe some watching actually felt that Strallon overdid and were (unconsciously) glad to see Tom vomit because he was an intruder, Irish, not fitting in. I also did see that Edith was hated for being overtly for marrying and not hiding this.
But I did not extrapolate out to see that this is one type of drop of water that makes up the ocean of fascism and nazism in its worship of male youth and power. I like your scares quotes around “morality” when it comes to the grandmother. Our US culture promotes just this worship — only now it’s much darker that we find people in movies being taught to torture and openly kill brutally
Yes we are supposed to find something embarrassing about the way Lavinia abjects herself before Matthew.
I did dislike very much Edith’s priggishness before the newsman, how Fellowes has managed to take a Jane Eyre story and make it utterly pious. I noted how she said she had to come down to breakfast but thought that was a reference to her sexless state. The other women stay in bed because they are there to have sex with the men, Edith has no one to service that way.
I do have 9 postings I did on the second season and have been in a quandary if I should bother turn them into polished blogs. It would provide easy material for my blog (it’s not easy to come up with blogs) and I would find a readership and could tell myself I was teaching another way of seeing these programs. But I fear those reading it would not take in my point of view at all and I’d just be reinforcing the program’s thrust no matter what I did.
OTOH, I really became deeply engaged with the characters for all they are turned and twisted to these ugly messages which makes it impossible to bond. I am not surprised it’s said Siobhan McKennan is leaving; in all her comments she keeps referring to the contemptibility of Miss Obrien which I thought was being dropped in Season 2; it was back in full force and Season 3 gave us another witch for the lady’s maid in Scotland. She tired of this stereotype and thought maybe it was not doing her career any good.
OTOH, further the lower class characters do get to speak back and to the point again and again and we do see their suffering (as in Ethel’s case): as in Tom to Lord Grantham “at least I know I live in a harsh world”; Miss Obrien’s wry raw witticisms functioned as a voice Dowager Violet; she knew she was continually at risk of getting sacked. I did “fall” for Anna too: I like her; I liked Mrs Patmore, Mrs Hughes (despite her grudging in her generosity and her firing women) too. I wanted to feel for Thomas and did whenever I was allowed to. It’s like living in our world here in the US and you find where you can breathe
Ellen
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[…] acquaintance with this serial drama, she’s the ugly 2nd sister, the one seduced by cripples, rawly humiliated at the altar .Both of them even have a big nose; both wear their hearts on their sleeves, only Lady Edith gets […]
What an intelligent, insightful article. Thank you- Edith and Isobel have been my favourites all along. I have been baffled all along at the lack of sympathy most of the downton audience seem to have. You’ve explained it brilliantly.