Joanne Froggart accepting Golden Globe as best Supporting Actress in a TV series, 2015
As Anna in Edith’s bedroom — after the fire, finding a photo of Marigold under Edith’s pillow — in this episode she is continually ferreting out, enabling her employer’s sex lives
Dear friends and readers,
This blog covers episodes 2 (with a forecast of 3) as I will not be here next week; there is retrospective, crystal ball work on what’s to come, and like last week’s, I take into account the whole arc of this season, which now includes the Christmas episode filmed partly at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland.
As famously painted by Canaletto in 1747 — the very basis of the Christmas episode is an old master painting
No one more involved with some of the characters in Downton Abbey than I. After rewatching Episodes 2 & 3 on Sunday night, last night I watched the Christmas Episode as it played on British TV (a region 2 DVD purchased from Amazon.uk): I became that distressed as I watched Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) go through grim gate after grim gate to reach Anna behind bars in a rough cotton, knee length smock I could hardly bear the distress. I am filled with perplexities. Why does Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) not come forward and say Anna was raped? is it that then there would be all the more reason to accuse Ann? is the rape nothing? Mr Bates (Brendon Coyle) visits her and we learn that her background will be held against her: it seems she picked up a knife (how was this recorded and remembered) when as a child her mother’s second husband, her stepfather did attempt sexual coercions of all sorts.
When at the Golden Globe, Joanne Froggart accepted (at last) the well-earned statue and said how gratifying it had been to her to receive a letter from a woman (which she read aloud) who said the depiction of the rape had helped her endure, cope with a rape she had had inflicted on her and the aftermath of that, I felt good for Froggart. Poor Anna, she’s never had a decent dress in the series for 5 years, the best they’ve done for her is a couple of snazzy hats with feathers along the brim.
Nonetheless, the word aftermath is unfortunately the state of things this season. Now that the initial flurry of the whipped-up first episode is done, we are rightly I should say back to the quiet diurnal patterns of the first season. Life’s like that and the original appeal of the series first five episodes of the first season is gestured towards.
Lord Merton (Douglas Reith) is lost in the room his wife built as he tells the dowager (Maggie Smith) and Mrs Crawley (Penelope Wilton)
Trouble is, this is not the first season, and a mini-series is art, not life, and these quiet diurnal events are too many of them mopping up operations of the previous three seasons or some off-stage pre-history (Raquel Cassidy as Miss Baxter’s excruciating ordeal as the reluctant thief and her need keep Kevin Doyle as Mr Molesley on her side). How can Laura Carmichael as Edith play mother to Marigold (indeed how does she endure being Edith) for yet another year? what is Mrs Crawley to do about Lord Merton’s lonely frustrated existence in that room with his mean sons? who will Lady Mary fuck and will Anna manage to buy a set of condoms for her?
The conventional tryst photo — faux aggression and glamor (complete with alluring hat band) — are we really supposed to take this seriously?
Where does Allen Leech as Tom belong? But we’ve heard it all before. Then life’s little troubles. Since the new turns are so resolutely pro-establishment, they fail to grip: Lady Rose (Lily James) is doing charity work among Russian aristocratic “refugees,” helping them back into “ordinary life: dancing and shopping and seeing one’s friends” (says Charles Blake, Julian Overden). Lady Rose is not permitted to be other than “a sweet young thing;” she is a sheltered virgin whose lost her way to her 19th century novel. Her anguish is for a wireless. The dowager (Maggie Smith) meets her old love, Prince Kuragin (Rade Serbedzija, embarrassing, the scene absurd). For more comedy we have: Miss Denker (Sue Johnston) and Jeremy Swift as Spratt vye for pre-eminence in the household of the dowager.
Where to place the memorial provides conflict with Lord Grantham refusing to give up his meadow devoted to Cricket for a memorial, and preferring the middle of the village where we do have a moving moment with yet another (this time lower middle class) widow and her student son walking past in the middle of the village, but then the moment is over and we are not involved with the potentially interesting story of widow and son. Our great climax is Robert agreeing to rent a wireless for a day so everyone can hear the King’s first speech to the nation over it, and however possible we get this stiff re-enactment of court behavior.
Portrait shots abound in these episodes
As it was not creditable that Cora, Lady Grantham would not pick up that her second daughter was pregnant and had a baby so Mrs Drewe (Emma Lowndes) is another mindless woman who does not begin to guess that Lady Edith is Marigold’s mother. She does not even come up with the theory that Mr Drewe (Andrew Scarborough) is the father. What are we to make of this? Well in the Xmas episode Lady Sinderby (Rachel Aldritch) joins the group of wholly undeductive women: Cora, Lady Grantham who never wondered where Lady Edith went for 10 months. A woman in her thirties (not too young) turns up at the castle with a young boy in hand and Lord Sinderby (Daniel Aldritch, in real life Lady Sinderby’s husband too) becomes mortified and runs away in shame to sit in a chair far from all; everyone seems to “get” who this person is (his long-term and now supported mistress? and son?), except Lady Sinderby who is characterized as not understanding who the inexplicable woman is. In context Barrow’s (Rob James-Collier) purpose is to expose Sinderby so Sinderby will stop castigating his daughter-in-law’s parents for their divorce and also to revenge himself for the way the same snobbish insulting butler (Alun Armstrong) has been treating Thomas: Lord Sinderby will blame the butler for having his (ex-?) mistress and son (?) come to the castle.
Walking outside Alnwick Lady Sinderby does not seem innocently naive
It seems to me that Fellowes saw as a boy growing up many of these privileged women turn a blind eye to the doings of their husbands — just as down south white women pretended not to know about their husband’s concubinage (and whatever cruelties went on). They knew, of course they knew, but they pretended not to to save face — as they could not do anything about it and keep their position. He has deliberately made a pretense into a reality in order to avoid showing us the anguish beneath. We could say the women are enigmatic and know more than they admit — Lady Sinderby does suddenly threaten to divorce Lord Sinderby if he will not allow Lady Rose to marry their son in Episode 7, but her awareness is not in the script, not a hint.
Curiously Fellowes is willing to show upper class young women’s anguish (Edith’s) over babies and of course women who don’t count like Ethel. He is also willing in this season to show us Anna’s anguish once again – -this time from a stepfather’s advances however muted. And last year spectacularly over the rape — though again Lady Grantham is not permitted to notice. Anna is — really strongly dramatized — is our real heroine and there he slams hard. As he did over Sybil who died of childbirth young.
I suggest there’s a twin thing going on: 1) if Fellowes were to show the anguish that would rip open the power and cruelty of males in charge and the compromises women supposedly with power (and they do have some Lady Grantham showed it in episode 1 and over when she learns Edith’s baby is her grandchild). 2) that he does see this and it’s a continual bemused undertow of the series (with hints that Lady Rosamund (Samantha Bond) had a child out of wedlock and gave it up, that Lady Grantham in this season had no happy marriage and made many compromises) shows that in fact he does look at these stories form the woman’s point of view (no matter how conservatively) and thus can write soap opera so appealingly for women. The number of widows mounts up season by season.
The distastefulness of blaming butlers for snobbishness, lady’s maids as semi-crooks and the like with their masters vindicated as amused egalitarians needs no comment beyond observing this I hope.
So what can we fall back on? I wish there was something interesting filmically innovative, musically, some apt filmic thought embodied in a techique, voice-overs (nothing of this, nothing at all in any of the seasons): all stage playlets, mostly faux theater. The actors carry it all in their faces. The audience watches the costumes and decor and fetishized objects and places (however rich, beautiful or picturesque). What there are this season are lovely pictures: many of the scenes are conceived as old-master paintings, glimmering with soft lights, and subtextually that’s a self-reflexive theme.
Note Elizabeth McGovern’s painfully thin shoulder and arms … (I keep it small so as not to dwell on the anorexic diet she’s been following all these years to keep herself a viable “beautiful woman ‘of a certain age’)
Perhaps the visit of the art historian, Mr Bricker (Richard E. Grant) to see a genuine old master painting Della Francesca (a bit of self-reflexivity here) and his flirtation with Elizabeth McGovern as Cora, Lady Grantham and Hugh Bonneville, Robert’s jealousy holds some new line of development but Robert’s pathetic complaint the man is flirting with his dog, is not exactly Othello.
I am happy Daisy (Sophie McShera) is continuing her studies in arithmetic now with Miss Bunting’s help (Daisy Lewis) and has become such a splendid cook (and anticipate her trip to the Wallace collection where she will see old-master paintings). Were this life it’d be touching and in the first season it might have worked well. It is pleasing development in the spirit of the 1st season, which of course is that a big fuss is made; deliberations carried on by Mr Carson (Jim Carson), Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nichols) and Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan): shall they permit it? is it good for her to improve herself? get aspirations. Would you believe it? And we are given modernized old master pictures.
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A symbolic moment, a climax of Episode 2: they turn the wireless on …
The series’s central action was laid before us towards the end of the third year after the death of Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay), with the death of Matthew (Dan Stevens) tacked on and thus providing grief, sorrow, and mourning for season 4. Season 5 we are watching them play on with no new material since Fellowes is not going to dramatize the new social change, but stick with Britain as a tourist attraction, and a commodified fetishized past. Now they have been inexorably tempted to keep salaries coming and revenue by selling products and advertisers/sponsors to a sixth season. So shall we predict how all will end up?
I have bought the scripts for the third season, which come with far more annotated notes by Fellowes than the previous two and more cut scenes fully written out. In effect a dense encyclopedia. And I restudied Season 4 – which I liked very much.
I discovered what Fellowes had intended for Dan Stevens had he stayed: in the 3rd season it’s clear that not long after Matthew and Lady Mary’s marriage he begins to become alienated: most strikingly by his discomfort over the way she continually denigrates and hurts Lady Edith, but the way she prefers her father, the older Downton way of life. Fellowes writes (elsewhere too), he intended them to separate slowly and Matthew go to the US. By the 4th season in place are the coming marriage of Mr Carson and Mrs Hughes (remember them holding hands at the close), Mr Mason’s farm for Daisy, Miss Baxter has arrived for Mr Molesley (Miss Obrien flees to the appropriate upper class witch, the Marchioness of Flintshire – play allegorical name — at the Christmas episode of the 3rd season she has taken over the Marchioness from the present lady’s maid), Mr and Mrs Bates have his house from his mother in London, their undoubted abilities to carry on. Perhaps Grigson would have returned, and Tom off to America.
At the end of the fourth season Lady Mary, Tom and Grantham together with their one tenant farmer, Mr Drew (also the fireman of the place, are making the place thrive; 5:3 they begin to plan to build houses on the estate. 5:3 also showed me I may have been wrong to assert so unqualifiedly that Mr Bates killed Mr Green, as now we see Fellowes left himself wiggle room for yet more denial as after all Mr Bates’s ticket to London on the train was uncut! Therefore he stayed in York all day. The only way he could have gone to London was to have bought 2 tickets. This is beginning to stretch it. But as they say, from the 2nd season on, Fellowes began to jump the shark regularly.
Anna’s trip to the pharmacy will provide a new turn in Episodes 3-4: she has Mary Stoke’s book and this and a version of Lady Mary’s cervical cap (?) is found by Mr Bates. Anna is utterly unfree. If she goes to the pharmacy, she is confronted by a demand on the part of the clerk that she prove she is not immoral. She has to state she’s married. In the 1950s when women went to doctor’s for contraceptives, they would be similarly condescended to. When Mr Bates finds this stuff in her drawers, he accuses her of preventing conception. Is it her body? Mrs Hughes did not seem to think Edna Braithwaite’s body (she who seduced the hapless Tom, MyAnna Buring) was hers when Edna said she was pregnant and in effect threatened to attack her, felt she had the right to intrude into her body. It’s such moments one can watch Downton Abbey for now.
So how will the life of the country house itself be brought to an end or turned into a tourist place with offers to the BBC to do radio shows from (TV shows will come later)? It’s being prepared for, and the death of Isis is the foreshadowing. Christmas time Robert is short of breath; can’t hold his liquor and is told he has angina pectoris. Robert will die. Yet another widow. Then the house will fall apart; it will no longer be needed. Silly as we never saw it properly used as the political linchpin it should have been, but Cora will go into a smaller place, maybe travel (why not? — she is still attractive, the false stereotype of the rich widow on cruises will do here). Lady Edith at last rid herself of her nemesis Mary by taking Marigold to London where she runs Grigson’s press. A new suitor appears for Lady Mary in the Christmas episode and Matthew Goode as Henry Talbot really does fit into a character who seems insouciantly up to Lady Mary; Fellowes must have said to himself, Why didn’t I see this before? the actor once you see him just is “it” for Lady Mary. Perfect for little George’s cool new father — another generation of heartlessness in the offing.
Violet, Lady Grantham and Mrs Crawley’s marriages do not come off – too much baggage and life does not always have happy ending; so they settle down to doing lunch with Lady Shackleton (Harriet Walter). Miss Denker will improve her culinery skills.
From the Christmas episode: Poor Mr Barrow. He will have to find another place – he’s not allowed to have a partner or open life.
We are never sure who killed Mr Green — I doubt Anna so back to Mr Bates even if sleuthing by Mr Molesley and Mr Baxter turns up an alibi for him — once again:
Our enigmatic heroine and her beloved tough husband discussing how that day in London will be understood but giving away nothing themselves (Episode 7)
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
A correction: Julie: “I think she’s purchasing one of Marie’s Stopes cervical caps–not condoms– that’s why she keeps it in the box and it is sold to married women!
12 minutes ago · Like
Me: Ah, thank you. I see now why Mr Bates would not know. Still why cannot any woman buy one? It reminds me of today where pharmacists are said to refuse to sell contraceptives which are abortifacients if it does against their conscience.
Julie: Only married women were allowed access to birth control after the war. Even in the States, it took a court case to allow single women access to it in the 1960s. Birth control just encourages promiscuity– right? men make the laws–pleasure is only for them
Me: Yes. Griswold v Connecticut. Two more perpetuating realities: a woman’s private space around her body and her body itself is no protected against anyone’s invastion. Mrs Hughes’s threat to Edna is a mirror of women in the 16th century on just invading a woman’s body when she was not married, was lower class, and possibly pregnant. How a woman gives birth continues to be a function of what the society thinks is safest for the child, so C-sections are today forced on women, the Virginia Apgar rating does good (because people care about the infant) but no one cares how dangerous a C-section to the woman, or any later pregnancies. She becomes in desperate need of a doctor lest she get pregnant again. No money provided of course.
This mini-series brings out such realities for women.
A wise comment on Anglophilia and these British costume dramas:
I had to smile when I read of Ellen being bitten by the Anglophilia bug by Mary Poppins, though we’ve exchanged these reminiscences long ago. I grew up in New York at the same time as Ellen, and was bitten as young as age three, when my mother read me Winnie the Pooh aloud in an English accent, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard! I remember watching the Coronation on black-and-white TV, as a small girl, wearing a princess crown. I lived on the Upper East Side in relatively privileged circumstances but my family life was at least as dysfunctional as Ellen’s and I longed for the same peace, order, and beauty.
… Although my Anglophilia is mostly of a literary variety, it is shared by so many other Americans who are drawn to England, as to explain the enormous popularity of shows like Downton Abbey. That I don’t share; I get my pleasures through reading, not through watching dramas, which often irritate me terribly by differing from my own mental images and seeming all wrong about the past. (Anyone who can put a Keira Knightley into a Jane Austen movie is creating something I want no part of.) I do not mean to sound disparaging of adaptations though, I’ve worked on them myself and admire many: I’m just not a spectator, that’s all.
As for the Mitfords, it was Nancy’s “The Pursuit of Love” and Jessica’s “Hons and Rebels” that I fell in love with as a teenager. Their wit and sparkle was so dazzling, I wanted to be like them, to write and speak and entertain like them, to know all about them. Well, now I do know all about them; I actually became friends with Jessica, and had one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life reading Letters Between Six Sisters and Jessica’s letters, back-to-back. It took several months, but was a devastating examination of family dynamics, like nothing I’d ever read before. And it was definitely warts and all. The Mitfords may have inhabited something resembling an idealized glamorous Downton Abbey existence (Debo aimed at it), but despite being of the aristocrat class, they were only too real, and their feuds and misunderstandings and pain and tragedies are palpable in the letters, an unparalleled social document. However, the letters, despite being singularly well expressed and full of wit, have not a great deal of insight, so the reader see through them, as it were. Jessica’s rebellion against a mindset that led to flirting (and more) with Nazism and fascism, presents a starkly different perspective, and completes the picture. Jessica of course is my favorite, along with the brilliant and hilarious Nancy. I don’t join in the universal Debo-worship, and Unity and Diana were utter monsters – Diana maybe even worse than poor crazy Unity. But what a portrait of an era…
I’ll answer too — for me it began with living in a violent slum, the southeast Bronx, seeing poverty, disorder, violence in my family, and then reading Mary Poppins. The green park world, the vision of civility. On some deep level Downton Abbey and much costume drama from the British is revisiting of this need in me for peace, a group of virtues including “c” words like courtesy, civility, consideration, moral courage ….
When I finally arrived by boat, sailing up the Thames to see the white clffs of Dover I didn’t see that dream place. I soon learned not only did it not exist, but what I had read before in say Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, it was a falsifying view. But the vision has stayed.
When I read Nancy Drew books and she wanted to marry an Englishman, so did I
I know very little about the Mitfords beyond Jessica’s The American Way of Death — powerful and still important and relevant (has done little good by now as the funeral industry has erased its complaints thoroughly but still operates with the same tough controls). But I would say that what we are seeing in Downton Abbey is a shallow surface pretense of upper class as well as lower class life. There’s not enough said about the miseries, treacheries, viciousness, and sexual violations — when people complain they complain of the unreality of the relationship and Downstairs life, they miss the upstairs too.
Fairy tale dreams for those who want order, peace, beauty, a vision of kindness, courtesy and above all communitarian values.
Can resist saying also that although I’m not black, the experience of the Jamaicans in Levy’s Small Island (and the film adaptation) upon coming to the UK was mine: freezing, terrible food, poverty, drab, city life — but I had read about that in books before. MP was reinforced not only by Secret Garden, but a row of English classics (including Austen) that (aside from True Confessions and my mother’s books-of-the-month club, many English or Anglophilic) and books set in the north about poor people. I loved the leftism, what seemed to me the socialism of those I met up north. The UK did not have to be green and sunny Barsetshire. It was an ideal of civility, irony, an attitude towards life I found in novels and memoirs that encapsulated the vision.
And in later years when Jim took me back he took me to the places that did embody these novels – many of them. Sussex and Kent do have beautiful places like in the novels.
And of course 47 years with an Englishman who himself embodied these values (read Betjemann, Orwell) was not likely to end the love affair … I long to go to Cornwall now as part of this vision I’ve not seen for all I know Cornwall is the poorest county in England still … and that’s saying something.
Nontheless, I suggest those who are arch conservative and loving DA are not the same Anglophilics. Many hated the UK when the labor party was in charge and their Anglophilia is a thin veneer. The new set of values growing up under Thatcherism, elite materialism, hierarchy, snobbism coming out of the cupboards and taking over these are not the Anglophilia of the novels of Anthony Powell or Anita Brookner ….