Downton Abbey, the cinema movie: the trick, the involving magic, begins a third or half the way through ….

The Upstairs set come out to greet the king and queen

The Downstairs set toast the king and queen (Downton Abbey, the film, 2019)

Friends and readers,

The old magic, the trick played on us by Julian Fellowes and his teams of people — for those susceptible to it — does not begin until at least one-third and maybe closer to half the way through. Anibundel over on NBC has argued that this cinema continuation carries on one important characteristic of the 5 year series at its best: nothing much or nothing overt happens to change anything in the visible life of these sets of people very much. I agree with her that the first season was particularly strong because more or less this formula was kept to. A crippled man arrives to become Lord Grantham’s butler (Brendan Coyle as Mr Bates), and after much stigmatizing and complaints, Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonnville) keeps him on, because “it’s just not right” to fire him. An old suitor of Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) turns up and asks her to go to a fair because at long last free he wants to propose marriage, and after much heart-wrenching, she decides to stay where she is. Lady Mary, the princess of the family, eldest lovely virgin daughter (Michelle Dockery) is (arguably) raped and the cad (Theo James who blackmailed the homosexual butler, Barrow, Robert James-Collier, to sneak him in as a surprise attack) dies during the fuck! But (awkwardly, with difficulty, comically) the corpse is carried back and there is no scandal at all!

But I want to qualify the implications here. The trick of the thing is to present a character in the throes of some inner crisis that matters to him or her and dramatize how some decision no one but the character and his or her closest intimates see, affects in some central way the rest of the emotional temperature or outlook of that character, the decisions he or she make afterwards, for the rest of their lives. This trick is most effective when it’s played out with the Downstairs people who are more vulnerable to deep hurt or an ejection (getting “sacked”) from the apparent social safety of the orderly household. Add to this what you find in many serial dramas, strong emotionalism, the stance that most people behave in warm and even caring ways to one another, at least emotionally. This does not distinguish Downton Abbey from other serial dramas, but Julian Fellowes is good at making this kind of thing believable. In life most people we meet behave anywhere from indifferently or with a hard edge. An adult might be extra benign to a child. I feel this sentimentalism is central to why people watch what are called realistic (naturalistic) domestic drama movies.

As everyone knows who has paid the slightest attention to the advertisements what happens at Downton is George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (Geraldine James) invite themselves for a one-night stay at Downton while they are traveling through Yorkshire and this creates an nearly traumatic emotional reaction as everyone in the household gear up to present an appearance of high excellence and welcome. As late as one-third or later the way through it becomes apparent the exclusionary snobbish tactics of the royal household decree that its staff replace any local staff. It also sets up a confrontation between the queen’s lady-companion, Lady Maud Bagshaw (Imelda Staunton) and the Dowager Duchess Violet (Maggie Smith) who are related kin but have been estranged for years; it is rumored she is determined to leave her fortune elsewhere than Lord Grantham. Gradually this visit, these two social dramas ripple outward to affect the inner lives of a number of vulnerable characters and at least momentarily affect the self-esteem and comfort of everyone else.

Imelda Staunton as Lady Maud Bagshaw (a name from Trollope)

The problem the movie has is these things take time, and when you have say anywhere from 8 to 10 episodes (plus Christmas specials) you have the requisite time; so it’s in the third episode of the first season that Mr Bates throws away the torture instrument he has put on his leg to make his disability less apparent. We have learned to feel for him for two episodes before this. Plus since Julian Fellowes has been determined to present the world order as ultimately benign, the last we saw of everyone they were apparently set for life in good and fulfilling circumstances. This was not so to begin with, nor did the shape of the series emerge as benign providential patterning until the fourth season when the series began to have problems finding crucial traumas and had to introduce new characters and put old ones through twists and turns of misery (especially Mr Bates and Anna as his wife, aka Brendon Coyle and Joanne Froggart).

So, Fellowes strains to invent inner troubles that matter. He has a couple and adds some: Thomas Barrow is still a vulnerable homosexual man; Daisy (Sophie McShea) has not agreed to set a marriage date with a footman, Andy (Michael C. Fox); Tom Bransome is still not trusted as an ex-chauffeur radical Irishman; and over the course of the couple of hours we discover Lady Maud is trying to leave her estate to her illegitimate daughter disguised as lady’s maid, Lucy Smith (Tuppence Middleton).

Anna and Mr Bates — brief scene showing her telling her idea to him and his loving her for it

What’s more: several favorite characters and a couple of new ones become powerful linchpins in securing respect and power for one another. It’s Anna Bates who seems to think up the plot that puts the royal staff out of commission (drugged, locked in rooms, hoaxed away) and recognizes the queen’s lady is a thief; Bransome saves the king’s life and falls in love with Lucy Smith; she likewise and they are last seen dancing a ballroom dance on the terrace in a lovely landscape (since she is not yet acceptable to the Upstairs people in the ballroom). Daisy leads Mrs Patmore (Leslie Nichol) for once to kindly lie to the grocer and accept an order of food she thinks they will not need.

Allen Leech as Thomas Bransome (working with Lady Mary again)

It does not all work: You would think Bransome was trusted by this time and a few others seem a stretch: Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) is still feeling undervalued and left alone; the rivalry of the Dowager and Isobel, Lady Merton (Penelope Wilton) has become tiresome; their quips no longer amuse. Lady Mary is still unsure she doesn’t want to disburden herself of Downton. Mr Carson (Jim Carter) is still absurdly proud and wants to work as a butler; Moseley (Kevin Doyle) makes a fatuous worshipper of himself. But Fellowes does have a gift for endowing his characters with good feelings and kindliness towards one another, and those endangered in some way, yearning for some kind of companionship, security achieve this by film’s end.

I’m saying I don’t think the movie quite succeeds. Those who like it are giving it slack — extra patience like you would an old friend.

Some will say this is not what draws people to this series. It’s the super-rich glamour of the house, the grounds, the gorgeous clothes, the leisured existences, the evocative music, the nostalgic escape into a world that never was — the servants were not treated in the way this series dramatizes; it omits 9/10s of the population of England. On top of that, the whole idea this order was a non-violent one is ludicrous. I can’t deny that might be why many people watched the TV series year after year and are making the Downton matter once again a big box-office money-maker. Who does not enjoy seeing a ball? I do. I love the beautiful photographed landscapes. There is the reiterated idea that these super-rich privileged people lead troubled lives themselves — so let’s not envy Princess Mary (Kate Phillips) as she tries to have a life with some emotional satisfaction with a cold mean man. (As if this were anything like the desperate needs and anguished conditions of ordinary people everywhere.)

Princess Mary (Kate Phillips who most of the time ends up dead or otherwise pulverized — as in Davies’ War and Peace …)

To that I can only say, I am not fooled, this kind of supposed comfort (?) is not for me. The thought we are offered at the end that the building, Downton Abbey, and this way of life will last another 100 years and more does not make me happy. It’s sad to think that so many will remain without and desperate so that the money may be gathered by this privileged class to live this way. I suggest that there are many like myself — since this trick so in evidence (for at least three years of TV time) is at the core of the plot-design once again. I know I would be an utter outsider and long ago (say the 2nd season) been ejected as unfit, perhaps scapegoated as a seduced woman. I don’t belong in this series anywhere — the closest I come is to Anna as she was presented in the first couple of seasons. Even then she is such a “good” girl, so filled with respect for the order that keeps her at work long hours most of her life — this is wholly anathema to my finding something to live for in my hours of existence as I recall them.

Yet I found tears coming to my eyes when a character is once again rescued from the possible exposure and punishment — Barrow is lured into going to a homosexual club, something very new, taken in to jail by a police raid but then released on the say-so of one of the king’s footmen, himself homosexual. I wish there had been more of the inner life of Anna and Bates (my favorites) but it’s clear their lives are all content, comfortable, good — as are those of Mrs Hughes (now Elsie to Mr Carson) and Mr Carson (Charlie to her) and others. I am fond enough of them all to feel good seeing them surviving still — like Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy) still waiting to marry Moseley.

Moseley and Baxter — behind the scenes (promotional) hsppy moment

I am not dead or broke yet myself. The magic is the trick of involving you, getting you to believe and identify.

Thomas finds a friend and ally, the king’s footman, Richard Ellis (Max Brown)

If you can respond to these carefully studied characters presented with tact and mostly compassion, and most of all, if you watched and liked the TV series for that first and second (occurring during WW1) seasons, here it is back again, trying to repeat what it managed in the first season especially. There is something for everyone, some qualification to enable us to identify. I agree with Anibundel the sweetest story is of that Barrow at long last finding a world forming he can join, and that the charm the wanting to hold onto this world is it feels like a blessed escape.  Quiet lives. So if you want a happy ending, yes, that’s there, but if you are into quiet melancholy, it’s here too.

Lady Mary at the opening of the film, tough lady left in charge at the end

And, for those who would find some satisfaction in thinking this meretricious stuff will go away for good after this, in the last scene Violet tells Lady Mary that she has been diagnosed with a mortal illness and will be gone from from the scene before long. It is a moving moment as she turns the Abbey over to Lady Mary as her replacement. One thing I liked across the series (and think it’s what makes it so appealing to women) is that we have strong women characters through out; it’s the woman’s anguish and loss and power that is often focused most upon. And so it is in this installment.

Ellen

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Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right: a scrutiny of clinical melancholia

Marcus Stone, “Trevelyan at Casalunga”

Dear friends and readers,

Though it’s been some time since I taught Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, and I have published a chapter of my book (Trollope on the ‘Net) on this novel, and know there is a sizable body of subtle interesting essays on the book — on the subjects of love, sex, marriage, custody of children, gender power, male abuse of women, male sexual possessiveness and anxiety — since writing on Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? after teaching it, I’ve been wanting similarly to focus on one aspect of this enormous and complex book, which we discussed in my class. This because I feel this perspective has the power to make the book function on the side of compassion in today’s world, and it was taken up by my class with real interest as reconciling together many of its disparate elements.

We can look upon He Knew He Was Right as a modern semi-medical study of anxiety and depression. I found the idea most fully worked out by C. S. Wiesenthal in “The Body Melancholy: Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, which appeared in the Dickens Studies Annual for the year 1992. In the case of Louis Trevelyan Trollope goes beyond his other studies of male who cross the line of sanity into insanity through obsession by a fixed idea, usually sexual jealousy, to present, examine and then trace the “psychopathology of melancholy.” He has gone beyond the traditional figure of melancholy (think of Durer’s famous icon) — super thinness, sleeplessness, profuse perspiration, paleness, hollow eyes, a bent back, his eyes not working right, all are slowly developed in Trevelyan.

Oliver Dimsdale brilliant as Louis Trevelyan, here he watches Emily leaving River Cottage (2004 He Knew He Was Right, scripted Andrew Davies)

In the last session of the class we examined Louis’s descent into profound illness and finally death as a gradual piling on of mental and then physical symptoms which destroy his ability to judge rationally and see what is in front of him. This leads to his inability to be around others, to adjust to them, so that he isolates himself in a nervous irritability. Most centrally he and Emily are just not compatible; what amuses her (social life, flirting) is anathema to him (he prefers to write papers in his study). He cannot bear the solutions presented to him as what he must do to alleviate the situation — take his wife away or come out of his study. He cannot present his case, adjust his conversation to theirs, and ends up intensely alienated from everyone. We were watching him break down step-by-step, with his hiring of Bozzle just one of the stages on his journey to a loss of the identity he had. Bozzle’s jokes are not just edgy, they have a sinister feel. The actor playing the part in Davies’s film adaptation had an expression on his face of self-deprecating irony, a wild laughter at himself,a kind of cunning in his eyes. He is alienated from himself and half-watches himself acting and talking in self-destructive ways, but he cannot help himself to stop. He writes letters from time to time which he thinks are offers of compromise when they are insults, threats, and come out of paranoia. Continual nervous distress and paranoia exhaust him to the point he becomes weak with inanition. He cannot dress himself conformably, is not used to sitting down to do anything with others. Bozzle sums this process up as Mr T “is no longer becoming quite himself under his troubles,” and wants to rid himself of this client. Louis crossed a kind of Rubicon when he paid Bozzle to kidnap his son. In his dialogue with Lady Rowley when the Rowleys come to England she discerns a mentally sick man.

Geraldine James as Lady Rowley, startled by what she is seeing

Seen from this angle, we could read the novel as a defense of Trevelyan: in his Autobiography Trollope said he wanted to create sympathy for Louis, and saw that he had failed. When I say the novel then becomes out about how Trevelyan came to act so badly, I would agree that this perspective is inadequate because it omits too much: Louis’s desire to control Emily, his insulting her for being knowing in bed (“harlot” is the word he uses); his overreaction to the petty rake, Osborne. Madness was in Trollope’s era thought to manifest itself in delusions, and he is delusional about what is going on between Emily and Osborne: flirting yes, adultery no. Emily’s refusal to assuage his anxiety at the price of her social liberty, life and self-respect are understandable, and the novel is probably more convincingly seen as genuinely feminist, genuinely about insoluble conflicts in temperament in marriage, the problems of using hypocritical cant. But Trollope also blame Emily for not yielding, refusing to compromise or reassure Louis — look how by contrast Dorothy and Aunt Stanbury give in and win out because they self-negate. She drives the man (the way Desdesmona does) when he visits by her recurring to the terms of the original quarrel and demanding he make a sign of admitting some wrong done; Trevelyan in frustration, and out of spite too, angry at his inability to make the Outhouses behave the way he wants — seeks some weapon he can use to compel the others to declare Emily sexually unfaithful, a bad wife, a mother risking her children. The weapon is his kidnapping of his own child. Now all will have to deal with him since the law is on his side over this child. We are now canvassing the larger important feminist themes and humane outlook at the core of this Trollope novel.

Uncle (Mr Crump) and Camilla

She cannot

Kindly collapse

Singling out Louis’s symptoms and trajectory —- helps us appreciate the depth of insight in Trollope. You can go round him to look at the other characters, and their coping with their bleakness: like Dorothy Stanbury who will say she is nothing to others, has nothing to offer, or Nora Rowley who wants more useful tasks and power than her gender allows; Priscilla Stanbury’s deeply generous letters showing her sane perspective against her life of poverty because she will not marry (is probably lesbian). The comic analogue to Trevelyan is the madness of Camilla French and her carving knife. She caves in easily when met with common sense backed by kindness. It’s funny in the film when Claudie Blakeley as Camilla breaks down and cries and hands the knife over to her uncle. But I suggest at the core of this is Trollope exorcizing his own demons: I agree with those (the Stebbinses are not alone in this) who suggest he spent long periods depressed (he says as much of his youth in London) and he is pouring his own experience into this character.

What I liked about ending the class discussion on the novel this way, and making this perspective one of the central ones is that the feminist position can become a series of beratings, blaming of Louis, anathematizing him. How does that help?

Ellen

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Julian Fellowes’ unwitting Dr Thorne: not quite hijacked by elite

The first shot of Tom Hollander as Dr Thorne in the film’s first scene with

Stephanie Martini as Mary Thorne, where she asks the question [visible in the subtitle] as a prompt for Hollander, Prospero-like to tell us and her not just many chapters of history but what is held back until near the end of the book’s plot-design (ITV Dr Thorne, 2015, scripted Julian Fellowes, director Niall MacCormick)

Friends and readers,

Julian Fellowes has managed to turn the novel Michael Sadleir ended his ground-breaking study of Trollope on (the book that first attracted respectable attention to Trollope — with preferring Dr Thorne to The Way We Live Now) into an embarrassment. A telling travesty. Reviewers veer from lamenting the very existence of this throw-back to picturesqueness as a travesty to earnestly showing how it has eliminated just about everything that counts in the novel. Viv Groskop of The Guardian suggested we take a drug to forget this disgrace. The courteous and judicious Alison Moulds of the Victorian clinic demonstrated the central matter of the tale, medicine and illness, comic and tragic, is left out. As might have been expected, Philip Hensher of the Telegraph demonstrates that the point Fellowes gets across (and by implication, Trollope’s) is that it’s impossible to cross (ontological?) class boundaries.

As it happened when the film aired on British TV, I was teaching the novel to a group of retired adults genuinely engaged by the book. Two British, the rest American. Contrary to Hensher (and like a number of scholarly critics, e.g. James Kincaid), they are persuaded this is an obsessive attack on the mindset that erects uncrossable boundaries and about the hurt (Mary made a taboo person) and damage, indeed death (Sir Roger’s and Sir Louis’s) the behavior enacting this idea incurs. Miss Dunstable’s role is to expose the hypocrisy of the social codes as we watch money and power throw people away, ruin their lives (e.g., Mr Romer, the liberal barrister who tried to help Roger Scatcherd, the railway contractor and banker) into parliament). I had hoped to screen the film until I saw that (worse than Downton Abbey where all deeper issues may be skimmed over, but at least suggested) Fellowes was simply not going to allow any depth to this, among Trollope’s most emotionally direct of all his novels. I admit there was no character they hated more than Lady Arabella and Fellowes fed this by giving full vent to her as the villainess who experiences a mortifying comeuppance (rather like Miss O’Brien and other upper level servants in Downton Abbey). She is in many scenes endlessly repeating her mantra, but then she is presented simply as winning out, having her way in the end. Rebecca Front was given this thankless role as she was given an analogous sycophantic snob in Andrew Davies’s recent War and Peace.

Trollope’s novel utterly resists treating it as light satiric comedy or “fairy tale romance” (which Fellowes in the feature labels his film and by extension Trollope’s book).

As Hollander squirms and twists his body to avoid the barrage, the scene becomes a tasteless joke

So why bother write about? Fellowes’s erasure and corrections reveal where the power of the novel lies and where there are cranks for us in Trollope’s attitudes.

In all the Fellowes’s films I’ve seen thus far he abjures all flashbacks, voice-over, soliloquy, montage, filmic epistolarity (where a character writes or reads a letter that is voiced by the actor who is played the character who wrote the letter) or any techniques that demands we go into the vulnerable psychology of any character to the extent of questioning a norm or value asserted. Trollope’s first four chapters are a daring retelling of deep, intermediate general past, and individuals personal histories (which he ironically apologizes for). He then recurs repeatedly throughout the novel to these pasts so that when the character in a social scene reveals his inner psychology, we realize the context which has given rise to this self normally hidden to us in our daily lives the social scenes. I had not realized how the novel is continually working through, back and forth, deeply layered intertwined time until I watched this film adaptation. In most of Trollope’s novels we recognize his gifts for showing the private self unable not to reveal itself in the social scene for those with eyes to see and understand (Trollope’s narrator and occasional preternatually perceptive characters like the Signora Neroni and Miss Dunstable). Here in Trollope’s seventh book he was consciously adding to that by making the character a product of a particular time, relationship, literal and social space.

Since Fellowes resists all deep wide explanation that filmic techniques can offer (including in-depth dialogue), all we have as opening for the film is some dialogue of nasty excluding of Mary from Frank’s coming birthday party by his (in this film) by his stupid dense and clumsy sister, Augusta (Gwyneth Keyworth) egged on by the apparently frigid manipulative Lady Alexandrina de Courcy (Kate O’Flynn). We then launch into Frank’s proposal to Mary to marry him, her “no,” and stay in the superficial linear time of the present, with the party, and Lady De Courcy’s nagging Frank (Harry Richardson, who plays the part of a privileged sheltered and thus idealistic male aristocrat — true to the book) to chase the rich Miss Dunstable (Alison Brie) now an inanely giggling rich American. (I read that the ITV people were told they would get no American funding unless they had an American character in the cast.) As in Downton Abbey Phoebe Nicholls is given the distasteful role of an utterly ineffectual despicable older woman bully. (She is paid well for it.) Fellowes just loves to invent this kind of female monster. But he must tell the important past or the present story makes no sense. How to do it? he is reduced to having Hollander as Thorne in the very first scene he appears, Prospero-like, tell Stephanie Martini as Miranda, just about everything in one go of her sordid Scatcherd family background. Since there is too much to tell, Thorne and Mary get together twice more (after the said party) and again in the second episode after her other uncle, Sir Roger Scatcherd’s death. What’s done for compression leaves the effect of a story turned inside out.

Far from admitting to anything serious in the novel, in the feature released on the DVD, Fellowes says he regards the book as a fairy tale romance. What he has done is chosen the scenes susceptible to being presented as light satiric comedy. I had not realized before what an experimental novel this is in its use of layered past and movement within different times and memories.

Then Fellowes has the problem of the book’s hinge points which he feels he cannot eliminate. Scatcherd must die so that Mary can win the property. In the novel Scatcherd dies from alcoholism and we read a rare protracted death scene in a Trollope novel. The man has drunk himself to death because he has not been accepted by his true peers because of his lack of surface manners, he regrets deeply what has happened to his son who has been similarly ostracized and exploited, but can do nothing about it. The unhappy man his son has become results from cultural realities beyond his reach. Trollope captures perfectly the mood of someone near death, and shows us that real kindness to such a person is to take seriously what they have to say and respond to it — as Dr Thorne does and Sir Roger’s son does not. He is devastated when the powerful remove him from the place in Parliament he has worked hard to win.

Lady Scatcherd (Janine Duvitski) over-hearing her husband talk to Thorne

I’m told that Ian McShane is a great actor; well he’s thrown away here. He is presented as foolish jackass. His alcoholism is made a joke of in order to us to laugh at elections as such. The working and townspeople are of course fools, and McShane directed to play the part archly until he falls into a pigsty. (Fellowes might tell us, have you not been watching how popular Donald Trump is?) In the book’s death scene, the pain of Scatcherd’s isolation is made worse because Thorne himself has invested so much in Mary, he cannot get himself to allow Scatcherd to know or to see her after Scatcherd first offers all his money to her and his son, if Thorne will encourage a marriage with that son. This horrifies Thorne who is as exacerbated by the class structure of the place as anyone. He wants above all that his darling niece-daughter be a lady, live with ladies and gentleman and turn to him. And how does Fellowes treat this matter at the center of the second episode? For a moment I had a hard time believing that Fellowes was allowing Thorne allow Mary to come over and nurse Scatcherd so we could get this emotional bath of sentimentality instead and listen to McShane as Scatcherd say he is consoled for his “misspent existence.”

“Very well,” says Hollander, and the puzzled angel appears, at which McShane says he thinks he will now cope better with “what is to come … ”

Beyond erasing all the material hung from the present time romance story (including its use of excruciating and satiric letter presences), Fellowes has done a Nahum Tate, a David Garrick! Nahum Tate was the man who rewrote King Lear to give it a happy ending; Garrick-like was the the man who rewrote Romeo and Juliet so as to make the lovers wake up to bid sentimental tearful farewells before they lie down to die. He reverses Trollope’s Dr Thorne’s refusal to allow Sir Roger to see or be seen by his sister Mary’s grown daughter, lest he, Dr Thorne, be dispossessed of what has made his existence meaningful, before he dies, even when Scatcherd threatens to leave all his fortune away from her (without which Mary has only the interest from 800£ in the funds, all Dr Thorne has managed to “amass” from his village doctor practice). Perhaps he thought no one reads Dr Thorne, or if we read it, we don’t remember it. Is there no limit to the man’s contempt for his audience?

Well yes.

Fellowes almost unexpectedly turns Scatcherd’s son, Sir Louis (Edward Franklin), the character pitied by Trollope’s narrator just a little, but most often despised, caricatured, sneered at, presented as a money-hungry creditor (as if he has no right to look into the arrangements Dr Thorne has made to keep Squire Gresham afloat all these years) — into the tragic hero of the film story. A chunk of its second episode and full third of the last was given over to a mortifying plangent rendition of Louis’s pursuit of Mary Thorne, his excruciatingly inept presence at a dinner party and then death (not from delirium tremens) but a suppurating bleeding lung (reminiscent in its stagy-ness of Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham near death for a few seconds in Downton Abbey) because he galloped across the landscape out of anguish at her rejection and fell off his horse and punctured his rib cage with the horse’s saddle. This subtextual slapstick is not in Trollope.

Among the character’s last lines is “she thought me a buffoon,” but Fellowes has not lifted him out of that

Fellowes has highlighted a problem his predecessor film adaptors managed to finesse. What are we to do with Trollope’s shameless stigmatizing of lower class males trying to “ape” gentlemen as ultimately slime to be expelled? In 1983 Alan Plater, scriptwriter of Barchester Chronicles (and thus the linchpin person) cast the part against type by hiring Alan Rickman and then had Rickman play the part with a self-controlled dignity, guarded rage, subtle manipulative ability (though out-maneuvred by Susan Hampshire as the irresistible erotic Signora Neroni). Before that a full 40 years ago (1975) in The Pallisers Simon Raven similarly endowed Trollope’s anti-semitic depiction of a Jewish hypocritical murderer, the Rev Emilius (Anthony Ainley) with a seething intensity of ambition that the amoral Lizzie Eustace (Sarah Badel) was too stupid to flee from. Fellowes, though, wanted to grant the character a full burden of human gravitas earlier, but could not pull out enough depth to invent longer scenes to show this. All we get is his screeching at his mother, Lady Scatcherd, how could you prefer Frank to me? Lady Scatcherd (as in Trollope) is otherwise mostly caricatured but as Lady Scatcherd’s preference for the heir is too much even for Fellowes (and he feared too much for pious viewers) Fellowes made her feeling acceptable by having her much earlier on insist how she loved both equally. To this low is Trollope brought and for those who know the text exposed.

I grant Fellowes much of the dialogue used in the film is in the novel — he chose the surface dialogues. He transfers the powerful epistolary narrative chapter where Augusta is treacherously persuaded to give up a possible happy marriage with the De Courcy solicitor, Mr Gazebee (Nicholas Rowe) on the grounds of his lack of rank into pantomime comic moments of dramatic startle. Her great cousin-friend, advisor has grabbed Gazebee for herself.

Augusta is made into an “old maid” buffoon

There are a lot of silences. Another actor-character thrown away is Richard McShane as Squire Gresham; he wanders around looking sheepish by the end behaving as if by not cold-shouldering others he’s doing enough. In the book it is his unexamined snobbery and self-indulgence in the book that wasted the Gresham fortune; the ambivalent and interesting friendship with Thorne and their dialogues are gone. Istead Fellowes has Hollander as Thorne giving Brie as Miss Dunstable sly glances. Yet the man avoids montage so the explanation at the end must be gone through in words character by character.

As a side note the production did not pay for the the use of the houses. We never see anyone going in and out. They were filmed from afar and then we found ourselves in the usual sets. One reminded me of the set from the 2009 Sense and Sensibility for Norland Park.

Ironically the film adaptation vindicates Trollope from being seen as simply material which lends itself for hijacking from the elite. Last year John McCourt asked why the bicentennial celebrations were so muted? He suggested that the kinds of things done were not the sorts of events a larger audience, especially one not equipped with tuxes and gowns could easily join into. As has been said before (John Letts among those saying this), Trollope has partly been hijacked by his elite mainstream fans. I’d maintain that more than his academic readers lean to the left. Plater wrote brilliantly radical 1970s style plays for TV and stage; Simon Raven was radical in his outlook; Andrew Davies is a humane left-leaning liberal; Herbert Herbert’s gem, “Malachi’s Cove” shows just how down-to-earth is Trollope’s appreciation of humanity.

So while I regret very much this opportunity to film another Barsetshire book was botched, it’s salutary to see the material of this Trollope novel resist the kind of treatment Fellowes tries to give it. A friend said to me this film adaptation is something Popplecourt (from The Duke’s Children) might have written. Perhaps that’s too strong, but pace what I’ve heard some fans say, Trollope’s novels are not at all like P. G. Wodehouse.

A rare far shot of the bedroom scene: Winterbones taking notes, Scatcherd helped up from his bed by Thorne, Lady Scatcherd leaving …

Ellen

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Downton Abbey 6:9: Icing on the cake; the need for police inspectors evaporates

Final shot of the series: Highclere Castle depicted as in snow, night falling — it is dark note

Antepenultimate shot: we glimpse Violet, Dowager Lady Grantham (Maggie Smith) with Mrs Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) and Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) with Tom Branson (Allen Leech) —

Robert, Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville): “We never know what’s coming of course, who does?” (his last words)

Friends and readers,

What can one say about 90 minutes of scenes presented as about real human beings where except for the two over-the-top caricatures of Lord Merton’s eldest son and daughter-in-law (Charles Anson returned with his horrible fiancee, now wife, Amelia, an actress whose name I cannot find), everyone is actuated by the kindest concern for everyone else? and they cave so easily: “If reason fails, try force,” says Violet and she and Mrs Crawley snatch Lord Merton (Douglas Reith: “Marvelous!” says he) back. It’s again scene after scene of the usual intense emotionalism, with wry sayings transitioning into complacent on-goingness.

Thomas (Rob James-Collier): “I think I might try to be someone else when I get to my new position … “

Yes Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) is tart to Bertie (Henry Haddon-Patton) when they meet again: he hurt her. Lady Pelham (Patricia Hodge grown old) put up a protest against Bertie, her heir and son, marrying “damaged goods” aka Lady Edith Crawley who comes with her daughter, Marigold, born out of wedlock (because Michael Grigson disappeared in the conflagration of Nazi Germany), on the ridiculous grounds they have to keep the “highest moral standards up” since Bertie’s cousin, the man he inherited from may have been homosexual, and didn’t lead a mainstream life; but the unbelievable stilted reasoning soon collapses under the weight of her desire to be central to her son’s on-going life. This desire of all of them (except maybe Mr Carson, see just below) to not be rejected by anyone, not to hurt anyone’s feelings controlled the behavior of all by all.

I was reminded of an essay I tried to read by D.A. Miller where he asked why there were no police in Trollope’s Barchester Towers?

A paraphrase: everyone polices one another and themselves … we are invited to sit around and fret about how to take how a character given hardly any of life’s real alternatives is acting … thus are we drilled into accepting our lot …

Mrs Hughes-Carson thinking about what she has seen

As usual Fellowes has a knack for surface realism: so we see that aging men sicken and move towards death much earlier than women. The “golden years” of Mrs Hughes-Carson (Phyllis Logan) and Mr Carson (Jim Carter) are going to consist of her selfless pragmatic and sceptical functioning as the friend, wise adviser and nurse of this rigidly martinet reactionary disciplinarian, worshipper of Debret’s as he subsides into Parkinson’s disease. Lord Merton (Douglas Reith) is not near death from pernicious anemia but he does have a serious case of anemia and will need his new second wife, Isobel Crawley, now Lady Merton, to care for and protect him.

Robert, Earl of Grantham did not die of a hemorrhage from his ulcers in the antepenultimate episode, and now has a new puppy dog to lavish affection on,

but he still clutches his chest in a worrying way that suggests angina pectoris, so it may be a good thing that (unlike her husband), Cora has found her metier in local politics at last: she is a soothing Lady Bountiful presiding over a remarkably anachronistically organized hospital system there in Yorkshire (it was Yorkshire the series began in?) where all will be taken care of. In their last conversation they acknowledge we cannot know what is to come.

It was well-calibrated not to make this last episode into a tear-jerker.

A few liberal joke-y notes. It turns out we are to see Spratt (Jeremy Swift) as another gay butler — that’s appears to fuel part of the Dowager’s delight when our resident (thwarted) witch lady’s maid, Dencker (Sue Johnston) carries on her thankless task of attempting to get him fired backfires.

Spratt’s stamp album now a cover-up for his notebook writing of his daily column of advice for young ladies love-lorn and wanting to know what to wear

Mr Barrow (Rob James-Collier) is just dew-y all episode long with gratitude to all for their concern for him when he tried to slit his wrists, and with determined sweet love for all. Lady Mary engineers Lady Edith’s marriage with so little ease I cringed to hear Lady Edith’s return to abjection: “you gave me my life back” — could she have done nothing? The actors did remarkably well under this perpetual pressure. I thought some of the lines downright corny and Michelle Dockery had some trouble in her dialogue with her new beloved. Rob James-Collier managed a little better because he was given fewer lines: if he couldn’t be married, he could smile at being included and replace Mr Carter at long last. If there have been any lesbians (say the lady’s maids) over the years, we were not permitted to glimpse this, though now and again we came across individuals who ended up going it alone.

Does anyone remember Alun Armstrong as Stowell the butler in Scotland? — Durkheim says elderly men alone are a population most susceptible to suicide

Or how Violet attempted to secure Lord Merton for Lady Shackleton (Harriet Walters)? — but alas she was too old for his taste (I thought I glimpsed her for a split second at the back at Edith’s wedding but perhaps it was Henry’s as she is his family)

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Why break a butterfly on a wheel at this point?

The scullery maid the first season opened with now has her hair fixed by the housemaid now privileged lady’s maid and companion — Daisy (Sophie McShea) who saved a farm place for Mr Mason by her protests is all set to become Queen there, with Andy her tender-hearted king

Andy Parker (Michael Fox) fixing the house roof

I direct my readers to two of several long-time bloggers on this series who offer the equivalent of Trollope’s ironically titled final chapter of Framley Parsonage: “How they all were married, had Two Children and Lived Happily Ever After:” Jane Austen’s world appeared to take it all solemnly, though she called it a “sugar spun bow;” Anibundel provided some salt while she went through it bullet-style: I add that even Mr Mason (Paul Copley) grins at Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nichol), and Edith’s editor catches the bouquet and so we know that soon she and Tom will be getting together. “All have won and all must have husbands after all.” Two children? Lady Mary is pregnant again, now that she’s got a Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode) who is working out to be another submissive male, and in this episode is a woman who mends and heals and takes care of all. At first Henry seems depressed over this turn of events, but there is Tom to buck him up, and with effortless ease they start a Daimler business. His only worry is lest Mary be ashamed of him, but not in this episode where she is all calm beneficence:

There were years where I became intensely involved and bonded with some of the characters, Anna and Bates in the early years (Joanne Froggart and Brendan Coyle),

In the church watching Lady Edith getting married

more recently Mr Moseley and Miss Baxter (Kevin Doyle and Raquel Cassidy). Servants on occasion educated themselves out of servitude: after all Moseley is not going to be a university professor.

The punctum (as the piercing feel of the image is called) was there for me

It did happen that children of people outside the family could be brought up in the family nursery: Here it’s enough to see Lady Mary bend down to take off Anna’s shoes to force Anna into her own bed to give birth:

And when the childbirth agon is over (hardly felt at all, hardly took any time) the new Bates son will be put in the nursery during the day with the Grantham children to be “followed by a young Talbot:” Lady Mary decrees:

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A typical kitchen scene, preparing food for the groups

In this last episode those still capable of being moved were so by the long years of “slow television” (individual scenes were not overlong but not a few seconds and broken up with interweaving with others as they played out), the images and dialogues repeatedly embedded in dramatised explorations of the neurosis of everyday life not gone into too deeply. In a world today where shallow relationships sustain daily communication in places where at any moment anyone may be ejected with no recourse, there can be no denying that finally the attraction was to this story of a group of people privileged to remain in a fractured-pastoral refuge. Community, safety, kindness is what is longed for after all.

So it feels inappropriate to dwell on close-up images of pairs or single individuals at this last: the episode is larded with scenes where the characters support one another and self-reflexively discuss their relationships, the past, and gently lament they like ordinary mortals must move into future time.

Isobel: “What else could we drink to. We’re going forward to the future, not back into the past.”
Violet: “If only we had the choice.”

The house was photographed again and again, three times in snow

This is but a blog, but it is mine own and effective soap operas weave themselves into our lives over time. When Downton Abbey began I was happily married after many years and at first did not watch, my husband did not care for TV in his last years, and I did not want to take over the front room where an old television was stationed. I succumbed to find common ground with Anibundel, caught up, became hooked, and over the years events, images, lines in these various seasons intertwined with what was happening with my life. My husband died as I watched the fourth season of mourning; now the quiet “exultation” at the close of this sixth saddened me, since I have no future I want to go forward into as do these “precious winners all.”

‘The only thing I’m not ready for is a life without you’ — Bertie to Edith

Judi Dench as Paulina (The Winter’s Tale)

Ellen

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Downton Abbey, sixth season 7 & 8: roller-coaster of smoothly manipulated emotional violations

Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy) finds Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier) bleeding to death in the servants’ bathroom

Soon over. Not to worry. Not much to get through now.

The best framing of the last two “regular” episodes of Downton Abbey is probably Fellowes’s sneering bad-mouthing of BBC as this leftish outfit who would have hampered his coming hijacking of Trollope material for the elite in the form of an adaptation of Dr Thorne. (Part of a decade trend, explains John McCourt in The Irish Times.) The photo of this self-satisfied boaster (just click) is another where he resembles Hitchcock, maker of signally nasty movies, horrifically violent towards women. He is throwing stones at the BBC to support David Cameron and MPs of that ilk who (following the US gov’t’s attitude towards PBS), are doing all they can to destroy the BBC as we have known it. Bite the hand that fed his career.

There have been many Trollopian motifs in Downton Abbey: In these last two episodes we have in the story of Mrs Crawley (Penelope Wilton) and Lord Merton (Douglas Reith) the young grown heirs who do all they can to prevent the older generation from fulfilling their needs for companionate and sexual love (one of many places is in Trollope’s Orley Farm).

Mrs Crawley (Penelope Wilton) struggling against the pious hypocrisy of Lord Merton’s coming daughter-in-law who does not care how miserable she and her husband will make the older couple, just as long as Mrs Crawley takes over Lord Merton’s care as he ages

Fellowes may have gotten the Pelham story from the background to The Warden: a Rev Francis North, Warden of the Hospital of St Cross unexpected became the Earl of Guilford after the death of a bachelor cousin (see latest Oxford ed by Nicholas Shrimpton, Introd. p. xvii).

Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) afraid of this man’s (Henry Haddon-Patton) sheltered life (we would not be asked to believe this in Trollope) cannot get herself to tell him on her own that Marigold is her daughter, and liking his sensitivity so cannot say no to the marriage

Yet just to say how smooth it all is to ignore the point. Fellowes wants to carve in cement the idea that this ruling class rides over all, and everyone fits in.

In these two episodes our third heroine, Anna Bates (Joanne Froggart) falls back to where she belongs: the careful diplomatic lady’s maid …

Because that’s the way it is and ought to be. Your loathing is so much useless banging against a wall which he claims won’t come down.

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To come to these two week’s salient themes and events, I thought again that Anibundel hit an important note when she remarked in her recaps of the last two episodes there’s something “emotionally horrific” about them (7: “But do they live happily ever after?”; 8: “The Truth about Mary”).

So Episode 7 achieves true heartlessness in the exploitation killing off of a character invented suddenly as of rooted importance to our new suitor-hero, Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode): what took my breath away was the overt kick Fellowes got out rubbing in the watcher’s nose that once someone, anyone dies, not only does just about everyone in the world carry on just as before (maybe one person affected, in this case the rival car driver in a death-race), but they are as happy, cheerful or occupied as ever. No one gives a shit — for even the grieving other car driver can’t resist asking the ice princess, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to marry him. She of course says no, being heartless herself — her ostensible believable reason that he has no rank nor money; he has forced her into this, it seems. She won’t admit to him the one legitimate reason: she lost her first husband to a car accident. What is she to be perpetually afraid to be widowed this way again. But no, not she, she won’t ask him to give this up.

At the races — he later tells her when it seems it’s money and rank alone that he lacks, that he didn’t think she was that small and she is electrified with nauseated resentment

Episode 8 multiplied this effect: we had a roller-coaster of humiliations and deaths of hope: Lesley Nicol as Mrs Patmore business is going to fail from public mortification; ho ho how funny this is everyone feels:

Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nichol) upon being told her lifetime savings may have gone poof in a squalid incident — the risks to a woman of opening a B&B or boarding house

Kevin Doyle as Mr Moseley is made a fool out of by his students after years spent trying to get the right to stand in front of a classroom.

Writing on the board

Cold and indifferent to him, seemingly disdainful

And Lady Mary finally outdid herself in attempting to destroy Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael’s love affair) with such cavalier bitchiness that for a time she was excoriated by the decent people in the house. Tom Bransom (Allan Leech) rounds on her as a coward bully, for once sneering at “her maid” as her friend (of course she would show a respect sympathy). And her father (Hugh Bonneville) on her snide remark that he and Carson together led to Thomas’s attempt at suicide as even he didn’t expect such a “blow, low even for you:”

and the worm turned:

Summing one another up at last: Lady Mary starting it: “You’re pathetic,” and Lady Edith finally, you’re a bitch … can’t bear to see anyone happy if you’re unhappy …

Fellowes is so true to the characters he does leave a line where Lady Mary almost implies she could go after Pelham now. Though as ever her mother (Elizabeth McGovern) overlooked it by treating it as trivia in her usual complacent way (“you wouldn’t want people to think you’re jealous”); and the Dowager, Violet (Maggie Smith) hurried back from her holiday in France to reassure the audience underneath Mary has a heart, she just pretends not to (as all worldly sensible people do and Fellowes’s high class heroine would).

Violet to the rescue

We did have to endure and cannot overlook the talk before and after Mary’s bombshell that Edith must tell Bertie Pelham, now Marquess (Henry Hadden-Patton). Robert had a good moment here to Lady Rosemary Painswick as she carries on insisting they cannot do this to this “other family:”

Lord Grantham asks Lady Rosemary (Samantha Bond) when she is planning to leave

We can remember how she tried to drive Edith to have an abortion and when Edith wouldn’t, to give up her child to strangers.

But such talk is in effect a form of blaming Edith for not telling him, and she says she might have tried to “trick” him (he’s another of the blind people of these 7 years who never once thought, Where does Marigold come from?). So Mary had to do it even if she did it so viciously. Tom is still half-used as a chauffeur by both Mary and Edith: so much for his views. Fellowes is so clever at getting the audience to accept this formula of resignation: Edith’s grating showing up at this ice princess’s wedding is accompanied by plangent speech about how someday they would be the only ones with shared memories of the world they had known so must not estrange themselves from one another.

But life you know carries on. Fellowes does what he’s so good at: involves you emotionally in realistically conceived and deeply felt characters’ deep crises and when the shit hits the fan, slips away. Snubbed and ignored, and sideswiped, and nagged to get the hell out of there once too often Thomas slits his wrists. But we are given no scene of him doing it, no over-voice, no aftermath: just what the public was told, a social scene of the upper class Master George showing some concern

and then Thomas at the wedding (looking a bit worn but none the worse for the wear) and it seems he is not going to be sacked after all. And suicide if it does not succeed can be hidden.

Here the arch enemy was Carson who once called Thomas disgustingly repugnant; we have later to endure Mrs Hughes’s (Phyllis Logan) calling his behavior to Mrs Patmore too as “curmudgeonly:” this is to trivialize the cold shoulder bully who behaves with repugnant words and active cruelty to real people in favor of upholding an abstract hierarchy of the rich

Here her forthright face-to-face response is the right one: to tell him he’s wrong and they won’t do as he wishes

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The most unqualified good moments are in the secondary stories where Fellowes seems more comfortable:

The servants picnicking

Mr Moseley succeeding with his students by telling who he is and about himself, and that learning is for itself, not lying that they can have anything they want as a result of this learning, Daisy (Sophie McShea listening)

And through stills:

Lady Mary at Matthew’s grave just before she’s about to marry Henry — this can remind us Fellowes never meant to kill Matthew off, but used it, together with the rape of Anna, brilliantly in the fourth season ….

Edith knowing she has done the right thing to bring up her own child, Marigold — the still closes the episode and so can remind us how often Fellowes has imagined unwed mothers whose raison d’etre becomes their child …

I agree with a friend that the dialogue, the scripts have been much less interesting the last two seasons.

I have read that the “final finale,” the last Christmas episode will not be aired for two weeks. If this is so, it shows a astute appreciation of how soap operas work in our lives. Their slow pace, the turning of their daily worlds punctuating our experience of our own once a week makes us react to them as we do to friends we see regularly. They enter our lives as part of the thread.

The latest family member: Violet’s present to her son, Lord Grantham of a puppy to replace Isis

Ellen

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Making Barsetshire: A spring syllabus

John Constable (1776-1837), Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (1825-26)

A Syllabus

Online at: https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2016/02/21/making-barsetshire-a-spring-syllabus/

For a Study Group at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Ten Monday afternoons, 1:00 to 2:50 pm, Temple Baptist Church, 3805 Nebraska Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20016
Dates: Classes start Feb 29th; last day May 2nd.
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course

The class will read Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, Barchester Towers, and Dr Thorne. Trollope conceived of his famed Barsetshire series while walking in the beautiful purlieus of Salisbury Cathedral in England; and sat down to write The Warden, his first of thirteen novellas, having in mind church-and-state, literary and newspaper political satire of his era. Of the writing of 2nd Barsetshire novel, Barchester Towers, an enormously wide-selling book at the time and never out of print since, Trollope wrote he took “great delight” and predicted Barchester Towers would be one of those by him which “live” on and are read for a long time to come. Elaine Showalter and others regard it as the first academic satire; I see it as a kind of Victorianization of The Warden. By the 3rd, Dr Thorne, Trollope knew he had created something more: an evolving 19th century world for richly-developed realistic characters to exist in; and by the 4th, Framley Parsonage, he was mapping his imaginary places over a palimpsest, with his characters and sites multiplying and spilling over through railway lines into a real political England which included London and parliament and far abroad. Of this novel, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote: “I wish Mr Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage forever.” Trollope is still primarily associated with the six books that emerged, and The Pallisers or parliamentary novels that developed out the Barsetshire world. In a ten-week course, we’ll see how this Barsetshire was first formed, and watch excerpts from the 1982 BBC The Barchester Chronicles, which adapts The Warden and Barchester Towers. I invite class members to see the seven episodes of the mini-series before the course begins, and to begin The Warden. We may also have a serendipitous treat (for those who can reach it): this coming spring a Julian Fellowes mini-series of Dr Thorne is scheduled to air on ITV (British TV).

Required Texts. Students are asked to bring a copy of the novel and any essays we may discuss for the week to class. These will usually be provided in the form of an attachment sent to the students’ email the week before.

Required reading:
Trollope, Anthony. The Warden, introd. David Skilton. NY: Oxford, 1980.
—————–. Barchester Towers, ed. Robin Gilmour. NY: Penguin 1994.
—————–. Dr Thorne, ed. David Skilton. NY: Oxford, 1980.

Format: Study group meetings will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

Feb 29th: Introduction: Trollope, life, career (especially the Anglo-Irish novels and beyond Barsetshire), reputation.
Mar 7th: [For this day read] The Warden
Mar 14th: Barchester Towers, Volume I or Chs 1-14 (“Who will be the new bishop?” to “The New Champion””)
Mar 21st: Barchester Towers Volume 1, Chs 15-19 and Volume 2 Chs 20-26 (“The Widow’s Suitors” to “Mrs Proudie wrestle and gets a fall”);read also Cockshut, Anthony. “The Warden: Nothing is Sentimentalized,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 17 (1963):381-90; Cadbury, William. “Character and the Mock Heroic in Barchester Towers,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language (5:4, Winter 1964):509-519.
Mar 28th: Barchester Towers: Volume 2, Chs 27 – 34, Volume 3 Ch 35 (“Oxford and the Master and Tutor of Lazarus: to “Miss Thorne’s Fete Champetre”); read also Cusick, Colleen. “Madame Neroni and Matrimonial Spiders: Spinning Courtship in Barchester Towers, Victorians A Journal Of Culture and literature, 127 (Spring 2015):75-89
April 4th: Barchester Towers, Volume 3, Chs 36-53 (“Ullathorne Sports Act I” to “Conclusion”). We’ll see clips from Alan Plater’s Barchester Chronicles.
April 11th: Dr Thorne, Chs 1-11 (“Greshams of Greshambury” to “The Doctor Drinks his Tea”): in context, AT’s developing art; read also Moulds, Alison. “TV Review: Dr Thorne (ITV 2016), Victorian Clinic, March 21, 2016. https://victorianclinic.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/tv-review-doctor-thorne-itv-2016/
April 18th: Dr Thorne, Chs 12-23 (“When Greek meets Greek” … “Retrospective”); read also Ziegenhagen, Timothy. “Trollope’s Professional Gentleman: Medical Training and Medical Practice in Doctor Thorne and The Warden. Studies in the Novel. 38.2 (Summer 2006): 154-171.
April 25th: Dr Thorne, Chs 24-34 (“Louis Scatcherd” to “Arrives at Greshambury”); read also Kincaid, James. “Pastoral Thriving” from The Novels of Anthony Trollope. (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1977); Edwards, P.D. “The Boundaries of Barset” in Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope. (Lucia: University of Queensland, 1977)
May 2nd: Dr Thorne, Chs Chs 34-47 (“St Louis Goes out to Dinner” to “And who were asked to the Wedding”); how Framley Parsonage brings us back to Barsetshire 1 & 2; briefly on the last two Barsetshire novels (The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset). We’ll see one clip from Julian Fellowes’s Dr Thorne.

Suggested reading and Viewing

Barchester Chronicles. A 7-part BBC mini-series, 1983. Dr. Gilles. Scripted Alan Plater. Featuring Donald Pleasance, Nigel Hawthorne, Alan Rickman, Eleanor Mawe, Barbara Flynn, Susan Hampshire, Geraldine McEwan, Clive Swift
Dr Thorne. A 3 part IVT mini-series, 2016. Dr Niall McCormick. Scripted Julian Fellowes. Featuring Tom Hollander, Ian McShame, Stephani Martini, Phoebe Nicholls, Richard McCabe, Rebecca Front.
Bareham, Tony, ed. The Barsetshire Novels: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Cadbury, William. “Character and the Mock Heroic in Barchester Towers,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language (5:4, Winter 1964):509-519.
Cockshut, Anthony. “The Warden: Nothing is Sentimentalized,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 17 (1963):381-90. Also his superb Anthony Trollope. London: Collins, 1955.
Cusick, Colleen. “Madame Neroni and Matrimonial Spiders: Spinning Courtship in Barchester Towers, Victorians A Journal Of Culture and literature, 127 (Spring 2015):75-89
Durey, Jill Felicity. Trollope and the Church of England. Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, 2002.
Edwards, P.D. “The Boundaries of Barset” in Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope. Lucia: University of Queensland, 1977
Kincaid, James. “Anthony Trollope and the Unmannerly Novel” and “The Power of Barchester Towers,” in Annoying the Victorians. London: Routledge, 1995.
Kucich, John. “Transgression in Trollope: Dishonesty and the Antibourgeois Elite,” ELH, 56:3 (1989):593-618
McDonald, Susan Peck. Anthony Trollope. Boston: Twayne, 1987.
Moody, Ellen. “Epistolarity and Masculinity in Andrew Davies’s Trollope films,” in Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama from The Forsyte Sage to Downton Abbey, edd. James Leggott and Julie Taddeo. London: Rowman and Littlefield,2015.
————-. “Intertexuality in The Pallisers” (& Barchester Chronicles), in Victorian Literature and Film adaptation, edd. Abigail Bloom and Mary Pollock. Amherst, NY: Cumbria Press, 2011.
Moulds, Alison. “TV Review: Dr Thorne (ITV 2016), Victorian Clinic, March 21, 2016. https://victorianclinic.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/tv-review-doctor-thorne-itv-2016/
————-. Trollope on the ‘Net. London: Hambledon and Trollope Society, 2000.
Overton, Bill. The Unofficial Trollope. NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982.
Snow, C. P. Trollope: An Illustrated Biography. New York: New Amsterdam, 1975.
Sadleir, Michael. Trollope: A Commentary. 1927; rpt. London: Oxford UP, 1961.
Terry, R. C. Antony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1962.
Ziegenhagen, Timothy. “Trollope’s Professional Gentleman: Medical Training and Medical Practice in Doctor Thorne and The Warden. Studies in the Novel. 38.2 (Summer 2006): 154-171.

From Previous semester teaching 1st Three Barsetshire books:

Barchester Towers: An Extraordinary Book and where there are no police
Dr Thorne: an emotionally powerful dramatic-scene laden book

Online group readings:

The Warden and Barchester Towers
Dr Thorne
A blog: Shoverdosing on Barchester Chronicles
From my website on Anthony Trollope

Drawn by sketch by Trollope (circa Framley Parsonage) by Michael Sadleir — click on drawing to make it much much larger

Ellen

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Downton Abbey Sixth Season 5 & 6: I take down my crystal ball

The best moments are the quiet ones: characters walking and talking, so here are Mr and Mrs Bates off to work (Brendan Coyle and Joanne Froggart)

Mr Moseley in the village square self-reflexively selling tickets to come see ….

Mr Carson: “Do other butlers have to contend with the police arriving every 10 minutes?”
Answer: No, but most are not part of moribund mini-series.

Friends and remarkably patient readers,

Despite outbreaks physiological and psychological of intense distress, surely you’ve noticed we are on our way to as happily ever after as human beings ever know:

I take out my crystal ball developed out of not-so attentive watching (I would open a book and take bets only that I don’t understand betting):

Our princess Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is going to marry the self-indulgent drone Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode) and run Downton Abbey efficiently as a cross between a tourist attraction and generous farm rental site; Barrow will become head butler and spend his declining years indulging all Lady Mary’s children; our secondary heroine Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) will marry Bertie Pelham (Henry Haddon-Patton, a double-moniker there) despite Lady Mary’s final spiteful attempt to use her knowledge that Marigold is an illegimate child. Pelham is not a prince in disguise, but he is not the total shit Lady Mary had hoped. Mr and Mrs Bates (the one truly aggressive man in the series and his very long-suffering wife) will have that baby, which will be healthy and retire to their property to become prosperous landlords. Lord Grantham will not die young because Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) is just too soothing and complacent a presence to allow an early death once Violet Lady Grantham (Maggie Smith) despite her Methuselah-like great age settles down to supporting Miss Dencker (Sue Johnston)’s matching spite and Spratt’s stamp-collecting habits (Jeremy Swift).

A single housekeeper, skeletal staff, and “day help” will replace “downstairs”

Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) will show yet more extraordinary patience as she endures married life with that self-indulged prig of the patriarchy, Mr Carson (Jim Carter) who is not capable of going to bed without looking to see if the sheet corners are expertly done nor eat if his dinner is not eternally hot and as exquisitely cooked as if he were a Shah of Saudi Arabia. Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) will marry Mr Mason (Paul Copley), bringing to his tenant farm her dowry of her property. Now married, a highly educated Daisy (Sophie McShea) and Andy (reading and writing too as the best of them, certainly no one knows pig theory better) will come to live with them.

Have I left anyone out? Tom Bransom (Allen Leech)’s fate is as yet obscure. Isabel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) and Lord Merton (Douglas Reith) have been granted an intermediary in the person of an astonishingly kind prospective daughter-in-law (what I can’t figure out is how she can marry that vicious son of his?).

While I just know in the longer run Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy) will marry Mr Moseley (Kevin Doyle) who will become a teacher in a school (he takes a test next to Daisy in Episode 6), there is another bit of a twist and turn down the road as it seems after all she had some feelings for the crook who arranged his theft in such a way as she went to prison. Both such good souls, they will work it out.

How easy some of them have it now? Lady Edith’s interviews of prospective women employees are without tension? No rivalry whatsoever. How is it that this newspaper is so easy to run?

What a gentle time of it they all have

As to Talbot, are there no aggressive males left on the planet? When with Lady Mary, he behaves as if he were in school assembly.

In Downton Abbey only servants are harshly treated …

So why are we carrying on? in this excruciating slow motion? (For recaps see Anibundel: 5, Who would have thought the old man had so much blood?, 6: Downton Abbey as Antiques Roadshow lacks information). Because the ratings were so high and potential audience and money from advertisers were too tempting.

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On Episode 5: I admit to being a viewer whose emotions have at times been deeply engaged with these characters, so when the hospital debate came a crisis with Violet’s coercing Neville Chamberlain himself to come to luncheon in the hope he will not permit the local hospital to be amalgamated to a county-wide organization and yet another of these tension-filled meals became too much for Lord Grantham — and his ulcers burst. What a comment upon 6 years of these dinners and luncheons, not to omit the occasional strained breakfast. I found myself distractedly distressed, tears running out of my eyes, to see this man coughing up huge goblets of blood.

Lord Grantham’s ulcer bursts — he has clearly had enough (Hugh Bonneville enters fully into the role assigned every time, DA 6, Episode 5)

So the first time I watched, I was started into upset, and my emotions rose strongly; but if a movie has real depth in it and has earned belief, adherence, the second time through should be stronger as you notice more. Alas (almost), the second time through I felt indifference; the contrived nature of the scene once the shock wore off and especially since Fellowes had relied on this melodrama. I read somewhere that the genuine shock on Elizabeth McGovern’s face came from her gown, face and hands being spattered with the false blood from across the room. That was not supposed to happen and you can do only so many takes with such a scene. In the event, they did two takes only. I could see how it neatly ties up with the hospital debate in such a way as the Dowager must lose, but I felt that a sensitive fine actor (Bonneville) who let himself go into the part was exploited by this use of him.

Mr Moseley helps Miss Baxter put on her coat after she has learned her ex-lover has pled guilty thus sparing her a confession of her complicity on the stand

As to Miss Baxter’s continuing agon, with the ever compassionate sensible Mr Moseley (who can put things into perspective with the joke — do you want me to go back and see if he will plead “not guilty”). What saves this series is not the humor (which is often not funny) but that continually as an undercurrent and some times rising to the surface (in coughed up blood?) are tensions, strains, disappointment, conflicted desires beneath the tranquil surface of life for these privileged lucky characters.

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The people on line are beginning to think somehow one group waiting has been favored over another, and the staff is doing what they can to push out such thinking from their minds.

On Episode 6: One of my favorite PBS shows has long been the Antiques Road Show on PBS as done in Britain; there is an American version, but for me not as much fun as these visits to large country houses and estates. And I have come to expect as a matter of course, that detailed knowledge of the most obscure objects will be forthcoming.

Taken as a gentle satire on the usual display of conjectured (they are careful to say it’s conjectured) information with prices that make the sellers unexpectedly happy, Episode 6 was worth a watch. There was a mild pleasure to be had in seeing how people really don’t know the facts wanted (or bogusly invented). Lady Edith couldn’t say who was in the picture; Cora, Lady Grantham did not know why one set of imitation shields over a fireplace had not been carved with any letters but over there was a bona fide Reynolds.

She never thought to ask why the shields are not carved — the false importance such tours give to brick-a-bracks, making them numinous because “gazed at” in this ritual way is felt

Robert: “What on Earth can we show them to make it worth their money? Lady Grantham knitting? Lady Mary in the bath?”

The dialogue where a tourist boy stumbles into Lord Grantham’s room to ask why he doesn’t get somewhere much more comfortable to live a bit heavy-handed but not all that improbable — if you think children are not alive to class and how rich people live differently. Mine and I knew by kindergarten.

Lord Grantham will soon tell the boy he lives this way because that’s what he is used to

What was registered was Fellowes’s looking askance at those people who come to gawk; and his quiet sneer that to keep such places going you have to let people in who envy a style of life they have misapprehended as exciting but who are really endlessly thinking of whether their egos have been assuaged.

Miss Dencker comes near to be fired for too much loyalty. When Dr Clarkson (David Robb) defected, she accosted him. He writes a letter of complaint to the dowager. So we see whose feelings count. Whose life matters. The Dowager’s response is not gratitude. What? did Dencker think she had a right to be loyal. to have any feelings at all? On the spot, the Dowager will fire her. The way Dencker holds on is to threaten to tell the Dowaer that Spratt hid his crook-nephew, so Spratt must go upstairs and ask for her reinstatement. When Spratt succeeds (so quickly it’s probable the Dowager did not want to sack Dencker), far from promising never to threaten again, Dencker says she will use short blackmail whenever she has to.

Thomas Barrow contemplates suicide as his utterly selfless teaching of Andrew Parker is sleazily misread (Rob James-Collier and Michael Fox, DA 6, Episode 6

Thomas is beginning to have had it. After all these years of faithful service and self-control on his part, he is still not trusted enough so that if he strikes up a friendship with a footman the first thought all have is he’s buggering him. And he is continually nagged to find a job where he might have something useful to do. Had this been imitative of life either he or Andy would have said he was teaching Andy to read.

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Lady Edith and her suitor stroll through St James Park — or is it Kensington Gardens we are to suppose we are entering into (Episode 5)

So what have we gained from Episodes 5 & 6: And they all headed to live happily ever after despite the occasional strong strains

I did remember this poem while watching some of the quietly strained moments amid the engineered systematic indifference of most to most between characters who pass through much splendor and have who at times have something to me:

Musee de Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
— W. H. Auden

Mrs Crawley facing Lord Merton’s persistence registers on her prudent face fear of what her marrying Lord Merton might cause them to experience

Ellen

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Well, it’s been a quiet week in Downton Abbey … the sixth season, 3 & 4

out there on the edge of change.

Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier) under considerable strain, with Andy Parker (Michael Fox) looking sorry for him

Friends,

In Robin Nelson’s State of Play, a study of “contemporary (post-1990) ‘high-end’ TV drama,” more than once we are told of Tony Garnett’s “famous refusal to make more runs of This Life even after it was a smash hit.” Since Fellowes wants to remain a major player writing costume drama for American TV (the up-coming Dr Thorne will not be his last), he didn’t dare. So we are left with this slow motion good-bye.

Fellowes is having artistic conscience enough to produce more episodes in the mode of this season’s 2nd: the hour feels like not much is happening, not much excitement, because in life that is how it is. And chosing at random, one of the many meals these character sit down to (they seem to have nothing else to do), I find that no change is registered if you notice four male servants stand at attendance for four diners:

and the way the various ladies in the houses we visit eat breakfast mid-morning in bed, command tea, whatever they want.

Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary — quite at random

My self-appointed task to finish out what I began is made less arduous because many like myself are doggedly keeping up: bloggers still do recaps whether sarky or perceptive (Anibundel covers episode 3 as “Hughes wedding is it, anyway?“; Episode 4 as The Return of Gwen Dawson).

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So, to begin, for myself I confess to feeling intensely moved by Phyllis Logan as Mrs Hughes during moments of the wedding she wanted with Mr Carson (Jim Carter).

Look at her face

And the camera switched to Leslie Nichols as Mrs Patmore taking equal emotional gratification from this coming future for her friend:

And Daisy (Sophie McShea) as ever close by her side

But Mr Mason and Daisy’s (Sophie McShea) satisfaction was marred by the punishment they had again had to take. And how he urged on her she had earned this by her submission to her employers. We also have the snide “Madame Defarge” hurled at her — has Mrs Patmore been reading A Tale of Two Cities? She can’t have seen the movie. The anxiety we were made to feel. Elizabeth McGovern as Cora, Lady Grantham may feel enough responsiblity or obligation to her servants and their connections, to push successfully to put Mr Mason (Paul Copley) a farm to work on as a tenant; she may even give up one of her many unworn (unwanted, unneeded) fur coats to Mrs Hughes because Fellowes tells enough truth to show us that servants don’t have super-expensive weddings or dresses, but catch anyone who belongs downstairs upstairs, or in her room without permission, and she is really to sack them, apologies afterward or not.

She is shocked, shocked, to find them in her bedroom; they scatter — that’s Joanne Froggart as Anna running away from wrath off the screen, Mrs Patmore behind our bride Mrs Hughes suddenly made into a schoolchild …

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Recurring or brought back characters can exert a powerful grip on the engaged emotions of someone who has been watching a soap opera for some years, and Fellowes has been careful to rehire the same actors years later to reassure us these dream figures exist. For me in these two episodes it was the re-appearance of Harriet Walter as Lady Shackleton:

At the remembered first shot, and when Lady Shackleton not only attempted to reason with Maggie Smith as the retrograde Dowager, Violet, Lady Crawley who had invited her to be an obedient supporter against re-organizing the hospital to make it part of a larger health group (therefore richer, therefore with better services), but referred to her life in just the same way she had the last time we met, I felt a tiny lump in my throat:

Lady Shackleton: “It was sweet of them to let me bring Henry.”
Violet: “Though why couldn’t he stay behind with a tray on his lap? …”
Lady Shackleton: “Don’t be unkind. I never see him. He’s only up here now to look at some horrid racing car.”
Violet: “Does he get on with Philip? – They were friends as boys.”
Lady Shackleton: “I’m afraid he doesn’t like my daughter-in-law.”
Violet: ” — Oh, dear.”
Lady Shackleton: ” — Who does …”

Walters’ voice lingers to give the tremor of unspeakable because however untheatrical nonetheless continual unavoidable heartache …

There were too few such moments for me. When Gwen (Rose Leslie) recurs, I’m again supposed to feel grateful to Lady Sybil (Deborha Findlay Brown) who is presented as almost single-handedly responsible for her great rise in life, but I remember the hard slog, insults (Mrs Hughes told her she had not right to the space she slept in so no right to a typewriter) and the fierce determination it took on her part. What is her reward? To be served upstairs?

Is it for this that she, Lady Edith and Lady Rosemary Painswick (Samantha Bond) are meeting to set up a college to train young women? I grant the good feeling to watch Edith driving Rosemary who broaches the plan to her:

Our upstairs heroine’s, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) and Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) suitors are so feebly there, emasculated into polite Ken dolls, ready to spend the night editing your paper with you (Bertie Pelham) or take you out to dinner inbeween expensive racing car bouts (Matthew Goode as Henry Tablot), that the pleasure is simply in the glimpsed romantic shot if you can identity with the venue:

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To turn to our perpetual presences and symbolic houses, Anna’s joy at holding on her to pregnancy begins to pall from too much use, especially since part of the point is to show us how Lady Mary has a heart after all. If we were to have to come back six seasons from now (fingers crossed this never happens in some movie-house singleton), we’d have to rely on Brendon Coyle’s undercurrent of realism to object to attributing his state of happy fatherhood to his wife’s boss. And Fellowes gives the scene a misogynistic (on Bates’s part) framing bite: his first impulse is to distrust Anna’s trip to London, suspect her of what?

I was intrigued, held for a time by how a formerly great house, Dayton Park, where Thomas endures his second interview transformed naturally as it were into a gothic mansion Anne Radcliffe would have recognized:

And there were other explanatory new images, upsurges of genuine feeling, as when Miss Dencker (Sue Johnston) chummily watches Spratt (Jeremy Swift) work on his stamp collection:

But do we really have to find more servants discovered as thieves and criminals. Spratt is hiding an escaped convict of a relative in the shed; once again Sergeant Willis exerts excruciating pressure on Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy) to go to court and re-confess her role in a jewel theft for which she has done enough time.

Yet as Mr Molseley (Kevin Doyle) tells her and we know from his presence, her life is far from ruined: he will become a teacher, and she his work-from-home seamstress wife. But that’s not the emphasis of this punitive series of scenes.

Why do we have no characters going off — as most wealthy families had — in form of of younger children to grab land and resources as settler colonials in say South Africa, Australia, New Zealand? No one profiting hugely off India? Grand thievery that would not bring any Sergeant to the door, but we could then see where some of the great wealth that made houses like Downton thrive? But no. This common type is missing, no where to be seen or heard of, and I’ve listened to our substitute, the man from Ireland, Tom Branson (Allen Leech) abjure his weak socialism too many times now, and talk fo how he wants to help and do his bit for everyone else, and haven’t the stomach to treat these matters merelyas fodder for supposedly trivial fun sarcasms. I want to turn to Thackeray:

“Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”

Maybe not quite? There is the on-going subgothic of Barrow’s frustrated life: a slow march to a suicide attempt.

Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham seriously displeased with how Thomas exposed Gwen to the company at lunch

Andy again observing Thomas slinking along

The strength of the series all along (unadmitted-to) has been that at Downton Abbey the men are not all strong and the women not all beautiful.

Ellen

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Poldark 1: 2015, 1975 & Graham’s Post WW2 novel

Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will,
the heart fiercer as our force faileth …
— Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon (as translated by Michael Alexander

Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark: as magnificent against defeat

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza Carne, asked where she is going (near final shots of Episode 1)

Dear friends and readers,

As I have written altogether too much (probably) about the twelve Poldark books, the 1975 mini-series (a Cornish Che Guevara) and 1977-78, Graham’s other historical fiction, mysteries and costume drama, I asked myself what could I contribute that would be found useful, or enrichening to readers of the books and watchers of these two mini-series, made 40 years apart. Well, comparisons. I will not be recapping; I assume my reader has read the novels, at least Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan (the first quartet, written 1945-53) and refer him or her to recaps elsewhere. I find most far-reaching in the changes is how the popular vision, how we today see the 18th century is changing in films:

Let us begin with Episode 1:

Let us first admit there is a real similarity in what is covered and emphasized in two mini-series, though the presentation seems worlds apart cinematographically, and what was contained in two episodes in 1975 (the taking in of Demelza occurred in Jack Pullman’s 1975 Episode 2) and occurs in one in 2015 (the screenplay writer is a directing force in British productions, so 2015 is shaped by Debbie Horsfield). Neither film dramatized Joshua Poldark’s death, both begin with Ross coming home in the stagecoach; both have his visit to Trenwith where Verity and Francis greet him with emotional friendship, while Charles holds back; while the 1975 includes Pearce as a first visit and Pascoe as a second.

Ross and Pearce (1975, where an emotional soft bonding counts, Pearce calls Ross “m’boy”)

Ross and Pascoe (2015, where the banker is predominant in telling the bad news of no legacy that can support him)

Both emphasize how Nampara has become a wreck (though Jud and Prudie are made more appealing in 1975, more genuinely attached to Ross, and he less severe to them), Ross’s bonds with his tenant-friends and companions and decent humane behavior towards them. Centrally important, both take material from Warleggan, the fourth Poldark novel (the back story which is not told clearly or that emphatically in Ross Poldark, the 1st) in order to make clear how Ross has loved, in his mind and heart clung to, a dream of Elizabeth Chynoweth, so we have several scenes between them. Both have Francis and Ross going down in the mine and Francis nearly drowning because he tries to apologize to Ross for taking Elizabeth from him and arouses Ross’s deep rage, with Ross’s hesitation about saving him (“Why haven’t you learned to swim?”), the wedding, Ross’s desolation.

Kyle Soller as Francis trying to explain, openly vulnerable (2015)

Ross and Clive Francis as Francis Poldark, companionable, after Ross’s rescue, Ellis not as deeply angry as Turner (1975)

In literal details it may seem that the 2015 episode is closer to the book (for example, Ross meets Elizabeth first at Trenwith at the engagement party), but a second viewing will reveal some pivotal details have changed. For example, nowhere in the novel does Charles offer Ross 300£ to leave; Horsfield (however she may deny having watched or read the previous mini-series) got that from the Pullman where Charles demands 300£ in money owed him by his brother, Joshua, money Ross desperately needs and has borrowed from Pearce; Horsfield makes central to her first episode that Ross is tempted to leave and then decides not to because what is most meaningful to him in life is his relationship to the people there, the land, and what he can do for both through his ownership of possibly payable ground (mining). Horfield brings Demelza in much earlier than Pullman because Demelza is not seen as a raucous “fiesty” semi-sexual thieving rakish girl (a concept Pullman and his team modeled Angharad Rees on from Tony Richardson’s influential 1966 Tom Jones where women are coy sex kittens), nor Ross as combining the swashbuckling romance hero of Gainsborough costume drama (a kind of Stewart Grainger) with the strong leftist-liberal politics of both Graham’s 1945 book and the 1970s BBC progressive costume drama.

Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees from Episode 2 (1975)

Instead Demelza is a genuinely abject semi-cowed, beaten, subaltern young girl, understandably hostile (like a dog who has been badly treated), guarded against all comers, attached to her dog, Garrick, who alone has loved her, and standing for in Ross’s mind, Cornwall itself, what (he says in the last moments of the episode) he had almost forgotten, what he will retrieve, and the eighteenth century here is not a world of elegance seen from an upper class Austen-ish point of view, but from below, a grimy, grim, brutal, desperate place of people living mostly a subsidence life, where they are hard to one another.

Ross by fireside drinking and eating with men; he often also drinks alone

Demelza walking, singing with dog alongside, but basically alone too

The analogy for 1975 is The Oneddin Line mini-series, for 2015, the recent Outlander, indebted to Peter Weir’s 2003 Master and Commander). Ellis’s ultimately descend from the Errol Flynn image of the gay swashbuckling, elegant hero, combining with the liberal outlook say of Albert Finney as Tom Jones; Aidan Turner’s looks are rough, Napoleonic era long coat and rebellious army man, strongly influenced at the same time by Johnnie Depp in The Libertine.

Other important differences which will be developed: Heidi Reed (2015) as Elizabeth Chynoweth is made much kinder, sweeter, less self-involved, and unlike Graham’s Elizabeth) partly marrying out of obedience to a mother and affection for Francis, guilty about Ross and herself rooted in Cornwall (all an invention on Horsfield’s part)

Reed given a penultimate speech to Ross that he must stay in Cornwall (completely outside Graham’s Elizabeth’s character

Jill Townsend is permitted to enact Graham’s concept in Warleggan of a woman genuinely frightened of the reckless Ross, seeking material comfort and prestige, in need of security. In neither series does the ambiguous woman, adult with complex motives, deeply resentful of Demelza eventually, and no friend to Verity, selfish and yet strong when and where strength is needed, not particularly enamoured of Cornwall (she’d love to go to London) whom Ross had fallen in love with:

Townsend turning away from Ross lest she be seduced by her erotic and affectionate attachment to him

Perspectives on the themes of Graham’s book matter: in both Verity is a kind of female Ross, both of them indifferent to worldly values of others; I found myself preferring Norma Streader because she is allowed to be more forceful and to scold affectionately:

Streader is unafraid to project her emotional life: Ross is here the revenant come back

Rare moment of selfhood for Verity (2015)

Horsfield’s version of feminism is to show us how women are subject to men (so Charles is made to use Verity ruthlessly, forbid her men — in 1975 Frank Middlemass as Charles wanted Verity to marry) and Verity does not get much chance to emerge until Blamey comes onto the scene. But Horsfield is much more pro-capitalist and conformist herself; she brings George Warleggan in much earlier as someone willing to negotiate work with Ross, more humanly understandable supposedly in his cool greed, more acceptable than in 1945 or 1975 (with the man of some integrity as a capitalist who will stay within the law, Nicholas, not there, instead the amoral more criminal type, Cary companions George).

Jack Farthing as George Warleggan making overtures (2015), Turner as Ross turns fiercely away

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Some notes on particulars in the two series, with a (I hope) fair assessment. We should remember the 1975 mini-series had the advantage of not expecting a wider critical audience, of seeing itself as fulfilling a minority taste in historical film costume drama, and by expecting a smaller minority audience could be more daring, more original, take chances. The 2015 has the burden of being second, of having to endure comparisons (like those above), of having much more closely monitored ratings so it must satisfy conventional expectations (thus Aidan Turner had to be muscularly gorgeous).

The iconic ending of the first episode (1975): Ross standing alone, swirling waters around the rocks

1975: The hour ends with him on top of a cliff fiercely looking down as the music rolls. The motifs of the Cornish seacoast and rocks and surging waters are part of a subgenre of Cornish movies. There has been more money spent on music and locations that persuade us we are in Cornwall in 1975. I was stirred by Robin Ellis’s ability to convey complex thoughts and depths. He is cinematically equated with the sea surging against the rocks, hurling itself. He comes home to find he has been thought dead and people didn’t really mind: his mine property taken over; his bethrothed refuses to break her engagement; his farmhouse a mess. He fights intensely at each turn and at each turn his way is made harder. His one great and faithful friend is Pearce, the banker-father, who secures some money for him. I loved how Ellis as Ross spoke and acted truthfully at each turn: he saves his cousin, Francis from drowning: he explains his hesitation by saying he forgot Francis can’t swim, but also it would have been in his interest to let Francis drown. The opening paratexts and music are haunting.

Both films have good actors and much has been done to re-create the 18th century worlds. The difference is the earlier one allows the characters to come forward much more individually with their presences felt; they are not figures in a landscape; the way films were made were to conceive of actors on a stage; in 1975 the actors interacted directly and have more length given each encounter and are more rounded as we meet them (a good example of this is Ross’s meeting with Ginny and the Martins in 1975); thus we feel their presence and their significance much more. Pullman’s screenplay is better: the language is really more particular bringing out the issues and feelings of the people much more adequately with more insight into the nature of their responses to one another and their environment. I miss Paul Curran as Jud — he was just so utterly believable, mean and yet comic; the good nature of Mary Wimbush as Prudie.

2015: since Horsfield chose to bring Demelza in early and include in the first episode material that takes half the 1975 second episode there is much less time in the first 2015 episode to develop the scenes, even if 2015 has 8 more minutes. there is too much garden opulence around Elizabeth Chynoweth: the Chynoweths are as broke or near genteel poverty as the Poldarks; only the Warleggans are doing well. Phil Davis is an utterly believable Jud but less appealing; the new Prudie is grossly sexualized (Jud seems ever to be having sex with her off-stage). This series lacks the comedy of 1975; it is darker dramatic romance. The best scenes as scenes are those closest to the book of which there are a number, e.g., between Ross and Elizabeth where he breaks out in exasperation. There though mostly is a reliance on sheer pictorial projection; we are given the backstory of Ross’s time in Virginia and his young love for a young Elizabeth as pantomime in a prologue; the camera makes love to Demelza’s hidden wordless moods:

Playing with her dog

Feeling better about being alive despite the putdowns and sordid jealous threats of the Paynters

The politics are not progressive (not pro-American revolution as in 1975), but darkly suspicious of all powerful people, Ross is seen as feeling the equal and friends of his men (Jim Carter, Zacky Martin, Mark Daniels), eating and drinking with them. Turner conceives him as forceful, self-contained as a survival technique. This series mirrors the scepticism of today in Britain.

The wide calm seascape is preferred (and a crossroads where a gibbet for hanging someone is placed)

2015 ends on Ross and Demelza riding by the mine — he looks up to it as what he may hope to support himself and his servants, tenants by

Next week, Episodes 2 compared.

Ellen

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Upstairs and Downstairs: British TV costume drama, Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey (3)

Anton Lesser as Thomas More (Peter Straughan defying a fear a wider swathe of viewers will declare a series boring or slow-moving returns to some of the techniques he used in Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy … ) The Washington Post featured a editorial column by Charles Krauthammer inveighing against the distorted portrait of More, showing how seriously these films are taken …

Dear friends and readers,

My concluding blog review of this unusually rich volume of essays on the often neglected and casually dissed costume drama from the BBC, for several decades a leading and influential creator of fine TV drama. The first part covered different ways of dicussing these serial films ; the second the history and evolution of historical films, and this last on the power of these drama’s audiences (especially in the age of fandoms on the Internet with their instant commentary) and how they can influence how a given mini-series might develop and frame how the series is discussed in public media.

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All we are permitted to see in the 1970s is the morning after (Ellis as Ross, Jill Townsend as Elizabeth)

Chapter 16: Julie Anne Taddeo’s “Why don’t you take her?”” Rape in the Poldark Narrative.” I liked this one — it coheres with my point of view on gender politics in the Poldark series (though I differ in how I see Graham’s stance). Where she differs from the approach I would take is she organizes her findings around the fan groups which protest regularly, where misreadings are a result of mainstream cultural values. It offended many viewers of the 1970s mini-series that Ross rapes Elizabeth, and they are given ammunition in this view by the relatively chaste presentation of the 1970s depiction, and by later qualified backtracking in the novels, to be noted in Ross Poldark’s memory — but not sufficient to turn away the reality that Elizabeth manifests intense bitterness towards Ross in The Black Moon and is in The Angry Tide given a very “rough deal” indeed (Graham’s terms for the realities of women’s lives in our culture): she dies of miscarriage she pays a doctor to bring in by causing early parturition, using some herbs known to lead to gangrene. why? the intolerable life she finds herself having to endure when George Warleggan, her aroused jealous husband begins to believe that her second son, he thought his, and born prematurely, is Ross Poldark’s.

Taddeo begins with the enormous popularity of the Poldark mini-series as well as the unacknowledged (by elite groups) extent of Graham’s readership for years of his Poldark and mystery-thrillers-psychologically complex books. Her point will be to show how the fan groups managed to influence how the film-makers changed Graham’s books when they filmed them. The central dilemma of the 12 books is that Ross Poldark loves two women, Elizabeth Chynoweth, aristocratic, upper class, who chooses to marry Ross’s cousin, Francis, partly because she fears marriage to Ross (as a man of renegade risky outcast behavior), and thought he was dead and promised Francis; partly because Francis is the oldest son’s older son, and thus the heir and she hopes can provide her with a high culture social life. Ross takes in a pathetic abject working class (beaten up or abused) young girl, Demelza Carne, to be a servant in his house. Demelza grows up and eventually they have sex (almost inevitably and this carries on) but he marries her quickly — as someone he really likes and feels comfortable with, as a good sex partner. As to defy his class; it is an act of rebellion.  He falls in love with her gradually and deeply. In the 1970s series this altered so that Ross and Demelza have sex for just one night (the film-makers feared the audience would think Demelza unchaste if there were many nights, and that even today would not condone breaking the taboo of marrying far beneath him); Demelza becomes pregnant, even tries to an abortion, but Ross finds out, stops her and “gives” and their child “his name.” When Francis Poldark dies, and Elizabeth finds herself impoverished, alone, insecure, lonely, she marries George Warleggan, even though Ross has made intense efforts to help her (like giving her a lump sum he and Demelza needed badly for his mining business).  Incensed, enraged, he goes to Trenwith and forces himself sexually upon her.  To take her back, to assert his right to own her.  Fans resent bitterly the idea that Ross could have raped anyone. Just the other day I debated this issue off-blog and off-facebook with a long-time ardent reader of Graham’s books and about his life.

So fans of the mini-series argue over this triangle, wanting to absolve Ross and turning to hating Elizabeth. Taddeo shows that Graham is seriously interested in the question of rape, presents women as subject to men; in the second mini-series (out of Books 6-8), we have a young woman, Eliizabeth’s cousin, Morwenna, forced into marriage and Graham dramatizes her experience of married life as continued sadistic marital rape — happily her husband dies, and she remarries a brother of Demelza, but she never recovers from her two years of such experiences.

A scene related to the one focused on above: another rape scene written by a man, and this time we are encouraged to see coerced sex as aggresive seduction (Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary, forced down by a Turkish friend of one of her suitors, Downton Abbey, the first season, 2010)

Chapter 16: Andrea Schmidt dilates on “Imaginative power” of the fan fiction and postings on the Net about Downton Abbey. She demonstrates how these fans — often disdained — expose the absurdities and perversities of Fellowes. He hires a “historian” as a reinforcement of his claim that he refuses to develop his characters in more sophisticated adult ways and deal openly with complex politics because is he keeps to “historical accuracy” no anachronisms in his characters. “Historical accuracy” is his mantra (like the US uses “national security”) behind which he wants to control the depiction of the characters to suit his defense of this super-rich order of people. At the same time he can write dialogue and invent presences with the power of suggestivity. He is usually real enough, and registers the depths and amorality of people sufficiently to open up suggestions we can play with — such as my argument last year that Mr Bates murdered his first wife and Mr Green through the clever ruse of accident.

Schmidt suggests that Downton Abbey fan fiction develops his characters from hints and behaviors Fellowes refuses to make clear or explicit — he cannot sue them as they are making no money and are not acknowledged as legitimate or serious by those in charge of literature and art. These fan fictions and postings and blogs too expose the nasty undercurrents of his portrayals, his fatuity. They complicate his stories in more “interesting, self-aware and sensitive areas” that he (in effect) refuses to. One I noticed is a fan fiction that postulates a love affair between Miss Obrien and “arguably the most underdeveloped character in the series, Cora, Lady Grantham.” A pair of lesbians. In another “poor Edith” is given a sarcastic and funny voice and describes the passive-aggressive relationship of Matthew (his sycophancy and making up to her) and Lady Mary (her cold indifference and potentially needling tongue) one New Year’s Day. They allow Robert (Lord Grantham to have his affair with Jane (the widowed housemaid?).

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From Mr Selfridge: the opening episode, Miss Agnes Towler gazing yearningly at the dress in the department store window

Chapter 17: Andrea Wright’s “This Wonderful Commercial Machine” defends and analyses “Gender, Class, and the Pleasures of Spectacle in The Paradise and Mr Selfridge compared to the 1970s House of Elliot. The 1970s is incomparably more genuinely feminist in outlook — for a start, the owners are women. These costume dramas have lots of “good girl messages” I’d call them — stay home, be obedient, don’t rock the values that sustain you supposedly and you’ll be safe and maybe unhappy critics who complain about the spectacle and shopping should realize that’s the point of these series; women go there for pleasure. The older program had 2 ambitious women now we have ambitious men.

Like The Bletchley Circle, The 1970s House of Elliot featured women in charge, dealing, negotating

Wright finds that conservative ideologies have taken over; we espape the present. In The Paradise something less authentic is taking over – modern retail is characterized by cavernous hypermarkets that lack all individiduality. The Paradise maintains its French origin in feel and tone. She carefully goes over the décor of the two series and what is projected – -an opportunity to revel. Respectability and reputation are central to women of all classes. Agnes the desperate girl of Mr Selfridge is matched with Denise of Paradise, a prey to men, clerks on display like the goods, women as a consumable pleasure. Wright compares the kinds and fates of the female characrers in the two series. They fail to offer progressive roles for women and reiterate rigid class structures. A French business women Clemence is a threat sexually as she seeks to win through sexual enticement; she is cast as a dangerous other. Normalcy restored. Agnes has little opportunity, she gets paternistilc support, a sexual education rather than emancipation. We have also another Miss Bunting, desperate over debt, who steals is not pardoned and kills herself.

The upbeat 1940s Cherry Ames/Sue Barton feel to the series can be seen in this kind of stylized cheerful promotional shot — connected to the above still, women going to work

Chapter 18: Louise Fitzgerald’s “Taking a pregnant pause: Interrogating the feminist potential of Call the Midwife.” It’s the story of a newly qualified midwife who arrives in Post WW2 London to take a position alongside other novice midwives and Anglican order of nuns – Jenny Lee, a middle class woman who once loved classical music. The midwife can be seen as a feminist figure because she has been cloaked in misogynies – female strength not liked, a scapegoat. Birth and reproductive rights continue to be a central feminist subject; the show breaks this aesthetic taboo. Abortion becomes a flash point in the series – a story of a backstreet abortion at a time abortion not legal; Nora Harding almost dies – we witness her screaming. Neither woman (a story of Trixie who is first seen painting her nails with blood red varnish) is judged by her community, but both women are in effect punished and abortion and sexual assault are seen as the result of sexual desire. After success of first season Heidi Thomas (the writer who is a centrally important person in costume dramas, especially British) began to try for feminist content. Midwives are a much more visible presence in the UK; US media did not like its bleak ideologies and socialist Health care system. It is feminocentric and about women – none of women defined by relationship to a man – it suggests a communitarian spirit and that domestic history is valuable history.

Another promotional still which does show the ambiance of at least the first season

The main concern of the series is the relationship of poverty and social welfare even if topics – domestic violence, abortion, rape, birth, prostitution are feminist issues – there are so very few programs with women at the center is one reason for its success. Channel 4’s reality TV show One Born Every Minute has a high prioritization of birth stories – central in popular culture today and does reinforce “fact’ of women’s biological difference from men – Call the Midwife is a ghettoizing of what it means to be feminist because midwifery childbirth and motherhood seen as female space. No new points of identification. There is a nostalgia in the way class identity and hierarchies are used (reinforced too). It is white – one nun makes an “unintentional racist” remarks does not provoke disquiet that working class women’s behavior does. A story about a black child is told without referring to the child’s race; the story about the man as a father and man. Call the Midwife does not offer new paradigms for identification nor systematically challenge sstems of oppression and inequity. The larger problem in feminist of racism is here.

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As general constant across the three parts of the book and different subgenres of costume drama and mini-series is the gender fault-line: there are men’s films and women’s films from the point of view of the characters and stories and from the point of view of how the screenplay writer, director and producer treat this content. And even if they are apparently feminist, written by women, feminocentric, sympathetic to women, they do not escape the hegemonic male dominance of our culture.

Chapter 20: Elke Weissmann’s “Transnational Complexity and the Critique of Masculinity in Ripper Street.

Promotional: Matthew Macfayden to the fore, the women ghostly

Elke Weissmann writes on a mini-series Ripper Street (2010-) produced by BBC and BBC America. She feels the mini-series “emphasizes the problem that is constituted by traditional patriarchal masculinities.” This drama exposes while it attempts to critique the results of these behaviors and especially a nostalgic view of them. It offers an intense emotional engagement with its characters — part of serial drama. A central character played by Matthew Macfayden is at first presented as a traumatized and admirable male; he’s a versatile actor and apparently unlike Walter White in Breaking Bad where (according to Weissmann) we see a good man gradually corrupted, Reid was corrupt to start out with. A large theme is the problem of policing: who is to police such a society when the police are part of the problem. Along the way she describes similar min-series which she aligns or contrasts with this one: none of them have I ever seen; Dixon of Dock Street (British 1955-76), Wire (HBO – -I know this one is much admired), Hill Street Blues (I know it was popular.

It’s telling how easy it is to find stills on the Net of profoundly wounded women with supposedly protective standing over them (from Ripper Street)

She thinks Deadwood the best of these, but it too makes an exaggerated use of violence, which is shown to be “deeply troubling”. Ripper Street manifests deep unhappiness and does allow for other concepts of masculinity. Violence is shown by the storylines to be a “key element of traditional, hegemonic masculinities,” is traumatizing and central to the problems men face too.

I’ve probably seen so little of this type of thing because I avoid high raw and continuing violence that I know is typical of a lot of filsm — Breaking Bad was an unusual program for me to watch

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Rob James-Cellier as Thomas Barrow, a homosexual footman who attempts to blackmail Charlie Cox, the Duke of Crowborough but finds the Duke has far more power than he (Downton Abbey, 2010, the first season)

I’ve omitted Chapter 12, Giselle Bastin’s treatment of the two Upstairs/Downstairs series and keep Chapter 19: Lucy Brown’s “Homosexual Lives: Representation and Reinterpretation in Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey to a minimum. As I remarked in the second of these blogs, I watched the two seasons of the 2012 Upstairs Downstairs and want to deal with the changes from the older to the new series separately, but here I would like to record the central insight of this essay. Lucy Brown shows that paradoxically the depiction of a gay footman in the 1970s, Alfred Harris, much more hostilely than that of Thomas Barrow, which actually ends on Harris’ execution as a spy is in a way far more truthful to the suffering and reality of life of homosexual men until the mid-1970s (Stonewall anyone?) than the sentimental way that Thomas is on the one hand sympathized with when it comes to his love relationships but otherwise stigmatized as a spiteful angry desperately snobbish man (in cohoots with that witch, Miss Obrien).

A single collection of essays has to leave some topics out. I was glad to see the emphasis in two of the essays on the importance and central function and dominance of the screenplay writer in the way the BBC does its actual film-making, but wished that there had been more about the business side of things. For example, a British friend told me:

it no longer produces drama itself. It commissions it from private companies — many of them (originally at least) comprising people who used to work at the Beeb. This new system has been in place for about twenty years, and certainly applies to Wolf Hall. Commissioning seems to work both ways — the idea may come from the Beeb, or the independent companies may pitch to them.

There are reasons to dislike this way of going about things, but it has resulted in many cases in higher production values — contrasting Wolf Hall with the 1970s Wives of Henry VIII shows the difference. It has also led to dumbing down, but Wolf Hall is not guilty of that.

Some the aspects of these dramas beyond dumbing down (short scenes, much less dialogue, itself much less complicated and thoughtful) which the essayists in the last part attribute to the power of audiences could be the effect of profit-making companies who want values that uphold their company and executives to be enacted.

I am a lover of historical fiction, biography, narrative history, historic fiction (older fiction) and think all these literary forms directly connected to, give rise to serial costume drama. I will be writing soon about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander (adapted from an amalgam of several of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, directed and written by Peter Weir, featuring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany).

Bettany as Stephen Maturin on the Galapagos islands, writing up his notes)

Ellen

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