Not only has Downton Abbey presented itself as an aesthetic play land (I say nothing about its depth), it has succeeded as a seductive treatise of privilege. It seems that across the pond Downton has lost its luster even as it continues to do well here in the states. Here, where we never really had the feudal-like system in which people worked, ate, and slept in others' home for grueling hours at little pay: well, we had slavery, but the show helps us forget that, too.
Andrew O'Hehir critiqued films like The Help for helping white audiences to see past racial injustices through a lens of contemporary morality in which we get to say, "Ah, yes, if I were in that place and time, I would have been one of those good white people who saw the system as unfair." Perhaps you/I/we would have; perhaps.
My five year stint in Louisiana taught me the phrase, "just like one of the family." Those words came from a number of my white students when referring to black women who worked in their childhood homes as housekeepers, child care providers, and general "help". The students who repeated the mantra, "just like one of the family," did so with genuine affection for a person that often served as a surrogate mother whom they could talk about things "I could never mention to my parents." The children did love these women, but members of the family they were not; often not educated and with little work experience outside their home raising their own children, who sometimes sat at home alone while their mothers tended to their employers' own, the women received meager pay and could be easily replaced. The employment afforded some women a paying job they may not have found elsewhere, but their ample availability for work spoke to the nature of a social order at play.
The people living in the homes of Downton certainly seem just like members of the family; just recently Lord Grantham paid for a plaque to honor his head-cook's late nephew. A few seasons ago the whole family—that is, the family with money— rallied to bring William to the manor house following a war injury that he might die at home—again, the manor house where he had worked. The storyline only helped to solidify the idea that the servants lived in a natural orbit around the family, seeing the place where they worked from before sunup to after sundown as home.
The show reminds me sometimes of Gone with the Wind, where Mammy (a woman whose position is also her name) provides the white heroine, Scarlett, a conscience first as a slave then as (presumably) paid help. Mammy's presence as the now-free, ever-loyal, and still-working for her white masters reminds us that she's just like one of the family, so long as that means she gives to her employers' as though they were her family but they never have a place for her at the table as though she were their family.
Often we cannot help ourselves; we always root for the main character. Romantic identification, we call it, wanting to see the protagonist prevail even in conflict with our morals (House of Cards, anyone?). Bertolt Brecht coined the phrase "alienation effect"—well, he called it Verfremdungseffekt—to describe the experience art might create to break audience's romantic identification with the narrative's protagonist. Brecht wanted us to examine the hero more objectively. Alas, Downton Abbey is all romance, no alienation.
Upstairs, Downstairs helped viewers to firmly connect and care for the family of employers and also see their occasional indifference and disrespect to the staff—in the first episode a maid is hired and then renamed in the same breath to something more pleasing to the lady of the house's ear. The tendency to make the employers sometimes unsympathetic, and the staff also flawed, faded with time as the characters lost their third dimension to become more easily likeable from all sides.
At Downton's start there seemed the chance we might get some of the sensibility from Upstairs. As we are introduced to life at Downton we meet servants beginning a day's work, forced to tend to the house without the paying family ever seeing them, saving the moneyed folk from a breakfast spoiled by seeing others work. Anna, a housemaid we have always been charmed by, laments being woken—to be ready to dress someone else—pleading to the universe to be wake on her own accord for once.
 |
| Thomas: servant, villain, realist |
The footman-cum-under butler, Thomas, provides the show a somewhat reliable villain. How do we know he's so bad? He keeps questioning everyone in the servant hall living and dieing with the happiness and sorrow of the people whose house they tend. In the first season, especially, Thomas raises the ire of his fellow employees whenever he suggests they care more about the people upstairs than is ever reciprocated. True, Thomas's harsh comment about the lady of the house's miscarriage went a little far, but his point remained that servants wept for their employer's loss when they cannot count on such intense sympathy in return, not in reality at least.
Rather than denying or shaming an in-house employee having concern for other humans, even those they work for, I mean to highlight the fantasy Downton perpetuates that class hierarchies can be filled with mutual love and affection, that life as a servant can be rather nice, and that the system of differences works just fine so long as you look at it from the right side of the green baize door. In recent episodes the cook and head butler, alike, have bemoaned the march of time, signaled by the absence of live-in help and the rise of the labour party. Here the servants worry about a world run a muck, where the class system has broken down, even just a little. You see, it was a good system; everyone agreed.
I do appreciate Downton's attempts at progressiveness. Thomas, the sort-of-openly gay character, gets to keep his job, he even gets a promotion. Another member of staff urges him to accept his sexuality, as does a physician, though with a slightly more realistic (to the time) suggestion he just accept it and forget it. Of course, the script generally elides actual discrimination of the period—hell, this period—in the attempt to make everyone seem always good. (On the plus side for Downton [thinking back to a storyline from Upstairs], the homosexual servant may be sort of sinister, but at least he has avoided being hung for murder, at least so far.)
Tonight I'll watch Downton and probably enjoy it. I won't think about the realities it masks or how it invites me to forget my own history, personal and cultural; I'll just root for Anna to be free, Isobel to find love, Edith to find happiness, and for Lord Grantham to find it somewhere in his generous, thoughtful heart to love his granddaughter(!). I suppose that's the secret to the show's success.
No comments:
Post a Comment