"Downton Abbey’s Sinking Ship"
Guest Writer: Tania Lown-Hecht

Friday, April 6, 2012

posted under , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[Below, Tania Lown-Hecht, a grad student affiliate in English and recipient of a Unit for Criticism travel grant last fall, writes about the representation of the estate house in Downton Abbey.]

Downton Abbey’s Sinking Ship

Written by Tania Lown-Hecht (English)

Downton Abbey, Masterpiece Theater/PBS’s dishy new drama about an early twentieth-century English estate, presents a sanitized view of England’s country house despite its engagement with scandal, gossip, and politics. Of course, the show’s rose-colored depiction of a “great house,” and the inter-class relations that entails, is partly what makes it such a hit with audiences. Stripped of the complexities of history, Downton Abbey’s country house is sunny and spacious, and viewers are more worried about who will kiss whom than they are about the class inequalities upon which the show and the aristocracy were built.

The show’s worshipful perspective on the country house should be no surprise to anyone who has heard Julian Fellowes, the show’s creator, speak about the program. In an interview about Highclere Castle (the estate where the fictional Downton is filmed), Fellowes marvels that the house’s size and style shows “the confidence of the late Victorians! The confidence of high empire!” This fascination with England’s landed estates seems to lack utterly any historical awareness that these houses were built and maintained by an oppressive class hierarchy and an expanding empire. The show’s representation of Downton’s interior space aligns with Fellowes’ historic amnesia and fantasies about life in an English country home. Fellowes, a self-described former “outsider,” now owns a manor house in Dorset and is a member of the House of Lords.


Title shot for Downton Abbey
The show’s representation of interior life takes liberties with historical reality: Downton’s basement has windows that let light stream in; the servants’ quarters in the attics, as Cecily Garber pointed out in an earlier post, are spacious and bright; the servants happily mend clothes and shine shoes at a scrubbed table in the basement during their time off; and the back-breaking work of washing sheets and hauling boiling water to the bath is notably absent from the diegesis. Long-shots of the house cater to historical fantasies about English country houses: the Earl of Grantham strides purposefully across the grounds with an obedient dog at his side. Back-lit at night, Downton appears to be a gothic castle; filmed from a low angle on a sunny day, it is an imposing fortress. In the title shot for the program, Downton Abbey rises powerfully over what seems to be a body of water, which reflects a darkened mirror image of the house below it. The double image of the house suggests two intertwined possibilities: the mirrored second house we see is both the basement and the reflection of the house above ground.

The relationships we view between the underclasses and the English aristocracy seem to take their cue from the title shot, presenting the two worlds as mirror images of one another. Episodes frequently alternate between scenes of the upstairs dining room, where the family gossips about the servants, and the basement kitchens, where the servants gossip about the family. The show juxtaposes the Earl’s daughters waking up in their sunny bedrooms with scenes of the servants waking up under crisp white covers (albeit several hours before the leisured family). As viewers, we are equally interested in the romance between the Earl’s daughter and the new heir to the house, as we are in the romance between the new valet and the head housemaid—creating a narrative equality that overtakes the material inequalities so seldom explored.

In the world of Downton, boundaries between the servants and the family are rarely contentious. The few scenes that show potential violations of the boundaries between servant-space and family-space are expurgated of political potential. When the Countess of Grantham steps into the servants’ quarters unannounced and overhears O’Brien (the lady’s maid) maligning the new heir to Downton, she chastises the servants. After she leaves, Thomas (the footman) complains, “this is our space, we can say what we like down here.” The scene opens up the possibility for the viewer to consider the experience of servants who live in a household that affords them almost no privacy or ownership over their personal space. However, the show blunts the potential political force of Thomas’s objection. Although modern viewers are likely to recognize the Countess’s intrusion as a violation of today’s norms of privacy, they are also likely to sympathize with her rather than O’Brien and Thomas--characters frequently portrayed as deceitful and manipulative.

To an attentive audience, Fellowes’s fantasy house unwittingly has something in common with the Titanic, which sinks on the day of the show’s premiere episode. When the Earl of Grantham reads the news of the Titanic, he laments the deaths of the third class passengers aboard— “the poor fellows below deck.” Yet neither he nor some other aspect of the show acknowledges the suffering of those “below deck” at Downton. Nor—so far—does the show give much indication of how tenuous the future of the English country house really is at this point in history. I have yet to watch the second season, but I can’t help wondering if Downton Abbey, like the English country house, is another sinking ship. Read more

"Upstairs, Downton?"
Guest Writer: Cecily Garber

Friday, March 23, 2012

posted under , , , , by Unit for Criticism


Bates (Brendan Coyle) and Anna (Joanne Froggatt) of Downton Abbey
[Below Cecily Garber, a grad student affiliate in English and recipient of a Unit for Criticism travel grant last fall, writes about the representation of class politics in Downton Abbey.]

Upstairs, Downton?

Written by Cecily Garber (English)

While I am as much a fan of Downton Abbey as any other lover of costume drama laced with intrigue and social commentary, a brief dip into the 1970s British series Upstairs, Downstairs, from which Downton clearly takes many cues, has made me think twice about how much social commentary Downton really has, particularly on economic disparity and class differences. Granted, I have only seen the first season of both Downton and Upstairs, Downstairs, but that is enough for me to know that many strands of Downton’s plot are inspired by Upstairs, Downstairs (e.g., both feature gay footmen involved with aristocratic houseguests, daughters with radical political ideas at odds with family heritage, and butlers with an unshakeable sense of dignity and propriety who run the house impeccably). But more interesting than superficial similarities are the ways that parallel strands of Downton and Upstairs, Downstairs play out differently, revealing different attitudes toward the master-servant relationships that are at the heart of both series.

Downton’s first episode features a stranger’s arrival at the estate, a convention that promises to initiate the audience into the customs of the great house by showing how the stranger, in this case the new valet Bates, adjusts to a new way of life. But Bates does not ask the kind of questions that an audience unfamiliar with Downton’s well-oiled system of service would ask. Rather, he appears to be immediately at home and, in fact, relieved to have arrived in this new world. Upon seeing his small and spare room in the attic, containing a twin bed, small dresser, and nightstand all washed cream white, he says, “Oh, yes, I shall be very comfortable here.” Bates is an outsider at Downton, but mostly because he is lame, not because he finds its habits objectionable or unusual. When learning his new duties from the footman, Bates opens a case of snuffboxes, which the master collects; “Strange,” he says, “how we live with this pirate’s hoard within our reach, yet none of it’s ours.” When he does finally remark on the strangeness of master-servant relationships, he doesn’t criticize it and uses the pronoun “we” when voicing this thought; already on his first full day, Bates identifies himself with his fellow servants and his place at Downton so much that he can articulate its inequities as an unquestionable commonplace.


Sarah (Pauline Collins) and Rose (Jean Marsh) of Upstairs, Downstairs
Upstairs, Downstairs opens with the arrival of a stranger too, but one that is a much ruder awakening. The young Clémence is to be the new under housemaid, and she presents herself by knocking on the front door of 165 Eaton Place in central London, the setting of the show. She is shooed to the basement door (unlike Bates who knows to go there and is first seen inside the house below ground). Upon entering the house, she is re-clothed and re-named and thrust into a world that looks unfair and illogical to her. “Clémence” is thought not to be a servant’s name, so she is quickly rechristened the simpler “Sarah.” Sarah questions the butler's authority, asking, “What makes you my better, I just want to know?”

Over subsequent episodes Sarah continues to question the way things are done, pushing the audience to question the system of service too. When she wakes up, she complains about the cold room and floor and the ill fit of the second-hand uniform she has to wear. In Downton the servants’ rooms generally look quite pleasant, washed with light and marked with a shabby chic grace, whereas in Upstairs, Downstairs the rooms are much darker. Sarah complains repeatedly about being stuffed in the attic at night and relegated to the basement for much of the day. She ends up leaving, not because she has an injury like Bates, but of her own volition because she has great imagination and an irrepressible personality, and she wants to see more of the world.


An anonymous tweet takes up Downton Abbey as a text for our times. 
In Downton, it is the unlikeable characters who lack integrity--for example, the lady’s maid O’Brien and the footman Thomas--who most often express strong discontent with their place and bring to light the cold facts of the servant-master relationship. Characters like Branson the chauffer, who question the system from sounder moral grounds, are marginal compared to Sarah. Upstairs, Downstairs thoroughly questions rules that the good servants in Downton quietly accept. I won’t give away the punch line of a pivotal episode of Upstairs, Downstairs’ first season, "I Dies of Love," in case any reader cares to it dig up, but I will say that it makes a mockery of the masters’ “benevolence,” their efforts to improve their servants’ lives; it clearly underscores the dark consequences of the stark differences between opportunities open to different classes.

In light of the growing income disparity in this country and elsewhere, it seems that the forty-year old series Upstairs, Downstairs, at least its first season, is more critically engaged in social debates than the infectious but hagiographic Downton Abbey. Considering the turbulent political atmosphere of 1971, the year of Upstairs, Downstairs’ first season, the earlier show’s more radical outlook may come as no surprise; at a time when “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland were nearly at their peak and debates about immigration to Britain were stormy too, class politics might have seemed relatively tame and well-trod. But then as now unemployment was exceptionally high—in 1971 it reached a post-WWII peak in the U.K.—which is perhaps one reason the unlikely show became so popular (the first season did not air until almost a year after it had been shot, and then at the unpromising time of 10 PM on Sunday evenings, yet went on to run for four more seasons, and ended to its producers’ great dismay only by its creators’ firm decision to do so). Period drama fans today, like their counterparts in 1971, might well appreciate less glorification and more defamiliarization of class differences that speak to disparity experienced in their own lives. Read more

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