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 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.