Downton Abbey, Psychoanalysis, Comfort, Modernity, Psychology of Downton Abbey
My father had an irritating and endearing trait. When we would watch movies on TV, he would
say the next line before it was spoken.
This was not because we were seeing Casablanca for the umpteenth time
and he had memorized the classic lines, but because he could anticipate the dramatic
moment and knew something about the ways that Hollywood writers capture them.
Much to my children’s dismay, I practice this habit. Of course, it feels different from
the inside. I have a sense of what is
occurring and feel able to “co-author” it.
It feels less annoying and more powerful. My children let me know that, of course, from
their position it is as annoying now as it ever was.
Nowhere have I had the feeling of knowing what was coming,
and feeling powerfully on top of it, than when watching Downton Abbey. The plot lines in this six season series and
the first movie following that are predictable – but not to the point of
triteness, and the resulting convergences are comforting. This is a world that, even as it is falling
apart, is about regularity and, oddly, exposes some of the bedrock principles
of western romantic thought as being based in a fantasy that could only be
produced in the lives of incredible privilege – lives lived with a certain kind
of oblivion to the lives of others all around – including the servants living
under the same roof – while also engaging in what appears to be noblesse
oblige.
Despite the predictability of the individual plots, the writers
of this series have learned from Seinfeld
– and before that M*A*S*H; they have multiple interrelated plots creating a
musical experience for the watcher, especially as they shift between plot-lines,
often using the opening of a door in a new scene as the mildly disorienting transition
point from the closing of the door in the prior scene.
Another important element in a series of this length is managing
to keep the characters and plot lines closely enough aligned that the series
doesn’t become so unfocused that it falls flat.
Like Schitt’s
Creek, this series uses a nuclear family and the de facto family of
servants that care for them as the critical mass holding the action in a tight
orbit. The writers rotate in, but at
least as importantly, rotate out the characters that fill in around the edges. They seem especially good at letting one or
two dimensional characters – characters that are either too morally upright to
be true or too thoroughly despicable to be redeemable – to disappear. Those that initially appear unidimensional
and end up staying develop in interesting ways and we discover they have flaws
– or virtues – that we couldn’t initially appreciate.
All of this is very well and good, but the primary reason
that this series resonates for me as a psychoanalyst has to do with the
particular time frame that it is representing and the social fabric that it is
calling attention to. Even though most
of the action centers on the “everyday” lives of a minor royal family and the
people who serve them, the action spans the psychoanalytically critical time
from 1912 – just before the First World War – the time when Freud had finished
describing his second great model of the mind – to 1926 – the time
when Freud had finished his third and final revision his theory of the
mind.
Freud’s change in mental models was necessitated apparently,
according to the dominant narrative, by the need to account for the massive
slaughter of human beings that occurred in the war. We needed a model that was not just based on
love (OK, sex) but one that acknowledge aggression (OK, he called it the Death
Instinct). The Downton Abbey series
allows us to expand our thinking about why it is that Freud’s model of the mind
had to become more complex.
In the beginning of the fictional series, the household
headed by Robert Crowley (Hugh Bonneville), the
7th Earl of Grantham, and presided over by his butler, Mr. Carson (Jim Carter), is in
crisis because Robert’s union with his wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern)
has ‘only’ three daughters – and thus no male heir, and the closest living
relative, to whom the eldest daughter, pretty but sharp-tongued and conniving
Mary Crawley (Michelle
Dockery) has been betrothed, dies, along with his brother, aboard the
Titanic, and the new distant cousin who is now going to be in line to become
the Earl is (gasp) someone who earns his living; Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) is a lawyer
of all shocking things. And he is not
too keen on leaving the world of earning a living to join the aristocracy, but
he and his equally upper middle class mother Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) move
to Downton Abbey to see what all the fuss is about. Even as Matthew comes to see the virtues of
the aristocratic lifestyle, his mother continues to have liberal, progressive
and very bourgeoisie values – values that put her at odds with the family matriarch,
Robert Crowley’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (played by the great
Dame Maggie Smith). There is a helpful family tree on the Wikipedia Page.
Meanwhile, downstairs, the house is run not just by the
butler, but by the chief housemaid, Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan). The gender politics that play out between
them, and between all of the characters, is a central theme of the series. Indeed, my Mother-in-law, who loves period
pieces, could not continue watching the series because of the (reality based)
treatment of women. As difficult as it
can be to watch, the plots upstairs and downstairs frequently revolve around
the women who, despite having a power structure that is stacked against them,
are generally more than a match for the men who, stuck in their roles and
wielding their inherent power, do not have to be as nimble or creative in the
inevitable power struggles.
The series begins with an unholy alliance between Cora
Crowley’s Lady’s Maid Sarah O’Brien (Siobhan Finnernan) and
Thomas Barrow (Robert
James-Collier), the forces of evil, and Robert Crowley’s valet, Mr. Bates (Brendan Coyle) who is maligned,
physically challenged and allied with young Mary Crowley’s Lady’s Maid Anna (Joanne Froggatt), the
endearing and beleaguered forces of good.
Additional members of the downstairs contingent include the cook and her
assistant, various footmen and maids, and the servants at other houses, including
especially the Dowager Countess’s.
The first great turmoil involves the First World War, the
war that would change Freud’s viewpoint on the world. In the British Census of both 1900 and 1910,
there were more people employed in service than in agriculture. Service was necessary to make a house run –
there weren’t washing machines or even electric irons, much less automatic dishwashers
and central heating. Indeed plumbing and
electricity were in short supply and survival required a group effort. A rigid hierarchy of class and role supported
civilized living, and the rules that governed this hierarchy extended beyond
such things as choice (or lack thereof) of profession and extended into how
various courses of meals were served and what implements were used to serve
them.
In England, and throughout Europe, this hierarchical system,
which had arisen during agrarian times, was still very much tied to the land,
though the wealth that was being generated was increasingly occurring through
exploiting colonies and through commerce.
The aristocracy, tied to the land and to traditional ways of supporting
themselves were being replaced by a capitalistic system that was reliant on a
meritocracy less focused on position and connection and more on one’s ability
to wield capital to create new wealth.
Freud’s patients were largely children of industrialists who
had achieved their wealth through hard work (like the newspaper man whose
ability to be ruthless leads him to be wealthy enough to woo Mary Crawley. He recognizes in her a kindred spirit, but she
doesn’t like it when someone else uses her connivances against her). Like the newspaper man, Freud's patients' families were former members
of the middle class who used their new wealth to live like aristocrats, with hot
and cold running servants, and their children were “ruled” by aristocratic top
down rules that didn’t leave much room for things like free sexual
expression. Freud helped to loosen the rules against sexual expression and this led his patients, but also the class as a whole to become less symptomatic.
One of the central plotlines in Downton Abbey has to do
with a downstairs/upstairs love affair where the potential for moving between
worlds and the tension involved in that is played out. One of the other plotlines is a perfectly
lovely affair between a proper English aristocratic woman and a man who is in a
marriage that is a marriage in name only.
We recognize (and ultimately even the dowager recognizes) the inhumanity
that the proper British rules have imposed on this deeply loving couple.
Freud’s articulation of sex as a deeply human expression helped fuel some of the transitions that occurred
in social mores and ethics in the modern era that is dawning at Downton Abbey. But this also opened us up to a variety of
things that weren’t allowed before – and these included the upward mobility of
classes of individuals who had previously not been educated. And we now have to contend with aggression as
well as sex not just because of war, but because of industry. We also have to contend with minds that are
not as docile as they had been. Whether a
member of the upstairs class or the one downstairs, everyone is thinking more
consistently about their survival and they are struggling with how best to
manage that in a world that is not as rigidly
scripted as it once was.
This modern world – the world of agendas and multitasking
and trying to get ahead, not as the dowager does through intrigue and
intimidation but as the head footman does through getting the goods on others (OK,
the dowager is not above doing that, too), but a world that will become ruled
one day by a news feed that tries to grab our attention away from what’s
important – the people that are in the room with us and about whom we deeply
care - this is a world that I am loathe to enter.
So, Downton Abbey is reassuring. When I grew up, I was taught that every man
at the table should stand when a woman was being seated, and one of those men
should be pushing the chair in for her.
Seriously, when I was growing up, I pushed my mother’s chair in for her
every night at the beginning of dinner.
Now let the record show that she had just prepared that dinner, brought
it to the table, and would, after she sat through dinner, supervise the
cleaning of the dishes and the kitchen, but by golly I was chivalrous. And let the record show that I no longer do
this. And if I did, the reluctant wife
would not approve!
By this I mean to point out that the Downton Abbey rules
were part of what we would now call institutionalized sexism (and there is
plenty of institutionalized classism, the first cousin of racism, on
display). The old ways were not better –
unless the rules were working for you – but they were clearly defined. There were rules. As we move towards a world of gender bending,
work/life balance bending, disruption worshipping, and climate upheaval, it is
nice to return to a place that feels safer and more predictable, even as the
telephone and electricity and motorized vehicles intrude into the sacred spaces
that have been inhabited in more or less the same way for centuries. Because we have navigated those changes, they
are less threatening than those that we will face tomorrow morning.
So Freud’s multiple achievements shine through. Not only did
he question the status quo before the first world war, helping to expose that
we have much more complex subjectivities than the objectively defined
romantic/classist world suspected, he adjusted to the sweeping changes that he
had been part of and revised his model of the mind not just because he wanted
to more fully account for the human condition, but to track the ways in which
that condition was changing as people relied more and more on living by their
wits and revising the way they engaged with the world on the fly rather than consciously
accepting the world and its rules while the unconscious rebelled – and became
symptomatic as a means of expressing that rebellion.
Where the pre-war Crawleys and their servants know their
places and operated from within those places, the post war Crawleys and their
servants adapted to changing situations:
·
The Dowager Countess moves from seeing her
distant, relative by in-law middle class nursing member of the family Isobel as
someone to be discounted and dominated, to a worthy adversary and, ultimately,
to a close kin with whom she has much in common and upon whom she can
rely.
·
Mr. Carson, the butler who is the soul of
decorum and doing everything properly, becomes, in the movie sequel, a henchman
in a minor palace coup, taking part in deceiving none other than the King’s
butler, something that decorum would never have allowed in the old world.
·
The servant who is transformed, against his
principles, into a family member, fights against the forces that he once swore
his fealty to. (I am straining here to
be vague enough that if you haven’t yet seen this, it won’t spoil it for you). In an upstream irony, the young revolutionary
comes to appreciate the virtues of the old ways (siding with the viewers in
being comforted by them).
·
The servant who is vile and repugnant turns out
to be a tortured soul, repressing himself in ways that make him alienate those
around him (pre-war), and then develops, post-war, into a self-possessed and
productive leader of a team that once rejected him. No longer needing to hide behind a veil of
superiority as a means of hiding his defects, he can allow his virtues to
shine.
I think there are plenty of other examples, but I will let
those central plot and character development lines make the case that Downton
Abbey presents the shift from the repressive pre-war period where anxiety was focused
on a fear of following the rules to a post war experience of being anxious
about being able to find one’s way in a changing and more complex world. We moved from being victims, if you will, of
what others expected of us – whether we lived upstairs or downstairs – to being
at the mercy of what we expect of ourselves.
Downton Abbey, for all its predictability (and in part because
of that predictability), has been a reliable and comforting companion as we
have drifted back into isolation and uncertainty about the future of the
pandemic. That said, it has played a bit
of havoc with my dreams. I find myself
sliding into a state of unknowing in them – as if I, too, had become caught up
in doing things right – and not in finding my own path (a lifelong conflict for
me). Here I am, facing the last part of
my life, happy with having successfully navigating the first part of it, but
what have I sacrificed by following a traditional path to comfort and
well-being?
Part of what becomes exciting – in those moments when I can
come out of feeling mired in the isolation and uncertainty of COVID related issues – is the possibility that
in my own smaller reflection of Freud’s achievement, I might be able to make
sense of the brave new world that we will encounter whenever it is that we are
free to move about the world again. Who
is it that we are in process of becoming?
What new models of the mind do we need to have available to us to help us
understand the turmoil that we are embroiling ourselves in and the new
opportunities that are only just now available to us?
This identification with Freud and with developing along
with the world into new ways of being sounds noble, but it is in conflict with
the comfort that I feel in the connection with the Crowleys and the old ways of
functioning. Couldn’t we just linger a
little longer with what is familiar? I
guess there will be a new movie version of the series coming out in the spring,
and that will afford a moment to slip back into something more comfortable.
To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
The reflection on how Freud adapted his theories to reflect what was happening in the world is helpful.
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