Downton Abbey: Trying to Capture Lightning in a Jar.

 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 7^th 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.  

 

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