{"id":255,"date":"2012-01-27T22:48:17","date_gmt":"2012-01-27T22:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=255"},"modified":"2024-05-28T08:14:41","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T12:14:41","slug":"what-should-i-do-with-the-dead-turk-in-the-bedroom-class-sex-and-otherness-in-downton-abbey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=255","title":{"rendered":"What Should I Do With the Dead Turk in the Bedroom? Class, Sex, and Otherness in Downton Abbey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Julian Fellowes\u2019 Downton Abbey<\/em> is fun and fascinating TV for lots of reasons.\u00a0 \u00a0It has an excellent script and superb acting, and the detailed development it gives just about all the major and minor characters is smartly set against a backdrop of dramatic social change as World War I invades the courtly rhythms of daily life at the Grantham\u2019s Downton Abbey estate and the village nearby.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s Upstairs Downstairs<\/em> merged with Brideshead Revisited<\/em>, but with more angst and turmoil for our even more dangerous and uncertain times.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In episode 3 of Season One, though, something really strange happens \u2014 a nighttime scene of seduction that is hallucinatory, melodramatic, and almost completely implausible, both in its set-up and, especially, its outcome.\u00a0 The episode involves a handsome young Turkish diplomat or embassy attach\u00e9, Kemal Pamuk, who tries to (and does?) seduce the eldest daughter of Lord Grantham, the owner of Downton Abbey.\u00a0\u00a0 How should we understand what happens?\u00a0 Why does this so smoothly modulated series so lose its composure when sex and an ethnicity foreign to \u201cEnglishness\u201d suddenly become central?\u00a0 For the presence of a Turkish seducer not only makes Lady Mary act almost completely out of character; it briefly throws into disarray of the stately pacing of the entire show.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

First, a few comments on that great pacing\u2014part of what creates Downton Abbey<\/em>\u2019s extraordinarily successful balance of intimacy and sweep, careful character portrayal and dramatic social history.\u00a0 Particularly intriguing is the show\u2019s exploration of the changing meanings of class divisions in England during the era before and during World War I. \u00a0U.S. TV shows just don\u2019t do class well.\u00a0 When they tackle the subject at all it is primarily through caricature.\u00a0 At first glance, it may seem that Downton Abbey<\/em> is only about the eternal British social divisions, where \u201ceveryone has their part to play,\u201d as Lord Grantham expounds at one point.\u00a0\u00a0 But a closer look, which each episode encourages us to do, reveals that everything that seems so stable about the British class system is actually shifting right before our eyes under the pressure of modernity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To begin with, there\u2019s considerable instability among the elite.\u00a0 This is primarily emphasized by Lord Grantham\u2019s family\u2019s long-running discussion about how best to cope with the fact that, unless a legal \u201centail\u201d is broken, their country estate and fortune may very well have to go to the closest surviving male heir, Matthew Crowley, a third cousin once removed, rather than to Lord Grantham\u2019s eldest daughter.\u00a0 Some members of the family are particularly scandalized because the potential heir is not just a mere appendage on the family tree; he holds down a solicitor\u2019s job in the grubby industrial city of Manchester. \u00a0 (Grantham is the family title; Crawley remains the family name. \u00a0One of the readers of this essay kindly corrected my confusion on this point.)\u00a0\u00a0 Matthew and his mother represent the rise of the English professional middle classes, and in a good many cases older aristocratic families had to make alliances with this new class in order to continue. \u00a0\u00a0Lord Grantham himself is an example from a generation earlier of such a strategic alliance with new money, for he too has been something of a class transgressor.\u00a0 He can keep his huge country estate in such pristine condition in part because he married Cora, a Jewish American millionaire whose fortune derives from her father\u2019s dry goods business in Cincinnati.\u00a0 (It\u2019s positively Henry Jamesian!)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lord Grantham\u2019s shrewd rebelliousness has been inherited especially by his youngest daughter, Sybil, who supports votes for women, scandalizes her grandmother, the formidable Dowager Countess, with her plans to work, and despises the class system that gives her freedoms while of course also binding her with all the obligations befitting a lady.\u00a0 Once the War gets underway, of course, these kinds of transfigurations of individuals and the class system as a whole accelerate, for social connections occur in the trenches that would be impossible at home.\u00a0 Thomas, the first footman in the Grantham household, hosts Matthew Crawley, an officer, for tea in a bunker, for instance.\u00a0 Upheavals on the home front are just as dramatic, as symbolized by Downton Abbey\u2019s plush rooms filled with doctors, nurses, and recuperating soldiers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Downton Abbey<\/em> raises fascinating questions about whether such changes in the British class system were structural and permanent, or temporary and superficial.\u00a0 Lord Grantham is proud of his boundary-crossing, but he understands it merely as expediency that he had to undertake in order to stay true to immortal British hierarchies.\u00a0 In the end, as he says to his possible heir, he sees himself merely as a \u201ccustodian\u201d of the Downton Abbey estate responsible for keeping it up and passing it on properly to the next generation.\u00a0 Social changes for him are mostly merely on the surface of society; underneath, the deep structure and ordained stratifications of British society must and should remain, a kind of eternal play in which, as he says, we all have our parts to play. \u00a0\u00a0He gives little sense that he can imagine the scripts being radically revised, though perhaps his daughters would have other opinions about this.\u00a0 Lord Grantham\u2019s mother, the Dowager Countess, not surprisingly, sees things similarly.\u00a0 As she puts it to Lady Sybil in an episode in Season Two, warning her, \u201cWar breaks down barriers, and when peacetime re-erects them, it\u2019s very easy to find oneself on the wrong side.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

More change may occur in the basement of the great house than in its parlors. \u00a0To its credit, Downton Abbey<\/em> shows great interest in the changes occurring \u201cdownstairs\u201d among the working classes, including the many Irish and English maidservants, cooks, footmen, valets, and others employed by the Granthams.\u00a0 In Season One, episode three, for instance, the maid Gwen is secretly studying typing and stenography in the hopes of being able to leave \u201cthe service\u201d to strike out on a different career path in a city\u2014one that she hopes will allow her to join the middle classes.\u00a0 Several of her superiors among the servants, most notably O\u2019Brien, are disgusted by her secret plan when it\u2019s revealed, while others are just made uneasy. \u00a0It\u2019s left to the two most sympathetic and generous servant characters, Mr. Bates and Anna, and the most rebellious of the Grantham daughters, Lady Sybil, to reassure Gwen that she should pursue her dream.\u00a0\u00a0 (A scene in episode 3 involving Mr. Bates and Anna and Gwen is particularly affecting because both Mr. Bates and Anna at this point are uncertain about their own futures.) \u00a0Further, by having Lady Sybil be so supportive of Gwen, Downton Abbey<\/em> is suggesting that some elements of the English upper classes actively encouraged social mobility among the working classes.\u00a0 It would be interesting to find out how true this was, or whether a character such as Lady Sybil represents Julian Fellowes\u2019 fanciful wish\u2014as a Conservative Peer in the House of Lords as well as the primary script-writer for and creator of Downton Abbey<\/em>\u2014about how things might or should have been.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gwen\u2019s dream of upward mobility and Lady Sybil\u2019s support, of course, are dramatically juxtaposed against the Dowager Countess\u2019 proclamation that the lower classes should not \u201crise above their station\u201d but do the work they were born to do. \u00a0Nonetheless, Downton Abbey<\/em> repeatedly shows that no one, rich or poor, may have a fixed \u201cstation\u201d any more, despite what the rich think.\u00a0 Some of the Downton Abbey staff are exhilarated at these prospects, while others are wary or fearful about them. \u00a0But just about all the characters, not just a privileged few, face life-changing choices. \u00a0It\u2019s the despicable characters, like O\u2019Brien and Thomas, who are most sure of what they want and how to plot to get it, while it\u2019s the honorable characters who most struggle how to reconcile personal hopes for change with their sense of obligation to others around them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2.<\/p>\n

Given all this nuanced writing and careful character development in Downton Abbey<\/em>, it\u2019s especially surprising when episode three in the first season suddenly gets a fatal attraction to sex, male power, and the allure of the East.\u00a0 A handsome young guest shows up in daughter Lady Mary\u2019s bedroom in the dead of night and seduces her (or rapes her, if that\u2019s your view)\u2014in the end it\u2019s pretty unclear just exactly what happens sexually between them.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s true it may a slight overstatement to say these developments are completely implausible, for Lady Mary has clearly become more than just a little intrigued with the dashing young man who has proven such a good horseman during that afternoon\u2019s fox hunt.\u00a0 When they return from the hunt, their fine clothes are fetchingly bespattered with drops of mud, their skin is flushed, and they can\u2019t take their eyes off each other.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But Lady Mary allowing herself to be seduced is not really in character.\u00a0 She\u2019s been portrayed up to this point as a very strong, controlled, and controlling person\u2014haughty, austere, with a very high opinion of herself and her beauty, not to mention a constant awareness of her unique responsibilities as her father\u2019s eldest daughter.\u00a0\u00a0 Julian Fellowes the scriptwriter tries to finesse this contradiction by having Lady Mary be angry and resistant at first to the young man\u2019s invasion of her bedroom.\u00a0 But in the last shot of them together that night we see her eventually embracing him and kissing him back.\u00a0 The show apparently believes that she wants<\/em> to give up being so responsible; her \u201cno\u201d doesn\u2019t really mean no<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The real question here is, how does Downton Abbey<\/em> portray the source of Kemal Pamuk\u2019s powers to Lady Mary?\u00a0 Is it his prowess on horseback, his cheekbones, or something else? \u00a0What\u2019s the relevance of the young man being Turkish<\/em>?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To answer that, we must first consider what hints we have about what happens behind the closed door. \u00a0First, there\u2019s a suggestion that Lady Mary, the epitome of self-control and self-regard, wants to be violated, and he\u2019s just the man to do it.\u00a0 Then something even odder occurs.\u00a0 Pamuk is in his twenties, active and healthy and obviously sexually experienced, but having sex with Lady Mary gives him a heart attack.\u00a0 What??\u00a0 When we next see Pamuk, he is lying naked on the bed barely covered with a sheet and staring vacantly at the exquisite wallpaper.\u00a0 Lady Mary, the head housemaid, and Lady Grantham (Mary\u2019s mother) desperately try to figure out how to lug Pamuk\u2019s body back to his guest bedroom before daybreak to avoid a major scandal.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Julian Fellowes would no doubt plead that this episode is based on a historical fact\u2014a foreign diplomat did indeed die in the bedroom of the daughter of his host in one of the country houses whose history Fellowes researched for Downton Abbey<\/em>.\u00a0 (See http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/culture\/tvandradio\/downton-abbey\/8820907\/Who-is-the-historical-model-for-Downton-Abbeys-sex-scandal.html<\/a> [.])\u00a0 But was this foreign diplomat really a healthy 20-something?\u00a0 I\u2019d be surprised.\u00a0 Even if so, so what?\u00a0 What is historically factual is not always plausible in a fictive world\u2014especially one that prides itself on its nuanced realism and one that has given us the kind of character that Lady Mary is.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Since the young man is Turkish, this means means that suddenly issues of race or ethnic difference have been introduced into the plot, not ones focusing on romance, or gender, or class among the English and Irish.\u00a0 \u00a0How is Pamuk\u2019s Turkish identity represented in Downton Abbey<\/em>?\u00a0 Well, here\u2019s where it gets really interesting\u2014and kinky, and relevant to the question of what really happens behind closed doors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To begin with, because Pamuk is a Turkish diplomat he represents a dangerous rival to the British empire, the Ottoman Turkish empire.\u00a0\u00a0 (His first name, Kemal, also recalls the name of great early twentieth-century Turkish leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.)\u00a0 Pamuk\u2019s portrayal on the show is completely schizophrenic.\u00a0 He\u2019s both more English than the English when it comes to certain skills, including horsemanship and the ability to captivate English maidenhood, and yet in most other ways he\u2019s portrayed as an uncivilized rake, a barbarian, a man far handsomer, skilled, and ruthless than any of his English rivals.\u00a0 Underneath his smooth veneer, Pamuk is, the show suggests, primarily driven by sex\u2014that\u2019s the real fox hunt going on here.\u00a0 Even more dangerously, to an \u201cEnglish\u201d point of view, is the fact that Pamuk is able to ignite an ungovernable sex drive in others\u2014not just in the normally adamantine Lady Mary, but also in Thomas, the normally hyper-controlled head footman.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And what kind of sex is<\/em> it, really, that Downton Abbey<\/em> wants us to believe proves so irresistible to Lady Mary?\u00a0 It\u2019s not clear what sex Pamuk and Lady Mary have, but we do know what he says to her beforehand:\u00a0 he tells her he knows how they can enjoy sex without vaginal intercourse (\u201cDon\u2019t worry, you can still be ready for your husband\u201d).\u00a0 This suggests that he\u2019s either going to teach her techniques that will really make her \u201cready for\u201d a new husband, or, more primly interpreted, that he pleasure her and himself while still leaving her technically a virgin, with oral sex or something more shocking.\u00a0 (As one blogger coyly put it, alluding to Last Tango in Paris<\/em>, \u201cOh, dear. I sure hope Thomas carried a stick of butter into Lady Mary\u2019s chambers.\u201d\u00a0 What lurid imaginations some in the Downton Abbey<\/em> audience have!)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And don\u2019t forget, earlier Pamuk had gotten Lady Mary\u2019s attention with the alluring comment that \u201cSometimes we must endure a little pain in order to achieve satisfaction.\u201d\u00a0 A little S&M, perhaps, stimulated by all those horses earlier being whipped by riding crops?\u00a0 The script\u2019s suggestiveness here is coy but clear.\u00a0 Under this suave Turk\u2019s civilized veneer lurks savagery, a lust for the domination and humiliation of others\u2014or at least a bit of controlled violence and pain mixed with pleasure. \u00a0Worst of all, but also most exciting perhaps, is that this English virgin (or part of her anyway) is attracted to being seduced by such a man.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pamuk is surprised by death, but Lady Mary afterwards endures a kind of death of her own.\u00a0 We watch as in scene after scene her whole marble veneer crumbles.\u00a0 She cries and has to leave dinner parties, pleading headache.\u00a0 And when speaking with Matthew, she suddenly admits to being frustrated by her life: \u201cWomen like me don\u2019t have a life. \u00a0We choose clothes and pay calls and work for charity and do the season, but really we\u2019re stuck in a waiting room until we marry.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This comes close to despair, and is a far broader response to the debacle than just bewilderment at her behavior that evening, or shock at Pamuk\u2019s death in her bed.\u00a0\u00a0 Something about him, or her, has caused all her confidence to collapse.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Lady Mary\u2019s sense of the gap between her behavior that night and what is expected of her as the eldest daughter of Lord Grantham?\u00a0\u00a0 The sex she had, the death that occurred, or some grisly intertwining of the two?\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever it is, she now sees her life as farcical, living in a mere \u201cwaiting room\u201d until a husband comes and defines her.\u00a0 (But it\u2019s not as if the life of a lady will be much different, for she knows it too will revolve around clothes, calls, charity\u2026.)\u00a0 Pamuk\u2019s male rivals among the gentry, like Evelyn Napier, the aristocrat and friend who brought him to Downton Abbey, express just rueful acquiescence to being bested as males by Pamuk.\u00a0 Lady Mary\u2019s response to Pamuk\u2019s virility and demise is much stronger.\u00a0 She now doubts the validity of her entire existence\u2014and the existence of all women like her.\u00a0 She\u2019s overcome by lassitude, doubt, and despair and spends a lot of time sitting and lying around in langorous depression.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Is there a precedent or analog for Lady Mary\u2019s posture and mood?\u00a0 Well, yes.\u00a0 In many ways it\u2019s not unlike the poses of light-skinned women shown in harems in paintings popular with the English in the nineteenth century, such as this one from 1892 portraying a courtesan named Leila after sex.\u00a0 It\u2019s by Sir Frank Dicksee, who was knighted for his work, and it\u2019s now in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London.\u00a0 \u00a0(See below.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The English in the Edwardian era were obsessed with the sexuality of Turkish and Arabian women in harems\u2014and its aftereffects, if that\u2019s the right word.\u00a0 They were thrilled yet horrified at the belief that women in harems were chattel completely at the mercy of male power, imprisoned in hidden spaces, surrounded by luxury yet also full of a kind of otiose melancholy.\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s more than just a hint in Downton Abbey<\/em> that Lady Mary, disillusioned about her future and with her reputation in danger, feels as if she too is now imprisoned chattel.\u00a0 Though supremely privileged, she feels bound not just by her own bad choices but by male power and prerogatives, \u201ctrapped in a waiting room\u201d as she puts it.\u00a0 Of course the harem analogy goes only so far: the males who rule Lady Mary\u2019s fate are English, not Turkish.\u00a0 But Pamuk\u2019s seduction of her will have far-reaching and as yet unknown consequences for her and her family: O\u2019Brien schemes how she can use the rumors, gossip circulates in London, and even Lady Mary\u2019s sister Edith, after a spat, decides to write the Turkish ambassador about her suspicions in order to get revenge on her sister.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Two Grantham male heirs die by water\u2014one on the Titantic<\/em>, to open Season One, and one related to a bathtub fall, to close Season One.\u00a0\u00a0 Over the last one, Matthew Crowley, is cast a shadow:\u00a0 he can\u2019t know whether Lady Mary is attracted to him for himself or for his probable inheritance.\u00a0\u00a0 Just as maddeningly, when Lady Mary distances herself from him, as she often does, she seems also to be struggling with knowing whether she\u2019s acting prompted by money or by her heart.\u00a0\u00a0 When she tells him \u201cdon\u2019t trust anything I say,\u201d it\u2019s hardly helpful.\u00a0 But why is Lady Mary so tangled up about her own desires?\u00a0 It\u2019s arguably not mainly the legal \u201centail\u201d that is causing this, but a forbidden piece of tail she had the night after a foxhunt.\u00a0 The narrative tension sustaining Seasons One and Two of Downton Abbey<\/em> is primarily formed by the question of whether Matthew and Mary will unite.\u00a0 If not, Lord Grantham’s daughters will be legally exiled permanently from their father\u2019s and mother\u2019s money and land.\u00a0\u00a0 All they will get will basically be charity.\u00a0 A Turk who\u2019s present for part of just a single episode thus plays a huge role in Downton Abbey<\/em>\u2019s eventual outcome.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just the Granthams who are shadowed by the specter of the Turk.\u00a0 The allure and threat that Kemal Pamuk presents to the English gentry itself is quintessentially Orientalist.\u00a0\u00a0 Pamuk can outdo them at their own rituals and then violate the English behind their backs.\u00a0 Yet these are not just centuries-old English fantasies and fears about Turkey and the Orient that we are entertained by, but a TV show written for broadcast over a century later, in 2010-12.\u00a0 Underneath our continuing fascination with and fear of \u201cOriental\u201d sexuality perhaps lies a still painful and still unresolved unease with the fate of British character and the British empire itself.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

A footnote before I move on to the issue of how other people\u2019s sexuality is portrayed in Downton Abbey<\/em>.\u00a0 The model-handsome actor playing Pamuk, Theodore James, is anything but Turkish.\u00a0 His online bio says he\u2019s English, Oxford-born.\u00a0 But then again his real last name, until it was changed, wasn\u2019t James but Taptiklis, which is Greek.\u00a0 Also of interest:\u00a0 Julian Fellowes himself has connections to the Arab world, for his father was an Arabist and a diplomat and Fellowes himself was born in Cairo.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 An author can have connections to the Arab world and still be seduced by the tropes of Orientalism, however.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3.<\/p>\n

Most of Downton Abbey<\/em> is not high melodrama and lurid suggestiveness about sex, of course. \u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s about the difficult life choices everyone faces, even the most privileged, and at the end of Season One none of the characters get what they have most wished for except Gwen and Sybil (and perhaps Mrs. Patmore).\u00a0\u00a0 In regard to sex, most of honorable characters in the series, aristocrats and servants alike, learn they must defer sexual pleasure.\u00a0\u00a0 Precisely here<\/em> is where Downton Abbey<\/em> strongly suggests that\u2014despite Lady Mary\u2019s and Pamuk\u2019s acts, and despite all the monstrosities that World War I inflicts\u2014British character remains solid and strong.\u00a0\u00a0 For all the heroes in the show, male and female, gentry and servant, know that \u201ccharacter\u201d means self-control.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The alliance that appears to be most active and sexually healthy, Lord and Lady Grantham\u2019s, is pointedly one first forged for financial convenience; it was only after the marriage, Lord Grantham boasts, that he then fell in love with his wife.\u00a0 Through such details and plot-lines, Downton Abbey<\/em> hints that the power of sexuality is so volatile that it is best corralled within strict social structures.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The other marriage that figures prominently in the plot is Mr. Bates\u2019, and it\u2019s a nightmare whose sulfuric fumes we can just smell behind Bates\u2019 grim silence about unmentionables in his past.\u00a0\u00a0 Sex, of course, hardly seems the source of Mr. Bates\u2019 problems with his wife, as opposed to greed, slander, and revenge.\u00a0 But Mr. Bates\u2019 strict control of his attraction to the maidservant Anna is coded strongly as one of the things that define his new self\u2019s integrity.\u00a0 It\u2019s a strange kind of honor based on shame:\u00a0 he\u2019s so ashamed of his own past that he refuses to defend himself against allegations that he knows to be false.\u00a0 But the show suggests that\u2019s the most honorable thing about him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When it comes to the two most scheming and unlikeable characters in the show, the servants O\u2019Brien and Thomas, they too follow the general pattern of keeping a tight control over sexuality.\u00a0 This is what makes them so interesting, as if they are demonic inversions of what makes other characters \u201cgood.\u201d\u00a0 For both O\u2019Brien and Thomas, for the most part, are masters of self-control, not to mention disguise.\u00a0 \u00a0In both their cases, furthermore, their sexuality is cast as deviant, though in different ways.\u00a0 Thomas, like Lady Mary, ironically, can\u2019t resist Pamuk\u2019s devilish charms. \u00a0\u00a0For someone as ruthlessly selfish and intelligent as Thomas is\u2014he knows the war is coming before anyone else, and secures a medical assistantship that he believes will prevent him from being sent to the front lines\u2014succumbing to an urge to paw Pamuk proves to be a dangerous slip in his normal icy self-control.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As far as O\u2019Brien goes, she\u2019s a mystery.\u00a0 Whatever her past has been, she seems now completely sexually repressed, more aroused by power and revenge than any prospect of sex.\u00a0 Yet she\u2019s also obsessed with others\u2019 sexuality and constantly alert to how it may make them vulnerable to her.\u00a0 (Thus in particular her shrewd and accurate guess about what happened in Lady Mary\u2019s room, and her obsession with calculating how best to use this information.)\u00a0 Then there\u2019s the case of O\u2019Brien\u2019s strange hairdo, featuring curls on either side of her forehead like curtains. \u00a0She has a strange idea of beauty; it\u2019s not clear whether she regards her hairstyle as making her look respectable, or whether she\u2019s just indifferent to how she looks. \u00a0 [One commentator on this essay suggested that O’Brien’s hairstyle is Victorian, revealing how fundamentally old fashioned she is. \u00a0 That may be right.]\u00a0\u00a0This odd blindness or backwardness in O’Brien regarding her appearance contrasts with other elements in her character, which are all about her future survival and control, such as her doling out attentiveness and deference as she manipulates Lady Grantham.<\/p>\n

Whatever O\u2019Brien\u2019s mystery and her past are, there\u2019s a powerful undercurrent of something dangerous going on in all her scenes with Thomas, swirling in the air as fitfully as the smoke from their constant cigarettes.\u00a0 She seems old enough to be his mother, yet they repeatedly stand or sit together as closely and intimately as conspirators or lovers.\u00a0 Of course many things shift dramatically at the end of Season One, and one of them is that O\u2019Brien scares even herself in the lengths she will go to keep her position in the Grantham household. \u00a0Thomas, meanwhile, secures his way out and leaves O\u2019Brien without a look back.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how to conclude this.\u00a0 Lots of conclusions suggest themselves.\u00a0 But this piece has long been too long, so I\u2019ll offer one last thought.\u00a0\u00a0 For a series so fixated on the virtues of self-control\u2014with Lady Mary\u2019s and Kemal Pamuk\u2019s escapade being the prime example of the havoc let loose when self-control is lost\u2014Downton Abbey<\/em> in the end may suggest that those who best survive the world\u2019s changes do so not through self-control but through acts of generosity\u00a0<\/em>performed with grace.\u00a0\u00a0 The Dowager Countess decides she doesn\u2019t need to win the prize for Best Rose yet another year and gives it to a humble gardener.\u00a0\u00a0 Mr. Bates breaks the rules for once and offers a tray of tea decorated with a flower to a sick Anna.\u00a0 Sybil helps Gwen, making the youngest of Lord Grantham’s daughters happy in a way sharply contrasted with her sisters. \u00a0\u00a0Matthew says \u201cI couldn\u2019t steal your life\u201d to Lavinia, his fianc\u00e9e, after his wound, an act of courage that takes even more guts than anything he did on the battlefield.\u00a0\u00a0 And Lady Mary in particular makes one gift after another to others in the final episodes of Season Two, including to Matthew and to Lavinia. It’s true she does this rather gritting her teeth and willing herself to do it. But she does it. \u00a0By the end of Season Two she may indeed have grown more than any of the other characters.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, being a good Brit, and a writer honorably in the lineage of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, not mention Upstairs Downstairs<\/em> and Brideshead Revisited<\/em>, Julian Fellowes would perhaps offer the observation that no act of generosity can be performed without self-discipline.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blogger \u201cMarlyK\u201d on the bedroom episode:\u00a0 Basket of Kisses: Smart Discussion About Smart Television. \u00a0http:\/\/www.lippsisters.com\/2011\/05\/18\/downton-abbey-\u2013-episode-3-\u2013-do-you-promise-not-to-tell\/<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On Julian Fellowes:\u00a0 http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Julian_Fellowes<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On Downton Abbey<\/em> characters in general:\u00a0 Enchanted Serenity Period Films Blog.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/enchantedserenityperiodfilms.blogspot.com\/2010\/09\/meet-characters-of-downton-abbey.html<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Clive Aslet, \u201cWho Is the Historical Model for Downton Abbey\u2019s Sex Scandal?\u201d\u00a0 The<\/em> Telegraph<\/em> 11 October 2011.\u00a0 http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/culture\/tvandradio\/downton-abbey\/8820907\/Who-is-the-historical-model-for-Downton-Abbeys-sex-scandal.html<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For the Dicksee painting, see The Tate Gallery\u2019s website \u201cThe Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting\u201d (2008).<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/britain\/exhibitions\/britishorientalistpainting\/explore\/harem.shtm<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julian Fellowes\u2019 Downton Abbey is fun and fascinating TV for lots of reasons.\u00a0 \u00a0It has an excellent script and superb acting, and the detailed development it gives just about all the major and minor characters is smartly set against a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,1],"tags":[25,42,39,23,41,40],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}