Ross carrying Demelza home after proposing marriage (Poldark, episode 1:5)
Julie Anne Taddeo
Rape in the Poldark Narrative
On 5 October 1975, the first episode of the BBC series Poldark (1975–1977) aired. Based on the historical novels by Winston Graham, the series follows British army officer Ross Poldark, recently returned from fighting the war in the colonies, and his struggles to rebuild his ancestral home and mining business in Cornwall. In his absence, his beloved Elizabeth Chynoweth has engaged herself to his weak-willed but wealthier cousin, Francis Poldark. But he soon finds solace in the form of a young street urchin, Demelza Carne, and eventually makes her his teen bride. Captain Poldark seems the perfect romantic hero: tall, dark, brooding, and his handsome face marred by a scar—a souvenir from the war and, as Graham writes, “a symbol of the nonconformity of his nature, the unabiding renegade.”[1] By the end of its first season, the television program had garnered fifteen million viewers and was so popular that clergymen in Cornwall had to reschedule Sunday-evening services. As broadcaster Hilary Oliver recalls in the 2008 BBC Four documentary Cult of Poldark, “At 7pm on a Sunday evening, the streets were empty. We all went to offices the next day and we all got on with our lives, but that Sunday night television serial lifted us out of all that.”[2]
In the decades that followed, the continuing popularity of the Poldark books and TV series helped revitalize the Cornish region, once known for its tin and copper mines, but economically hurting in the 1970s; tourists flocked (and still do) to the newly rebranded “Poldark Country,” complete with “decorative young wenches,” miners in clean overalls, and an eighteenth-century tableau with a “Ross & Demelza kitchen and parlour.”[3] Not surprisingly, heritage scholars lament this “narrative of quaintness” that, in their opinion, obscures the history of mining and the postwar problems of unemployment that had struck this formerly prosperous area.[4] Similar criticisms haunt historical TV programming in general, painting such costume dramas as Poldark (and Downton Abbey [2010– ]) as conservatively nostalgic and escapist. But as media scholar Jerome de Groot counters, such programs have “the potential to include dissident positions” and to be “flexible and innovative . . . problematic or challenging” even as they use familiar heritage tropes; in short, the period costume drama “fosters a more nuanced understanding” of the past, as well as the immediate context in which it is consumed by its fans.[5]
The series crossed the Atlantic, airing from 1977 to 1978 on Masterpiece Theatre, which since its inception in 1971 has made an effort to take up the BBC’s mantle of “quality programming.” And Poldark’s popularity has not waned—repeatedly listed as one of the “top ten” favorite Masterpiece Theatre programs, Poldark was released on VHS in 1993 (“The Cornish Cpt. Rides Again!”) and on DVD in 2010, described by an LA Times reviewer as “a cure for your Downton Abbey blues.”[6] Social media sites like Facebook and the Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board connect old and new fans (primarily in Britain and the United States), while YouTube tributes to Ross and Demelza (as played by actors Robin Ellis and Angahard Rees respectively) seal their reputation as one of TV’s “sexiest couples.” Fans assert their intense personal connection to the TV series and often fail to distinguish between the characters and the actors portraying them: “They are a part of me”[7] being the most typical response, and their devotion to the series has been described as “cultlike,” perhaps best demonstrated by the Poldark Appreciation Society’s costumed protests that almost derailed HTV’s filming of a 1995 sequel because it did not employ Ellis and Rees in the reprised roles of Ross and Demelza: “They are Ross and Demelza and it’s as simple as that.”[8]
Graham once joked that he was “the most successful unknown novelist in England.”[9] The Poldark novels have never been out of print since their initial publication in 1945, and in the United States, Graham was a regular Book-of-the-Month Club selection, but despite (or perhaps because of) his popular success, he remained pegged as a regional novelist and marginalized by academics and critics. The little attention that Poldark (in both its book and TV formats) has received from scholars has tended to focus on the series’ depiction of class issues. Nickianne Moody calls Ross Poldark the perfect “post-war settlement” hero, with whom readers after the Second World War—facing the dismantling of the empire and a rapidly changing class structure—could easily identify.[10] Twenty years after the publication of the first four novels—during which time Graham claims “there was a constant procession of letters asking me to continue”[11]—a very different context of postindustrial decline, miners’ strikes, and popular unrest confronted Poldark fans. Moody contends that series 1 of the TV adaptation (1975) based on those very same four novels helped viewers recall the glory days of the mining industry that had once made Britain a superpower. Such moments of economic and social crisis inevitably trigger “intense national interest in nostalgia,”[12] and Poldark, Moody concludes, in both its forms, engaged with the “anxieties of both the middle and working class.”[13]
While I do not deny that class concerns and nostalgic longings were (and still are) triggered by the Poldark series, this interpretation ignores the centrality of gender and domestic issues to Poldark’s thematic content, its largely transatlantic female fan base, and its continuing popularity into the twenty-first century. In adapting the Poldark books to the small screen, both Graham and the BBC’s production team quickly realized that the history of Cornish mining and banking and parliamentary politics were of less interest to its mainly female viewers than the Ross-Demelza-Elizabeth love triangle;[14] by its second season, the Poldark series clearly reflected what film scholar Claire Monk calls “the pleasures of involvement and identification” that the historical costume drama promises its female viewers.[15] However, Poldark, in either of its formats, is no romance in the Mills and Boon tradition; addressing “the rough deal women have” (both in the late eighteenth-century context of his characters and the post–Second World War contexts of his reading and viewing audiences), Graham interrogates “the status of women” issue, paying particular attention to rape and the “psychological repression of women” in and outside of marriage.[16] Nevertheless, though filmed at the height of the feminist movement in Britain (and aired shortly after the BBC’s suffragette-themed Shoulder to Shoulder [1974]), the TV version of Poldark highlights how the commercial realities of the adaptation process competed with the author’s original vision; in particular, fans’ desires and expectations of a romantic hero complicated (and continue to complicate) their engagement with the Poldark narrative.[17]
I want to look first at the coupling of Ross and Demelza, one of TV’s “greatest love stories,” and how the version in the inaugural novel of the Poldark series was changed, against Graham’s wishes, for the small-screen adaptation. When they first meet in the dirty streets of Truro, thirteen-year-old Demelza Carne has run away from her abusive father and is living hand to mouth. Ross, lonely after Elizabeth’s rejection, takes her home as a lark, cleans her up, and employs her as a house servant. Four years later he marries Demelza, who has taught herself to read and has become a beauty: her earthiness, Ross observes, is a stark contrast to Elizabeth’s aristocratic fragility (“earthenware” versus “porcelain,” as he succinctly sums up the difference between the two women). Graham explains Ross’s motivations in marrying Demelza, with whom he has already had sexual relations: “It was not that he loved her but that such a course was the obvious way out. . . . She had already proved her worth about the house and farm, none better, and she had grown into his life in a way he had hardly realized.”[18]
Ross’s decision to marry Demelza in the televised version, however, is less matter of fact and deliberately drawn out to reveal his “chivalrous” side. She is pregnant from their one night together and has left his estate of Nampara, headed on foot to town to procure an abortion, when he rescues her and offers her marriage just as Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) is considering leaving her first husband, Francis (Clive Francis), and running away with Ross.[19] Ross nobly gives up the woman he thinks he wants to fulfill his “obligation” to someone he says he feels “responsible for.” Declaring, “You won’t be alone. We’ll be married. . . . The child is mine, too—it will have a name, my name,” he then lifts a weeping Demelza into his arms and carries her back to his home by horseback.[20] Viewers cheered (and still cheer) this seemingly romantic gesture and recall with pleasure “those beautiful scenes of Ross carrying her [Demelza] to his horse.”[21] As Ellen Moody observes, such “carrying scenes” that are written into the filmed adaptations of novels reflect a trope typical of the costume drama—“a test of a man’s masculinity whether he rises to the challenge and takes responsibility.”[22] But this moment also diminishes Demelza, so headstrong in the novel, making her more vulnerable and in need of Ross’s protection. In the next scene, responding to the angry cries of “trollop” that Elizabeth casts at Demelza, Ross defends the latter’s honor and insists—as a 1970s hero rather than one from the 1790s would—that he shares “the burden of blame.” That it is Elizabeth, and not Ross, who questions the paternity of Demelza’s unborn child further seals Elizabeth’s position as the villainess of the love triangle.
At the time of Poldark’s adaptation for TV, illegitimacy had lost its legal and much of its social stigma in England and the United States, and with contraception and abortion widely available,[23] sympathetic female viewers would regard Demelza’s pregnancy as a decidedly, and thankfully, eighteenth-century predicament. Yet, the screenwriters’ addition of the pregnancy as the catalyst to the marriage also makes the TV adaptation much more conservative in its sexual politics than Graham’s novel in which the couple have simply added sexual relations to their already mutually enjoyable domestic routine. Curiously, when later faced with a similar dilemma, Elizabeth (pregnant with Ross’s illegitimate child) elicits very different responses from viewers. In the episodes that follow, she becomes more and more the character fans love to hate—“a shallow cardboard cut-out of a woman”[24]—and it is this transformation of Elizabeth’s character from book to small screen that makes what happens to her at the end of the first season less troubling to fans of the TV series than Graham had originally intended.
In the fourth novel, Warleggan (1953), Graham presents Elizabeth in a much more sympathetic and relatable light than does her later TV portrayal. Recently widowed (after enduring years of her husband’s infidelities) and saddled with Francis’s gambling debts, elderly parents to care for, a crumbling estate, and an aristocratic reputation to maintain, “Elizabeth looked into the future and saw it as one in which sickness and age and responsibility were her only companions.”[25] She agrees to marry Ross’s rival, the nouveau riche banker George Warleggan, as a last resort and hopes that one day she can bring herself to love him. This is a far cry from the TV scene in which she boasts of the money and social clout that marriage to George (Ralph Bates) will give her: “You’re all such little people,” she exclaims, marking her as a money-grubbing snob rather than a desperate woman facing impending poverty.
In the novel, an enraged Ross, upon learning of the engagement, rides to her house late at night, scales the walls, and enters her bedroom; though she demands he leave, he won’t unless she agrees to not marry George, and when she refuses, he pushes her onto the bed as she cries out, “Ross, you can’t intend . . . Stop! Stop, I tell you.”[26] Yet, when this scene is filmed for episode 15 of series 1, there are subtle, but very significant, changes that deviate from the novel. Elizabeth’s protests are much weaker; there is no slapping of Ross before he pinions her arms and stifles her protests with kisses. Instead, when Ross rushes her to the bed in the TV adaptation, she merely says, “Ross, oh my God, Ross,” and the camera cuts away to a knowing Demelza, at home, weeping in her servant’s arms and lamenting that Ross has “broken it, he’s ruined it” (their marriage). We are also given a brief glimpse of the morning after: Ross and Elizabeth, lying side by side, both looking straight ahead, almost stunned—unlike Vivien Leigh’s whistling Scarlet O’Hara the morning after Rhett Butler forcibly carries her up to the bedroom. Nevertheless, they are still together—a whole night has passed—so viewers are left to wonder, was it rape after all?[27] In the novels, Ross often reflects on his behavior that night and justifies his actions by blaming Elizabeth: her “initial resistance,” he reasons, really concealed a pent-up desire for him, and her refusals “provoked” him to act this way. He even imagines a conversation in which he explains to his wife his “uneasy conscience” regarding the “misdeed” he committed against Elizabeth when “I took her against her will—though in the end I do not believe it was so much against her will.”[28]
Fans, both those who viewed the series when it first aired and those who discovered it years later on video or DVD, express disappointment over what they call Ross’s “infidelity” and “cheating on Demelza,” whom they regard as the “wronged one”; like Ross, fans seem reluctant to label his actions “rape.” They have already come to regard him as a hero in his defense of the poor miners throughout series 1, while pegging Elizabeth as a fool to have chosen Francis, and later George, over the more worthy Ross. A heated discussion on the Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board—whose members often conflate the book and TV versions—overwhelmingly concludes that the encounter between Ross and Elizabeth must have been consensual. One member declares, “I can’t see Ross being so out of control to do such a vile act,” while another insists, “I would not have found a man capable of rape as endearing as I found Ross.” It is simply impossible, fans contend, to put Ross in the same category as the overweight, foot fetishist, wife rapist Ossie Whitworth who features prominently in series 2: “Ross, even in anger, had an iron control most of the time and I think would have desisted if Elizabeth had not wanted him.”[29]
In both book and TV versions, Ross and Elizabeth never discuss what happened until three years later when they have a chance encounter in a cemetery. In The Four Swans (1976), written almost twenty years after the novel in which the rape occurred, we see how Graham has considered this moment in greater depth from Elizabeth’s perspective and perhaps how changing attitudes about rape in the 1970s has prompted him to rule out any earlier ambiguity about that night. Ross, in Elizabeth’s opinion, is “this man who had done her such a monstrous, an unforgivable wrong”—not just the rape but all that has followed: her illegitimate son that she has passed off as George’s prematurely born heir, and George’s jealous suspicion that is making life for her and the boy a misery.[30] Ross admits, “Three years ago, mine, no doubt, was the crowning injury, the insult you can never forgive and forget . . . the guilt was all mine,” but he adds, while “it was ill done until now I have not regretted it.”[31] She then tells him of George’s suspicion, and Ross’s ill-conceived solution is for her to fake another premature birth so George will think she is prone to seven-month pregnancies (she will die as a result of this plan in The Angry Tide [1977]—her putrefying body a horror to behold). Before they part, he grabs her, despite her resistance, and smothers her face with kisses, suggesting little remorse for his past actions.
Though written during and for the filming of series 2, this scene from Graham’s novel was significantly revised for its TV adaptation. When they meet in episode 7, there is almost no discussion of the night three years prior—was it rape or not is no longer of interest to viewers. Instead, Elizabeth simply tells him of George’s suspicions about the child and chides Ross for never wondering if Valentine is his son. Her anger is gone, and when Ross tells her his potentially life-threatening plan, she smiles and says, “You are good for me.” Finally, it is she who kisses Ross, very gently, so that the hero is forgiven, and with such a response from Elizabeth viewers are even more inclined to accept that the bedroom encounter involved Elizabeth’s consent.[32] While this interpretation is certainly in line with eighteenth-century legal and social attitudes about rape as “seduction by force” or a man’s “giving way to passion,”[33] it more importantly reflects the BBC’s and viewers’ urge to maintain Ross’s heroic image; in short, that night is rewritten as what one fan calls “the result of a temporary madness”; adds another, “After all, we know he did it out of love; it was never just a callous rape.”[34]
However Ross recalled his actions from that night, his wife regretted how his lack of self-control damaged her “ideal” of him and almost drove her to infidelity. In the novel Warleggan, Demelza, seeking revenge, attends a neighbor’s weekend house party and drunkenly flirts with another of Ross’s nemeses, Captain McNeil (in fact, she prepares in advance to sleep with him, buying the latest undergarments from Paris), but once stripped down to those very drawers, she realizes that she cannot betray her husband. McNeil thinks to himself, “Of course he could still have his way if he chose. It was simple enough: you hit her just once on her obstinate little chin. But he was not that sort of man.”[35] Removing himself from her bedroom, McNeil declares, “I like to think of myself as civilized so I give you best, Mrs. Poldark. I hope your husband appreciates such fidelity. . . . When admiration turns to contempt, it is time to go.”[36] McNeil (perhaps echoing Graham’s own enlightened feminist views) recognizes what Ross so clearly does not: that if a woman cannot make up her mind, it is still not license to rape her. However, in the televised version, McNeil (Donald Douglas) does try to overcome Demelza’s resistance, but she expertly knees him in the groin and escapes out the window, keeping her honor intact; such a scene implies that Elizabeth, had she truly wanted to, could have kept Ross out of her bed with one swift kick to the groin.[37] In the final episode of series 1, Demelza tells Ross she was faithful because “I’m better than you” and, in effect, better than Elizabeth, too, whom Demelza accuses of being as guilty as Ross: “You did not stop her and you couldn’t stop yourself.”
Unlike the BBC version of events that treats Elizabeth and Ross as equally complicit, Graham’s novels continue to remind his readers that their one sexual encounter was indeed rape. Almost a decade after series 2 aired, Graham resumed his Poldark series, chronicling the lives of the next generation in five novels published between 1984 and 2002. In The Loving Cup (1984), an older, but not necessarily wiser, Ross advises his son Jeremy to “take” the woman he loves by force—to storm her bedroom and carry her off: “She belongs to you more than to anyone else,” to which his son replies, “Are you joking? . . . This is the nineteenth century—I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.”[38] Hearing of this plan, Demelza warns her son that he cannot just “help yourself to a woman,” though “aware that Ross in fact had once done that.”[39] Though seemingly attributing Jeremy’s and Demelza’s responses to more enlightened nineteenth-century attitudes, Graham also assumes he echoes the sentiments of his modern readers: such sexism as espoused by Ross—“a little aggression can often help them [women] decide”[40] —is countered by Demelza’s assertion that, regarding sex, “it is her [the woman’s] decision at the end of it.”[41]
Looking back on the TV series in his memoir, Graham recognized how the actors portraying Ross and Demelza carefully crafted their image for their fans, who, in turn, treated them like “idols” and how this sometimes interfered with the integrity of the story: “They had created these two characters on screen from the characters in my novels. For weeks and months in the Seventies they had worked together, projecting themselves into these two eighteenth-century people. . . . They had presented these characters to the world . . . perpetuating the image, and the dream.”[42] Of course, practicalities must also be considered here: popular media outlets like the Sun and Cornish Life, in response to the success of the TV adaptation, gushingly immortalized Ross Poldark (and the actor portraying him on the small screen) as “strong, true, and hot-blooded”;[43] if Ross is a rapist, viewers might be reluctant to return for a second season. Therefore by the end of series 1, it is made patently clear who the real villains of the story are. The series finale involves a scene—absent from Graham’s novels—in which the hungry villagers, angry over land enclosures ordered by Warleggan, burn down the grossly lavish home of newlyweds George and Elizabeth’s, and the cowering couple are rescued by Ross and Demelza. Demelza has at last forgiven Ross for his infidelity, and their courage in the face of the mob stands in stark contrast to the greed and cowardice of the Warleggans. Curiously, Elizabeth (who, in the novels, has indeed grown to love George) asks Ross, with disappointment clearly evident in her voice and face, why he didn’t let the villagers kill George. Such a scene not only adds dramatic climax to the series finale but also reaffirms viewers’ affection for Ross, who in that moment realizes that he married the right woman.
When Graham resumed his Poldark novels in the early 1970s, he added a new character, Morwenna Chynoweth, yet another impoverished but genteel member of Elizabeth’s family. Her arranged marriage to Rev. Osborne Whitworth (“Ossie”) in The Black Moon (1973) and the ensuing abuse she endures in The Four Swans (1976) will become a major plot point of series 2 of the TV adaptation. Written when domestic violence and rape took center stage in feminist discourse and activism, Graham’s novels suggest the timelessness of these issues, especially the psychological as well as physical damage caused by rape.
In the TV adaptation, viewers are not privy to the wedding-night rape detailed in the novel, The Black Moon: “Once she resisted and once he hit her, but after that she made no protest. So eventually he laid her naked on the bed, where she curled up like a frightened snail. Then he knelt at the side of the bed and said a short prayer before he got up and began to tickle her bare feet before he raped her.”[44]
Such scenes were perhaps too explicit for a 1970s costume drama in which clothes remain on and hair and makeup untouched even during the most intimate encounters (as attested by Elizabeth’s perfectly coiffed appearance in series 1’s bedroom scene with Ross). The BBC’s 1967 production of The Forsyte Saga had already scandalized audiences with its scene of Soames ripping Irene’s bodice, implying the marital rape that would follow. But it is obvious from Morwenna’s (Jane Wymark) stunned face and near revulsion after Ossie (Christopher Biggins) rolls off her during their only filmed sexual encounter that she is not a consenting participant.[45] When warned by Morwenna’s physician that his nightly sexual demands threaten the health of his unborn child and wife, Ossie (in both novel and TV versions) roars that it is the legal and moral duty of a wife to submit; he echoes, almost verbatim, the oft-cited statement by Justice Sir Matthew Hale that remained in effect until 1991 when the marital rape exemption was at last overturned by English courts: “But the husband cannot be guilty of rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.”[46] After two years of nightly rapes, Morwenna internally laments, “I don’t exist any longer. Nothing of me—it’s all gone—mind—body—soul, even . . . I don’t need to be buried, for I am dead already.”[47]
While the TV version cannot probe Morwenna’s psychological state in the way that Graham’s novel does, it does effectively convey the trauma of marital rape. After Ossie’s conveniently timed death (just as he is considering having Morwenna committed), she tells Drake Carne (Demelza’s blacksmith brother [played by Kevin McNally], who has loved her all along and who now proposes marriage) that she can never be touched by a man again: “What has happened to me has contaminated me.”[48] Such language, in the novel and TV series, is clearly shaped by second-wave feminist discourse and the growing awareness in the 1970s of “rape trauma syndrome,”[49] but Graham reminds us that marital rape (and its damaging effects) was just as pervasive (and sometimes even recognized as rape) in the eighteenth century, even if the courts upheld husbands’ “rights.” As Elizabeth Foyster notes, women in “polite society” like Morwenna did find ways to resist, even hinting to others of their situation while still maintaining their social status; in particular, the retreat to the sickbed could afford some protection from further abuse and suggests the complicity of doctors in protecting their female patients from sexually violent husbands.[50] Morwenna’s two physicians diagnose her as melancholic and repeatedly insist, much to his dismay, that Ossie cease conjugal relations.
In series 2, Drake and Morwenna rival Ross and Demelza as fans’ “favorite couple”—but despite their wedding and kiss that conclude the TV series, fans are left to wonder if the couple “would ever have a happy ending.”[51] Indeed, when Graham revisits their marriage in The Loving Cup (1984), he reveals that Morwenna, though now outwardly a contented wife and mother, still suffers nightmares from her treatment by her first husband. Even a happy second marriage cannot erase the scars of rape.
This story arc, while speaking directly to female readers and viewers, further complicates our attempts to understand Ross’s earlier behavior. In The Four Swans, Ross blames Warleggan for thwarting his plans to bring Drake and Morwenna together, in favor of an “over-dressed and loud-mouthed cleric,” and he recognizes how marriage to “that man” has left Morwenna “a damaged swan . . . feathers awry and stained.”[52] But this brief moment of feminist empathy on Ross’s part is immediately countered by his statement to Demelza that the Drake-Morwenna-Ossie triangle is “no different from what I went through thirteen years ago.”[53] However, there is a key difference, and Graham reminds us of this when Drake promises the newly widowed Morwenna that he will wait for her and never so much as “unbuckle a shoe” until she asks him to (“twill be for you always to say”).[54]
Still, this subplot does further endear fans to Ross, who readily declare, “Ross is no Ossie!” There is absolutely no ambiguity concerning the issue of rape in the Whitworth household, in the novels or the TV adaptation; moreover, the depiction of Ossie as gluttonous (“I like my food”), vain, and with a sadistic foot fetish stands him in stark contrast to the dashing Captain Poldark (they are even shown riding together in a coach in series 2, episode 10—Ross’s contempt for Ossie almost palpable to viewers). In an online debate as to who is the worst villain in Poldark, Ossie beats out even George Warleggan, who, fans agree, is at least redeemed by his love for Elizabeth.[55]
Though he sometimes battled the BBC production team for authorial control over Poldark’s adaptation to the small screen, Graham recognized that the need for “legitimate dramatization” and the desires of a new, and international, generation of fans, many of whom very likely did not read the books and were becoming more and more personally attached to the actors who portrayed his characters, would inevitably alter “the intention of the book.”[56] When Graham resumed the series of novels in the 1970s at the insistence of his fans—and having recognized what an international hit series 1 of the TV series was quickly becoming—he put domestic and women’s issues at the forefront of his narrative, earning him praise from one critic for being “an instinctive feminist.”[57] Yet, he did not always elicit the reaction from his audiences that he may have expected, and when the TV adaptation rewrote the Ross-Elizabeth rape scene, he used his later novels to redress this interpretation, to limited effect.
Perhaps fans have been complicit with the adaptation process in keeping the myth of the Poldarkian romantic hero alive, but they have also been successful in validating their own version of events. Rachel Moseley and Joanne Hollows remind us that popular costume dramas, while often discredited by academics as antifeminist “trash,” in fact offer women viewers an empowering space in which they can discuss matters central to their own lives[58]—even allowing for a contested definition of rape in the case of Ross and Elizabeth.
Viewers’ personal attachment to certain characters/actors clearly impacts how they react to a rape subplot, with fans’ overwhelming preference for Demelza as the hero’s romantic partner making them reluctant to interpret Elizabeth’s treatment by Ross as an act of sexual violence. Meanwhile, Downton Abbey’s series 4 story arc involving the rape of lady’s maid Anna Bates (Joanne Froggat) caused an uproar among fans and journalists alike who suggest the rape was added for shock value only; as one journalist observed, the “problem is the character Fellowes chose. Anna is one of the best-loved in Downton: a rare beacon of goodness who stood by her husband Bates when everyone else thought him a murderer.”[59] Mrs. Hughes’s response to news of Anna’s rape—“No man should be able to do what he did and get away with it”—while in sync with twenty-first-century attitudes, simply ignores the sad fact that female domestic servants were often subject to sexual harassment and unwanted advances from men both upstairs and downstairs. That Anna is beaten and raped by a visiting valet, rather than by one of Downton’s own residents (a far more likely possibility), not only removes any ambiguity about the rape but also fuels fans’ expectations for retribution against the perpetrator. Poldark viewers, so forgiving of Ross’s actions, applaud Ossie’s death—the wife-rapist dragged through the streets by his own prized horse—which also paved the way for Drake and Morwenna’s much-longed-for reunion.
Whether as costumed protesters, bloggers, amateur Amazon reviewers of DVDs and books, or message board contributors, Poldark fans since the 1970s have exercised a degree of control over the production, reception, and afterlife of the series that has also afforded them so much pleasure. They continue to imagine an afterlife for the characters and debate possibilities not covered in the novel or TV series—such as “Could Demelza and Elizabeth ever have become friends?” or “What if Elizabeth had married Ross?”[60] At the time of writing this chapter, a remake of Poldark has begun production, prompting a reinvigorated Poldark Appreciation Society to try to dictate to the BBC just who should fill the shoes and petticoats of their beloved characters. As one member of the Facebook group “A Passion for Poldark” asserts, “Just hope the beeb (BBC) remembers what it owes to . . . the adoring fans.”[61] Just how the remake will address Graham’s depiction of rape and how fans, both old and new, will respond to their hero’s transgressions remains to be seen.
Winston Graham, Ross Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall, 1783–1787 (1945; repr., Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2009), 319.
Hilary Oliver, Cult of Poldark, BBC Four, aired 17 February 2008, accessed 10 June 2013, https://www.youtube.com/.
Neil Kennedy and Nigel Kingcome, “Disneyfication of Cornwall: Developing a Poldark Heritage Complex,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 4, no. 1 (1998): 52.
Ibid., 52–53. Kennedy and Kingcome also cite heritage scholar Robert Hewison, who notes that the “paradox of the industrial museum movement is that it is ultimately anti-industrial” (53).
Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), 185, 184.
Robert Lloyd, “‘Poldark’: A Cure for Your ‘Downton Abbey’ Blues,” Los Angeles Times, 27 February 2012, accessed 13 June 2013, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.
This conflation of Graham’s characters with the actors who portrayed them on-screen is exemplified by fan Dwight’s response to the death of Angahard Rees, who portrayed Demelza: “But when Angharad left us, although there was never any realistic likelihood of her, or indeed Robin, being ever likely to reprise their eponymous roles of Ross and Demelza, to me it felt like it really was Demelza who had left us as well, and while grieving for Angharad, I truly felt that I was also grieving for Demelza, and of course with Ross for the loss of his soulmate.” “Dwight,” Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, 10 October 2012, accessed 21 July 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/.
Oliver, Cult of Poldark.
Graham’s obituary in the Guardian notes how he wore this label with pride. Dennis Barker, “Winston Graham,” 14 July 2003, accessed 20 July 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/.
Nickianne Moody, “Poldark Country and National Culture,” in Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place, ed. Ella Westland (Penzance, UK: University of Exeter, Patten Press, 1997), 132.
Winston Graham, “Poldark: How It All Happened,” Woman Magazine, December 1977, 47, reproduced on the Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, accessed 19 July 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/.
David Cannadine, cited in Moody, “Poldark Country,” 131–32.
Ibid., 132.
Poldark TV writer Paul Wheeler recalls in Cult of Poldark, “You didn’t really want to know whether a bank was going to foreclose more than you wanted to know whether Ross and Demelza were going to sleep together.” Graham, however, discusses his “angry protests” over changes to his original story, especially regarding Demelza’s character, but he “lost” the battle to the BBC’s production team of multiple writers and directors. Not until series 2 was he allowed a more “hands-on” approach to the TV adaptation. See Winston Graham, Memoirs of a Private Man (2003; repr., London: Pan Books, 2004), 202–6.
Claire Monk, “The Heritage Film and Gendered Spectatorship,” in Close Up: The Electronic Journal of British Cinema 1 (1997), accessed 25 August 2013, http://www.shu.ac.uk/.
Ellen Moody quotes Graham’s interest in “the rough deal women have” in “Winston Graham’s v. Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie,” Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Two, 13 January 2011, accessed 22 July 2013, http://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/. Tony Lee Moral discusses Graham’s awareness of the “abjection of women within society” in Graham’s novel Marnie and sees his body of work as a “critique of social inequality”—an interpretation Graham himself was happy to agree with in his Memoirs (142). See Tony Lee Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005), 19.
The recent trend in social media sites connecting fans of novels and TV adaptations helps to gauge current audience’s reactions as well as mine the nostalgic recollections of older fans, many of whom also write reviews for the books and DVDs on sites like Amazon; articles on Poldark and its TV cast featured prominently in Cornwall Life, the Sun, and Woman Magazine in the late 1970s, while memoirs by Graham and Ellis also provide insight into the connection female fans have had with the Poldark series. See Robin Ellis’s discussion of “Poldark fever” in Making Poldark: Memoir of a BBC/Masterpiece Theatre Actor (1978; repr., London: Palo Alto Publishing, 2012).
Graham, Ross Poldark, 236.
Graham pointed out to the show’s writers that legalized divorce would not yet be an option for someone in Elizabeth’s position until 1857. See Graham, Memoirs, 205.
Poldark, series 1, episode 4.
“Nampara Girl,” Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, 27 June 2010, accessed 25 July 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/.
Ellen Moody, “The Carrying Motif,” Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Two, 13 June 2013, accessed 19 July 2013, http://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/.
For a history of illegitimacy and contraception laws in twentieth-century Britain, see Leonore Davidoff et al., The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999).
On the Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, not a single fan claims “Elizabeth” as her username.
Winston Graham, Warleggan: A Novel of Cornwall, 1792–1793 (1953; repr., London: Pan Books, 2008), 272.
Graham, Warleggan, 314.
On the Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, “Lori” notes that Elizabeth’s “behavior after the whole ordeal in the T.V. series seemed kind of odd for a rape!” (29 July 2011, accessed 25 August 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/).
Winston Graham, The Four Swans: A Novel of Cornwall, 1795–1797 (1976; repr., London: Pan Books, 1996), 212.
See online debate, “Ross and Elizabeth,” May–August 2011, Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, http://poldark.activeboard.com/. An earlier discussion in 2010 also referred to the rape as “frenzied lovemaking” and concluded that “Ross was no Ossie Whitworth!”
Graham, The Four Swans, 198.
Ibid., 201.
“Lori” on the Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board refers to this scene in the TV adaptation: “I think in the graveyard when she kissed him on the mouth and he did not return the affection I felt better!” (27 June 2011, accessed 18 August 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/).
See Carolyn A. Conley on attitudes about rape in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. “Rape and Justice in Victorian England, Victorian Studies 29, no. 4 (summer 1986): 519–36.
Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, 29 July 2011, accessed 20 August 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/.
Graham, Warleggan, 346.
Ibid.
Poldark, series 1, episode 15.
Winston Graham, The Loving Cup: A Novel of Cornwall, 1813–1815 (1984; repr., London: Pan Books, 2008), 533.
Ibid., 538.
Ibid., 542.
Ibid., 539.
Graham, Memoirs, 225–26.
Rachel Moseley, “‘It’s a Wild Country, Wild . . . Passionate . . . Strange’: Poldark and the Place-Image of Cornwall,” Visual Culture in Britain 14, no. 2 (2013): 220n18. News coverage of the series noted hordes of adoring fans chasing Rees and Ellis, and babies and pets named after their TV characters. An Australian TV Week article from 4 June 1977, “Poldark: The Sexiest Man on Television?,” further noted how female fans conflated Poldark and Ellis: “Women see him as the idealized embodiment of consumed, horse-riding romance. And the fan mail, which includes numerous marriage proposals, proves it.”
Graham, The Black Moon: A Novel of Cornwall, 1794–1795 (1973; repr., London: Pan Books, 1996), 532.
Poldark, series 2, episode 6.
Hale, cited in Rebecca M. Ryan, “The Sex Right: A Legal History of the Marital Rape Exemption,” Law and Social Inquiry 20, no. 4 (autumn 1995): 947.
Graham, The Four Swans, 200.
Poldark, series 2, episode 13.
In 1974, a two-person team of psychologist Ann Wolbert Burgess and sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom coined the term “Rape Trauma Syndrome” to describe a variant of posttraumatic stress disorder experienced by women who had undergone sexual assault. See Fiona E. Raitt and M. Suzanne Zeedyk, “Rape Trauma Syndrome: Its Corroborative and Educational Roles,” Journal of Law and Society 24, no. 4 (December 1997): 554.
Elizabeth Foyster, “Creating a Veil of Silence? Politeness and Marital Violence in the English Household,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12, series 6 (2002): 395–415.
“Drake and Morwenna,” Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, October 2010, accessed 20 August 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/.
Graham, The Four Swans, 480, 551.
Ibid., 58.
Winston Graham, The Angry Tide: A Novel of Cornwall, 1798–1799 (1977; repr., London: Fontana, 1986), 374.
“Who Is the Best Villain,” Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, April 2010, accessed 20 August 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/.
Graham, Memoirs, 208–9. Graham was especially concerned that fans had come to regard the actors as “idols” (230).
In his Memoirs, Graham recalls, “Lee describes me in his book [Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie] as an instinctive feminist. Maybe that is right” (142).
Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley, “Popularity Contests: The Meanings of Popular Feminism,” in Feminism in Popular Culture, ed. Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2006), 4–5.
Glenda Cooper, “Rape at the Abbey”: Has Downton Gone Too Far for Sunday Nights?” Telegraph, 7 October 2013, accessed 5 November 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
“Could Demelza and Elizabeth Ever Have Become Friends?” Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society message board, January 2011, accessed 20 August 2013, http://poldark.activeboard.com/.
Beverly Ann Merrill, member of Facebook group “A Passion for Poldark and Cornwall,” 16 May 2013, accessed 17 May 2013, https://www.facebook.com/.
Andrea Schmidt
Efforts to quickly capitalize on the initial great success of Downton Abbey have tempered enthusiasm for the heritage serial revival of the past few years for viewers, fans, and critics alike. As Mark Lawson from The Guardian suggests, fans of the show were beginning to show signs of “disappointment” during season 2 of Downton Abbey “with suspicions that ITV1’s understandable desperation to get its cash cow back on [television] may have led to the 2011 run being written and made in risky haste.”[1] Critics and also fans have pointed out that seasons 2 and 3 relied more on shock value to garner ratings rather than the carefully constructed and critically self-reflexive narrative of season 1. A short-lived cameo by Shirley MacLaine as Cora Crawley’s mother, Edith Crawley’s sudden jilting at the altar by Sir Anthony, and the unexpected deaths of two major characters left many fans feeling nostalgic for the previous narratives, which had relied heavily on the angst-ridden Matthew and Mary romance set against the historical backdrop of the First World War. However, once the romance and the war plotlines resolved themselves, it seems the dramatic arc of the heritage serial has been difficult to sustain. The continued viewership for the show seems to base itself off of nostalgia for its first strong season. Or, as one British friend only half jokingly said in conversation, “We just all watch it for Maggie Smith, now.” Yet, the Downton heritage text has taken on a life of its own outside of the weekly serial format. From YouTube threads to message boards and creator and screenwriter Julian Fellowes’s Facebook page, fans have been voicing their frustration with the series, and many of them have turned to fan fiction as a critical and creative form of expression. As Henry Jenkins argues in his seminal Textual Poachers, writing and reading fan fiction provides an outlet for fans to establish a sense of control over their version of the show.[2] I expand on Jenkins’s argument and suggest that Downton Abbey fan fiction challenges the idea of a hierarchical creative process and its implicit claims to authenticity in its representation of a heritage past. Downton’s appeal lies as a foundational catalyst from which fans can “poach” to create their own meaningful representations of the series.
Heritage film and television criticism has largely ignored fan fiction and vice versa. “Modern” fan fiction has been traditionally viewed as stemming from the science fiction genre, in particular the original Star Trek series (1966–1969). Meanwhile, heritage criticism tends to focus on films and television serials with “high production values,” such as the texts of Merchant Ivory or Julian Fellowes.[3] Yet the explosion of fan fiction based on heritage texts since the late 1990s, as demonstrated by the numerous Pride and Prejudice sequels that surfaced soon after the 1995 Andrew Davies miniseries, indicates the clear commonalities between fan writing and heritage texts. Furthermore, as Suzanne Scott and Jenkins both touch upon in the introduction to the rerelease of Jenkins’s Textual Poachers, critics have begun expanding the historical understanding of fan fiction by tracing it back to the “participatory” fan culture present in the eighteenth century.[4] The heritage film and television genre lends itself well to the “poaching” Jenkins suggests fan fiction promotes. In a critical piece that supplements her 2011 monograph on heritage film reception, Heritage Film Audiences, Claire Monk demonstrates that many heritage productions, such as Merchant Ivory’s Maurice (1987), have experienced a critical rebirth in diverse online fan communities through the advent of DVD and YouTube. Monk defines fan writings as “stories inspired by a specific text, and hybrid or crossover fictions meshing together characters, narrative events and/or settings drawn from more than one source text or franchise.”[5] As Andrew Higson, one of the other foremost critics of the heritage genre suggests, the “heritage” film and television serial itself is one that thrives off of intertextual references whether through literary adaptation or the use of stock actors.[6] Thus, as the appeal of the heritage text already lies in a certain degree of “textual poaching,” it is of no surprise that fans would do the same to their beloved heritage serials. In doing so, the fans challenge the problematic depictions of gender roles, the nation, and class in ways that have gone untested in the politically conservative narratives of recent revivals of the heritage serial genre, as exemplified in Downton Abbey.
For the purposes of the scope of this chapter, I will focus only on the fan-fiction works of one recent heritage text, namely Downton Abbey. Of recent heritage serials, Downton has by far the most prolific number of Internet fan texts, which speaks to the immense popularity of the Downton series established in such a relatively short amount of time. Its online fan-fiction archives rival in number older heritage texts, such as Pride and Prejudice (1995) or North and South (2004). Though a reading of the relative fan success of Downton Abbey versus other heritage serials lies outside the scope of this chapter, I would suggest that the prolific nature of Downton fan fiction correlates to the success of the show itself compared to the other serials that followed. (It does remain to be seen if the Downton fictions will continue after the demise of the series, though I strongly suspect they will continue in popularity.) My decision not to focus on other contemporary heritage serials, such as Mr. Selfridge (2013– ) and the revival of Upstairs, Downstairs (2010–2012), lies purely in the scarcity of textual examples. Furthermore, I will use fan-fiction examples from only one of the most popular and accessible fan-fiction websites, FanFiction.Net, which contains fan fiction based on numerous genres and media formats. I will limit the majority of the discussion to the heritage television serial, though the lines are drawn with great difficulty. Monk cites the “infinite” nature of these texts “where fandoms blur with and feed off multiple other fandoms in an ‘infinite’ continuum or mesh,” creating “a rabbit hole of self-referentiality.”[7] As an example, a fan may write a Downton story inspired by a Tumblr blog that is based on a recent episode of Sherlock (2010– ), and that would be a relatively tame number of intertextual references for the fan-fiction universe. The multitude of narrative possibilities opens up new possibilities for reader/viewer identification and participation in the Downton universe.
In contrast to the narrative opportunities provided by the fan-fiction communities, Fellowes pursues a conservative and generically non-self-reflexive narrative in his series. Indeed, to what extent do heritage texts promote a conservative representation of the past? The heritage film (and implicitly the heritage serial), as defined by Higson, is a film set in the past meant to emphasize a specific representation of the nation—mainly that of the conservative, white, upper-class society. Heritage productions have been criticized for sacrificing a compelling narrative for a stagnant mise-en-scène devoted to an “authentic” representation of the historical nation.[8] Monk has since challenged Higson’s narrow definition of heritage productions with her term “post-heritage” film.[9] This concept alludes to a trend of historical films produced in the 1990s that challenge portrayals of gender and sexuality rather than focusing solely on the nation, such as Maurice (1987) or Orlando (1992). The debates over the representations of gender and nation still remain pertinent to contemporary discussions of the heritage text, as it is often where their points of intersection lie that make them the most interesting.
Yet, as Lawson suggests, Fellowes has missed these points of intersection, suggesting the series’ creator “needs to remember that the house has stairs and that class war is British TV’s great subject.”[10] In his desire to create a glossed-over representation of the past, he trivializes class conflict and disparities in gender power. Friendships may be cultivated between the Crawley family and the servants, but a class system remains in place. The emphasis on their kindness toward the servants could be read as a justification for the class system. Furthermore, the females’ character development lies in their relations to men, and the serial most disturbingly carries undertones of victim blaming and verbal abuse. For example, Tom Branson insinuates that Sybil Crawley remains ignorant, though his assaults are glossed over by her untimely death. Furthermore, though the historical argument could be made that the Crawley family would have little contact with those who do not fit into their white, upper-class world, the entrance of hypersexualized Pamuk into the Downton estate ends in his death and never rises above an exoticized caricature. He then becomes a plot point to be brought up in later seasons.
In the deproblematization and absence of gender, race, and class conflicts, the serial implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, condones them. Indeed, Fellowes received a great deal of backlash in the United Kingdom for using a rape of one of the main characters, Anna, as a plot device in season 4. As Holly Baxter of the Guardian points out, though Anna’s powerlessness in reporting the rape at the time is most likely historically accurate, the focus of the story line turns to the impact of the assault on her husband and “dignifies” her silence: “Depicting the sexual assault of Anna Bates as the next obstacle for her husband’s freedom and happiness does every woman who settles down to Downton on a Sunday night a great disservice.”[11] If Fellowes refuses to address or complicate these issues in Downton Abbey, then fan-fiction writers see these gaps as useful points of departure for their own Downton stories that are certainly more interesting, self-aware, and sensitive.
For Downton Abbey fans, there exists a very clear creative force behind the serial, responsible for all creative changes: Fellowes. For example, although actor Dan Stevens’s (Matthew) decision to leave and not return to the show was well publicized months in advance, the backlash from fans and critics for Matthew’s untimely death fell on the creator/screenwriter. Best known for his Academy Award–winning Gosford Park (2001), Fellowes cultivates at least the image of an “old-school” British devotion to meticulousness and quality, furthered by his own upper-class pedigree and place as a Conservative in the House of Lords. A presenter and actor in his own right, his devotion to heritage culture extends beyond the Downton Abbey series itself. He recently hosted an ITV documentary series Great Houses (2013) where he toured large estates throughout Great Britain. In addition, he also engages in other heritage texts, including a Titanic miniseries (2012) and a recent screen adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (2013).[12] Though his creative talents vary, his devotion to a representation of the past lies in a deep-rooted belief in the superiority of privilege. In response to Shakespeare scholars’ criticism of his reworking of the bard’s language in Romeo and Juliet, he stated, “I can do that because I had a very expensive education, I went to Cambridge. Not everyone did that and there are plenty of perfectly intelligent people out there who have not been trained in Shakespeare’s language choices.”[13] He hence suggests a pedigree of an upper-class education enables him privileged access to a heritage text, embodying the classism for which the genre has been heavily criticized.
As a Vanity Fair interviewer argues, “Fellowes’s particularity is the very thing that has propelled the Downton phenomenon.”[14] Through Fellowes’s emphasis on his ability to give “value judgment,” he implies that a loss of “quality” would occur if creative control over the show were given to anyone else.[15] Indeed, the interview describes Fellowes’s interference with the direction of one of the episodes in an effort to maintain historical authenticity. Yet, though the aura of authenticity may have explained fan attraction to the miniseries in its earliest days, its longevity rather lies in the narrative possibilities it provides. Contrary to Fellowes’s deep-rooted belief in class structure and heritage, fan writing brings in other value judgments, such as ones that address gender and class conflict, which have the potential, if not to solve, at least to bring attention to problematic depictions of the past perpetuated by Fellowes in Downton.
The identification of authors plays an important part in the fan-fiction universe through the emphasis on creative individuality as well as collaborative efforts. Downton fan fiction provides a method of breaking down the representation of an implicit hierarchical authorial structure. On the whole, relatively little is revealed online about the personal life of the fan writer, as the emphasis appears to be on the commonality of the Downton universe and escapism. Writers originate from a variety of different countries and languages, but the majority are written in English and posted from the United States, Australia, or Great Britain; the prevalence of English-language use in Downton fan fiction most likely exists in order to reach a wider audience of readers. Fan writers, instead of using their own names and pictures, will take on pseudonyms and use Downton screenshots as avatars. Though the individuality of the respective avatars remains important, there also exists a strong collaborative effort within the fan-fiction communities and an overall desire to better their works through feedback. Although an option enables members of the community to “report abuse,” reviews, on a whole, tend to be positive and encouraging. Normally, a lackluster effort incites few responses in the review section of the fan fiction, and the harshest criticism is reserved for those who leave their readers hanging with an unfinished story. Though the texts differ stylistically and in sophistication of syntax, many of the authors would compete with Fellowes in the attention to period detail in their works. Furthermore, set-aside forums and community boards allow members to present challenge prompts to fellow writers and voice their own frustrations with their work and/or the serial itself. Overall, there lies a determination to test the generic boundaries of Downton.
Unsurprisingly, given the emphasis the serial places on “emotional narrative,” a term Fellowes uses interchangeably with melodrama, the majority of the stories fall under the romance category.[16] Yet romance, associated with the often critically pejorative term melodrama, takes on an emotional depth and diversity not realized in the serial. First, as Jenkins suggests, one of the major appeals of fan fiction lies in the ability to explore alternative narratives and fringe characters. Compared to the amount of screen time devoted on the show for their specific romance story line, few texts focus on the Matthew/Mary romance (referred to as M/M angst in the fan-fiction world). The interclass marriage between Sybil and Branson, the underwritten affair between Robert and Jane, and the May/December romance between Edith Crawley and Sir Anthony Strallan receive a great deal more online fan interest. “Problematic” romances resolved through less-than-satisfactory twists in the series (Sybil’s sudden death, the servant Jane’s sudden departure from Downton Abbey, and Anthony’s last-minute flight at the altar) are given greater narrative dimension and character depth. Hence, romance that transgresses both traditional class and normative gender boundaries flourishes in the fan-fiction world while merely used as an exploitative plot distraction in Downton.
Fan writing in the romance genre also explores the sexuality largely absent in Downton, even though the program claims to lead the viewer behind the closed doors of the Edwardian household. After two seasons of angst-ridden tension between Matthew and Mary, the postnuptial lack of sexual chemistry between the two characters has been anticlimactic for most fans. They exchange a few chaste kisses during the first few episodes of the third season, several lines of dialogue suggest that problems in the bedroom may exist, and yet, several episodes later a pregnancy appears. In the fifty-thousand-word “smutty epic,” “Consequences of the Castle,” author Of Sandwiches and Sea-Monsters gratuitously expands on the chaste kisses of Fellowes’s characters: “One hand slid around his neck to pull his head down towards her and she kissed him deeply and confidently, letting out a sigh of fulfillment as she did so, as her other hand went round his waist to embrace him fully.”[17] As in many examples of romantic and erotic (sometimes a mixture of the two) fan fiction, the women are the sexual aggressors, giving them agency in the relationships. Taking place over the course of a marathon twelve chapters with constant interruption from nosy family members and servants, “Consequences” is by far one of the most sexually explicit examples of Downton fan fiction. Yet, in contrast to other examples of fan fiction, such as Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), which has created controversy due to its portrayal of females as passive and submissive, the female characters exhibit a great deal of power in their sexual experiences.
Furthermore, several communities are devoted to the popular erotic genre slash fiction, which most often features male characters in sexual relationships. One Downton community challenges the male-centric tendencies of slash fiction with “femslash,” most often featuring an interclass relationship between Cora Crawley and her maid, Sarah O’Brien. In “Hearts Aflame,” for example, Cora and Sarah have a moment of passion literally behind a closed door: “Cora kissed her fiercely and pushed her back against the wooden door. They had just a couple of minutes snatched in between the dinner and when she was expected to join the others.”[18] A love affair between arguably the least sympathetic character on the show (O’Brien) and the most underdeveloped character (Cora) gives narrative depth to their characterizations denied to them in the series itself. Another popular story line in the femslash forum involves an affair between Lady Mary and Lavinia sans Matthew, a subversion of the traditional marriage plot fulfilled within the television drama: “She brought my face to hers, my eyes closed. And then our lips were together, so softly together.”[19] The fan founder for the “Downton Abbey Femslash Community” writes in the introductory paragraph that “lesbian non-canon couples need a place to be recognized.”[20] As the founder does not clarify “non-canon Downton couples,” this statement implies that this lack of recognition in nonmale slash fictions plagues the fan-fiction community at large. Furthermore, she addresses Fellowes’s conservative narrative but also the “potential” that lies in the serial, “the one thing Julian Fellowes has given [her].”[21] Hence, not only do Downton fans test the boundaries of the show, but also they give voice to underrepresented communities in the fan-writing world itself.[22]
When set in the present day, fan fiction subverts the notion that the appeal of the heritage serial lies in the depiction of a “pastness” and alternately highlights the “pastness” latent in the present.[23] Popular with fellow fan writers for its erotica but also a well-researched critique of heritage culture, Silvestria’s modern-day “University Challenge” places Mary and Matthew as two politically polarized rival Oxbridge students. Set many years after the heritage serial itself, Downton Abbey has been sold to the National Trust, and Lady Mary mourns her sense of displacement as a member of the aristocracy: “All she could look forward to was the opportunity to live in one wing of the Abbey, watching tourists trample all over her family’s ancestral home and hold vintage car rallies in the grounds.” Stripped of the estate, but continuing to hold on to her aristocratic ideals, Mary finds herself isolated from her colleagues and treated as an outdated relic of the past at her university: “It was the Annual Conservative Association versus the Labour club’s debate and dinner. She would have never bothered going normally as she was only a member of the CA to meet rich and upper class men to marry.” Instead of her rich, upper-class man, Mary finds herself, of course, attracted to Matthew, a Labour Party member who has the exact opposite political views. What seems a setup for a clichéd romance of opposites instead includes academic stress and the drama of Sybil’s unexpected pregnancy. A possible story line only hinted at on the Downton series itself addresses the unfulfilling sex between the two leads. When asked to describe her sexual experience with Matthew, Mary uses less than gracious terms: “‘Memorable,’ she said finally as she sat up and reached for the bedclothes. Matthew thought it was a curious term but did not question it.”[24] Not only does fan fiction connect the anxieties of the class system of early twentieth-century Downton with similar concerns facing Great Britain a century later, but also the fiction manages to weave in the personal anxieties of modern university students.
This line between past and present is also achieved through intertextual references to modern-day literature. LadyEdithC’s “Confessions of a SingleMiddleSister” takes Edith away from the early twentieth-century country setting and “follows the journey of an urban single woman trying to survive life and family.” Beginning on New Year’s Day and written in a diary-entry style, the fan fiction emulates Helen Fielding’s 1996 best-selling novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (itself based on Pride and Prejudice). Edith describes the dreaded New Year’s Day dinner, “sitting between Mary and Matthew, absorbing all the pent up sexual frustration and trying to eat my pudding avoiding the passive-aggressive cutlery-abuse as lustful glances are stolen on both my sides.” Here, Edith, a fringe character in Fellowes’s serial, undermines the primary romantic plot in a sarcastic and funny voice denied to her in the series. In particular, Edith’s desperation as the one Crawley sister who cannot seem to marry has become almost unwittingly laughable on Downton. Instead, in “Confessions,” she is able to ironize her unsuccessful encounters with the opposite sex: “Bammo, another successful interaction with a man!”[25] Hence, the author’s emulation of Edith as a Bridget Jones–esque character dismantles the separation between past and present but also gives Edith narrative voice denied to her in the television serial as the “middle sister.”
Interestingly, some examples of fan fiction also engage in self-reflexive experimentation to directly challenge Julian Fellowes through his on-screen characters. As Jenkins points out, fans often protest when they feel a character development has gone awry as the series progresses.[26] In “Leave Us Alone, Julian Fellowes,” written by Darthsydious, the figures from the show choose to criticize their own serial story lines. Here characters of Downton disrupt the television program to question Fellowes’s writing midscene. The piece establishes its authenticity by opening with a monologue by an unnamed, but very famous, film star. After kissing Jane, Robert complains about the sudden change in plot, at odds with his once staunch moral code established earlier in the series. His wife, Cora, cuts him off: “Save it dear, it’s called bad script writing, the best of us have suffered from it.”[27] More-than-miraculous recoveries, troubling gender politics, and the use of tokenism are all criticisms levied at Fellowes. Lady Violet, the one figure in Downton who, according to the piece, has remained true to her original characterization, saves the day by handing Fellowes over to the wrath of disgruntled fans. The characters go on to finally criticize the serial format itself: “Must we go through every single moment of our lives from middle-age to old-age to death? Good heavens, there are much more important things to watch on the television. Like Doctor Who.”[28] In a final dismantling of Fellowes’s devotion to authenticity and detail at the sacrifice of narrative, even the Downton characters prefer the science-fiction fantasy of Doctor Who over the nostalgic, yet limiting, comforts of their own program. This fan fiction creates a self-reflexive fantasy environment where fan and characters dynamically communicate, sans Fellowes.[29]
In a further metafictional twist, Downton Abbey characters also indulge in reading fan fiction as well. A story contributed as part of a Downton Abbey fan-fiction metafiction challenge, Clara Webb’s “Afterglow” features Lady Sybil reading fan fiction based on the program’s characters. Her husband, Tom, catches her reading fan fiction in bed one night. “Sybil—his gorgeous wife, the daughter of an earl, a political rabble-rouser educated at some of England’s finest schools—had another side only he knew about. ‘You’ve been reading smutty fan fiction again, haven’t you?’”[30] A mix of identification occurs within the scene: the fan-fiction writer identifies with Lady Sybil, who identifies with the characters she reads about in the fan fiction. The emphasis in this passage is that Sybil is accomplished and admirable through both her political and her personal connections and still enjoys reading fan fiction. If fan-fiction characters are designed to live out the fantasy of the writers, then their avatars also engage in and enjoy the same fantasy practice. As Jenkins points out, the fans do have “lives,”[31] and the characters they project themselves on also engage in the imaginative constructions.
Though containing instances of humor and irony as illustrated in the examples above, in contrast to recent spoofs of the series, Downton Abbey fan fiction does not set out to trivialize the serial and implicitly its viewers. (Admittedly, the novelty factor of these parodies also wears off rather quickly after the first few minutes.) The focus of the works remains on pastiche rather than parody. The majority of writers and readers in the fan-fiction forums acknowledge the Downton Abbey television serial as its own text (and, perhaps, also out of fear of copyright laws). Oftentimes, these plotlines become more complex and interesting than the ones featured on the drama itself. Their works participate in the universe initially created by Fellowes, though also highlight the fact that the producer/writer’s creation is certainly not self-contained. Indeed, it is debatable to what extent the term “fan” remains useful in connection to these writers. As evidenced by their message-board commentaries and the content of the stories themselves, many are dissatisfied with the series itself and its limited possibilities; rather, they find interest in the narrative possibilities provided by its characters. Their profiles and online activity have a broad array of interests in many different genres, not merely limited to the Downton universe. Furthermore, fan-fiction writers exhibit an incredibly sophisticated sense of the intertextual nature of the heritage serial itself and its genealogy in nineteenth-century literature. They also, through their works, comment on the changing nature of the relation between screen and text in adaptation itself. To make a separation between a “critic” and “fan” of the series seems pejorative and also perpetuates the same artistic hierarchical limitations Fellowes promotes.
Using the Downton Abbey “source” text as a springboard, fan-fiction writers use the series’ frameworks as catalysts for their own imaginative narratives. Fan fiction allows viewers of the show to challenge the conventional narratives and authorial hold Fellowes has chosen for Downton Abbey. They do so through the creation of supportive communities, which seek to improve their writing through feedback and creative prompts. In addition, they use the program as a catalyst to pursue their own personal and often subversive story lines. Finally, the use of metanarrative provides useful commentary for the potential impact of fan groups on established productions. Perhaps, like Fifty Shades of Grey, a fan fiction will come to the attention of mainstream popular culture (though the Downton erotica is far more empowering to women). As Fellowes has already expressed pleasure with some of the online viral parodies like “Downton Arby’s,” he may also be aware of some of the more popular Downton fan fiction.[32] The lagging narrative of his serial would surely benefit from another value judgment and bring a degree of generic self-reflexivity to representations of gender and class. Further study of fan writing could also lead to conversations on predecessors of the television serial itself. For example, Marc Napolitano’s chapter in this collection ponders how Dickens, an author with a very specific representation of Great Britain, incorporated fan desires and/or writings into his serialized novels. Fan fiction ensures that at least in some universes, if not in Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey, fans will act and experience through infinite screens dynamic conversations on representations of a heritage past.[33]
Mark Lawson, “TV Review: Downton Abbey,” Guardian, 25 December 2011, accessed 1 August 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/.
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers (New York: Routledge, 2012), 118.
Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 38–42.
Suzanne Scott and Henry Jenkins, “Introduction,” in Jenkins, Textual Poachers, xxii.
Claire Monk, “Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: Period Film Audiences and Online Fan Culture,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 8, no. 2 (November 2011): 450–52.
Higson, English Heritage, 38–42.
Monk, “Heritage Film Audiences 2.0,” 452.
Higson, English Heritage, 38–42.
Claire Monk, “Sexuality and Heritage,” Sight and Sound 5, no. 10 (1995): 33, as cited by Higson, English Heritage.
Lawson, “TV Review.”
Holly Baxter, “The Rape of Anna Bates: What If Stieg Larsson Had Written Downton Abbey?” Guardian, 12 November 2013, accessed 20 November 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/.
“Julian Fellowes,” IMDb, 26 November 2013, accessed 30 November 2013, http://www.imdb.com/.
Sabrina Sweeney, “Romeo and Juliet: Julian Fellowes Reinvents a Classic Tale,” BBC News, 10 October 2013, accessed 15 November 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/.
David Kamp, “The Most Happy Fellowes,” Vanity Fair, December 2012, 170.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Of Sandwiches and Sea-Monsters, “Consequences of the Castle,” FanFiction.Net, 23 January 2012, accessed 15 August 2013, http://www.fanfiction.net/.
MirrorOfSin, “Hearts Aflame,” FanFiction.Net, 16 November 2011, accessed 1 August 2013, http://www.fanfiction.net/.
Kissthespider26, “Forbidden Kisses,” FanFiction.Net, 20 November 2011, accessed 1 August 2013, http://www.fanfiction.net/.
Kissthespider26, “Forum: Downton Abbey Femslash,” FanFiction.Net, 22 November 2011, accessed 1 August 2013, http://www.fanfiction.net/.
Kissthespider26, “Forbidden Kisses.”
Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 189.
Higson, English Heritage, 38–42.
Silvestria, “University Challenge,” FanFiction.Net, 15 August 2011, http://www.fanfiction.net/ (1 August 2013).
LadyEdithC, “Confessions of a SingleMiddleSister,” FanFiction.Net, 11 October 2012, accessed 1 August 2013, http://www.fanfiction.net/.
Darthsydious, “Leave Us Alone, Julian Fellowes!,” FanFiction.Net, 18 November 2011, accessed 1 August 2013, http://www.fanfiction.net/.
Ibid.
Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 118.
Clara Webb, “Afterglow,” FanFiction.Net, 8 June 2013, accessed 20 October 2013, http://www.fanfiction.net/.
Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10.
Kamp, “The Most Happy Fellowes,” 170.
Marc Napolitano, “It Is but a Glimpse of the World of Fashion”: British Costume Drama, Dickens, and Serialization," Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey, eds. James Leggott and Julie Anne Taddeo (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Andrea Wright
Gender, Class, and the Pleasures and Spectacle of Shopping in The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge
Splendor, opulence, and meticulous attention to period detail have been defining features of the British costume drama. Indeed, such focus on the visual delights of the past has encouraged some commentators to dismiss the productions as frivolous entertainment that negate opportunity to make any serious social or political comment. Andrew Higson, engaging with the “heritage debate,” which explored the tension between the spectacle and the substance of the predominantly cinematic period adaptations of the 1980s and early 1990s, criticized the “conservationist desire for authenticity” at the expense of preserving the irony or satire of the original texts.[1] This approach to the period drama persists and has characterized responses to the recent BBC and ITV productions, The Paradise (2012–2014) and Mr. Selfridge (2013– ). Michael Hogan, in his two-star review of the series finale of The Paradise, described the program as “mid-market tweeness,” which “blew its budget on fancy packaging and forgot about the product.”[2] Similarly, Lara Prendergast, in a marginally better two-and-a-half-star review of the final episode of the first season of Mr. Selfridge, noted, “If the next series wants to keep viewers hooked, it must offer something more subtle than sumptuous window displays.”[3] However, both reviewers overlook that these two programs, and the books on which they are based, are about spectacle and seduction. Unlike heritage cinema, these productions deliberately revel in the pleasures of consumerism and invite the viewer to experience the wonders of the grand department store. But, just as it is questionable that the earlier period adaptations sacrificed any serious intent for style, it is remiss to claim that these more recent productions are simply vacuous ocular treats. Fundamentally, spectacle and shopping are intrinsically bound up with gender representations, class structures, and social change, and the retail environment provides a fascinating alternative to the more common country house settings.
This chapter will explore these relationships, as well as addressing the specific viewing pleasures on offer via the resplendent halls of the department store. In particular, the role and representation of women, and their association with consumerism and commodification, will be examined. The two series will also be discussed in relation to their closest predecessor, 1920s-set House of Eliott (1991–1994). While the earlier program focused on the developing couture business of two independent women, the more recent productions center on the rise of two ambitious men determined to revolutionize the British shopping experience. Consequently, The House of Eliott seems domestic and genteel, while The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge are public and exhibitionist. Ultimately, the two recent series are seductive and sensational and, although familiar in some respects, invigorate the costume production by making shopping and its attendant pleasures the main attraction.
Chris Hastings’s June 2012 article about upcoming dramas on British television in the Daily Mail was titled “After Upstairs v Downton It’s Store Wars. . . .” It was reported that the BBC and ITV were about to reignite their costume-drama rivalry with similar-themed series, but after poor audience figures and subsequent cancellation of the revived Upstairs, Downstairs (2010–2012), the corporation was keen to air its program first.[4] Accordingly, the BBC’s The Paradise premiered on 25 September 2012, and ITV’s Mr. Selfridge commenced nearly five months later on 6 January 2013. The Paradise, based on Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise or Ladies’ Delight), exchanges mid-nineteenth-century Paris for an unnamed town in the north of England (most likely Newcastle), while Mr. Selfridge adapts Lindy Woodhead’s 2007 biography of the charismatic Harry Gordon Selfridge, founder of the eponymous West End department store that opened in 1909.[5] Both focus on middle-class entrepreneurs, John Moray (Zola’s Mouret, played by Emun Elliott), and Selfridge (Jeremy Piven), who are building their businesses by simultaneously attempting to coax investors and seduce shoppers. To help facilitate the costume drama’s staple upstairs-and-downstairs format, they also centralize a motivated and aspirational young working-class woman, Denise Lovett (Joanna Vanderham) in The Paradise and Agnes Towler (Aisling Loftus) in Mr. Selfridge. Each explores the lives, loves, scandals, successes, and failures of these characters and their relationship to the department stores. Significantly, both Moray and Selfridge risk their reputations and businesses because of personal and professional indiscretions. Moray becomes romantically entangled with Denise, thus jeopardizing the financial backing of upper-class investor Lord Glendenning (Patrick Malahide), to whose overbearing socialite daughter, Katherine (Elaine Cassidy), he is rather reluctantly engaged. Selfridge’s weaknesses for gambling and beautiful women consistently threaten to overshadow his business innovations and risk his marriage.
Such plot preoccupations situate both, like many television costume dramas, in a curious position in regard to generic classification. Producer of The Paradise, Simon Lewis, when asked about what “edge” the show had over other costume dramas, replied, “ When I read it I thought, it’s sort of Sex and the City in the 19th century. I think a lot of the values are fairly contemporary. We’ve dressed it up in a very fancy setting and actually a lot of the dynamics that the characters face are really modern.”[6]
Lewis’s comments, although suggesting a rather more racy interpretation than the program itself delivers, highlight the continued appeal of the period text because of its familiar format and preoccupations. Creator, writer, and executive producer of Mr. Selfridge Andrew Davies explained perhaps even more surprising similarities with other television genres: “I began to see parallels to my favourite TV show The Sopranos. A charismatic hero with self-destructive tendencies, at the centre of a drama that explores the world of business and the emotional joys and traumas of family life.”[7]
More accurately, though, they appear to be somewhat of a hybrid of the aforementioned period/heritage cycle and soap opera. Chris Louttit, writing about the BBC’s Bleak House (2005) and Cranford (2007–2009), highlights how similar combinations of generic styles have characterized other period adaptations since the mid-2000s. Louttit discusses how elements such as length, editing, aesthetics, and stripped-back narratives have contributed to a perception that these programs were transforming the costume drama, but that often innovation was tempered by conservative ideologies and an emphasis on their “quality” status.[8] He concludes that they contain “a conservative strain which reveals not only our ‘obsession with the past’ but also, especially in recent years, a growing anxiety about the future.”[9]
A preoccupation with the past as a way of mediating the present aligns the television costume drama much more closely with its cinematic predecessors. However, the relationship between past and present is complex, and as Higson points out, the nostalgia of the heritage cycle is ambivalent and can be read in numerous ways. He argues that
nostalgia is always in effect a critique of the present, which is lacking something desirable situated out of reach in the past. Nostalgia always implies that there is something wrong with the present, but it does not necessarily speak from the point of view of right-wing conservatism. It can of course be used to flee from our troubled present into the imaginary stability and grandeur of the past. But it can also be used to comment on the inadequacies of the present from a more radical perspective.[10]
This kind of vagueness means that it is sometimes difficult to attach a particular reading to a heritage text. Such texts were perhaps a distraction meant to counter, at least in part, the reality of living in Britain in the political and economic climate of the 1980s, but at the same time, they can also be recognized as means to remark upon contemporaneous culture and politics. This uncertainty lingers within post-1980s heritage cinema and television, and the productions are still readily tied to contemporary political commentary. One of the most poignant connections appeared on the cover of a 2010 edition of Private Eye magazine; under the heading “Downturn Abbey,” the heads of key members of David Cameron’s cabinet (including Cameron himself in the position of Lord Grantham) were Photoshopped onto the promotional shot of the Downton Abbey (2010– ) cast posed in front of Highclere Castle.[11] Essentially, the television costume drama has not lost its cinematic predecessors’ ability to comment upon, or at least be used to comment upon, contemporary social and political life, and like Higson’s description of the ambivalent meaning of nostalgia, recent costume dramas can be understood as a way to escape the present and to explore the implications of current changes. As Louttit notes, when commenting on the scheduling of Cranford in relation to the documentary The Blair Years (2007), “Adaptations like Cranford are a part of their own historical moment as much as a reflection on the past.”[12]
The contemporary resonance of some of the themes around shopping, such as commodification, raised by The Paradise was recognized by the series producer Lewis:
[Zola] was talking about the big shops killing off the artisans, the craftsmen, and you think, well that’s no different to us bemoaning the arrival of another chain store on the High Street. He was talking about capitalism and how it was killing off the art of making things individually and personally and replacing it with something much more cynical—that’s a completely contemporary notion.[13]
But Lewis’s comments perhaps only go so far in explaining how both The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge are a response to current changes in retail and shopping experiences. The point of dramatic transformation brought about by the department store from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth century saw small shops, merchants, and craftsmen under threat from the magnificent premises and enhanced experience offered by their much bigger rivals. Michael B. Miller, writing about Paris’s Bon Marché, describes how the stores were “dazzling and sensuous, a fantasy world, a spectacle of extraordinary proportions” and that visiting them “became an event and an adventure.”[14] In the early twenty-first century, the British high street is in a precarious state because of the increasing popularity of alternative shopping attractions and the digital economy. In 2011, retail expert Mary Portas published an independent report detailing the decline of the high street and twenty-eight recommendations designed to reinvigorate it. She wrote that “the phenomenal growth of online retailing, the rise of mobile retailing, the speed and sophistication of the major national and international retailers, the epic and immersive experiences offered by today’s new breed of shopping mall, combined with a crippling recession, have all conspired to change today’s retail landscape.”[15]
The sense that the old, or at least traditional, is being usurped by something new and somehow less authentic is foregrounded frequently in The Paradise, particularly in the relationship between the small drapers and haberdasheries that occupy one side of the street and the grand store that dominates the other. Tailor Edmund Lovett (Peter Wight), Denise’s uncle, describes The Paradise as a phantom, a daydream, thus underscoring the almost ephemeral quality of the store and its goods when compared to the work of traditional tradesmen. The distinction is further emphasized when Edmund is commissioned by Katherine, to spite Moray when it seems he is not willing to marry her, to create a gown. The process of designing and crafting a garment of quality by hand is presented as requiring passion, commitment, and pride. Edmund spends many hours working on the dress in his small shop, and his workmanship speaks for itself. Conversely, the young saleswomen in The Paradise simply produce enticing garments from boxes and tempt their customers with florid descriptions of the fabrics.
Interestingly, though, both programs seem to offer something more significant: a nostalgia for a certain kind of shopping itself. By focusing on the pleasures of the retail environment, the goods, the display cabinets, window designs, and the personal input of the floor staff, they recall an experience that is less important in modern retail, which is overwhelmingly characterized by cavernous hypermarkets and malls (all offering a similar selection of shiny units and brands) that lack the individuality and character of their forebears. Moreover, online shopping in the UK has increased at a staggering rate, with the Centre for Retail Research indicating that by 2012 it already accounted for 12.7 percent of all purchases.[16] Both The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge create a visual hyperbole of shopping, and the multitextured and almost tactile quality of the sets and dressings produces a potent retail fantasy that is potentially absent for viewers. It is in this respect also that these productions share aesthetic concerns with heritage cinema. Higson describes the key iconography of the heritage film as “completed by the rich mise-en-scène of the antique collector, with its tasteful period décor, furniture and ornaments.”[17] In these programs, the opportunity to revel in the creation of a period wonderland is aided by the department-store setting.
In the opening section of Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola describes the bustling streets of Paris and its consumer temptations as seen through the eyes of Denise. He describes her fascination with the Ladies’ Paradise, which seems to be a dynamic machine vibrating with warmth and energy that contrasts with the drab and old-fashioned surroundings of her uncle’s shop.[18] The opening shots of the television adaption feature a young woman being drawn to the elegant white-painted beacon on an otherwise gray city street. Before entering her uncle’s shop, she crosses the road to stare in wonder at the decorative and brightly lit window displays. When Denise first enters The Paradise to seek employment, the camera follows her progress and reveals the delights of the interior. Delicate glass and china objects arranged on elegant shelves catch the light in the entrance halls, and the stylish ground-floor department glows in pale candlelight. The nondiegetic music, played on predominantly wind instruments, heightens the sense of wonder and is accompanied by the soft tinkle of glass as customers handle goods, and movement disturbs the dangling crystals of the candelabra. While the BBC chose not to emphasize Zola’s gender designation of the store and removed “Ladies” from the title, the style and contents of The Paradise are clearly intended to entice the female shopper. Production designer Melanie Allen has described how, architecturally, it is an amalgamation of stores and buildings from the 1800s, “but its ‘look’ is based on the work of [James] Tissot. In the 1870s, when our story is set, he was here painting society ladies. It’s his influence that gives The Paradise its French feel—romantic and feminine.”[19] The pale color palette, fine décor, and elegantly dressed ladies in particular reveal Tissot’s influence. Despite the feminine interiors, though, it is a man who provides the new pleasures for women, and in this very public space he orchestrates how women will spend their money and leisure time.
In the first episode of Mr. Selfridge, before the opening of the store, Selfridge tells his staff that “we are going to show the world how to make shopping thrilling,” and indeed as Piven plays him, he is portrayed as a consummate showman. Each of the events that the store hosts, including visits from explorer Ernest Shackleton and aviator Louis Blériot, is focused on performance and garnering appreciation from shoppers and the popular press. The interior of the store itself is more ordered and formal than The Paradise. The white marble walls with grand classical columns and wide staircases give a sense of space and grandeur, and the goods are neatly displayed on and inside large glass and wood cabinets. The sweeping camera shot that ushers the viewers from the upper balcony to the sales counters as the (predominantly female) staff excitedly prepare for the opening accentuates the spectacle. Throughout the series, there is much emphasis placed on the window displays. Although this is partly to enable the relationship between Agnes and the suave French window dresser, Henri (Grégory Fitoussi), its function is to showcase the consumer goods in a manner that seduces the customer and ultimately augments the exhibitionist nature of the department store.
By contrast, The House of Eliott , although sharing a similar concern for period detail, has a far more domestic feel. Initially, Beatrice (Stella Gonet) and Evangeline Eliott (Louise Lombard) work from their family home, and when their couture business is established, they move to a building that houses their apartment and workrooms, meaning there is little distinction made between home and employment. The industrious heart of the business is the sewing room, a small and feminine space filled with fabrics and patterns. A team of women, who regularly gossip and quarrel, make garments based on designs created by the Eliott sisters. It is not until the final episode of the first season that there is any public show of their work, and when their collection is premiered, it is a genteel affair. Each of the gowns is introduced by Beatrice as a small number of models walk out onto a stage and wait for the response of a polite upper-class audience and writers from upmarket fashion publications. They struggle with the showmanship and confidence that seems natural and acceptable for men in the public sphere, a historically important representation.
In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Diane Rappaport explores retail, gender, and class in London from the latter part of the nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century. She argues that a bourgeois femininity was “born” within this public realm and that “public space and gender identities were, in essence, produced together.”[20] She states that contemporary social observers professed the city a “pleasure zone” and women, the “natural” shoppers, “pleasure seekers.”[21] But she also highlights the tension between the public and the private that emerged as the idealized middle-class wife and mother who belonged to the domestic sphere gradually made her way into the public arena. For Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot, the department store offered a space where such tensions could be negotiated as they “were in the public sphere, but in their very construction, architecture and aura they presented themselves as part of the private sphere.”[22] Andrews and Talbot and Rappaport imply that there was a complex relationship between women, shopping, and the new freedoms that consumerism and access to city spaces provided. Rappaport argues that “class and gender conflicts were fought out through the construction of the female consumer as either a victim or an emancipated woman” but that these constructions should not be understood as simply emancipatory or oppressive.[23] Furthermore, Brian Nelson notes that for middle-class women, in particular, the store was a “dream world” where women could enjoy a “sense of freedom from husbands and the restraints of family life” but that ultimately the pleasures of shopping were “half-illusory.”[24] This complexity surrounding the association of women, shopping, and the public sphere is consistently foregrounded in The House of Eliott, The Paradise, and Mr. Selfridge.
There is frequent concern expressed about respectability and reputation in all three programs that impacts women of all classes. In The House of Eliott, Beatrice and Evangeline’s business ambitions are hindered by suspicions that their enterprise is not appropriate for women of their social background. When the women lose their father, their aunt encourages Beatrice to apply for a position as a lady’s companion because it is befitting a spinster, and they find it difficult to secure and sustain financial backing, despite their obvious talents. In Mr. Selfridge bold marketing strategies are employed to entice women into the store, but reservations about the suitability of advertising what are perceived to be intimate items such as toiletries, perfumes, and makeup are expressed by senior staff. Ultimately it is decided that scents, particularly the sentimental lily-of-the-valley signature perfume, should be displayed at the front of the store but that lipsticks and rouge should be discreetly concealed under the counters. One of Denise’s innovations for The Paradise is to invite women to the store after hours to exclusively view luxurious underwear and nightwear ranges. The secrecy of the event is simultaneously intended to allow the respectable middle-class clientele to shop without damaging their reputations and to increase the profits of the male entrepreneur, which appears to be an acceptable negotiation. The notion that middle-class women could take refuge in shopping, if only temporarily, is also prominent. After the death of their controlling father, Beatrice and Evangeline immediately indulge in the previously denied consumer pleasures, and a montage shows them carefree as they try on hats and shoes. In the second episode of The Paradise, Katherine’s friend, Mrs. Brookmire (Olivia Hallinan), describes the store as a “piece of heaven” and masks her personal unhappiness in her marriage by gleefully ordering multiple items on credit.
While the department store helped to facilitate the emergence of middle-class women into the public sphere, it did not offer working-class women the same, however limited, freedoms. Nelson, in his introduction to Zola’s novel, observes that “for working-class women the store was hardly different from the street: whether in the street or in the store, Denise and the other working-class salesgirls are constantly a prey, because of their subordinate and economic status, to the masculine gaze; and they themselves are also buyable objects.”[25]
Appearance and presentation are consistently foregrounded as essential to the success of a woman working in the retail environment. Miss Audrey (Sarah Lancashire), the spinster head of ladieswear in The Paradise, regularly inspects the girls’ attire and hairstyle, and Mr. Selfridge lines up almost identical female lift attendants wearing matching outfits for his appraisal before they enter the shop floor. Over the counters the girls demurely smile at female customers as they make their selections and often flirtatiously engage male shoppers; they are ultimately as on display as the goods they sell. However, the commodification of femininity is perhaps best exemplified by the character Ellen Love (Zoë Tapper) in Mr. Selfridge. Although she is not a shopgirl, she is initially used to help promote the store, and she is described as the “spirit of Selfridges.” Selfridge is immediately attracted to the young actress when he sees her in a somewhat risqué music-hall performance as she suggestively sings about how she would like to be “his new girl.” From that point she is consistently presented as a spectacle to be appreciated. When she first enters the store, she sweeps through the shop floor dressed in red as the male and female staff look on in admiration, and Selfridge himself cannot resist her charms. Framing and costume make sexuality overt and unquestionably construct woman-as-object; she is a consumable pleasure.
In keeping with Louttit’s suggestion that television dramas produced since the mid-2000s are somewhat ideologically conservative, the recent productions (and indeed their earlier predecessor) fail to offer consistently progressive roles for women and reiterate rigid class structures. Female roles are often compromised and even trivialized, thus indicating an ambivalent attitude toward female empowerment. For example, the presence of the suffragettes and Selfridges’ endorsement of their cause may appear positive, but the representation of individual female characters is more problematic. In The Paradise, Denise regularly shows initiative and imagination. She is distinct from her peers, who seem either flighty or spiteful, and she has ambition and an ability to understand the changing retail market. In episode 1:7, when Denise has left The Paradise because of her feelings toward Moray, she proposes that her uncle and the shopkeepers who have lost trade because of their much bigger rival collaborate and offer incentives to shoppers. Such positive representation of an aspiring young woman is tempered, however, by the need to gain approval from men and by the way in which established structures restrict her progression. The cooperative of shopkeepers ultimately fails because of internal disagreements and an unwillingness to be guided by a woman.
This representation of Denise seems to be in keeping with Nelson’s reading of Zola’s character. He argues that feminist critics such as Naomi Schor have been inclined to understand Denise as “an allegory of feminisation and female revenge, transcendence of the commodity, and the achievement of autonomy,” but that what is more significant is the way that Mouret is humanized and domesticated by bourgeois ideology.[26] Fundamentally he contends that “although Denise breaks the mould of masculine domination, her influence and independence are only achieved in terms of her critical presence within the existing system.”[27] The BBC adaptation does not portray Moray as a ruthless exploiter of women who needs to be reformed in the way that Mouret is in Zola’s text, but there is the same sense that Denise, a modern, capitalist woman, recognizable to contemporary audiences, brings about change by knowing and understanding the evolving business world that she inhabits, not by challenging patriarchy. This is further emphasized by the contrast between Katherine and Denise, and by the brief appearance of Clemence Romanis (Branka Katic) early in season 2. Katherine is an upper-class woman who attempts to manipulate others through her social status and wealth, but she ultimately fails and loses Moray.
More significantly, the representation of Clemence, a French businesswoman invited to The Paradise by Moray, demonstrates a reluctance on the part of the producers to allow a successful woman to operate unproblematically outside of patriarchal influence. As soon as she arrives, Clemence attracts considerable male attention, which she uses to her advantage in attempting to secure a deal for the (rather appropriate) fireworks that she is promoting. Importantly, the visit coincides with Miss Audrey’s announcement that she will be leaving her employment to marry Edmund. Her fear of dying a spinster has precipitated her decision, but she is not without doubts about having to give up her livelihood. Clemence’s questioning of the position of women in a man’s world stirs up strong feelings in the women around her, especially when she gives a rousing speech about her own success and makes a toast to women’s passion. Denise admits to Clemence that she wants to be just like Moray and run The Paradise, and the older woman says that she knew they wanted the same thing and kisses Denise on the lips. Denise recoils, but she discloses to another assistant, Clara (Sonya Cassidy), that she does not want to tell Moray that his friend tried to seduce her because she respects the other woman’s philosophies and still wants her to win the contract. Miss Audrey also repeats Clemence’s words about a woman’s calling to Edmund and tells him that she is reconsidering her decision. However, the way in which Clemence manipulates the men, in particular the married shop manager Dudley (Matthew McNulty), is portrayed as villainous, and she reveals to Denise that she has had to flee Paris because of some mysterious “difficulties.” It seems that she believes that toying with men is the only way that a woman can do business, thus confusing what seemed to be feminist ideas. Moreover, her sexuality is handled in a manner that casts her as a dangerous Other with the potential to corrupt those around her. Ultimately, and in keeping with the conservatism of the program, Clemence is only a temporary interruption, and she is exposed to be driven by bitterness because a former lover chose a man over a life with her. The hapless Dudley is rescued from committing adultery, and Edmund and Miss Audrey are reconciled. Normalcy is restored as Clemence retreats, literally, into the darkness after the successful fireworks display at the store.
Agnes is also ambitious, but her prospects are even more limited. She is given some opportunities, but she is always beholden to men. In the first episode she impresses Selfridge by breaking the rules of the store that she worked in by allowing him to see and handle the goods without intention to buy. At the end of the day she is told not to return and is forced to seek out the mysterious American. He gives her a position in his new store and continues to offer paternalistic support, especially in dealing with her own father, a violent drunk. She does not have a physical attraction to her employer, and instead falls for Henri, but the relationship is controlled by him and is presented as her sexual education rather than emancipation. He eventually leaves to go to work in America with his much more experienced French lover, and Agnes reevaluates her potential union with a young waiter who is firmly indicated as belonging to the same class.
There are far more derogatory female characters to be found in both series that perhaps highlight popular culture’s persistence in using established representations of femininity. Denise’s working life is made uncomfortable by her relationship with Clara, an outgoing, aggressive, and competitive assistant. Physically they are distinguished in a manner that relies on conventional stereotypes of virgin and whore. Denise, as the ingenue, is petite, blonde, and suitably bashful when she receives male attention. Meanwhile, Clara is brunette, tall, with a consistently hostile posture and manner, and is sexually experienced. While Moray refers to Denise as his “little champion” and “inspiration,” and respects her business acumen, it becomes clear that he has had a brief sexual relationship with Clara and is now keen to distance himself from her. Dudley warns Clara that she is to cease in pursuing her employer and “restrain” herself. Indeed her desperate attempts to win Moray’s attentions make her appear undignified and reckless. Clara is revealed to harbor secrets, in addition to her encounter with Moray, that threaten her position, and she—and other characters, such as the desperate Miss Bunting (Pippa Haywood) who steals from Selfridge—highlight the precarious nature of a working-class woman’s reputation. Interestingly, in both programs, the central upper-class women, Katherine and Lady Mae (Katherine Kelly), who initially helps Selfridge find additional financial backing, are portrayed as calculating, greedy, and controlling. Their unsympathetic representation perhaps aids in underscoring the promotion of bourgeois ideals and the success of Moray and Selfridge as central to progress.
It is through these representations that The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge reveal their inherently conservative attitude toward women. It is also this aspect that separates them most decisively from The House of Eliott. While, as noted earlier, there are restrictions for the Eliott sisters in their business dealings, which seem to be tied as much to their social position as their gender, they are afforded considerably more autonomy in their private lives. Birgitte Søland, writing about young women in the 1920s, notes that the decade saw considerable social changes and shifts in gender politics, and although it “may not have ultimately overturned fundamental power relations between men and women, it transformed many patterns of daily life.”[28] Søland acknowledges that differing accounts of women circulate perceptions of the 1920s and that
the “Modern Woman”—the scantily clad, sexually liberated, economically independent, self-reliant female—was a rhetorical construction, the quintessential symbol of a world in disarray. But, “modern women”—women who cut their hair, wore short skirts, worked for wages, and enjoyed themselves outside the home—were not just figments of anxious imaginations.[29]
The House of Eliott represents changes linked to the “modern woman” rather than a sensationalized and revolutionary shift, and Beatrice and Evangeline embody a sense of steady progress. In her relationship with Jack Maddox (Aden Gillett), Beatrice maintains her independence and often appears to be more rational and more confident in both business and social situations. Once they are married, she is initially reluctant to start a family because of the implications it will have for her professional life. Eventually this causes them to separate, and Beatrice embarks, for a time, on another relationship. Although she does come to realize that Jack is her true love and settles into family life, she has arrived at this conclusion after a journey of self-discovery. Evangeline has numerous relationships throughout the three seasons, and there are strong implications that many are sexual. After turning twenty-one, she makes the decision, as a newly autonomous woman, to take a position at a couture house in Paris. The stay is short lived, but she makes clear, with a revealing smile to a rather stunned Beatrice, that the affair with designer Gilles Caragnac (Patrice Valota) was fun and that she was unsure who seduced whom. Unlike Agnes’s sexual education, this encounter seems to mark Evangeline’s maturity and liberation. Arguably, in this respect, the Eliott sisters have more in common with Moray and Selfridge, and often their colorful private lives threaten to eclipse their public and professional careers. Equally they are less consumers or consumables than their counterparts in The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge.
The seduction of shopping and the retail fantasies provided by The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge make the programs stand out from other contemporary period productions. As a response to the present social and economic climate, they offer a particular type of escapism linked to shopping. However, in their representation of women and class they remain determinedly conservative and largely reliant on established stereotypes. The programs are, therefore, paradoxically, forward and backward looking, and continue to engage debates concerning style, substance, and gender politics. Zola frequently describes The Ladies’ Paradise as a machine, a dream-machine or a commercial machine, controlled by a man and designed to draw women in when pleasures of retail were an emergent force. These slick, attractive productions, wonderful commercial machines themselves, likewise seduce and indulge their audiences and provide new delights alongside familiar representations.
Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, 2nd ed., ed. Lester D. Friedman (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 101.
Michael Hogan, “The Paradise: The Last Episode,” Telegraph, 17 November 2012, accessed 4 April 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
Lara Prendergast, “Mr Selfridge, Episode 10, ITV,” Telegraph, 10 March 2013, accessed 4 April 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
Chris Hastings, “After Upstairs v Downton It’s Store Wars . . . and This Time, the BBC Is Determined to Get Its Drama On First,” Daily Mail, 29 June 2012, accessed 2 September 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/.
Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Lindy Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction and Mr Selfridge (London: Profile Books, 2007).
“The Paradise: Bill Gallagher’s Glittering New BBC One Drama Series,” BBC Media Centre, 12 September 2012, accessed 29 August 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/.
“Mr Selfridge: Production Notes,” ITV Studios, accessed 29 August 2013, http://ianwylie.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/mr-selfridge-wylie-itv-production-notes.pdf.
Chris Louttit, “Cranford, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television,” Adaptation 1, no. 2 (2009): 34–48.
Ibid., 45.
Andrew Higson, “The Heritage Film and British Cinema,” in Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson (London: Cassell, 1996), 238.
“Downturn Abbey,” Private Eye, 12 November 2010.
Louttit, “Cranford,” 45.
“The Paradise: Bill Gallagher’s Glittering.”
Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 167.
Mary Portas, “The Portas Review: An Independent Review into the Future of Our High Streets,” December 2011, accessed 29 August 2013, http://www.maryportas.com/wp-content/uploads/The_Portas_Review.pdf.
“Online Retailing in Britain and Europe in 2012,” accessed 29 August 2013, http://www.retailresearch.org/.
Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995), 27.
Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 16.
Lucinda Everett, “Behind the Scenes on ‘The Paradise,’” Telegraph, 2 October 2012, accessed 28 August 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5.
Ibid.
Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot, “Introduction: Women in Consumer Culture,” in All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth-Century Consumer Culture, ed. Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot (London: Cassell, 2000), 3.
Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 13.
Brian Nelson, “Introduction,” in Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, xviii.
Ibid.
Ibid., xxi.
Ibid.
Birgitte Søland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
Ibid.
Louise FitzGerald
Interrogating the Feminist Potential of
Call the Midwife
In her essay “Rethinking Culture: Doing Justice to Feminism,” Diane Elam writes that “the shared importance of feminism and cultural studies as an academic practice is that in their better moments they manage to situate both culture and gender as instances that always demand to be rethought.”[1] What follows then is a discussion, a rethinking about the tensions and contradictions of the “feminist”-inflected analyses that emerged in the media about the BBC One’s highly successful Sunday-evening drama series Call the Midwife (2012– ). This chapter mirrors my own conflicting feelings about the program. While I embraced Call the Midwife for its presentation of women being nice to one another (a rare paradigm in a postfeminist culture that encourages female misogyny) and appreciated its apparent critical reflection on the current budgetary constraints placed on public services by Britain’s coalition government, I also became increasingly uneasy about the appropriation of Call the Midwife as “worthy” feminist television by prominent women in the media.
Call the Midwife tells the story of Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine)—later Jenny Worth—a young and newly qualified midwife who arrives in the post–Second World War working-class community of Poplar, in order to complete her training alongside two other novice midwives and the Anglican order of nuns at Nonnatus House. Lee is described as a middle-class woman who once lived in Paris, who loves classical music, and who was more used to working in the surroundings of clean and orderly hospitals than in the slum conditions of 1950s East End of London. Call the Midwife follows Jenny as she comes to term with her new environment and her role as community midwife. I want to suggest here that neither Heidi Thomas, the program’s writer, nor Jennifer Worth, the author of the best-selling trilogy, Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s (2002), Shadows of the Workhouse (2005), and Farewell to the East (2009), initially or explicitly framed Call the Midwife as influenced by feminist politics. However, after the success of the first series, Thomas does begin to correlate feminist politics with her approach in adapting the book for the second series of the program. In an interview with the Big Issue, she notes that the program was shaped by her “respect” toward “other people [who] had done the hard work, the women who had stuck their necks out; the bra burning generation. I have always been a conscious feminist; I went to an all-girl school where all of the teachers were women. Interestingly feminism was never mentioned—but it was lived.”[2] The absence of such explicit political positioning prior to the broadcast of the first series raises the question as to why the program was taken up by a number of cultural observers as feminist television.
It is with these issues in mind that I seek to interrogate some of the conflicting ideas circulating around the BBC’s adaptation of Call the Midwife to ascertain the declarative significance and discursive symbolism of the program as feminist television. My interest in the show has to do with the way it became, momentarily at least, what Caroline Bainbridge might describe as a “token of exchange” in larger debates about feminism.[3] Where are feminist politics located in Call the Midwife? How is a feminist discourse directed? Does the fact that Call the Midwife is set in a prefeminist era impact on a feminist reading?
Like most screen culture that deals with female issues and female expression, the critical reception of Call the Midwife often ran along the fault line of gender, with a number of male writers agreeing that the BBC One’s program was nothing more than sentimental, nostalgic claptrap all too familiar for the Sunday-evening slot. For example, David Herman from the New Statesman argued that Call the Midwife is “Rose tinged nostalgia,” a show full of “soapy romance” that removed traces of the “dark side of British history.”[4] The author’s evidence of Call the Midwife’s mediation of a certain form of British history, “the dark side,” is concentrated on the lack of accuracy between the books and the series and Call the Midwife’s emphasis on romance plots and “cakes and Horlicks.” The Guardian’s Sam Wollaston took his criticism in a different direction when he suggested that Call the Midwife was explicitly and problematically sexist in its portrayal of masculinity as either violent or inept or sometimes both and criticized the show for its wholesale marginalization of men from the central narrative.[5]
But the show garnered much more enthusiastic and politically motivated responses from female cultural observers. Caitlin Moran, self-confessed feminist rock star and author of the best-selling 2011 book How to Be a Woman, referred to Call the Midwife as “Call the Radical Feminist” in her Sunday Times TV review, where she wrote, “There’s an argument to be made—by me, now—that lovely Christmas special-y, cover-of the Radio-Times sensation Call the Midwife is actually the most radical piece of Marxist-feminist dialectic to ever be broadcast on prime-time television.” Moran locates feminism in what she refers to as “the socialist agenda of the programme.”[6] Radio Times reviewer Alison Graham claimed that “Call the Midwife is the torchbearer of feminism on television,”[7] while the feminist website the F-Word suggested that the program “engages with feminist ideas through women’s different battles.”[8] The Guardian’s Suzanne Moore described the program as “delivering drama, history and Female Empowerment,”[9] and UK Feminista along with Bitch magazine located Call the Midwife’s feminist potential in its engagement with the politics of reproduction and female agency. And Salon ran an article titled “Call the Midwife Defies Viewers’ Ageism,” which suggested that “the BBC series finds beauty in elderly women’s bodies and offers a corrective to TV’s patriarchal sub-culture.”[10]
US reviewers were not quite so ready to position Call the Midwife as a feminist text; this, Gerald Gilbert suggests, is because midwives do not have such a visible presence in the US as they do in the UK where “82% of babies are delivered by midwives . . . compared with 8% in the US.”[11] Nonetheless, Call the Midwife was seen as the harbinger for the rejection of Obama’s aims for socialized health care and a rightly realized fear about the loss of reproductive rights for women. Many of the US reviewers pointed to similarities of Call the Midwife to Danny Boyle’s politically charged 2012 Olympics opening ceremony that prioritized the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) just as the coalition’s policies were beginning to bite, but it was also the political nature of the show, its bleak thematics and “socialist” ideologies of free national health care, that, it was suggested, had resulted in smaller audience numbers in America than Downton Abbey, which was being positioned in the United States as Call the Midwife’s natural bedfellow.[12]
The attention that Call the Midwife received both in the UK and United States suggests a deep investment in the thematics of the show and demonstrates the desire of cultural observers to align Call the Midwife with politics. But a cursory glance at these reviews reflects some of the problems that arise when declaring a cultural product to be aligned with a particular political worldview because what feminism and “feminist television” might mean to one person does not mean that it will resonate in the same way for another. Nonetheless, feminist scholarship has argued that television has often and quite distinctively been located as a definitively female-centered cultural space and is recognized as a site of struggle over meaning where oppositional values are negotiated on a daily basis.[13] It has been exactly the struggle over meaning that has proved to be extremely fruitful for feminist scholarship, so in assigning Call the Midwife the mantle of feminist TV, feminist cultural observers have undermined one of the central ideas of feminist critique by “professionalizing” meaning.[14] However, if telling women’s stories is in itself feminist praxis because it accords agency to the female voice, then Call the Midwife appears to meet the requirements of “feminist television.” Written by a woman, narrated by another woman (British actress Vanessa Redgrave, whose own political activism is often associated with the women’s movement), and adapted for screen by Thomas (screenwriter of TV films and serials: I Capture the Castle [2003]; Madame Bovary [2000, BBC Two]; Cranford [2007, BBC One]; and Ballet Shoes [2007, BBC One]—all of which prioritize the female voice), then Call the Midwife begins to look like the holy trinity of female authorship. Indeed, Thomas told Hollywood Reporter that series 3 of Call the Midwife will be directed solely by women, a move that might mirror the alleged political agenda of the show or might serve as a response to the cultural investment in Call the Midwife as “the torchbearer to feminism.”
Much to the earlier chagrin of Guardian’s Sam Wollaston, all of the stories prioritized in Call the Midwife are about women; four young women and a group of nuns who occupy an almost exclusively female world and the pregnant women whom they care for are also supported by mothers, sisters, female neighbors, and friends. Jessica Raine suggests that the show is doing something distinctive in its screen presentation of women: “It’s very interesting,” she says, “seeing a show where none of the women are defined by their relationships with a man. That is unbelievably rare on television. The amount of scripts I read where there are two women in the show and it’s a mother and a wife, it makes me really angry.”[15] Helen George, who plays midwife Trixie Franklin, reiterates Raine’s sentiments about the show’s more interesting treatment of women when she notes, “The focus is the women and the work, the vocation, having a through-line with your life. It’s so nice to do a female-friendly show that isn’t about fighting over a man or whatever.”[16] Pam Ferris (Sister Evangelina) makes the feminist potential of the show much more explicit when she claimed that as a self-proclaimed feminist she thought the show “tells us where we come from and that as women we should be really grateful for the things that have changed over the last fifty years.”[17] If Ferris is suggesting that women’s bodies are always political, then the correlation of a fictional program set in the 1950s about midwifery and the emergence of the NHS clearly has feminist potential; however, the implied sentiment in her response to the show, that women should be grateful for what has been achieved on their behalf, smacks of a repudiation of the continued struggle over women’s reproduction agency. Nevertheless it is the rare prioritization of a female ensemble on screen that appeared to be one of the most treasured elements of the show.
Not since the BBC’s adaptation of Cranford has the television screen been occupied by what academic Nina Auerbach might describe as a “Utopian community of women.”[18] Auerbach argues that Cranford moved away from the romance plot of Gaskell’s novel that would traditionally be the fare of Sunday-night costume dramas by focusing on the stories of a group of middle-aged, unmarried, unglamorous women. It is the “utopian community of women,” or the “gynocentric focus of Cranford,” argues Katherine Byrne, that “championed a feminine ethic of compassion and care and its exploration of the relationship between private and public and the bonds within and between classes.”[19] The alignment with and interweaving of the domestic and familial, personal with public, and political and community that made Cranford appear to be politically motivated is mirrored in the private and domesticated, familial, and personal community of women in Call the Midwife. The program’s foregrounding of the personal with the public (whether in Nonnatus House or the domestic setting of the homes and communities that house the pregnant mothers and their families) provides the criticism of patriarchy precisely because Call the Midwife suggests that domesticity is valuable history.
Women’s domestic and community life is as worthy of study as anything in the public (men’s) realm precisely because, as Nancy Armstrong notes, the domestic cannot be removed from the political; it is here where the nation’s future is being formed through childbearing and through management of household expenses, health, and community issues.[20] To hear the voices of these domestic working-class women from the interior of a text “at a point at which the authorial subject is constructed independently rather than as a site at which male lack is disavowed”[21] is feminist politics.
Call the Midwife’s feminist potential can be located not only in the holy trinity of female authorship and the focus on female subjects often ignored in the cultural imagining of the nation’s history but also in Worth’s personal decision to tell her story of midwifery. After reading an academic article in the 1998 Medicine Review titled “Impressions of a Midwife in Literature” in which the author of the article asked why midwives were virtually nonexistent from the literary landscape, Worth made the decision to make the midwife a visible literary figure and raised the profile of another female voice that has been traditionally excluded and silenced by patriarchy. Historically, feminism and midwifery have been intermingled by the fact that they both serve to advocate for reproductive rights on the behalf of and for women; midwifery is often perceived then as feminist praxis. But I would also suggest that the midwife has been appropriated as a feminist figure because she has been so consistently cloaked in misogyny. Indeed, as Lucy Fischer writes, the midwife is a feminist figure because she has been seen as a subversive woman. Often associated with witchcraft, the midwife became “the repository of patriarchal fears of female strength and as a scapegoat for the new obstetrical profession.”[22]
Fischer’s analysis of the relationship between horror films and parturition offers an account of the historical positioning of the midwife as abject prior to the “ascendancy of the male physician.”[23] Quoting from the 1484 Malleus Maleficarium (Witches’ Hammer), Fischer demonstrates how this compendium on witchcraft aligns the midwife’s association with birth and death as an indication of her collusion with evil spirits. Whether the alignment of witchcraft with midwifery is a myth, as suggested in David Hurley’s revisionist interrogation of the witch/midwife figure,[24] the fact remains that the persistent association of the midwife with the witch figure has more to do with the desire to professionalize childbirth by replacing these women with medically trained male doctors. Thus both accounts from Fischer and Hurley highlight the ways in which the midwife has been disavowed by patriarchy. Worth’s books and Thomas’s adaptation rescue this female figure from the margins by centralizing the midwife as an authorial subject whose agency is not disavowed by male lack.
Call the Midwife’s focus on the story of the midwife and the work she does with and for women is mirrored in another extremely popular and BAFTA-winning British reality program, One Born Every Minute (Channel 4, 2010– ) where viewers watch women’s labor (in both senses of the word) on a maternity ward. One Born Every Minute cuts between the experiences of the midwives—who in direct-camera address discuss the joys and pains of their job—and the women who are in the process of giving birth. One Born Every Minute is also interspersed with moments of a “Utopian community of women” when the midwives sit together in their staff room to discuss personal and professional issues with care and compassion. Call the Midwife and One Born Every Minute take their place among the raft of programs that have emerged over the last ten years on British television that focus on the process of childbirth, producing what Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser call “the cultural cacophony of maternal publicity.”[25] Tyler and Baraitser suggest that the contemporary cultural trend to foreground the visceral nature of partum can be seen as a feminist act precisely because it breaks the “aesthetic taboo” of childbirth. Traditionally, the cultural presentation of partum was kept hidden from view within the domestic sphere, and more often than not, stories of childbirth were absent the actual birth; they were not “represented, but staged around a series of lacunae, gaps or missing images, particularly of the maternal vagina ‘holding’ the head of the emerging feotus and the maternal face in pain and pleasure, such that the birthing subject is both there and not there simultaneously.”[26] Tyler and Baraitser offer an extensive account of the relationship between birth, women, and feminism, showing how patriarchy has “consistently eviscerated and/or appropriated women’s reproductive capacities” within Western culture to argue that one of the tasks of feminism has been to “write birth back into the story of subjectivity and politics.”[27] The very fact is that the predominance of the “new visual culture of birth” (with all of its concomitant paradoxes and problems) is challenging the traditional paradigm of abjection normally associated with the birthing female body and “returning birth to women.”[28] The visceral nature of birth, the bodily fluids, and the “abject” image of the “maternal vagina holding the head of the emerging foetus” might not be as explicit in Call the Midwife as it is in programs such as One Born Every Minute, but this has more to do with its Sunday-evening’s prewatershed broadcast slot; however, Call the Midwife does return birth to women through its “graphic and realistic” envisioning of partum. But I also want to suggest that in focusing on working-class women in the process of partum, Call the Midwife breaks the “natal aesthetic taboo” further.
Birth and reproductive rights continue to be a central feminist issue, and the womb remains the most political place on earth, especially the womb of poor women. Images of working-class women laboring are rare because working-class pregnancy and birth have been historically framed as horrifying; the working-class woman is perceived as an overly fecund, parasitic female figure whose body reproduces an undesirable working/underclass. In the telling and showing of the birth stories of working-class women, not only does Call the Midwife put the story of birth back with women, but also its political potential is in the fact that it prioritizes the natal stories of a group of women that feminism has been so often accused of leaving behind.
If birth and pregnancy are understood as feminist issues, then abortion is the flashpoint of feminism. Call the Midwife does not shy away from abortion; in series 2 an episode focused on the story of Nora Harding (Sharon Small) living in squalor and abject poverty with her unemployed husband and their eight children. Nora is dismayed to discover that she has fallen pregnant and is desperately worried about adding to an already struggling family. Call the Midwife depicts the Hardings as a loving and supportive family and frames Nora’s single-minded determination to terminate her unplanned pregnancy with candor and little sentimentality. Without the support of the health system, Nora has little choice other than to terminate the pregnancy herself. Nurse Lee recognizes the impact another pregnancy will have on Nora’s health, but abortion is illegal at this point, and by law Nurse Lee is required not to support Nora’s decision. The nuns, constricted as they are by their religious beliefs, are not judgmental toward Nora; rather, their support for her is based on a deep understanding of the socioeconomic position for economically disenfranchised women of childbearing age and the risk of backstreet abortion before the widespread accessibility of the pill. As a way of highlighting exactly the risk associated with backstreet abortion, Diane Munday, Colin Francome, and Wendy Savage’s analysis of maternal deaths in the UK state that one hundred thousand illegal abortions were documented in the 1950s and that 25 percent of all maternal deaths were a result of illegal abortion.[29] These stark figures illustrate the social and political resonance of Nora’s story, and as the episode continues the audience witness her trying and failing at different methods of termination—scalding hot baths, taking Epsom salts, and punching herself in the stomach—before she seeks the help of Mrs. Pritchard, the local herbalist, to perform the abortion. Nora contracts septicemia and ends up in the hospital fighting for her life. While the episode concludes with a happy ending—Nora survives, and the family are rehoused outside of Poplar—Thomas frames the narrative with a discussion of birth control, which was still a scientific work in progress.
Nora’s personal experience serves as a case study in the personal becoming the political, and according to Thomas this was intentional because Worth felt very strongly about the right for women to have control over their own bodies. Indeed, Thomas suggests that this particular episode has ramifications for today when intervention into abortion rules signifies a turning back of the clock for women’s reproductive agency. However, I want to stay with the abortion story line as a way of highlighting some of the tensions involved in framing Call the Midwife as feminist television. Before Nora has the abortion, she clearly states that both she and her husband had had their “fun.” The implication here is that the unintended pregnancy, the termination, and the subsequent risk to Nora’s life are as a result of sexual desire. At the same time that Nora is dealing with the consequences of having “fun,” Trixie is seen preparing for a night out with an American film star whom she had agreed to meet if he helped to raise funds for Nonnatus House. As the abortion is being performed on Nora, the camera cuts to Trixie painting her nails with blood red varnish that drips onto a white tablecloth. The scene cuts again to the abortion scenario where Nora is writhing and screaming in pain while Mrs. Pritchard continues the termination. Not long after this distressing scene has ended, Trixie is assaulted by her date. Both Nora and Trixie are punished, and although Call the Midwife ensures that neither woman is judged by her community, the experience of abortion and of sexual assault are implicitly framed as a direct result of their sexual desire. Call the Midwife might “live” feminism through its thematic focus on issues that affect women, but it does not speak about feminism. To do so would mean that the program would have to make visible and challenge embedded patriarchal discourses that frame female desire as punishable as well as offer some suggestions for alternatives that do not limit female experience.
Clearly Call the Midwife resonates with themes and subjects that have been associated with feminism: domestic violence, abortion, rape, birth, and prostitution. But its main narratological and thematic concern is in the relationship between poverty and social welfare, not feminism. Indeed, the idea that showing intelligent, educated, white women who temporarily forsake romantic relationships while they care for other women and are nice to one another is somehow politically engaged enough to serve as an example of “feminist television” is worrying, but it is also indicative of the paucity of television programs that centralize the stories of a “community of women.” Much of the success of Call the Midwife has been attributed to the phenomenal success of Downton Abbey, another British period drama that draws attention to the British class system, but as I suggested earlier its success can also be attributed to Channel 4’s reality television show One Born Every Minute and the high prioritization of birth stories that dominate the screen. Birth has taken center stage within popular culture, and it comes at a time when a more traditional, conservative drive to reinforce the “fact” of women’s biological difference has positioned labor and childbirth as the very pinnacle of womanhood, the moment of epiphany when women experience total fulfillment and total self-expression. That Call the Midwife is so widely seen as feminist television suggests a ghettoizing of what it means to be feminist because midwifery, childbirth, and motherhood are already demarcated as female spaces. As such, Call the Midwife does not offer any new points of identification for women; rather, it reaffirms postfeminist notions of women as only ever the bearers of any form of cultural power if and when associated with birth.
The cultural agency of working-class women in Call the Midwife is also mediated by the way in which they are framed both as spectacle and as repositories of a nostalgic gaze. Working-class women are “othered,” and their stories are secondary to the women of Nonnatus House, a place that is based in Poplar but kept at a distance from the working-class world of Poplar. The opening scene of the first episode explicitly marks the working-class culture as a different and dangerous world. Working-class men are depicted as threatening as they whistle, heckle, and glower at Jenny as she makes her way through the streets of Poplar. Working-class women fight one another, ripping each other’s clothes until a policeman and a nun intercede and restore order. Call the Midwife cannot tell its story about a middle-class young woman learning to work with people whose “otherness” is marked by class without setting up this world as alien, but the fact that Lee’s education is predicated on coming to terms with a working-class community demonstrates how Call the Midwife relies on the juxtaposition of class identity and reinforces class-based hierarchies. For all the rhetoric about the Marxist and socialist nature of Call the Midwife, the program is reliant on hierarchical systems; the church runs Nonnatus House, the nuns have authority over their younger female charges, and the young nurses serve to educate the poorer and disenfranchised working-class women. More worrying is the near invisibility of nonwhite people in the show; the only story that prioritizes a nonwhite woman deals with racist treatment by a small group of white, working-class women that is overcome by the birth of a child. Call the Midwife’s treatment of this story puts the blame and shame squarely on the shoulders of working-class women. In stark contrast, Sister Evangelina’s “unintentional” racist remarks about the number of “black faces” coming out of school in her response to Chummy’s (Miranda Hart) “calling” to do missionary work in Africa does not attract the same sort of disquiet among the nuns as does the behavior of the working-class women. As such, Call the Midwife not only makes a distinction between “intentional” and “unintentional” racism, but also explicitly aligns “intentional” racism with uneducated working-class women. The same episode does make some reference to the racist overtones of a golliwog doll that the senile nun is knitting, but her attitude and behavior are associated with her pathology, and the issue of miscegenation is dealt with when Winnie (Tessa Churchard), a white married woman, gives birth to a black baby after having an affair. When the baby is born, Nurse Lee hands him over to Winnie’s husband, Ted (John Ashton), who makes no reference at all to the fact that the child is black—a silence that continues throughout the episode. In her own telling of the story, Worth supposes that Winnie spoke to her female friends to make sure her child’s racial background was never spoken of. Indeed, in both the television episode and in the book, race is not discussed; rather, it serves to reconfigure Ted’s masculinity from a seventy-year-old man “to a man who looked ten years younger.”[30] The real story here then is about Ted as a man and as a father; the subject of race and racism in Call the Midwife serves only as a narrative device to further demonize working-class women and to reconfigure “tired” masculinity.
The absence of nonwhite people within Poplar sits in stark contrast to the realities of life in the 1950s East End of London that saw new populations from commonwealth countries such as the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent settle in the area. Britain was suffering from severe labor shortages after the Second World War, so much so that in 1945 the government funded a recruitment drive in commonwealth countries, appealing for at least thirty thousand already qualified nurses and midwives to work in the newly founded NHS.[31] Perhaps the absence of these women’s stories, women who were nurses, midwives, and members of this community, from BBC’s Call the Midwife is as much to do with the nostalgic overtones of the show as any explicit exclusionary practices. Call the Midwife, despite its visceral nature, is nostalgic, and it is well documented that nostalgia allows for a certain rewriting of history that can result in a sort of social amnesia.[32] For a show that is predicated on remembering, on representing women who have not been traditionally remembered within the nation’s cultural storytelling practices, this sort of social amnesia marks Call the Midwife as an extraordinarily and problematically white utopian account.
Which stories dominate, what narratives are excluded or marginalized from the screen, is always a question of power and authority, but perhaps one of the questions that should be asked is how and why a story about a midwife in prefeminist 1950s East End of London became so popular now. The reification of the 1950s within contemporary culture and especially on television has been noted by scholars who have suggested that the “retreatist”[33] elements of postfeminism are most evident in programs that are set in a time prior to Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963). Call the Midwife might seem radical in its cultural presentation of women, but its feminism is safe and contained within the past. When feminism is located in the past, its present political interventions and future political aims do not have to be addressed.
By way of conclusion I want to argue that the discursive symbolism of Call the Midwife as feminist television should be tempered because it achieves its feminism by creating a hierarchy that is based on class; it does not offer new identification paradigms for women, nor does it systematically challenge systems of oppression and inequity, and its utopian community of women ignores and excludes nonwhite women. It is exactly these issues that have been indicative of a larger problem in feminism: white middle-class privilege and the inability to identify with women of color and with working-class women.
Diane Elam, “Rethinking Culture: Doing Justice to Feminism,” 1992, accessed 12 January 2014, http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/.
Adrian Lobb, “Call the Midwife: Men Have Been Watching This More than Top Gear,” Big Issue, 22 December 2013, accessed 10 January 2014, http://www.bigissue.com/.
Caroline Bainbridge, “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Mamma Mia as Feminine Object,” in Mamma Mia: Exploring a Cultural Phenomenon, ed. Louise FitzGerald and Melanie Williams (London: Tauris, 2013), 76.
David Herman, “Horlicks for Chummy: Britain’s Romance with Cosy TV Nostalgia,” New Statesman, 7 February 2013, accessed 9 January 2014, http:///www.newstatesman.com/.
Sam Wollaston, “TV Review: Call the Midwife,” Guardian, 20 January 2013, accessed 7 January 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/.
Caitlin Moran, “Call the Radical Feminist,” Sunday Times, 26 January 2013, accessed 17 September 2013, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/.
Alison Graham, “Call the Midwife,” Radio Times, accessed 17 September 2013, http://www.radiotimes.com/.
Emily Kenway, “Call the Midwife: Another Kind of Nostalgia,” F-Word, June 2012, accessed 14 December 2013, http://www.thefword.org.uk/.
Suzanne Moore, “On the Set of Call the Midwife with Suzanne Moore,” Guardian, 21 December 2012, accessed 10 January 2014, http://www.the.guardian.com/.
Stephanie Bower, “Call the Midwife Defies Viewers’ Ageism,” Salon, 9 July 2013, accessed 10 January 2014, http://www.salon.com/.
Gerald Gilbert, “Call the Midwife Returns: All Hail the, Er, Breaking Bad of Midwifery,” Independent, 29 December 2013, accessed 29 December 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/.
Neil Genzlinger, “A Career in Obstetrics, with On-the-Job Training,” New York Times, 28 September 2012, accessed 19 January 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/; Maureen Ryan, “How Call the Midwife Is Like Downton Abbey,” Huffington Post, 27 September 2012, accessed 19 January 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/; Mary McNamara, “Review: BBC’s Call the Midwife Is Sweet, Stirring Medicine,” Los Angeles Times, 28 September 2012, accessed 19 January 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/; Dina Copelman, “Real Life History of Call the Midwife,” WETA: Public Television and Classical Music for Greater Washington, accessed 19 January 2014, http://www.weta.org/.
Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel, Feminist Television Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, “Feminist Television Criticism: Notes and Queries,” Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 1 (spring 2006), accessed 12 December 2013, http://uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/8303/904664.pdf; Christine Geldhill, “Pleasurable Negotiations,” in Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, ed. E. Deirdre Pribram (New York: Verso, 1998), 64–89; Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000); Bonnie Dow, Prime Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture and the Women’s Movement Since 1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985), 132.
Stuart Kemp, “Call the Midwife: Season Three to Be Directed Exclusively by Women,” Hollywood Reporter, 17 June 2013, accessed 12 December 2013, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 77.
Katherine Byrne, “‘Such a Fine, Close Weave’: Gender, Community and the Body in Cranford,” Neo-Victorian Studies 2, no. 2 (winter 2009/2010): 45, accessed 16 December 2013, http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 7–10.
Kaja Silverman, “The Female Authorial Voice,” in Film and Authorship, ed. Virginia Wright Wexman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 55.
Lucy Fischer, “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby,” Cinema Journal 3, no. 3 (spring 1992): 7–8.
Ibid., 8.
David Hurley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife Witch,” Social History of Medicine 3, no. 1 (1990): 1–26.
Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser, “Private Views, Public Birth: Making Feminist Sense of the New Visual Culture of Childbirth,” Studies in the Maternal 5, no. 2 (2013), accessed 15 December 2013, http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/.
Ibid., 1.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 10.
Diane Munday, Colin Francome, and Wendy Savage, “Twenty-One Years of Legal Abortion,” British Medical Journal 28 (1989): 1233.
Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s (London: Merton Books, 2002), 265.
Ian Gordon and Tony Travers, Race, Immigration and Community Relations in Contemporary London (London: London School of Economics, 2006), 3–4.
Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, “The Modalities of Nostalgia,” Current Sociology 54, no. 6 (2006): 919–41, accessed 19 January 2014, http://csi.sagepub.com/; Nicholas Dames, Amnesia Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and British Fiction 1810–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2009).
Lucy Brown
Representation and Reinterpretation in Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey
Homosexuality has gradually become more acceptable fodder for British literature and drama since the liberation movements and the decriminalization of homosexual acts that began with the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Authors and scriptwriters alike have embraced the idea of “writing back” to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to illuminate previously hidden lives, homosexual and otherwise. In the context of costume dramas, both the original Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1975) and Downton Abbey (2010– ) include gay footmen. The treatment of them, however, is markedly different. Set between 1903 and 1930, with the homosexual subplot running until around 1912, Upstairs, Downstairs grapples with representing homosexuality, both within the confines of the 1970s and within the confines of the historical society it showcases. Downton Abbey, meanwhile, is a product of twenty-first-century Britain where homosexuality is generally incorporated into everyday life as standard. Downton Abbey, then, contends with the deviation between the era it is representing—the first four series of Downton Abbey are set between 1912 and 1923 when homosexuality was still a criminal offense—and the sensibilities of the milieu in which it was created. The date of production is a significant explanation for the differentiation between the two programs, yet even Downton Abbey’s treatment of homosexuality often borders on the conservative for a drama created in the twenty-first century.
A key moment that dispelled some of the willful ignorance in relation to homosexuality in the early twentieth century was, of course, the 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde for sodomy. H. Montgomery Hyde describes this period: “The Wilde trials and their aftermath represented the high water mark of popular prejudice against homosexuality in Victorian England . . . and the anti-homosexual feeling was continued into the Edwardian and neo-Georgian period. A more humanitarian climate was slow in coming.”[1] Against the backdrop of this climate, then, the characters of Alfred Harris and Thomas Barrow are introduced with vastly different story arcs. These contrasting story lines demonstrate the changing attitudes of the public and signify what was deemed appropriate for portrayal within a costume drama at two different periods in history.
Appearing in five episodes in series 1 of Upstairs, Downstairs and one further episode in series 3, Alfred Harris is a small character in the popular 1970s drama. However, the character’s arc is striking due to his ultimate fate—execution as a direct result of his homosexuality. In the opening episode, “On Trial,” Alfred is seen to be eccentric, sarcastic, and mischievous, hiding things from the lady’s maid merely to annoy her. However, at the end of the episode, he ambushes new maid Sarah and deliberately scares her, bringing his biblical references scattered throughout the episode to the fore as he declares, “Beware the lusts of the flesh.”[2] This sentence suggests how Alfred views himself, particularly when events from later episodes are taken into consideration. Alfred’s religiosity is intrinsically linked to his character, with biblical references in almost every scene in which he appears. In a book published later in the 1970s, Jeffrey Weeks explains the impact faith could have on a homosexual’s self-opinion:
Inevitably, the concepts which emerged from the nineteenth century carried with them a weight of ideological baggage, much of it stemming from the intertwined Hebraic and Christian traditions, in which the taboo against homosexual behaviour is deeply rooted. No one who has lived in the West . . . can deny the dreadful feelings of guilt and sin that our culture still produces.[3]
This indicates the impact religious beliefs had on both homosexuals themselves and the wider public during the twentieth century, lasting well beyond the first transmission of Upstairs, Downstairs in 1971.
Certainly, Alfred’s frequent recourse to the Bible in conversation with the other servants is not incidental. It frames him as a character uncomfortable with himself and concerned with a perceived higher power. It also serves to offer a definitive structure that can be used by Alfred and about him without direct reference to homosexuality. For instance, in his final episode, “Rose’s Pigeon” in series 3, he describes the lover he has murdered as “like a serpent, the lowest of the beasts.” Alfred’s reference to the Garden of Eden can easily be seen as regret that he is not himself an Adam. In addition, Alfred suffers from nightmares, both before his initial departure and in his return episode. Explaining these nightmares to Sarah in “On Trial,” Rose describes him as “a bit touched.” These nightmares can also be seen as a sign of Alfred’s self-loathing.
It is Alfred’s appointment as temporary valet to Baron von Rimmer in episode 1:5, “A Suitable Marriage,” that prompts his departure from Eaton Place. He is noticeably enamored throughout the episode, and when the pair is alone the truth about their relationship begins to shine through. They are discovered by Rose righting their clothes, which she interprets as the aftermath of sexual activity. It is a subtle revelation, unsurprising since the first kiss between men in a relationship did not occur on British TV until an episode of EastEnders in 1987.[4] Indeed, much of the aftermath occurs offscreen: the viewer does not witness Rose’s explanation to butler Hudson or his subsequent explanation to Richard Bellamy, head of the household. As Rose interprets what she has seen in the baron’s room, the viewer is left to apply meaning to Rose and Hudson’s coded language. This can be seen as a strategy by the writers to address 1970s sensibilities, cautiously bringing homosexual activity into the fray without naming it as such.
After helping the baron, a German spy, escape from the police, Alfred accompanies him to Germany. In his return episode, “Rose’s Pigeon,” he explains that the baron married and he was “found” a new position in England with a Lithuanian gentleman. Later statements suggest that he was “sold” or “given” to his new employer as a sexual plaything. Neither of Alfred’s lovers is portrayed in a positive light: the baron is a spy searching for military secrets, while the Lithuanian man Alfred kills is unedifying at best. Alfred only mentions him in snippets, trailing off as he describes the “baron’s friend. Baron’s vile, disgust. . . .” By situating homosexuality in this world, Upstairs, Downstairs establishes it as “foreign.” This is further enhanced by Hudson’s pervading mistrust of all foreigners, something alluded to time and again in “A Suitable Marriage” and articulated by Lady Marjorie at the climax of the episode when she accuses the baron of “corrupting” their footman.
Ultimately, Alfred’s fate is execution by hanging. His barbaric and premeditated murder of his Lithuanian lover with a meat ax is unforgivable, despite his motives. He explains to Rose, “People I lived with like here, decent people always here. I wanted to be decent. Wouldn’t let me . . . pushing me to grovel . . . just wanted to get away back to this life, anything, wouldn’t let me. Just laughed at me.” Alfred’s attack, then, is presented as a direct result of his homosexual lifestyle, a lifestyle of which he seems wholeheartedly to repent.
After the hanging, Rose says to the butler, “He was ill, Mr. Hudson. It wasn’t his fault, what he done, it was other people made him. You can’t hang a man what’s not right in the head.” Here, Rose equates his homosexuality with a mental illness, something not uncommon in the discourse of the period or, indeed, in the contemporary environment of the 1970s where homosexuality was not declassified as a mental illness in the United Kingdom until 1973. Hudson responds, “No matter why, he took away a human life and must pay with his own. That is the law of civilized man, and God’s law too, if you read your Bible.” This final word on Alfred’s fate returns to the religiosity that has plagued him throughout his brief appearances in the program. This is both a comment on the Edwardian values the program is depicting and the environment in which Upstairs, Downstairs was created and first viewed. Jeffrey Weeks concluded in 1977 that “attitudes to homosexuality, at least on a formal level, are still shot through with medieval hangovers, both in phraseology and attitudes, which suggest that sex outside rigidly defined areas is at best something to be tolerated, and at worst dirty and sinful.”[5] Viewing these episodes decades after their initial transmission reminds us that, despite the decriminalization of homosexuality, prejudices were slower to disappear.
There are striking similarities between Alfred Harris and the character of Thomas Barrow, a regular in Downton Abbey from series 1 onward. The first is that they are both footmen who are out of kilter with most of their colleagues. The situation that reveals Thomas’s sexuality to the viewer is also reminiscent of Alfred’s revelation episode. In Upstairs, Downstairs, Alfred is drafted in to be temporary valet to Baron von Rimmer; in Downton, Thomas is drafted in to be temporary valet to the Duke of Crowborough, the difference between the two situations being that Thomas is already sexually involved with the duke. This is demonstrated to the viewer during a scene between the pair in the duke’s bedroom where Thomas is removing the duke’s boot. Similarly, Alfred Harris removes the baron’s boot in a tense scene immediately prior to their discovery by Rose. The similarities between the characters are too evident to be ignored, although Thomas’s longevity in the series contradicts Alfred’s brief, and ultimately unhappy, tenure in Upstairs, Downstairs.
Like Alfred, Thomas is generally a destructive character. He is a vindictive, self-serving, and manipulative footman turned soldier turned valet, certainly, but he does not progress as far as murder. His intent throughout is to rise above other members of staff and be in a position of power within the household. However, his love affairs all display him in a sympathetic light, quite unlike the malicious personality he cultivates more generally. It is true, too, that Thomas’s sexuality is an open secret. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains the climate of secrecy in Epistemology of the Closet:
With a new public discourse concerning male homosexuality that was at the same time increasingly discriminant, increasingly punitive, and increasingly trivialising or marginalising, the recuperative rhetoric that emerged had an oddly oblique shape. I would describe it as the occluded intersection between a minority rhetoric of the “open secret” or glass closet and a subsumptive public rhetoric of the “empty secret.”[6]
Unlike Upstairs, Downstairs, where Alfred’s sexuality is hidden until it is forced into the open, this idea of a “glass closet” is applicable to Thomas’s position in Downton. It becomes more important as his sexuality threatens his job and freedom in series 3.
While the viewer learns of Thomas’s sexuality in the very first episode, the evidence that other members of the staff are aware of his sexuality comes in episode 1:4, when cook Mrs. Patmore attempts to dissuade kitchen maid Daisy from pursuing him. She tries four times to explain the situation without actually saying anything incriminating. She begins, “He’s not the boy for you, and you’re not the girl for him.”[7] When this doesn’t work, she adds, “Perhaps Thomas has seen and done more than is good for him.” Getting exasperated, she continues, “He’s not a ladies’ man!” Finally, she tries, “Daisy, Thomas is a troubled soul.” While her euphemisms go unheeded, this scene demonstrates that, among the older staff at least, Thomas’s sexuality is common knowledge. He does indeed live in a “glass closet” where everybody sees but nobody comments openly.
While Thomas is a difficult character to sympathize with, his relationships with his lovers show him in a vulnerable light. In episode 1:1 he is betrayed by the Duke of Crowborough, who steals incriminating letters before abandoning him. After this altercation, Thomas is visibly upset rather than angry. Equally, in episode 2:2 he connects with a blinded soldier and opens up to him. Thomas’s weeping over his suicide confirms that there was, at least in his mind, a romantic aspect to the relationship. Again, there is emotion attached to his sexuality, differentiating this aspect of his personality from the ambitious and selfish ones he proudly portrays at Downton. In series 3, when this emotion comes to the fore, Thomas’s sexuality is thrown out into the open, and the repercussions demonstrate how twenty-first-century values have been imposed by the writers (to an extent) on early twentieth-century set historical fiction. While Upstairs, Downstairs depicts a harsh reality, a gay man being driven to murder his employer in Edwardian Britain, Downton seems to examine the past with modern, perhaps even rose-colored, sensibilities in mind.
Thomas’s infatuation with Jimmy Kent, the new Downton footman, is partially the result of expert manipulation on the part of his former friend, lady’s maid Miss O’Brien. It is crucial to note that Thomas only acts inappropriately toward Jimmy because he has been led to believe that his growing feelings are reciprocated. As he explains to Carson in episode 3:7, “When you’re like me, Mr. Carson, you have to read the signs as best you can because no one dares speak out.” Earlier in this episode, Thomas makes a move on Jimmy when a series of conversations confuse him and he misreads Jimmy’s demeanor toward him. He goes first to his bedroom and then sneaks into Jimmy’s room and into bed with him, awakening him with a kiss that the second footman, Alfred, walks in on. In this scene, Alfred functions much as Rose did in Upstairs, Downstairs as the bewildered and “good” servant. The similarity between these two discovery scenes is again striking, although Downton, written and filmed nearly forty years later, dares to show more on screen than does Upstairs, Downstairs. The conundrum there was deciphering what had happened: in Downton there is free rein to be more explicit.
Like Rose, Alfred brings the truth out into the open, but unlike Upstairs, Downstairs, this provokes more irritation than horror. The housekeeper, Mrs. Hughes, remarks in episode 3:8, “I think the point is that we didn’t know officially. That’s what Mr. Carson finds hard. He can’t avoid the subject any longer, because it’s lying there on the mat.” Here, Mrs. Hughes shatters the illusion of the “glass closet,” explaining that the tactics of avoidance rested on the assumption that everyone else would participate in the evasion. Alfred has broken this unspoken code, and the Downton residents are forced to confront the consequences.
Interestingly, the older members of the staff are generally the ones most at ease with Thomas’s sexuality, with Mrs. Hughes asking Carson, “Do you think Thomas is the first man of that sort I’ve ever come across?” Mr. Bates fails to understand the problem, pointing out, “It’s not as if none of us knew,” sentiments echoed by Lord Grantham before he utters the memorable line, “I mean, if I’d shouted blue murder every time someone tried to kiss me at Eton, I’d have gone hoarse in a month.” Although this line is clearly played for laughs, it certainly does create the illusion that homosexuality was more tolerated than it was.
This deviation from probable lived reality depicts the older generation as more accepting. H. Montgomery Hyde, however, describes a more accurate situation in The Other Love: “In the decades between the two World Wars, homosexuality in England came to the surface of society for the first time, although what was visible was only a portion of what was still largely a submerged iceberg. With the older generation the subject was still taboo as a topic of conversation.”[8]
To an extent, Mrs. Hughes, Mr. Bates, Mrs. Patmore, and Lord Grantham conspire with this taboo and do not speak about it until, as Mrs. Hughes says, it is “lying there on the mat.” However, once the subject is approached, their attitudes are benevolent, with Mr. Bates blackmailing Miss O’Brien on Thomas’s behalf in an ironic reversal of probable lived reality. Clause eleven of the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885—under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted—was dubbed the “blackmailer’s charter” due to the extortion attempts homosexuals suffered under fear of being reported. Downton Abbey turns this on its head with Miss O’Brien being blackmailed to keep Thomas’s “open secret” out of public view.
Thomas faces losing his liberty when Alfred calls the police to report him. They arrive at the cricket match at the climax of series 3, and it falls to Lord Grantham to persuade Alfred not to formally accuse Thomas of homosexuality, which under the Labouchere Amendment, could have subjected him to two years in prison, with hard labor. Lord Grantham says, “I’m not asking you to abandon your beliefs, Alfred. Just to introduce a little kindness into the equation.” He continues, “Thomas does not choose to be the way he is, and what harm was done, really, that his life should be destroyed for it?” Lord Grantham’s attitude here seems at odds with his implacably conservative outlook evident in earlier episodes. He condemns his daughter’s “lesser” marriage to his chauffeur, reinforcing class division; he has criticized the women’s suffrage movement and his daughters becoming involved in the labor market, reinforcing gender divisions. His support for Thomas in this episode can be traced back to his guilt at having to part with him as valet now that Mr. Bates has returned. It also marks a continuation of the benevolent employer facade that has permeated Downton from the first series including, for instance, the payment for Mrs. Patmore’s cataract operation in episode 1:7. Occasionally, Downton seems to obstruct the reality of master-servant relations in favor of showing the family as enlightened and kindhearted employers. His defense of Thomas is a direct continuation of this idealistic viewpoint but also stems from the desire of Lord Grantham to keep one of his best cricketers on the field. The fact that winning a game of cricket is more important to Lord Grantham than upholding the law and condemning “gross indecency” is a striking, if slightly unconvincing, representation of an early twentieth-century aristocrat.
The attitude that may have been expected of Lord Grantham is represented instead by Carson the butler. In episode 3:7, after being told of Thomas’s attempted seduction of Jimmy, he prefaces his vitriol by saying, “I don’t need to tell you this is a criminal offence,” which serves to remind the twenty-first-century viewer of the comparatively recent decriminalization of homosexuality. By invoking the law, Carson roots his abhorrence in fact and is therefore given a respectable platform from which to speak. In the context of 1920s Britain, Carson is the accepted voice of condemnation.
His viewpoint is entirely in keeping with what Sean Brady describes in Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913: “This sexuality was inimical to masculinity as a social status in this country to such an extent that any public acknowledgement of its existence threatened society itself.”[9] Carson asserts his own masculinity by opposing Thomas, but is Thomas really a threat to society? He is, perhaps, a threat to Downton’s own insular society that Carson covets. As his attempt to seduce Jimmy has proven by this point, Thomas’s sexuality has the potential to create discontent at Downton. Carson explains to Jimmy his own motives in trying to secure a peaceful departure for Thomas in episode 3:8: “I’ve never been called a liberal in my life, and I don’t intend to start now! But I do not believe in scandal. Mr. Barrow will go, and when he does, I would like him to go quietly. For the sake of the house, the family, and for that matter, you.” So, while Carson appears to relent by offering a positive reference, it is protection of Downton Abbey itself and not Thomas he is pursuing.
This attitude is again a repetition of what has already been seen in Upstairs, Downstairs. When Alfred Harris’s return to Eaton Place in “Rose’s Pigeon” is discovered by Hudson, his anger is rooted in household protection: “This man brought shame and disgrace on this house it took a long time to recover from.” In a further twist, when Mr. Bellamy is discussing the ex-footman, he says, “Oh, yes, he had some trouble with a German baron, but that’s all forgotten.” As in Downton Abbey, it seems to be the butler who acts as the moral head of the household, essentially espousing the conservative arguments expected of his employer. In episode 3:8, Carson’s vitriol is tempered by what appear to be more modern sensibilities: “I cannot hide that I find your situation revolting, but whether or not you believe me, I am not entirely unsympathetic. You have been twisted by nature into something foul, and even I can see that you did not ask for it.” This seems out of kilter with his previous comments but does serve to add a sheen of respectability and compassion to Carson’s attitude: in essence, he may not be as enlightened as everyone else in the house, but he is not completely reprehensible to our modern eyes.
Unlike Upstairs, Downstairs’ Alfred Harris, Thomas Barrow not only keeps his job but also finds himself promoted to underbutler as there is no other position for him. Furthermore, his infatuation with Jimmy develops into love. In the 2012 Christmas special, “A Journey to the Highlands,” footman Alfred points out to Jimmy that the “funny thing with Mr. Barrow is he won’t hear a bad word about you.” This observation reiterates the emotional aspect of Thomas’s attachment to Jimmy. It is not merely a physical attraction, something that is demonstrated later in the episode when Jimmy is attacked and Thomas rushes to help, taking a beating in the process. This fight is the catalyst for a reconciliation of sorts between the pair, which takes place when Jimmy visits the injured Thomas in his room and says, “You’re brave, Mr. Barrow. Very brave. I feel badly. I . . . I shouldn’t have run off,” to which Thomas replies, “No, you should have. Otherwise, what was I bloody doing it for?” This exchange demonstrates the emotional aspect of Thomas’s relationship with Jimmy. Despite being forcibly rejected—and almost losing his job—a year earlier, Thomas’s attitude toward his colleague has not altered. The multiple episodes in which Downton explores Thomas’s growing affection for Jimmy allows this facet of his character to be handled sympathetically: it is not a two-episode story line with a moral center as seen in Upstairs, Downstairs.
Jimmy’s sexuality itself is considered unequivocal due to his overt interest in women. However, Thomas is certainly given the impression that Jimmy understands his overtures. While Jimmy appears ill at ease with these, even before Miss O’Brien’s meddling, Mrs. Hughes sums up the situation perfectly to Mr. Carson in episode 3:8: “I think James may have led him on. . . . I don’t mean deliberately. But he’s a vain and silly flirt. He may have given Thomas the wrong impression without meaning to.” However, some ambiguity over Jimmy’s sexuality remains, particularly once he has agreed to be friends with Thomas.
Thomas Barrow is often portrayed as a snide and manipulative character. However, it is clear that some of this bravado is false, as he explains to his blinded soldier friend in episode 2:2: “All my life, they’ve pushed me around, just ’cause I’m different.” This may explain Thomas’s scornful attitude toward his colleagues that acts as a shield and allows him to mask his true self at Downton. This facade slips on several occasions, most notably following the death of Lady Sybil in episode 3:5. He has to leave the room after learning the news to cry in the corridor and explains to maid Anna Bates, “In my life, I can tell you, not many have been kind to me. She was one of the few.” The fact of Thomas’s “difference” may have, ironically, helped to create one of the most unlikable men at Downton. But, in relation to the deaths of Lady Sybil and the blinded soldier and his true, self-sacrificing affection for Jimmy, Thomas Barrow emerges as a somewhat sympathetic character, alienated by his own difference. He explains to Carson in episode 3:8: “I am not foul, Mr Carson. I am not the same as you, but I am not foul.”
Upstairs, Downstairs was one of the most popular programs of the 1970s, a surprise hit that captured the imaginations of millions of viewers. Downton Abbey is equally as popular, with the series 3 finale garnering twelve million viewers in the UK alone and captivating audiences around the world. Colin McArthur offers one explanation for the popularity of the costume drama during certain periods of upheaval: “It seems reasonable to suppose that a society going through a period of transition and finding it immensely painful and disorientating will therefore tend to recreate, in some at least of its art, images of more (apparently) settled times, especially times in which the self-image of the society as a whole was buoyant and optimistic.”[10]
This proposition certainly applies to not only the economic and social upheaval of the 1970s but also the financial crash of 2008 and recession that predated Downton’s emergence. The idea of harkening back to more “settled times” is understandable when the fabric of society is under threat, and this may be partly responsible for the success of Downton. Other costume dramas have also emerged since the financial crash with similar success, such as ITV’s Mr. Selfridge (2013– ), whose first series regularly attracted over 7.5 million viewers, and The Paradise (2012–2014), the BBC’s adaptation of an Émile Zola novel, which garnered over 5.5 million viewers in an earlier time slot. It may be significant that the 2010 revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, set in the years prior to the Second World War, suffered from low ratings and was consequently axed after two series. This may suggest that our renewed fascination with costume drama lies in an earlier period: as McArthur suggests, a period where the mood is more “optimistic” and positions within society more “settled.”
One benefit of the costume drama is the ability writers have to explore positions that may be distasteful to modern viewers—for instance, the condemnation and secrecy of homosexuality when, today, it is far more accepted and acknowledged. In this way, the costume drama can act as an educational tool, but the entertainment value lies partially in the distance between “us,” the modern, and “them,” the older, more inferior version. For all the delight in watching a program where everyone knows their place, there is a certain satisfaction to be gained from the belief that “we” are better than “them” in terms of our attitude toward homosexuality. This may explain the differing attitudes expressed by characters in Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey toward their homosexual colleagues or employees. Downton distinctly operates a “glass closet” where everybody knows and almost everybody is undaunted by it, but the wider society is seemingly more backward than the residents of the household. Upstairs, Downstairs—created in a culture that, despite the efforts of the British gay rights movement, was still more critical of homosexuality—allowed more realistic attitudes of both the early and late twentieth century to prevail.
There is a sense that Downton’s attempts to represent homosexuality as compatible with early twentieth-century values have failed, prioritizing the needs of a continuing drama over historical authenticity. The character of Thomas Barrow is one fans love to hate and has become a series staple: disposing of him at the end of series 3 seemed unlikely, so attitudes that would enable the character to stay had to be explored, but these ultimately oversimplified the contemporary prejudices. Forty years earlier, Alfred Harris was a short-term character with a predetermined arc that led to his initial dismissal from Eaton Place. His eventual death by execution offered no chance for rehabilitation and seemed almost inevitable to viewers at the time, as well as being historically accurate. Upstairs, Downstairs, then, allowed for homosexual prejudice to be shown unsentimentally in a way the sanitized Downton has perhaps not. It seems that in the twenty-first century we are as interested as ever in penetrating the mysteries of the past and rewriting them to accommodate more contemporary norms.
H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1970), 2.
Upstairs, Downstairs (BBC One, 1971–1975).
Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977), 4.
Tom Geoghegan, “It Started with a Kiss,” BBC News Magazine, 26 June 2008, accessed 5 July 2014, http://news.bbc.co.uk/.
Weeks, Coming Out, 4.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Hertfordshire, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 164.
Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–2012).
Hyde, Other Love, 197.
Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 83.
Colin McArthur, Television and History (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 40.
Elke Weissmann
Transnational Complexity and the Critique of Masculinity in Ripper Street
The title Ripper Street (2012– ) creates associations with traditional images of gendered violence—women as sexualized victims, men as perpetrators and heroes.[1] The BBC–BBC America coproduced drama offers these images and at the same time complicates the associated pleasures by providing a critique that emphasizes the problem that is constituted by traditional, patriarchal masculinities. Set in the aftermath of the Ripper Murders, Ripper Street constantly plays with the images associated with sexualized violence, only to draw our attention to the failure to police such crimes. This chapter will provide an analysis of this, by unpeeling the layers of meaning that are produced in Ripper Street via a complex mix of genres that are drawn from the United States and the UK. I will argue that the drama, on the one hand, presents us with a return of the patriarch through traditional British genres such as period drama and crime drama. On the other hand, Ripper Street provides us with a critique of these nostalgic views of masculinities by drawing on the US quality dramas of Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–1987) and Deadwood (HBO, 2004–2006), both of which trouble their traditional genres of crime and Western respectively. Ripper Street uses such a transnational mix of genres as a result of its particular ontology as a coproduction between the BBC and BBC America, but also in order to complicate traditional notions of masculine heroisms. In particular, it investigates the trauma of violence on men and questions what place they can have in society. The chapter will first give an overview of masculinities in the new millennium before examining the genre complexity of Ripper Street.
The literature on the representation of masculinities has grown exponentially since the 1990s, although earlier work exists.[2] Most of these are focused on representations of masculinities in film, and more specifically Hollywood.[3] The work of Steven Cohan, Andrew Spicer, and Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yates emphasizes that masculinities are, first of all, culturally and historically specific, and that they are in a constant process of renegotiation that is often perceived to be continuous with a sense of crisis.[4] In the case of Ripper Street, the instability of hegemonic patriarchal masculinity derives its sense of crisis from its situatedness in a particular time and a particular place.
Indeed, Ripper Street appeared on British and American screens at a time when the confidence of Britain and America as international economic powerhouses was severely shaken and the culture of hedonistic return to masculinities, which dominated British culture in the 1990s, came under scrutiny. In Britain, the economic crash of 2008 came at a time when the change in government seemed inevitable as New Labour, originally led by Tony Blair, had been in power for over ten years. The new Conservative government openly subscribed to the international mantra of austerity in order to see through a number of significant public-sector cuts. Under the Conservatives, the economy contracted for several quarters, leading to a wider sense of deprivation and crisis. The sense of crisis led to a wider reevaluation of the Blair years, including the availability of cheap credit, subprime mortgages, and an out-of-control financial market that had fueled a boom-and-bust economy. In America, the ultraconservative regime under George W. Bush was replaced by Barack Obama, the first African American president,[5] who had campaigned under the banner of hope and change but soon found his efforts hampered by the power of the Senate and Congress, which were largely held by Republicans.
The sense of crisis on both sides of the Atlantic also led to a distancing from the hedonistic, politically incorrect, and quite traditional form of masculinity that had been at the center of quite a few popular representations in film and television—and beyond—of the 1990s and early 2000s.[6] In the UK in particular, the “new lad” occupied the media during the 1990s and early 2000s.[7] This included, among others, celebrities such as Jamie Oliver and Liam Gallagher as well as fictional representations such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998) and Coupling (BBC, 2000–2004). As Imelda Whelehan points out, the new lad represents a deliberate rejection of both feminism and the “new man” who espouses political correctness.[8] More importantly, he celebrates and embraces the nostalgic construction of traditional masculinities,[9] even if he does this using an apparently knowing and humorous style.[10] Within this context, the new lad’s deliberate misbehaving was often excused by pointing to his immaturity, with phrases that emphasized his boyishness.[11] Thus, the return of misogyny and traditional masculine behavior could be excused as a passing phase. As Leon Hunt highlights, the men who participated in the creation of the new lad culture were usually middle class but were “in love with working-class masculinity,” which further disguised the inherent power that the construction of the new lad actually facilitated.[12] In other words, the proposition that the new lad is both immature and affiliated with the working classes implies that he is inherently powerless, which suggests that his behavior is essentially harmless. In reality, the proponents of new laddism were everything but.
At first glance, Ripper Street’s narrative of a team of three men banding together in a society that reduces women to housewives or prostitutes seems to continue some of the themes established by new laddism. These are men who don’t (yet) know better, who bend the law in a celebration of traditional masculinity. As such, Ripper Street shares some commonality with Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–2007), which engages knowingly and humorously with conventions of the British cop show. In particular, as James Chapman points out, “The characterization of the decidedly non-politically correct Gene Hunt . . . represents nothing if not a throw-back to the hard-drinking, straight-talking manner of Jack Regan [from The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–1978)].”[13] But Ripper Street differs significantly from Life on Mars, in that it rarely includes a humorous element. Thus, where Life on Mars celebrated the return of traditional masculinities, Ripper Street presents them at work, only, as I will show, to undermine them. It does that in a way that is unique to television and its long-form serialized narratives.[14] Such serialization has often been understood as evidence for a drama’s attempt to engage a specific—highly educated, professional, middle-class—audience that values the narrative complexity and literariness of such apparently “quality” dramas.[15] As Jeffrey Sconce highlights, such a “cumulative” narrative allows for the development of “nuances of plot and character as a series matures over several seasons.”[16] In Ripper Street, this goes beyond nuances but instead emphasizes that character needs to be gradually revealed in “moments of affect,” as Robin Nelson proposes.[17] In these moments, the narrative of the episode slows down completely in order to reveal the complex emotional world of a character that becomes the focus point of the larger, serial narrative. In other words, in the “cumulative” of “serialized” series, the serial narrative is no longer linear but instead offers moments of intense emotional engagement—for the viewer as well as the characters on screen—that allow a patchwork of character knowledge to emerge. In the following I will show how this revelation of character and the connected critique of traditional masculinities are deeply embedded in the use of a multitude of genres in Ripper Street.
As a coproduction made by Tiger Aspect for the BBC and BBC America, Ripper Street meshes a number of genres that appeal to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The period drama, for example, is perceived as quintessentially British and enjoys significant success in the United States because it provides an image of a unique Englishness that is bound up in the past.[18] Two channels have contributed to the success of period drama in the United States; namely PBS, which dedicates its regular, and prestigious, Masterpiece Theatre slot to it; and A&E, which in the 1990s in particular developed a unique brand that drew on British period drama.[19] In contrast to PBS and A&E, however, BBC America has focused on a more modern image of Britain, which celebrates the “Cool Britannia” of the Blair years.[20] As a result, Ripper Street betrays a knowingness about its own conventions and challenges some of these by using a scruffier aesthetic that is deliberately juxtaposed to the sumptuousness normally associated with period drama.[21] As John Ellis indicates, in part this is derived from its engagement with steampunk, which merges the nostalgia for the Victorian past with a deep-seated belief in scientific progress.[22] Thus, the London and the science that we see, though presented as progressive for its time, is also looked at through the lens of superior knowledge of the present. As a result, the Victorian age as a whole appears as backward and (relatively) primitive. In addition, the use of conventions from the Western,[23] and some from those of crime drama, contribute to the image looking decidedly less sumptuous than in other British exports on American screens.
As a period drama, Ripper Street at first sight seems to subscribe to a nostalgic view of the past.[24] Belen Vidal highlights, however, that neither period drama nor the heritage film is inherently nostalgic.[25] Rather, they might allow for a critique of understandings of past traditions, including gender roles. In order to offer such a critique, however, period drama needs to reconstruct traditional notions of gender. In the case of Ripper Street, this seems particularly apparent, since the Ripper Murders themselves represent gendered violence that relies on well-established dichotomies of femininity (as housewife, prostitute, or victim) on the one hand and the normalization of violent masculinity on the other.
Ripper Street goes further than that, however: it also establishes the traditional patriarch at the helm of his crew. Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen), crucially, is haunted by his personal position as a father. In the first season this is revealed gradually to us as we come to understand that he and his daughter were caught up in a boat accident in which his daughter went missing. Reid clings to the thought that she might still be alive. The trauma of the event has left physical scars that we are shown twice in the first three episodes: In episode 1, “I Need Light,” Reid changes his clothes at his home while his wife watches. His body is covered in scar tissue that makes Reid visibly, but not audibly, wince as he takes off his shirt. That his wife observes this is no accident: it allows us to also see her emotions, which are a complex mix of empathy and sympathy. As Nelson highlights, such reactions from surrounding characters express the revelation of character: what we learn here about Reid is not just that he is scarred but also that he has learned to carry this pain that would overwhelm others.[26] As a result, Reid’s character is marked by emotional and physical strengths, as well as integrity. In “The King Came Calling” (1:3), a similar scene shows us Reid with an inspector of the City Police at the river. Again, Reid takes off his shirt, this time without betraying any emotion, while the camera first catches the scar tissue in close-up and then the reaction of the other police officer who notices, is shocked, but then also hides his emotion. Such a sequence of shots and emotional reactions remind us of the fact that Victorian masculinity was supposedly marked by an (at least public) silencing of emotion,[27] a fact that at this point seems to inspire admiration rather than censure.
Ripper Street, then, presents us with a traumatized patriarch but one who is nevertheless, at least at first, presented as admirable. The casting of Matthew Macfadyen, who has in the past played primarily heroic, if troubled, and likable characters (Spooks [BBC, 2002–2011] and Pride and Prejudice [Joe Wright, 2005]), contributes to this. Increasingly, however, Reid is shown to not just fail but also be deeply fallible: he has affairs with two women, he makes use of heroin in order to get information from a suspect and by doing so jeopardizes several investigations, and he causes his wife’s mental breakdown when he finally admits to the fact that his daughter must be dead. His relationships to women in particular reveal the flaws of his character. None of his relationships seem particularly warm, and our first visit to his house makes evident that he and his wife are practically estranged. His first affair with orphanage mistress Deborah Goren (Lucy Cohu) seems driven by his need for redemption from a maternal figure, rather than by lust or love. Finally, his moral corruption is revealed in his relationship to the first female councilor, Jane Cobden (Leanne Best), who acts as moral guide to the viewer throughout the second season. In the final episode of the second season (“Our Betrayal, Part 2”), Cobden is there to witness Reid’s call for Sergeant Drake (Jerome Flynn) to kill his enemy in the boxing ring. Her shock and instant flight on hearing Reid scream “kill him” make visible that even in this “lawless town,” murder by the police remains unacceptable. Unlike other dramas, such as Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013), which suggests the gradual corruption of an essentially good man, Ripper Street seems to imply Reid’s inherent moral corruption. It does this by revealing his character gradually through the moments of affect and by doing so offering more and more insight into his character. In that respect, too, the drama follows the example of Victorian masculinity that presented a nondescript public persona while hiding personal emotions and turbulences from others.
The series achieves this complex depiction of masculinity also because it draws on a number of tropes from different subgenres of crime drama. On the one hand, the regular shots of police bobbies in their uniform draw attention to nostalgic images of a time when policing still seemed morally clear cut; particularly images of bobbies wearing their helmets draw on similarities with Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955–1976). As Susan Sydney-Smith highlights, the image of Dixon walking the beat remains firmly embedded in the popular imagination as a myth that presents an example of the “‘olden days’, a mythical time during which everything seems—and in televisual terms, literally was—more black and white.”[28] She indicates how this connects to relatively recent police scandals that had highlighted, among others, the institutional racism within the police. Within this context the past is evoked in order to present a counterpoint to a more troubled present. Thus, the play with the mythical past could be understood as retrogressive. However, the return of the bobby in Ripper Street functions precisely as a reminder of the fallacy of such a myth; it presents a comment on this nostalgic view as the image of the bobby in full uniform usually goes along with a representation of their struggle to actually keep order. Rather than presenting the British police as competent, therefore, they are shown fighting against superior forces, be that vigilante police in “In My Protection” (1:2) or a skilled kung fu fighter in “Pure as the Driven” (2:1).
The theme of the problem of policing is further developed by drawing on aesthetic tropes that are known from “quality” crime dramas such as The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008), SouthLAnd (NBC, 2009; TNT, 2010–2013), and Hill Street Blues. The latter has attracted some academic attention as the predecessor of the two former, but also as one of the first series to emphasize “(program) quality . . . over (viewer) quantity.”[29] While Caren Deming focuses her discussion on the series’ narrative complexity and the prevalence of melodrama in what she describes as essentially a “modernist text,”[30] she also draws attention to stylistic elements that contribute to the discourse of complexity. In particular, she stresses that “the density of the action is matched by the dense visual and aural texture and overall naturalism of style. The naturalism is achieved through harsh lighting, tightly-shot, crowded sets, handheld camera work, and thick, ambient sound.”[31] It is these stylistic elements, rather than the complex narrative structure, that Ripper Street borrows from Hill Street Blues.[32]
Unlike Hill Street Blues, the BBC drama does not use handheld camera work, but its editing, particularly in moments focusing on violence in crowded places, is often rapid, giving the scenes a similar sense of immediacy. More importantly, the predominant use of sepia colors for costumes and to light nighttime scenes, when daytime scenes often use high-contrast lighting, creates a sense of realism as it reflects the limited color palette of Victorian photography and printing. In addition, the series uses an extremely complex aural design in which different sounds—from ambient ones of a city at work to a multitude of voices—overlap, making it sometimes difficult to follow the dialogue and creating again a sense of immediacy. As a result, Ripper Street presents policing as something that engages with a complex environment, in which what happens cannot always be assessed as the chaos of action and sound undermines the police’s (and the viewers’) ability to gain an overview. In that respect, it draws directly on the example of Hill Street Blues, which had similarly drawn attention to the difficulty that policing in an inner city presents.
While the discourse of the difficulty of policing dominates the narrative via the use of generic elements borrowed from both traditional British police series and American quality crime drama, the series nevertheless also offers a possible solution to this problem that it locates in science. In this respect, Ripper Street continues discourses well established in forensic science dramas on both sides of the Atlantic (e.g., Silent Witness [BBC, 1996– ], Bones [Fox, 2005– ], and NCIS [CBS, 2003– ]). In particular, it draws on aesthetic elements of the most popular of these, namely, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000– ).[33] In the first series, several episodes stage the autopsy and examination scenes in ways that are similar to those of CSI: in the “King Came Calling” (episode 3), for example, images of blood flowing into a bowl under the autopsy table, shots of a visibly disturbed rookie policeman, and detailed verbal explanation of what Captain Jackson will do to the body in the process of the autopsy emphasize the body gore that made CSI stand out from its contemporaries. Ripper Street also makes use of extensive editing to condense the time that it takes to investigate evidence in the lab, perhaps most notably in “The Good of this City” (1:4), which adds an element of stylishness to the scene. Overall, Ripper Street betrays a stylistic awareness that is not dissimilar to CSI and connects to the postmodern pastiche of stylistic borrowing from different genres. Unlike the other stylistic borrowings that are clearly used to develop a self-reflexive critique of policing and masculinity, here the representation of rational science seems to suggest a way out of the problem of policing: it is in science that the answers lay.
Science itself is deeply intertwined with notions of masculinity, and forensic medicine even more so. Mary Jacobus and colleagues emphasize that science has since Francis Bacon’s time become associated with the masculine while its object is presented as feminine.[34] In the context of nineteenth-century medical science, women’s bodies were often used to teach and investigate aspects of life and death, while the male scientist was perceived as disembodied.[35] In that respect, nineteenth-century science mirrors the interest of Victorian art and literature in the female body. As Elisabeth Bronfen highlights, women’s death in nineteenth-century literature functioned as a sacrifice to restabilize a society in crisis: “Over her dead body, cultural norms are reconfirmed or secured, whether because the sacrifice of the virtuous, innocent woman serves as a social critique and transformation or because a sacrifice of the dangerous woman re-establishes an order that was momentarily suspended due to her presence.”[36] In addition, the female body can be used by male writers (and scientists) to grapple with the problem of their own mortality by displacing it on a body that is perceived as other.
Ripper Street complicates this by drawing deliberate attention to the body of its scientist. Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) is presented as the most dandyish of the three characters who indulges in sexual pleasures and attracts women easily. In addition, he is often seen using his own body as an object of study, particularly in order to test substances that he cannot identify through textbooks. Overall, he is shown to be the most flawed of the characters, with a potentially criminal past and living off his wife’s brothel, which he also uses. More importantly, perhaps, his solution to problems is often to run or pull his revolver, which highlights his inability to offer more complex solutions. This becomes particularly apparent, again, in his relationship to a woman: his wife rejects him when, after a short honeymoon period in the second season, she realizes her inability to escape the patriarchal pressures of society. Jackson’s attempts to rekindle her love for him all flounder, and he becomes the lovesick fool who populates the margins of the narrative. Thus, while Ripper Street does not necessarily question science itself, it does recognize that it might lie in deeply problematic hands. In the case of Jackson, the problem stems from his hedonistic, and at points misogynist, behavior that resembles that of the 1990s’ lad. But science can more generally become flawed when it is used by the wrong men. This is made explicit in the many stories that focus on science and that emphasize that science can be used for both good and evil (see, for example, “The Good of this City” [1:4] and “Dynamite and a Woman” [2:4]). As a result, the series introduces an element of doubt to the use of forensic science. What the inclusion of stylistic elements from CSI makes visible, then, is that the success of policing hinges on the quality of men who make use of it. We have already seen that the men who form the main investigative trio are perceived as deeply flawed. But Ripper Street goes beyond even the gradual revelation of apparently respectable characters as morally corrupt and hints at the problem that masculinity itself poses. It does that by using stylistic elements that it borrows from the post-9/11 Western, and more specifically the critically acclaimed Deadwood.
The sepia colors that pervade everything in Ripper Street also mark the color palette of the HBO Western. Moreover, it draws on a similar cluttered and claustrophobic imagery as Deadwood for its external scenes, while locating much of its action inside pubs or bars and brothels. While these stylistic elements clearly set the tone, the presence of Jackson, as lone gunslinger, further points to Ripper Street’s generic borrowing from the Western. Deadwood itself mixes a number of subgenres together, drawing on the stylistic devices of the classical Western and the spaghetti Western. As David Drysdale argues, this draws out elements of the different subgenres, which can, as a result, be critiqued within a larger critical examination of America’s relationship to the “war on terror.”[37] One such element is the exaggerated violence of the hero in the spaghetti Western (and indeed in Deadwood). Ripper Street too exaggerates the use of violence, casting Sergeant Drake primarily in the role of willing henchman who can beat a man to death if Reid wants him to. In most episodes, the use of violence seems to be celebrated as it restores the power of a deeply beleaguered police. But one episode, “The Weight of One Man” (1:5), makes it clear that violence is deeply troubling, and it does that by exploring the character of Drake.
Drake has experienced war and is famous as a result of fighting his way back to the British army when he was abandoned behind enemy lines. In the episode we see Drake gradually becoming more and more violent, including to his colleague and friend Captain Jackson. Standing next to each other in a pub as Jackson rambles on about a case of robberies, Drake suddenly breaks his whisky glass with one hand and then grabs Jackson by the throat and throws him against the wall. The camera then follows him outside, where the image of the gray outside world is slowed down and suddenly interrupted with fast-cut images of men being shot. These images appear and disappear so quickly that they can hardly be grasped by the viewer. However, they clearly visualize the suppressed trauma Drake deals with in this episode. The same trauma is played through again when Drake kills the band of robbers and arrests their leader. This time, the episode reveals more to allow the viewer to more fully understand just how violent the experience was. Violence, then, as a key element of traditional, hegemonic masculinities, is presented as traumatizing and as such contributes to the problems men face.[38]
Overall, then, Ripper Street presents men whose specific form of masculinity contributes to their problems: Reid’s role as patriarch places him in a position of traumatizing failure; Jackson’s masculine body undermines the rational science of his profession; and Drake’s connection to violence leaves him vulnerable and traumatized. Thus Ripper Street does not return men, over the body of women, into the disembodied space of traditional hegemonic masculinity and dominance, as the title seems to suggest. Rather, it constructs traditional masculinities in order to uncover their flaws and the problems that they cause. It achieves this critique of masculinity not just via the complex and transnational mix of genres and the foregrounding of the men’s bodies; instead, Ripper Street achieves this through the gradual revelation of character in moments of affect. In addition, the series’ continuous story lines allow for the juxtaposition of different conceptualizations of masculinities that enables Ripper Street to question if the crisis in society—its deep-seated sense of unhappiness—is not precisely derived from traditional gender roles.
Karen Boyle, Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates (London: Sage, 2005).
See, for example, Donald Spoto, Camerado: Hollywood and the American Man (New York: New American Library, 1978); and Michael Malone, Heroes of Eros: Male Sexuality in the Movies (New York: Dutton, 1978).
Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993); Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumin, eds., You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men (New York: St Martin’s, 1993); Peter Lehman, ed., Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001); Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993); Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Thomas Shary, ed., Millenial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013).
Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: Tauris, 2001); Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yates, “Cinematic Symptoms of Masculinity in Transition: Memory, History and Mythology in Contemporary Film,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 10, no. 3 (2006): 299–318. Peter Lehman, adapting a psychoanalytical approach, indicates how this sense of crisis in film connects to representations of the male body as bearer of the penis-phallus, which for men presents both a source of empowerment and alienation from their own bodies. Such an approach, however, can too easily assume that the sense of crisis is disconnected from its historical place. Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 39.
Thomas Shary, “Introduction,” in Shary, Millenial Masculinity, 3.
Spicer, Typical Men, 192; Aaron Taylor, “Adam Sandler, an Apologia: Anger, Arrested Adolescence, Amour Fou,” in Shary, Millenial Masculinity, 19–51; Rebecca Feasey, Masculinity and Popular Television (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Carlen Lavigne, “Two Men and a Moustache: Masculinity, Nostalgia and Bromance in The Good Guys,” Journal of Popular Television 1, no. 1 (2013): 69–81.
Joanne Hollows, “Oliver’s Twist: Leisure, Labour and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 229–48.
Imelda Whelehan, Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (London: Women’s Press, 2000).
Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1998), 6.
Hollows, “Oliver’s Twist,” 233.
Hunt, British Low Culture, 8.
Ibid., 7.
James Chapman, “Not ‘Another Bloody Cop Show’: Life on Mars and British Television Drama,” Film International 7, no. 2 (2009): 12–13. See also Elaine Swan, “‘You Make Me Feel Like a Woman’: Therapeutic Cultures and the Contagion of Femininity,” Gender, Work and Organization 15, no. 1 (2008): 88–107.
Jane Feuer, “Genre Study and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allan (London: Routledge, 1992), 154.
Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (New York: Continuum, 1996); Trisha Dunleavy, Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 98.
Robin Nelson, “The Emergence of Affect in Contemporary TV Drama” (paper presented at the Identity and Emotions in Contemporary TV Series conference, Navarra, Spain, October 2013). Nelson does not engage with the feminist understanding of affect that recognizes the phenomenological experience of emotion. See, among others, Laura Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Misha Kavka, Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy: Reality Matters (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Katharina Lindner, “Questions of Embodied Difference: Film and Queer Phenomenology,” NECSUS, European Journal of Media Studies 1, no. 2 (2012), accessed 19 March 2014, http://www.necsus-ejms.org/.
There is a tendency across the world to conflate Britishness and Englishness in regard to period drama. Period drama is perceived to be quintessentially British, despite the fact that it tends to focus on English, and largely southern English, upper-middle-class characters and their servants. See Elke Weissmann, Transnational Television Drama: Special Relations and Mutual Influences between the US and the UK (Abingdon, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 57–62.
The most successful drama that A&E coproduced with the BBC during that time was Pride and Prejudice (1995).
Christine Becker, “From High Culture to Hip Culture: Transforming the BBC into BBC America,” in Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000, ed. Joel H. Weiner and Mark Hampton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 275–94.
Such sumptuousness is expressed clearly in the titles of dramas such as Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey (ITV, PBS, 2010– ). Compare that to the collage style of Ripper Street, which uses a postmodern aesthetic and emphasizes how the world of Whitechapel is permeated by the makeshift.
John Ellis, “BBC Goes Steampunk: Ripper Street, Peaky Blinders and the Memorialisation of History,” CSTOnline, 15 November 2013, accessed 19 March 2014, http://cstonline.tv/.
Showrunner Richard Warlow highlights that Ripper Street is also a Western in the DVD extras of series 1.
Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, UCL Press, 1993), 109–29.
Belen Vidal, “Labyrinths of Loss: The Letter as Figure of Desire and Deferral in the Literary Film,” Journal of European Studies 36, no. 4 (2006): 418–36.
Nelson, “The Emergence of Affect.”
Stephen Garton, “The Scales of Suffering: Love, Death and Victorian Masculinity,” Social History 27, no. 1 (2002): 40–58.
Susan Sydney-Smith, Beyond Dixon of Dock Green: Early British Police Series (London: Tauris, 2002), 2.
Caren J. Deming, “Hill Street Blues as Narrative,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2, no. 1 (1985): 2.
Ibid.
Ibid., 8. See also Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age.
Richard Warlow, “Ripper Street: Policing the Meanest Streets Possible,” BBC Blogs, 4 January 2013, 20 January 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/.
One of BBC America’s previews to Ripper Street was indeed titled “CSI: Victorian Style,” YouTube, accessed 6 March 2014, http://www.youtube.com/.
Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, “Introduction,” in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1–10.
Sue Thornham, “‘A Good Body’: The Case of/for Feminist Media Studies,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 75–94.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992), 181.
David Drysdale, “‘Laws and Every Other Damn Thing’: Authority, Bad Faith, and the Unlikely Success of Deadwood,” in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: Tauris, 2006), 133–44.
Drake’s story arc becomes even more complicated in series 2 in which we witness his descent into depression and subsequent rescue by a woman, Rose, a prostitute turned singer. Where Drake struggles with the legacy of violence and his exploitation first by the army and then by the police, Rose manages to transform herself, indicating yet again how traditional masculinities are shown to be helpless in the face of the status quo.