Photo: ITV
That’s not really what it’s called, the British series that has managed somehow to entangle me. It’s what I called Downton Abbey for several years while making fun of my friends’ adoration of the old-time British upper class. After all, during the early years of the last century, American girls were shipped to England to find husbands lured by their family dollars as they, presumably, were lured by titles and landed estates. Winston Churchill’s mother was one of these so-called “Dollar Princesses.” So we’ve been engaged in this worship for a long time.
Now I have to confess that I’ve bought every single episode of the series, hoping against hope that it will last to the end of the pandemic, although that is unlikely. I have to discipline myself every evening to finish my reading before I turn on the set, and I also have to forbid myself to look at more than one episode at a time.
Yes, it’s the superb acting, but it’s also an array of eye-goggling costumes, including the staff’s, and the delicious attentions of ladies’ maids and the profound, if obviously questionable, devotion of the staff to their masters. It’s clear to me that the same displays of loyalty, even affection, are used by diehard Confederates to persuade the rest of us that slaves “were just like family.”
And this in the midst of daily, even hourly, debates about racism.
I’m not pleased to learn that I have a hidden admiration for the Crawleys. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. I realized that I also have a hidden admiration for hierarchy when I found myself abjuring Lord Crawley to put Jane, the chambermaid who was trying to seduce him, out of the door. And me a feminist!
I wonder if a hidden love of hierarchy and the order it imposes is in the end our greatest obstacle to creating social change. Change means chaos—no evening clothes laid out on the bed, no solemn announcement, “The Dowager Dutchess is leaving.”
So now perhaps when I wax righteous about other forms of discrimination, I will have to remember how I adore the denizens of Downton Abbey.
This article so accurately describes many people’s likes and ideas. It gives some insight why it is difficult for some of us to see racial inequalities