The Roar of the Twenties

Through 3.6 of Downton Abbey, we begin to see the various new tension in the house take place of the old tensions, during Autumn of 1920.  The "roaring twenties" have begun, and relationships, friendships, rivalries, the separation between "upstairs" and "downstairs" of the estate, and the imminent expansion are all being tested.  

One of the first tensions we are aware of is Tom wanting to give baby Sybil a proper Catholic baptism.  However, tension is initiated here by Robert's firm reluctance to this, because he did not have a Catholic upbringing.  However, the rest of the family, including Violent, push him to accept and attend the baptism.  We see that the rest of the family, except for Robert, is becoming more accepting of changes such as this. After Robert attends the baptism, more tension arises, but this time between Robert, Matthew, and Tom in terms of what to do with the Downton estate.  

It is evident throughout a lot of this episode that Robert feels and is out of the loop.  One time that we see this is through Mary and Matthew's fertility tensions.  Cora seems incredibly aware of Mary's issue, her small operation, and her reason for going to London, whereas Robert is completely unaware.  Indeed, this is because Mary potentially being infertile would be detrimental to Robert's traditional views of the continuance of Downton.

More tensions circulating around the estate are brought up as Matthew, Robert, and Tom decide how to approach it.  Matthew and Tom believe that Downton needs to change its approach to its land in order to accomadate to the changing times.  Even Violet, tending to be very reluctant to change, supports this, as well as supporting other non traditional things in this episode, such as Edith's employment.  However, Robert, with his traditional values, is stuck in the past and, for a long time, is reluctant to change.  Instead of this crisis, his focus is on the imminent cricket match.

Throughout the cricket match though, as the new permanent resident of Downton, Tom, tries to persuade Robert to focus on the future of the estate, Robert eases in.  The cricket match is worked into the show very nicely: to bring the whole group together, and to allow for focus on specific side conversations.  Finally, the cricket match, which started very disjointed, ends with Robert, Brandson, and Matthew embracing after a win, finally.  This allows us to think that change, collaboration, and good things are on the way for Downton.

Favorite quote of the episode: 

Violet: “It seems a pity to miss such a good pudding.”

When Did Thomas Become Sympathetic?

The episode opens with the conclusion of Bates’s imprisonment. This was a notably long plot line  and the audience is allowed some happy shots of Bates and Anna walking around the estate and admiring their future home. Anna and Bates discuss how Lord Grantham will have to let Thomas go now that Bates is back, and Bates remarks “revenge is sweet.”

This was an unsettling moment. Thomas has become more sympathetic as the show has progressed, and I think Bates reveling in the downfall of Thomas creates a moment of internal analepsis. We've examined these moments before, Steph pointed out the scene where Daisy reflected on all that’s happened in the past three seasons. This internal analepsis  Bates created was more focused. When I bristled at the thought of Bates taking down Thomas, I immediately thought back to the sneering, scheming Thomas of season one. That Thomas would never have cried over Sybil’s death, and I probably would have been rooting for Bates to take him down.

Of course, this moment of reflection was only building towards the climax of the Thomas/Jimmy plot line  Now that Thomas has become more sympathetic, we’re pushed into the role of a helpless observer. The sequence of Thomas sitting in room, with tense music building and building, is almost farcically contrasted with the easy flirting and banter between Alfred and  Ivy as they head back to the house. The cuts between the cheerful pair and the agonized, singular Thomas serve to highlight Thomas’s desire for something he can’t have. And as Alfred and Ivy fall apart on a sour note, Thomas decides to go to Jimmy. The quick disintegration of Alfred and Ivy is a foreboding warning for the viewer, and as if that’s not enough, Thomas’s approach is filmed in unsettling colors and angles. Some of the camera angles on Thomas are noir-ish, they’re shot from below and he’s in heavy shadow as he approaches Jimmy. This is not a romantic moment, it’s a moment laden with tension and fear.

In the aftermath of this scene, the audience’s sympathy is on Thomas. This only complicates the Bates vs Thomas plot line  and the audience is placed in more ambiguity. Unlike season one, we don’t have the easy decision between a snarky, evil Thomas a saintly Bates. We have a more complex and sympathetic Thomas, and Bates…is about as saintly as ever.

What are some other character progressions or shifts in dynamics that you've noticed?  

Downton Abbey on steroids

I was surprised to see that last night both episodes 6 and 7 of Downton Abbey (Season 3) were aired on Wisconsin Public TV. Oddly enough, PBS/Masterpiece is only making episode 6 available for streaming online at their website. I suggest, therefore, that for discussion and blogging we still stick mostly to episode 6 (since not all of you may be able to view 7). I am looking forward to your insights and critiques!.

Lady Audley's Secret uses a more subtle type of suspense than Great Expectations or Downton Abbey. It doesn't throw the characters into mortal peril seconds before the end of an installment. For example, George Talboys, the young man introduced as a major character near the beginning, goes missing. But, he doesn't go missing in a captured-by-bandits, sort of way, he just wanders off into the countryside. It doesn't even happen as the final action of the chapter. George's scene of disappearance is not nearly as dramatic as Braddon could have made it. Everyone else doesn't even realize he's missing until the next chapter. The chapters leading up through Chapter 13 are peppered with Talboys sightings.

Great Expectations and Downton Abbey would handle this type of situation very differently. Dickens probably would have had George go missing at the end of an installment, and there would have been more exciting physical action in the process of running off. Downton probably would have ended an episode with George running off to the sound of dramatic music. We'd probably get to see where he really is, and get a better idea of his motives. The main difference I've found between the way Lady Audley's Secret deals with suspense and how our other two serials deal with suspense is that Lady offers less immediate satisfaction, but the mysteries last much longer.

Foreshadowing and Suspense

While reading through the first thirteen chapters of Lady Audley’s Secret, I noticed in particular the use of foreshadowing to create suspense. The title of the work sets the reader up for some kind of mystery; we know from the outset that we will read about Lady Audley and that she has a secret. Indeed, the reader meets the kind, bubbly, curly blonde Lucy Graham--and her mysterious black ribbon. At the conclusion of the first chapter, Lucy has just accepted Baronet Audley’s marriage proposal (in a very strange manner) and stares out the window with a forlorn expression, murmuring how “every trace of the old life melted away -- every clue to identity buried and forgotten -- except these, except these” while holding her necklace (Braddon 17). So here is her secret! Lady Audley has a past and one cannot help but conjecture that this past will catch up with her in an unfortunate way. 

Unlike Great Expectations that frequently leaves the reader at an intense moment of action--Pip running home, Estella kissing Pip--to create suspense, Braddon uses foreshadowing and direct addresses to the reader to create suspense. After we learn that Lady Audley’s secret is connected to the necklace, the next few chapters set up the connections that the reader begins to forge: we meet George Talboys on the boat from Australia and learn of his wife and son, we meet the young Robert Audley and learn of his friendship with Talboys, we learn of the supposed death of Helen Talboys just a week before, and so on. The next important clue in connecting these events comes with direct foreshadowing in Chapter 7; the first-person narrator (yet unnamed) muses to the reader that “if any one could at that moment have told the young barrister that so simple a thing as his cousin’s brief letter would one day come to be a link in the one only criminal case in which he was ever to be concerned, perhaps Mr. Robert Audley would have lifted his eyebrows a little higher than usual” (55). The connections the reader has begun to make in his or her mind are solidified: Lady Audley (whom we begin to guess is Helen Talboys) does not want Robert Audley and George Talboys to visit Audley Court, but somehow they will and a crime will occur. 

With this foreshadowing, Braddon uses missed connections to create even more suspense. When Robert and George finally make it to Essex, clueless George and mischievous Lady Audley manage to miss each other an uncommon amount of times (similar to Pip almost getting caught after bringing food to the convict in Great Expectations). The reader at this point knows something foul is bound to happen (based upon the direct foreshadowing of chapter 7) but are pulled to keep reading to find out just what and when it will happen.

Indeed, something foul does happen and Lady Audley is involved; the particulars are not yet revealed, but Robert Audley's slow collection of clues and the narrator's analysis draw us in as readers curious to be a part of the murder mystery.

The Follow Through

"But not only Downton. Us. We must never take us for granted. Who knows what's coming?"

The trick to good narrative storytelling is the follow through. Action is exciting, but the aftermath is always the best payoff. If things reset at the end of each episode, then there's no narrative to look forward to (although there may be other benefits, re: most sitcoms pre-2000s). How does the show deal once someone has died? How do we get back to status quo/what changes are caused by the death? At the end of Episode Five, all these questions immediately come up and remained to be answered. Episode Six delivers, giving us a quiet, introspective installment, but also one of the most involving and emotional episodes of the season.

Because of the soapy roots of the show, viewers are allowed to wildly speculate about any number of twists coming up. Will Branson go insane with grief? Will Mary and Edith ever be so compassionate towards one another again? Will Lord and Lady Grantham tape off areas of Downton in a fight for territory? If one plot gets settled by the end of the episode, the others can only be hinted at for future use. Sybil's death is in some way a catalyst for the show to have the characters re-examine themselves and look to the future. The most forward-thinking and independent woman of the show is gone, as well as the most un-impeachable, so now it's up to the rest of the characters to fill the void in her memory.

On top of that, we get three extra plots: Ethel as a cook, the complicated love quadrangle (with weird arms sticking out all over the place), and the extended Bates-in-prison plot. It makes for a very packed episode, the likes of which we haven't really seen since season one.

The love squid situation is especially notable for how the writers are exploring and deepening the characters. Apparently the only way to characterize the footmen and scullery maids is by whom they want to sleep with. Granted, there might not be many aspirations much beyond marriage for the life of servant in that time, but it's interesting that we're presented with these complications first, and then learn that the new maid likes the foxtrot and wearing rouge. And then there's poor Thomas (and honestly, it's a credit to the writers that I ever even wrote the words "poor Thomas"). Combined with his open grief for Lady Sybil, and apparent new friendship with Anna, we are getting to the point where any time he blatantly hits on Jimmy, I put my head in my hands in commiseration. Now we have ourselves a well-rounded character. All he has to do next time is prove he's still evil at heart by murdering a farmer or something and he'll be all set.

This is also the episode where Lord Grantham's vendetta against change also comes to a head. First there is the subject of religion (and I quite enjoyed everyone ganging up against the priest, way to go pragmatic Crawley's!), then the estate's finances, and finally a clever dovetail into the Ethel plot line that moves Robert's frustration forward and nicely confirms Ethel's place in the village. And honestly, at this point, all the women in Downton should just buy themselves NOW pamphlets and wear jeans around the house.

In the past the team at Fellowes Inc. hasn't been too great on giving us the on-screen dialogues we need to hear, particularly regarding Mary's confession of her "damaging" to Matthew. And while I was initially very wary of the fact that the episode begins directly after Sybil's funeral, the rest of the hour was packed with enough rewards that I didn't find myself minding at all.

Viewer's Voice Award goes to Mrs. Patmore:

"You know the trouble with you lot? You're all in love with the wrong people."

Anachrony in S.3 Ep.5

While watching Season 3, Episode 5 of Downton Abbey, I found myself focusing on the ways in which the episode related to Gérard Genette’s piece, “Order in Narrative”.  As Genette explains, there is the time of the story and then there is the time of the telling, which he calls narrative time.  The writers’ use of anachrony, or chronological inconsistencies, stood out to me from the very beginning of the episode.

While the narrative lengths of breaks between episodes are always seven days, the lengths of the gaps in the time of the story have varied a great deal.  Gaps between previous episodes have ranged from a few days to many months.  Since the length of the gap in “story time” between episodes is always different, I look forward to seeing how much time the creators will write-in before continuing the story in the next episode.  In this instance, while the break in narrative time was seven days, the gap in “story time” between Episode 4 and Episode 5 was only a couple of days, as evidence by the death of Lady Sybil at the end of Episode 4 and Lord Grantham saying goodbye to the visitors paying their respects at the opening of Episode 5.  I was happy to see that not much time had passed between Sybil’s death and the beginning of Episode 5.  This use of time gave the writers a great opportunity to develop characters and character relationships in the context of Sybil’s death, which was a highly emotional ordeal for most characters in the story.  For example, with Sybil’s death still fresh in the minds and hearts of the characters and audience, the writers were able to more fully develop the issues in Robert and Cora’s relationship.

My favorite example of anachrony in this episode occurred during the scene in which Daisy tried to teach Alfred how to do the foxtrot in the servants’ hall.  I assumed that this scene would simply be another goofy example of the awkward tension between Daisy and Alfred, but a short line from Daisy changes the feel and purpose of the entire scene.  When she shows Alfred how to hold his arms, she pauses and says that it reminded her of when Thomas tried to show her how to dance the grizzly bear.  This internal analepsis, as Genette would call it, takes the audience away from the present moment in the story and causes one to think back to a seemingly insignificant moment from Season 1.  Then, a close-up shot of Daisy is used as she says, “It was a long time ago.  A lot has happened since then”.  And in that short moment, the viewer is reminded of the many events that have occurred since Daisy and Thomas danced in the servants’ hall.  Personally, I thought of the war, William’s death, Matthew’s injury, Sybil and Branson, Lavinia Swire, and Bates’ trial, just to name a few.  In the tradition of a serialized narrative, all of these stories and events came together at once, connected by the common thread of Daisy’s memory.

There are numerous other examples of how the writers used the discordance between narrative time and story time to develop the plot.  Which were your favorites?