Downton Abbey’s Secret Feminist

For the uninitiated, Downton Abbey is a Masterpiece Classic TV show about a fictional English patriarch, the Earl of Grantham, and his family and staff, who live on a massive estate in early 20th-century Yorkshire. The story, whose fourth season began airing in the U.S. this week, follows the insufferable entitlements, infighting, and romances of the noble Crawley family and the below-decks machinations of their (mostly) loyal servants. It’s worth watching just for the glorious costumes.

The Crawley birthright

Like any period British family saga worth its salt, the story begins with the inheritance woes of a man who, tragically, has only managed to sire daughters. The fact that I actually felt sorry for Lord Grantham when he faced the prospect of selling Downton and moving the family to a smaller house that would require a staff of just eight people is the biggest reason I hate to love Downton Abbey.

Imagine living with only eight servants.

I also couldn’t help thinking that if the Crawleys’ home is an abbey, it came to Lord Grantham’s forebears because Henry VIII dismantled England’s Catholic institutions to enrich himself and his allies. Talk about rightful ownership. (And of course such a thing could never be inherited by a female.)

Smooching the chauffeur

Season three, which aired early last year on PBS, shocked us all when we lost the saintly Lady Sybil Crawley to eclampsia. But she had to go.

Sybil looked interesting for awhile, when she fled the hidebound Crawley mansion to dabble in progressive politics, and later shocked her parents by becoming a nurse, but all that was quickly eclipsed by her chaste, patient, and disinterested romance (disinterested in the Austen sense, you know what I mean) with the family’s chauffeur, Tom Branson, who joined the Crawley fold without bloodshed. Other than that scandalous Aladdin-pants incident, Sybil was goodness itself, and the only other drama her character could conceivably create was to die in childbirth.

Face it. In a true soap opera, there’s only so much room for these types, and we’ve already got head housemaid Anna and her limping, faithful, crinkly-eyed husband, Bates.

Crawley sister Lady Edith is a tad more exciting, though her lovers all seem to be desperately affable yet unavailable middle-aged men. And have you noticed that everyone who hits the sheets with Lady Mary ends up dead? (Though death isn’t quite as bad as an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, as we saw with the fate of uppity housemaid Ethel.)

The crash heard ‘round the world

Yes, Mary’s love interest, Crawley heir Matthew, survives WWI and the Spanish flu, recovers from both paralysis and the threat of inheriting a house with just eight servants, only to die in a freak car accident after his wife gives birth.

Hearts stopped all over the world as season three ended with Matthew crushed beneath his car, blood pooling out of his ear.

Hanging was too good for series writer Julian Fellowes.

Women grieved for Matthew as if he were a real person — except worse, because with real grief, much as we’d like to lay blame somewhere, there’s really no point when it comes to coping with death. But in this case, we could blame our broken hearts on actor Dan Stevens, who reportedly refused to renew his contract for the tacked-on season four, or on Fellowes, who then devised a graceless, gruesome death as clichéd as it was shocking.

The Sybil syndrome

But really, it was the Sybil problem all over again: The only thing bigger than Matthew’s torch for Mary was his moral fortitude. Now that the whole thing with Lavinia and the inheritance was (finally) put to rest, how much blissful connubial nuzzling could the audience take?

News had broken of the actor leaving the series before the final episode aired in the U.S. But I knew Matthew was going to bite the dust because of his season three dialogue.

When Matthew wasn’t declaring his undying love for his wife every time they turned back the sheets, he was nobly sticking up for the downtrodden Edith, his servant-class brother-in-law, and even that new floozy, Cousin Rose.

When he became a father, Matthew was so happy he felt as if he’d “swallowed a box of fireworks.”

Some argued that Fellowes punished Stevens with Matthew’s car crash because the actor had the gall to leave Fellowes’s hit show. But if the writer really was trying to stick it to Stevens, I think the best evidence is the truckload of sap that characterized Matthew in season three.

For even the most progressive female viewers, such a stream of unadulterated manly goodness could only be matched by our tears.

Downton’s closet feminist

But through it all, there may be one true feminist at Downton Abbey, though he probably would never admit it from his office downstairs, where sending a maid instead of a footman to serve dinner is the crisis of the century. Carson, the butler, loves the lady Mary as if she were his own daughter. He hates to see Downton entailed away from her.

But it doesn’t come to that.

“Downton is safe,” Mary sighs as she cradles the estate’s newborn heir. The entire family is likewise in raptures because Mary’s baby doesn’t have a vagina. But when Carson, otherwise a terminal traditionalist and the biggest snob in the building, gets news of the birth by phone, he’s the only one in town who completely forgets to ask if it was a boy or a girl.

For another take on Downton Abbey, click here.