So I signed up for Netflix and started with season one. It was so fun to see the first happenings of these characters I'd come to really like. To see what they were like in the beginning.
Finishing season one, I moved on to season two (viewing that one on Hulu Plus, because Netflix only had season one) and I followed Mary and Matthew's on-again off-again romance with enthusiasm.
(If you haven't seen all of Downton Abbey seasons one through three and you plan to, don't read anymore here. Spoiler city, from here on.)
Equally, I'm a fan of well developed, realistic characters and thoughtful writing. This is just a very well done show. It's impossible to be too upset with Lady Violet Grantham's snarky comments and rude retorts when she is so often spot-on with her views. She's terribly old fashioned, but seems to choose just the right moments to be surprisingly understanding and almost modern.
You have to hurt along with Edith as she repeatedly is overlooked and unrecognized, but admire her spunk as she keeps trying to break out of her role.
Mr. Carson - the head butler - oh so old fashioned, knows his place and everyone else's, and rules the servants with a kind but strict hand. When you see how deeply he cares for both the family he works for as well as the rest of the staff, you can't condemn his efforts to keep everyone in line.
And Matthew. Too-good-to-be-true Matthew. Not a dishonest, selfish, evil bone in his body. Honestly, a person almost has to have a little bit of looking-out-for-myself in him, or he's hard to believe, but for me, Matthew's redeeming quality is the way he moves on after Mary rejects his (first) proposal. He is upset, but he doesn't wallow or beg. He promptly enlists as a soldier and meets another lovely, kind woman he proposes to.
That's one thing I find so interesting in this show. These days, people date for years and years before getting married. We know each other backwards, frontwards, and inside out before we commit to a lifetime together. In Downton Abbey times, immediately after the first admission of attraction, proposals start flying around. It's either sweetly romantic or frighteningly rash, I can't decide which.
"I decided that I love you. Do you love me?"
"As a matter of fact I do."
"Of course I will."
And bam! They are engaged.
Truly, they are a very chaste bunch, except for that little indiscretion Mary had in one of the first episodes of the first season. A ridiculously handsome visitor seduces Mary - a woman born and raised to save herself for marriage. It's shocking but at the same time, it humanizes her. She is proper and good, but she is also a young girl, and not at all immune to immoral attentions from a dashing and dangerous stranger.
Most people who succumb to a brief temptation get away with it. Not Mary. In true dramatic soap opera fashion, Mary's lover falls dead, right there in her bed. Poor Mary. Let's not even talk about how an experience like this might damage one psychologically.
Mary is understandably horrified. She can't be caught with a man in her bed, dead or alive. The ruin of her own reputation is only a small part of it - the waves of scandal would follow the entire family for generations.
With the help of her outrageously dedicated maid and her appalled but resolute mother, she manages to get the body out of her bed and back into his own, but of course, word leaks out. Through the next couple of seasons, Mary and those who care about her are forced into all sorts of difficult situations in order to keep the coverup.
First and foremost for Mary is the desire to keep her father and Matthew from knowing about it. She couldn't take the disappointment from her father, and she worries Matthew will for ever see her as "damaged goods."
Finally, though, in the last episode of season two, she has to admit her indiscretion to him.
Which brings me to my point - the whole reason I wanted to write this article. Matthew's reaction to her confession.
He walks a few steps away from her. His face is a mixture of confusion, and a little despair. But it's not because he sees her as "ruined."
He turns to her and says, "Did you..... love him?"
Why would she do that..... when she wasn't married to him..... how could this be..... You can just see him trying to work it all out, in just a few seconds.
It's like he has no idea that he lives in a world where that happens. He thinks everyone in his world is better than that. I'm sure Mary, especially, he thinks is better than that.
How sweet, innocent, and almost unbearably naive of him. He has no concept of how she could have been intimate with someone she didn't love. No idea. He can't get his mind to fathom it.
To me, he says so much about himself, his way of thinking, his upbringing, and his attitude toward women, in those four little words. (I know, I'd have killed it in a English Lit. character analysis class. I'll take my honorary Masters degree now.)
Mary more or less says "duh, I barely knew him, it was just lust!" (Only, you know, in her stiff-upper-lip British sort of way) And Matthew seems to come to his senses. But just for that one brief moment where he couldn't understand a world in which this could even happen.... you have to adore him for that. He's like a little boy. His momma raised him right.
You just had to know, though, that someone that sweet and innocent and adorable was not long for this world.
YES! I did the same thing!
ReplyDeleteHave you discovered Call The Midwife?
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