Downton Abbey and Philosophy (3 page)

As the suspicions build and the evidence seems to being going against Bates, the Earl of Grantham asks him for mitigating circumstances, to which Bates responds merely that the earl will have to judge him based on the evidence.
22
The irony here is that Bates is not giving all of the evidence; he refuses to correct false impressions. But these choices do not represent lies, in Bonhoeffer's sense, because Bates works to prevent betrayal in any form. If he set the record straight for himself, he would cause someone else harm. And that he refuses to do.

In the story of Bates and Anna, we can also see the importance of attending to the truth in different relationships. Because of Bates's silence about his past, Anna must do her own digging, tracking down Bates's mother to discover that Bates went to prison to protect his (ungrateful) wife Vera; this confirms Anna's belief that Bates is a man of integrity.
23
When Anna relates her discovery to Bates, arguing that she had to find the truth, Bates says that Anna does not know the whole truth, just his mother's truth, to which Anna responds, “But not your wife's?” Bates consistently tortures himself and turns the blame away from others, even if, by all accounts, they deserve the punishment (as Thomas and Vera do).

Should Daisy Have Told William the Truth?

Both Bok and Bonhoeffer can help in answering the difficult question of whether Daisy should have told William the truth. Bok lays out a two-part method for determining whether Daisy's lie can be justified. First, she should check with her own conscience, and second, if her inner voice affirms that the lie is reasonable, she must take her decision to a public setting to be confirmed or denied by other “reasonable people.”
24
We can't read Daisy's mind in the hope of divining her conscience, but we can see the looks of anguish on her face as well as her repeated expressions of remorse, which deepen as she contrasts her own actions with the standard of truth that William provides. We know she regrets the initial lie as well as her maintenance of it. So any justification for the lie fails Bok's first test.
25

But when Daisy takes the deception to her community, she receives overwhelming affirmation. Mrs. Patmore, the cook, is the dominant voice here, encouraging Daisy to accept William's proposal and not tell him or his father the truth about her feelings. Mrs. Patmore's regret over the death of her nephew in the war (with the stigma of cowardice) and her admiration for William prompt her to move into Daisy's personal life, ordering her around there just as she does in the kitchen. Mrs. Hughes also quickly lines up in support of the wedding, offering frowns whenever Daisy shows indecision.

Eventually, all of the staff and even some of the family get caught up in the romance of the events, especially after William returns from the front mortally wounded. It seems as though every “reasonable” person around Daisy supports the marriage. Daisy is caught between her conscience and the public support of what she sees is a lie.

Bonhoeffer's relational theory helps us to grapple with this conundrum in another way. If we understand the lie as a fundamental betrayal of a relationship, we clearly see what has bothered Daisy. Even if we believe that feelings are fickle and that Daisy will learn to love William as he loves her, Daisy acknowledges that she cannot return the honesty that William has given her. To the extent that Daisy sees her action as a betrayal of her relationship with William, then it is a lie, and she should not have started down that path by kissing him and then accepting his proposal, much less continued with it by the marriage just before his death.

Furthermore, her community has also betrayed its own relationships with both Daisy and William, by encouraging her to initiate and maintain the deception against her better judgment and by betraying William's trust in the others when they were aware of Daisy's uncertainty the entire time. The community members are all complicit in the deception; this is especially regrettable, given Daisy's and William's trusting natures, which the more worldly inhabitants of Downton Abbey took advantage of for their own personal reasons.

Daisy might have had more success staying honest if her lies had not accumulated through such an overwhelming snowball effect. Her case demonstrates Bok's most convincing argument against lying: that deception will become a habit because lies often need to be reinforced with more lies.
26
The real danger here is not the individual lie but the cumulative effect of multiple lies, each one building on the one before it. If Daisy had not led William “up the garden path,” progressing step-by-step with each additional lie, she might have been able to resist the pressures around her.

Oh, the Web We Weave . . .

In the end, perhaps the person hurt most by Daisy's lie was Daisy herself. She could have spared herself much guilt, anguish, and shame by being honest with William from the very beginning. But she does not have the experience, the strength of character, or the encouragement to be able to express what she sees as the truth while the community around her is pushing her toward deception.

No matter which school of ethics we use to evaluate lying, we need strength of character to carry through the decisions we make. Bates excels at this type of strength, holding to his principles even in the face of personal disaster. But Daisy is a different person: younger, inexperienced, and less certain of herself. As
Downton Abbey
continues, perhaps we'll see Daisy grow as a person, as has already been hinted in her relationship with William's father. And we can hope that the next time she faces the temptation to lie, she will not buckle under social pressures, but instead will do everything in her power to listen to her conscience and protect the relationships that are important to her.

Notes

1
Season 2, episode 4.

2
Season 2, episode 6.

3
Sissela Bok,
Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life
(New York: Vintage, 1978), 14.

4
Augustine, “On Lying” (395), New Advent,
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1312.htm
.

5
Immanuel Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns,” in
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
, trans. James W. Ellington (1799; repr., Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 8:427.

6
Immanuel Kant,
The Metaphysics of Morals
, trans. Mary Gregor (1797; repr., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially “The Doctrine of Virtue,” book 1, part 1, chapter 2, section 1 (“On Lying”), 6:429–31 by the standard Academy pagination.

7
Note that this is different from saying that considerations of cost and benefit should determine whether
particular
lies are wrong.

8
Bok,
Lying
, 25.

9
Ibid., 27.

10
Ibid., 32.

11
Season 1, episodes 5 and 6.

12
St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologica
(1274), 2.2.109 and 2.2.110, Sacred Texts,
http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/sum365.htm
and
http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/sum366.htm
.

13
Bok,
Lying
, 85.

14
Ibid.

15
Season 1, episode 3.

16
Bok,
Lying
, 85.

17
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Ethics
(1949; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1986), 365.

18
Ibid., 369.

19
Ibid., 366. For a related discussion, see chapter 5 in this book.

20
Ibid., 364–365.

21
Ibid., 372.

22
These events occurred in the second half of the first season.

23
Season 1, episode 7.

24
Bok,
Lying
, 99–108.

25
For more on the sources of moral knowledge, see chapter 5.

26
Bok,
Lying
, 64.

Chapter 3

“Put That in Your Pipe and Smoke It”

The Women of Downton Abbey

Rebecca Housel

Downton Abbey
first took U.S. audiences by storm in 2010 as part of
Masterpiece
on PBS, showing the lush decadence of an age past. Downton Abbey is the name of the manor featured as the setting of the series created by Oscar-winning writer and actor Julian Fellowes, the Baron of West Stafford. The manor was a traditional reward given to English aristocrats for service to king and country, but many nobles found society changing after World War I. Equality between the social classes was called for after manor servants fought as gallantly in the trenches as gentleman officers. But class equality wasn't the only thing on Britain's evolutionary timetable—sexual equality was coming as well. Taking up the issue of the sexes and gender, then, this chapter will present a feminist analysis of the women of
Downton Abbey.

“Fragile Feminine Sensibilities,” Indeed

In 1918, an educated British woman over thirty who was either the head of her household (since many women were widowed during the war) or married to the head of the household could finally vote. The eighty-six-year struggle for women's suffrage began with the 1832 Great Reform Act, which had limited the right to vote to men only. Even wealthy aristocrats like Lady Mary Crawley were unable to bend the laws of men, including the social expectations of a largely patriarchal society. Lady Mary was given more respect than, for instance, the housemaid Anna, who in turn was given more respect than the scullery maid, Daisy, but she was still not the political equal of a male servant before 1918.

As the series opens, the year is 1912, and audiences find the Crawley family mourning the loss of their heirs, Lord Grantham's first cousin and his son, who both perished in the sinking of the
Titanic
. Lady Mary, the eldest of Lord Grantham's three daughters, was engaged to her now-deceased first cousin once removed, Patrick Crawley. One of the first insights the audience gets into Lady Mary's character is her question to Lord Grantham of whether she has to dress as though mourning a fiancé when the engagement hadn't been announced before Patrick's death.

Was it cold of Lady Mary to ask such a question? It certainly may have sounded that way. But imagine for a moment how you would feel if your fiancé was your fiancé only because he was the closest male kin to your father, and because of your sex, you could never be the heir to your family's title, home, or fortune. All you, or Lady Mary, could do would be to marry the male heir with the hope and intention of having a son. Lady Mary's leadership ability, intelligence, breeding, and education did not matter as much as her sex, according to British law and, social expectations. Her engagement to her cousin was arranged by her father; she had little choice in the matter.

Lady Mary wasn't the only one frustrated and disappointed with British society. The philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), a member of Parliament, wrote a book titled
The Subjection of Women
in which he credited Harriet Taylor.
1
Taylor and Mill would later marry after Taylor's husband passed away. Mill and Taylor considered the arguments against women's rights having to do with “women's nature” absurd.
Downton Abbey
depicts the patriarchal sentiment that Mill and Taylor were fighting against with lines like Lord Grantham's “We must have a care for feminine sensibilities . . . they are far more fragile than our own.”
2
(The irony is that his mother, the Dowager Countess, is the last person anyone would call “fragile”!)

Lord Grantham's valet, Mr. Bates, introduces us to one of the sexual inequities of the time in discussing his marital status with his beloved Anna. Mr. Bates is married but estranged from his wife, Vera, whom he wishes to divorce so he can marry Anna. He explains to Anna that Vera's infidelity provides sufficient grounds for him to divorce her, but any infidelity on his part wouldn't be enough for her to divorce him; she would have to prove cruelty in order to petition for divorce. Mill and Taylor wrote of the inequities in marriage and divorce decades before British feminists achieved the legislative victory in 1857 allowing women to sue their ex-husbands after divorce.

The women of
Downton Abbey
may be oppressed by the social attitudes of the time, but they manage to push the boundaries. Lady Mary defies social expectations by having a dangerous liaison with the Turkish diplomat Kemal Pamuk. This was surely no one's business but her own, yet the potential gossip was enough to threaten her reputation.

Lady Edith, with whom Mary has a very competitive—and sometimes overtly hostile—relationship, learns of the incident and decides to take matters into her own hands. She sends a letter to the Turkish ambassador informing him of her sister's role in Mr. Pamuk's death.
3
Edith's actions go well beyond any cruelty she has suffered from Mary; her letter could very well have destroyed Mary's future and perhaps even Mary herself. Mary gets revenge, however, when she leads Edith's older gentleman caller, Sir Anthony Strallan, to believe that Edith thinks him a joke—on the day he was expected to propose.
4

The Performativity of the Crawleys

Although both Mary and Edith behave properly in public, dressing appropriately in the feminine style of the day, conforming to their father's wishes, and generally accepting the patriarchal world they live in—all part of what contemporary feminist philosopher Judith Butler would consider the performativity of gender—neither can change who she truly is: a human being. All human beings, regardless of their sex, have a capacity for good and evil, which was exactly John Stuart Mill's argument in
The Subjection of Women
:

So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.
5

Essentially, Mill pointed out that it is only custom that dictates how women are treated, and therefore male tradition is what defines the social expectations of women's roles in society. What is perceived as “natural” appears to be so only because it is based on tradition, not reality.

Building on Mill's insights, Butler's concept of performativity maintains that gender is merely a matter of performance, in which our ideas of “woman” and “man” are based only on how people behave (or “perform” their roles), as opposed to the biologically based concept of sex.
6
Performativity is easy to see in everyday life. Walk into any retail store and observe the differences in the clothes aimed at boys and girls. But would a little boy care if he wore pink clothing with a princess motif if no one told him that it was “wrong”? Similarly, would a little girl think twice about wearing dark blue overalls with a football sewn on the front if no one told her it was “wrong”? Neither child knows the difference, but as both of them continue to grow around such social cues, they will learn; this is the essence of performativity.

Downtown Abbey
even addresses the phenomenon of gendered clothing when the youngest of Lord Grantham's daughters, Lady Sybil, comes to dinner in her new “dress,” a stylized version of a pantsuit. Even Sybil's sisters are shocked when she enters, but Anna, perhaps the most progressive of all the women on the show, is quite encouraging. These women are demonstrating that since gender is a social construction, the expectations related to it can be changed if the people subject to them choose to “perform” them differently. Just consider the way that Sybil dresses differently, speaks out against her father, attends women's suffrage rallies, becomes a nurse, and marries a chauffeur (who's also an Irish radical).

Cora and O'Brien: Two of a Kind

At first glance, Cora Crawley, the Countess of Grantham, and her lady's maid, O'Brien, seem as much alike as water and fire. But on closer examination, both are perfect examples of how similar personalities are played out as governed by their different social circumstances. O'Brien is manipulative and miserable, always plotting with the footman Thomas against others in order to protect her own interests.
7
Cora is no different, except that she, unlike O'Brien, has been wealthy from birth and has the privilege of property and a title.

Cora doesn't need to plot next to the stairway. She doesn't need to manipulate innocents like Daisy into spilling household secrets to leverage against others. But she clandestinely works with the Dowager Countess to try to undo the contract that prevents Mary from inheriting, she cuts Isobel out of codirecting the convalescent home because it suits her, she manipulates her husband to get him to use his power and influence to her own ends, and she plots with Sir Richard Carlisle to get Lavinia, Matthew's fiancée, back into the picture, deliberately subverting her eldest daughter's happiness.
8

Cora is extremely driven, and her position and power allow her to further her own ends (including the well-being of her family and friends) under the cover of nobility. But O'Brien doesn't have the benefit of wealth or a well-connected husband to protect her and help her get what she wants. All she has is her wits, which she uses to keep things moving at Downton Abbey: planting the seeds of division between Mary and Edith, getting Thomas back in the good graces of the house after the war, and working with Thomas to bring down Mr. Bates. O'Brien is a fairly miserable person when we meet her, but she's clearly had a long and difficult life of poverty, loneliness, and hard work—the opposite of Cora's life.

By comparing Cora and O'Brien, we can recognize how both illustrate performativity but also how performativity is affected by class. All women were thought of as inferior (“fragile”) and generally not of the same “nature” as men, but if you were a wealthy woman, this only meant that you were doomed to a life of comfortable boredom—insulting and demeaning, but not torturous, in material terms. If you were a poor woman, without wealth and the protection of a husband, however, it meant that you could be used up and discarded like garbage.

To Cora, such effects did not matter, and she could indulge in ideas like “women's rights begin in the home.”
9
Of course, that's easy for her to say when her home is filled with servants to fulfill her every need along with the needs of her husband and her children. O'Brien had no home of her own, so how could her rights begin there for her?

Isobel Crawley and the Dowager Countess—Oh My!

A relationship on
Downton Abbey
that provides a greater contrast—and greater entertainment—is the delightfully tension-filled one between Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, and her cousin, Isobel Crawley. Violet is the mother of the current Lord Grantham, and Isobel is the mother of his heir (and third cousin once removed), Matthew Crawley.

The two are perfect foils: Violet is happy in her elevated and privileged place in society, and Isobel is a progressive, outspoken, and independent woman devoted to helping the sick and the poor. Isobel represents Mill's ideal, whereas Violet is a consistent product of tradition, willingly bowing to the performativity of gender as if it wore an English crown. But neither is entirely consistent: Violet is willing to entertain change when it threatens her favorite granddaughter's inheritance, and Isobel seems to have no problem with archaic custom when it means that her son will one day rule over Downton Abbey. This sentiment is perfectly summarized by Violet when she declares to Mary, “I'm a woman, Mary. I can be as contrary as I want.”
10

Isobel is constantly challenging tradition, which implies challenging Violet. The two push themselves to push each other, which appears to benefit the larger family and the community. An example of this is when Isobel challenges Violet to recognize that the annual prize for cultivating the most beautiful flowers, which has been given to Violet every year, hasn't been earned, and others in the community may deserve the prize more than she does. Violet may not like Isobel, but she is still open to seeing the truth, so she awards the prize to the elder Mr. Molesley for his roses.
11

Isobel further flies in the face of decorum when she transforms Downton Abbey into a convalescent home for wounded officers. Violet, in contrast, makes it clear that she does not want Downton Abbey used in that way. Her exact words are “I forbid it,” but a convalescent home it became, with Lady Sybil as one of the nurses. In a discussion with her sister Edith, Sybil explains that being unproductive is the root of unhappiness: “It's doing nothing that's the enemy.”
12
Sybil's decision to work as a nurse is somewhat vexing to her grandmother, Violet. By subjecting herself to training and physical work, Sybil challenges her assigned place in society—and it isn't be the only time. Sybil becomes interested in politics, particularly women's suffrage, encouraged by both Isobel and the chauffeur, Branson.

Branson openly challenges social norms, calling himself a socialist and telling Sybil that although he's a chauffeur at the time, he won't always be one. Because Branson refuses to recognize his place, he takes liberties in speaking to Sybil. He casually touches her on the waist during conversation, declares his love for her, and eventually proposes marriage, encouraging her to leave her home and family. Thanks to Isobel's initial support of Sybil's interests, Sybil naively falls in love with the brash Branson, ultimately marrying him and settling in Ireland to start a family.

Julian Fellowes, the creator and chief writer of
Downton Abbey
, masterfully weaves a cautionary line between progress and tradition—that is, between feminism and patriarchy. Although we see some isolated steps forward, such as through Isobel helping Violet to recognize her role beyond her social station and Sybil becoming a productive member of society, we see that this path is not always a smooth one. Sybil's independence at first threatens to estrange her from her family.