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Downton Abbey and the Loss of Matthew Crawley -- Spoiler Alert!

3/3/2013

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              Downton Abbey and our loss of Matthew Crawley
                                       Spoiler Alert!
                                               *
            Okay, first an apology for not posting anything in nearly a year. I know I have no excuse except “I’ve been busy.” That’s a feeble one, but it’s all I can offer.
            Busy end of my Spring ’12 semester. Busy summer winding down my five-year tenure as Chair of the English Department here at SMSU. Busy sabbatical semester which included lots of writing and editing and reading; a week-long trip to California for a wedding; a three-week trip to London, Bath, and Canterbury; then home to surgery (needed but not life-threatening); Notre Dame going 12-0 during their regular season; Thanksgiving, Christmas, and an intense Landmark Forum Weekend; and then school resuming with a rush and with me again teaching fulltime.
                     [Insert a longing breath for more sabbatical
                              disguised as a deep sigh…..]
                                                     *
            And now here I am, heartbroken over the Season Three finale of Downton Abbey.
            I wish I could sing it like Curly does in Oklahoma!, “ol’ Judd is dead, poor Judd Frye is dead…” but I can’t. Judd wasn’t dead, but Matthew Crawley is most sincerely dead. He lies in a ditch; blood running down his handsome, young face; crushed by his sports car that flipped over on top of him after being hit by a furniture remover’s lorry on a beautiful Yorkshire road near Downton Abbey itself.
            Only moments before, he’d held his son, his only child, born of his beautiful wife, Lady Mary, who never looked better even though she just went through labor and delivery.
            And he’s saved the estate, Downton. And he’s saved his brother-in-law, Tom Branson, from poverty and estrangement from the Crawley family. And he’s saved Cousin Rose, Lady Rose MacClare of Scotland, from running off with a married man three times her age and as randy as a goat on the heather-covered moors of Scotland. And he stood by his sister-in-law, Lady Edith, as she strove to become a journalist.
            Oh, Matthew, so middle-class! He once worked as a lawyer, after all, and is the son of a physician whose practice was in Manchester, the hallmark of all things “trade” in Edwardian times. And yet, he grows so aware of what it will take to save an institution like Downton for generations to come and understands why that’s important for his family and the nation. And those will be his generations, since he managed to melt the icy-but-not-so-maiden Lady Mary and produce a one-and-only heir by her.
           I think at times, if it weren’t for bad luck, the Crawley family would have no luck at all.
           Let’s take Lady Mary as an example. She’s born into the most powerful social class ever, the Gentry of the Victorian Period, and she grows up surrounded by limitless Edwardian splendor. But that enormous grandeur can’t be hers; she’s a woman and can’t inherit directly.  This is a historically inaccurate plot line, by the way. Jane Austen used the same last will and testament tension in Pride and Prejudice, but it wasn’t accurate even in 1813. By 1912, women didn’t have all the rights they do now, but it’s reasonable to assume Lady Mary would have been sitting pretty without tying the knot to secure her own home. But, in 2011 when Season One opens, we accept this twist of fate and horrid Crawley luck as history, but it’s not.
          So, Julian Fellowes, our script writer, has taken some liberties with Lady Mary’s fortune.
           And, even before the opening credits for Episode One (Season One) have ceased running (with the spectacular Highclere Castle in the background and swarms of starched servants preparing breakfast and ironing the newspaper to stop the ink from bleeding), Lady Mary is left with an unscathed heart. This is April 15, 1912, the morning that the tragedy of the Titanic makes headlines. Lady Mary’s fiancé died on that emblem of wretched excess gone with the waves.
          In A Room with a View by E. M. Forester and published in 1908, Lucy and her brother refer to all fiancés as fiascos; it’s a running family joke in this Matthew Crawley-like middle-class family. Lady Mary’s never-seen-on-screen-alive-or-dead fiancé fits as a fiasco to be sure. He was a distant cousin of her father’s, the Earl of Grantham, Robert Crawley, and conveniently close enough in blood to be a lackey for Lady Mary to marry the estate she loves.
          Unlike John Brown, who lies moldering in his grave, this cousin’s remains are never recovered, and he is declared dead.
          Lady Mary wears black, but hardly feels the loss except for the inconvenience of having to find another way “to marry Downton” as it were.
          Her luck runs from rot to riot as a lover dies in her illicitly sensuous bed, potentially razing her social status while her jealous sister, Edith, stokes the fires of ruinous scandal.   
          Now enter Matthew Crawley, by chance, a more-distant cousin and only living male descendent able to inherit Downton from Lord Crawley. Matthew, of course, is smitten at once by the beautiful and haughty Lady Mary, but he manages to insult her even before she’s properly introduced herself and delicately raised the veil of her riding habit, so fashionable in 1890 yet still in style at the Yorkshire Downton estate. Soon, to show how much he really loves her, he even tries to disinherit himself. He knows the law. He tries to give back his future title, and thus Downton, but can’t while he’s upright. No way exists to do so.
          Another unlucky sister of the Downton threesome is Lady Sybil. She’s the youngest, a bit wild, appearing in one scene wearing I Dream of Jeannie Harem garb and in another helping a house maid secure a position as a typist, at the time, a job with a future for a young, independent woman.
          When Lady Sybil is being wildly political by going to a Suffragette Rally that turns violent, Matthew comes along with Branson, the chauffer, to save her. It’s at this point that Lady Mary sees Matthew for what he really is, a decent, smart, kind gentleman who happens to love her and happens to have the key to her happiness—the future ownership of Downton. But, in fairness, I think Lady Mary is more caring and generous than not, but brought up to presume that life will always be fair to her and always gild her way.
          That evening, after Lady Sybil is back safe at Downton, Lady Mary order sandwiches for Matthew. They sit together in a small dining room, just the two. He has wine, which he offers to share but lacks a second wineglass. She accepts but won’t break the enthralling spell by ringing for a servant to fetch one. She drinks from his crystal goblet; one sip’s all it took.
          At the end of The Princess Bride, the grandfather tells his grandson that Wesley’s kiss of Buttercup was one of the best ever given. I would rate Matthew’s leaning over and kissing Mary after he proposes (the first time) right up there. The way she hold his neck to draw him closer, it’s a marvelously done scene. In this informal setting in an all-too-formal world, the seemingly invulnerable woman allows herself to be vulnerable, allows herself to love an honorable man.
          Then, her change of heart: her engagement with Matthew is off and the Great War is on.  Season One closes as that magnificent world ends, at English high summer with its gaiety and splendor, and with thoughts of Sarajevo far from everyone’s mind. No one at Downton that bright day knew the lights were going out all over Europe; no one knew they’d never be lit for these gilded elites again. No one at that summer lawn party has the gruesome vision to imagine the unimaginable horrors of Ypres or Gallipoli or Verdun.
          Season Two begins with Captain Matthew Crawley a gallant officer on the Western Front, the Somme specifically, about the worst hell-hole in the whole bloody, aimless affair. He’s now engaged to Miss Lavinia Swires, like himself, a wealthy middle class denizen. And luckless Lady Mary has snagged a wealthy scoundrel from the heap of conniving opportunists circulating London society but not in uniform.  She takes up this second fiasco, Sir Richard Carlisle, a wealthy up-and-coming newspaper mogul whom no one likes and many fear, even though clearly she prefers the engaged-to-another-woman Matthew. Dante would be hard pressed to know into which circle of Hell to fling this fiasco; he’s mean-spirited and threatening, vindictive, arrogant, and utterly contemptuous of the very privileged society he hopes to marry up to. Even the butler, Mr. Carson, knows better than agree to work for the future bride and her brooding, ill-tempered groom-elect.
          Also in Season Two, Lady Sybil becomes a nurse surrounded by Gentry officers but falls for her father’s worst nightmare, the chauffer:  a commoner, an Irish Catholic, a Sinn Féin supporter, and one solidly principled and conscientious young man. No father could ask for more of his Irish son-in-law except possibly a Trinity degree.
          And this season ends with the Great War reaching its non-conclusive Armistice and the Great Influenza cutting its snarling swath through many of the War’s survivors, including Matthew’s Lavinia. But eventually, Lady Mary sees the light, accepts Matthew’s hand (a second time) and his second memorable kiss in the snow of Christmas 1919. All seems set for a happy Season Three.
          But early in Season Three, Lady Sybil, now Mrs. Branson, dies from complications of childbirth, which paints a cross-hair target on Lady Mary’s back at the end of this season when she, like her sister, becomes pregnant. Was Sybil’s condition hereditary, and thus, would Lady Mary suffer the same fate? Would this pregnancy be another successful live birth that tragically costs the mother her life?
          Circumstances beyond the control of the producers forced Julian Fellowes to let Lady Mary and child both survive but forced Matthew’s death. Dan Stevens’ decision to leave Downton Abbey after three years left few options. So, Matthew, played by Stevens, dies in that ditch five minutes before the end of Season Three.
          It’s a painful loss. Matthew was so upstanding without being a prig, so middle-class in the best sense: fair and open, willing to hear all sides, dedicated to his principled causes, willing to speak up against the disdainful authority and omnipresent precedence of class and society as often represented by his father-in-law. And he loved Lady Mary and let her know it. He actually seemed to me to be the embodiment of everything we brag about as being a modern, enlightened, and liberal-minded American.
          In the USA, Season Four won’t start until January 2014. We’ve ten months to fret, to hope for leaks from across the Pond informing us of what’s up at Downton, and to follow the actors as closely as we are following Princess Kate’s pregnancy.
          I speculate that Tom Branson will shine even more now that he’s not in the glare of Matthew’s stellar status. I’m pulling for Tom and Rose to fall into a stunning and fulfilling love. And I hope Lady Mary will discover she can run Downton as well as our deceased Matthew did. And here’s a plug for Lady Edith finally finding an honorable single man rather than converting to Catholicism and joining an order of nuns heading off to equatorial Africa as a missionary.
          But I fear for Matthew and Lady Mary’s son, who will be old enough in Downton Abbey, Season Twenty-Two to die on the beaches of Dunkirk.  

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"How I Spent my Summer Vacation"

10/1/2011

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[Dear readers:  My first entry of the school year was delayed due to the busy rush at the beginning of the semester and a nagging illness I had difficulty shaking.  That said, I plan to publish weekly for the rest of the school year. 
Thanks for hanging in!]


       “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”

    Way back in September 1974, when I first started teaching high school, I really did assign my 9th graders an essay on this topic.  It was a hot day, nearly 100 degrees, an easy temperature for the Sacramento Valley to hit at that time of the year.  The building had no air conditioner; the assignment turned out to be a flop.

     That semester, however, I did garner the absolute best excuse I have ever received from a student who did not do his homework and therefore was unprepared for a Monday morning quiz.  He wrote: “I am not prepared for this morning’s quiz because my father and me drove to Idaho to watch Evil Knievel jump the Snake Canyon.”  Knievel was unsuccessful in his jump; the student wasn’t particularly the best I ever taught.  His excuse, however, still ranks as my #1.

    The second best excuse came here at SMSU.  I had a world-class weightlifter in class.  His reason for missing:  tournament judges for an upcoming championship match came by his apartment that morning and demanded an immediate, unannounced, random urine test to make sure he was not using steroids to enhance his performance.  And so, he was late—but he passed that test.
           
     The semester after this particular incident, I was explaining to my advanced LIT class, one filled with mostly future high school teachers, the range of excuses we hear as teachers.  Of course, I began, Evil Knievel still ranks #1.  But when I next explained the weightlifting #2 excuse, his girlfriend (unbeknownst to me, a member of the class) blurted out, “But, it’s TRUE, he did need to give a urine sample that day.”  
         
     My third best excuse is actually the most chilling.  A student missed class because of a train accident in her home town, an accident that released a tanker car of chlorine gas.  The mustard-colored cloud forced the evacuation of the whole town. It made the national news. 
 
    Coincidentally, this was the semester I was teaching World War One poetry and could tie the accident to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about British Tommies being caught in a poison gas attack:  
    “Gas!  GAS! Quick, boys!" – an ecstasy of fumbling,
    Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
    But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
    And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . .
    
     This past summer, in addition to trips to Arizona and Grand Marais, I read several excellent books. One, Beatrix Potter:  A Life in Nature, is an engrossing biography of an individual woman who changed the world even though confronted with her culture’s entrenched sexism.  At first aiming to become an amateur botanist and scientific illustrator, Potter was rejected by the decidedly male scientific community of her day.  Over time, her illustrations (which she fortunately kept) proved to be more accurate than many others of the day.  And her theories about mushrooms and how they spread was scientifically correct if not accepted until many years later.  When a work covering all the fungi of Britain was published in the 1990s, the author rediscovered her illustrations and used about two dozen in his work because Potter’s were finer than any other illustrations and photographs of this subject. Potter was long dead by then.
   
     And besides Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck and a host of other children’s favorites, Potter began buying centuries-old farms in the historic
and remote Lakes’ District and restoring them as working farms.  She supervised their renovation; hand-picked their managers; introduced Herdwick sheep (a breeding stock better suited to the harsh climate in Northern England); and eventually donated her considerable land holdings to the National Trust. Today, these farms are owned by the citizens of the United Kingdom.  The Lakes’ District had been the haunt of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge and scores of landscape painters a century before Potter settled there; her actions saved a huge slice of English literary and artistic culture in perpetuity.
     
     My literary specialty is the British novel, so it’s no surprise I read a few novels this summer. I finally finished the 20-volume Patrick O’Brien series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.  O’Brien’s two heroes are unlikely friends:  Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin. 
 
    “Mad Jack” is a devoted Royal Navy officer with the spleen to fire all his guns and the ambition to capture valuable prizes on the high seas.  In that era, officers grew extremely rich from such tactics that we would describe as piracy today.  The captain’s medical officer, Maturin, is a renowned surgeon, a naturalist, a Catholic whose family came from two natural enemies of England (Spain and Ireland), but an enlightened Renaissance Gentleman devoted to stamping out tyranny wherever he found it.  

     Napoleon is his arch enemy even if the Doctor has latent sympathies for his beloved Irish; he views France’s dictatorial Emperor as worse than anyone sitting on the English throne.  And, Stephen is a spy for the British, a way to insert him on shore for adventures in his native Spain and eventually the fledging United States and the rebellious areas of South America.  He is a way for O’Brien to introduce some cloak-and-dagger plot twists and elements that span a few volumes as subplots.   
      
     Since I started reading the series in the summer of 2001, I have watched this pair woo and wed elegant ladies and then watched one of them lose his beloved wife.  I’ve witnessed in brilliant prose as “Mad Jack” Aubrey attacked French, Spanish, Moroccan, Dutch, and American men-of-war.  I’ve seen the pair cast adrift on the sea, tossed up helpless on deserted islands, been too hot, too cold, too hungry, been overstuffed with the delicacies of the era, been drunk, sober, and been consumed by a cocaine addiction.  They also play a respectable selection of violin and cello pieces together when not waging war or discovering the latest mammal or aviary specimen.    

     I had thought that O’Brien was going to return the pair to England at the end of Volume Twenty, Blue at the Mizzen.  Jack has defeated a superior fleet in the South Pacific as he helped Chile free itself from Spain; Stephen has aided in the political intrigue while pointing out (accurately) the flora and fauna of the South America coastal areas.  Jack’s wife and children are waiting at home in Kent; Stephen has proposed to the one stunning woman who can match his scientific wits.  Napoleon is out of the scene, but trouble is brewing and so. . .

     O’Brien was about a third of the way into his 21st novel when he died.  I have the publisher’s attempt to put the partial manuscript into novel form, but I found it uninviting knowing it will just end without a clear plot conclusion. Yet I envy O’Brien’s grit to keep going, handwriting fifty thousand words, fully committed even in ill health to reach the last paragraph and period of #21.  Surely, the writer’s equivalent of dying with his boots on.  
 
     Also this summer, I ordered the DVD set of The Pacific and watched that.  For those of you who don’t follow HBO Productions, The Pacific is the companion to Band of Brothers, the HBO series that told the story of the “The Screaming Eagles,” the 101st Airborne Division in Europe during World War II.  The Pacific follows various Marines as they land on Japanese-held tropical (and fortified) islands to fight a determined enemy and the horrific jungle itself.  Both ten-hour mini-series are worth the effort to watch, as graphic in language, action, and accuracy as they are.  Although made-for-TV movies, they hold nothing back.

     After I finished The Pacific, I downloaded to my Kindle two of the memoirs the film used as sources, Robert “Lucky” Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow:  From Parris Island to the Pacific and E. B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge’s With the Old Breed:  At Peleliu and Okinawa.  After the war, Leckie became an award-winning AP journalist; Sledge earned his PhD in biology and was a beloved professor for many years.  Both are now dead.  The war stories are harrowing and graphic, not to sensationalize the violence, but to make a point:  war is hell and should not be glorified.  
 
     But both authors accurately point out that those young Marines in the Pacific suffered    unimaginable horrors to defeat a determined enemy capable of unimaginable horrors.  Neither war survivor wanted to write about their buried memories of friends dying painfully, of buddies being mutilated by the weapons of modern warfare or by a cruel enemy, of malaria and other jungle-borne diseases ravaging their own young, healthy bodies.  But they felt compelled to in order to put their post-War demons to rest.  So write they did of these gruesome miseries, of their own fears, and frankly, of their own eventual hatred for their fellow humans whom they killed with ruthless and merciless efficiency.  (Lucky was a machine gunner, Sledgehammer part of a mortar team.)   

     Enrolling in college after his discharge, Sledgehammer was asked by a perky coed what he learned in the Marines that could be used to foster his education.  “I worked with explosives,” he softly replied, embarrassed by the question.  “Well, that might apply to engineering,” the overly-helpful coed chirped.  Bending down to her ear, he whispered, “The Marines taught me to kill Japs. I learned really well and got damned good at it.”  
 
    Upon seeing a stage production of the upbeat South Pacific soon after it first opened on Broadway, Leckie began writing Helmet for my Pillow so people in the peaceful USA wouldn’t think the South Pacific war was a musical.  He succeeded.

     This gives you a glimpse of how I spent my summer on top of Chairing the Department, traveling to a few weddings and graduations, and working on my own sci-fi novels, The Marsco Saga.  By Christmas ’11, you will be able to download the first, The Marsco Dissident, onto your e-readers.  An electronic stocking-stuffer.

     Meanwhile, keep reading in good health!    


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    The Zarzana Eclectic Blog seeks to occasionally publish essays about assorted topics that would interest a wide reading audience.

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