It’s easy to sneer at melodrama as though it’s nothing more than Snidely Whiplash tying Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks. But we cannot forget that it’s as essential to the human spirit as bread is to our stomachs. Consider:
Two gold-hearted servants of an English lord fall in love. The man, however, is married, and his wife will not grant him a divorce. But then the wife is murdered in mysterious circumstances, and the husband is accused of the crime. He’s sent to jail, but back at the manor, his heart’s true love is as constant as a brick, working every angle to prove her lover’s innocence. Ultimately, she succeeds, the man walks free, and the gold-hearted lovers are united in marriage and live happily ever after. Or until the next season of episodes.
This is melodrama. It differs from drama taken neat in that melodrama spares no expense in getting audience emotions to spin around its conflicts at maximum torque. Lovers need to be kept apart until the third-act climax. How exciting if one of them is behind bars and facing the hangman’s noose.
Why is melodrama so essential to us? Because we cannot live without stories, and the stories we need most are the kind that make exciting the most basic truths of our existence. Melodrama is the thrill of seeing the deepest needs of the human spirit put at fantastic peril.
David Mamet distinguishes between good and second-rate melodrama. Good melodrama pushes the hero or heroine to a point where real, that is costly, humility and wisdom are gained. Second-rate melodrama spares the hero or heroine by solving all problems with a deus ex machina.
The launch last Sunday night (here in the U.S.) of Season 4 of PBS’s hugely successful Downton Abbey was pretty good melodrama. In the season three cliffhanger, young Matthew Crawley, scion of the manor family, dies in a car crash immediately after seeing his newborn baby. Season 4 opens with his widow, the hard yet unexpectedly vulnerable Lady Mary Crawley, still absorbed in her grief six months after Matthew’s death. The central plot of the season premiere involves Lady Mary, with the help especially of her brother-in-law Tom Brandon (the former family chauffeur!) struggling to help her come back out into the world. In one of the most powerful scenes of the episode, Lady Mary’s grandmother, the Dowager Countess Violet, played by the redoubtable Dame Maggie Smith, urges her to make the biblical choice between death and life. But it isn’t until Lady Mary is lovingly upbraided by Carson the butler, a man who has known her from her infancy and for whom she has real affection, that she finally finds the courage to venture out into life again. Carson is no deus ex machina; he is the only friend she has with the authority to teach her humility and wisdom.
Which is just the kind of thing that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd sneers at when she calls Downton Abbey a “subversive fantasy” in which the “servants rule the masters. The bad ones manipulate the lords and ladies into doing their bidding. And the good ones instruct and nag their superiors into making the right moves in their royal lives, both personally and professionally.” The motif of servants ruling their masters is as old as the hills, or at least Plautus, so there is nothing new under the sun there. Dowd’s beef, however, is that the show doesn’t accurately reflect just how miserable the lives of servants in the 19th and early 20th centuries were. Dowd affirms her Times colleague Alessandra Stanley’s opinion that Downton Abbey is a show “about class differences that panders to contemporary notions of democracy and equality.”
Surely there is romanticization of the servants’ lives in Downton Abbey, though Dowd fails to cite the many episodes in which their lives are portrayed with pretty rough historical accuracy: such as the plotline involving the pretty maid, Edna, who has a fling with a soldier staying in the house and, after being sacked for being discovered with him, finds herself pregnant, abandoned by her lover, and without the means of providing for herself and her baby.
But Dowd’s chief error is not that she overplays her point about the romanticism of the show. Her chief error is that she fails to appreciate the deep spiritual hunger that Downton Abbey addresses. The show does not “pander,” for instance, to our needs for democracy and equality. It simply argues that they are indispensable. In showing us an aristocratic family sharing its hopes and its foibles with the servants downstairs, we are given a picture of a shared humanity that transcends class distinctions.
Aristotle, moreover, said about tragedy that it should concern itself with “great houses.” Why? Because the aristocracy stands for, or should stand for, what is “best” (aristos) in human achievement and character. Downton Abbey is also about a great house, and in being so it satisfies our perennial desire to contemplate what the world takes to be the best, and to laugh or at least recognize the irony when those claimed to be the best inevitably fail to live up to the mark.
Finally, Downton Abbey is about love. We cannot live without stories, and among the stories we crave most is the one that confirms the perennial truth that love is what makes the world go round, and no matter what happens, love in some sense conquers all. Not that all the love affairs in Downton Abbey live up to the highest moral standards. Romanticism seeps in here, too. But in the marriage of Matthew and Lady Mary, especially, we have a union of lovers in which, as in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the moral limitations of each are overcome in a way that clears the ground for a lasting marriage lived in true friendship.
That is a happy ending that will always keep them coming back on Sunday nights.
Daniel McInerny is the editor of Aleteia’s English edition. He is also the author of the comic novel, High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare, as well as two books in the Kingdom of Patria children’s series, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits and Stoop of Mastodon Meadow. You are invited to contact him at daniel.mcinerny@aleteia.org, friend him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter: @danielmcinerny, He blogs on the renovation of the Catholic literary tradition at thecomicmuse.com.
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