“Welcome to a New Era”? Downton Abbey in 2019

ABSTRACT

Just as Downton Abbey seasons 1–6 coincided with the Coalition government, the production schedule for the 2019 movie paralleled key moments in the Brexit campaign. The film offers a comforting, optimistic narrative to an audience expected to have recently severed ties with Europe, bidding viewers “welcome to a new era.” Like the series, however, which has been read as an apologia for the new conservatism, the film has a deeply reactionary narrative, pretending that technological and sartorial advances constitute progress. The article pursues this argument from a feminist perspective, proceeding down the film’s social hierarchy from the Princess Royal to the under-cook.

Keywords:

• Brexit
• conservatism
• Downton Abbey movie
• feminism
• nostalgia

Notes

1 All of the unattributed quotations in this article are sourced from the film Downton Abbey (dir. Michael Engler, 2019).

2 In contrast to these six figures, who shoulder much of the narrative, the male characters are typically consigned to supporting roles, though their interests are privileged throughout. Men thus relegated to spare parts include the ineffectual Lord Grantham and Bertie Pelham and the absent Henry Talbot, while one exception, Tom Branson, is discussed in the main body of the article.

3 As the series wore on, the resignations of key actors took it in an increasingly dark direction, a phenomenon Katherine Byrne has dubbed “downer Downton.” Following Sybil’s death in childbirth, her sister Mary had a safe delivery but lost her husband Matthew in a car crash immediately after, in an episode screened on Christmas Day. The trajectory continued in season 4 with the rape of lady’s maid Anna, a storyline which won actress Joanne Froggatt a Golden Globe but attracted widespread criticism for its privileging of Anna’s husband’s reaction over her own trauma (Byrne, “New Developments” 185, 190). In the wake of this, the film—disingenuously, as it turns out—pledges a return to the uncomplicated pleasures of monarchism and pageantry, and a distancing from problems “belonging to … ‘the real’” (Salmagundi 106).

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Notes on contributors

Bethany Layne

Dr. Bethany Layne is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, and the author of Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has published widely on biographical and appropriative fiction, in journals including The Henry James Review, Woolf Studies Annual, and Adaptation, and her interviews with David Lodge, Colm Tóibín, and Susan Sellers appear in Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions Across the Globe (Bloomsbury, 2018). She pioneered the first specialist biofiction module in the UK, and is the editor of a volume entitled Biofiction and Writers’ Afterlives (Cambridge Scholars, forthcoming 2020). Recent and ongoing projects include Malory Towers, pastiche, and the Harry Potter phenomenon.