Fussing over whether to use a bouillon or melon spoon
Downton and Downward
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
Like everyone else with a perverse curiosity about a castle-bound community fussing over whether to use a bouillon or a melon spoon, I've been consumed by the turns in "Downton Abbey," the latest export from England to keep American public television afloat.
In a season of haute-soap plot twists, the story of the working-class Irishman, Tom Branson, whose marriage to Lady Sybil gives him a life leap in upward mobility, is worth examining for what it says about class, then and now. Branson is still "the chauffeur" to a family living on moldered wealth, and his brother the car mechanic is "a drunken gorilla" for asking if there's any beer in the House of Lord Grantham.
But if someone with grease on his hands and an accent from a workaday neighborhood can rise to an estate management position in the rigid British class system, what, by comparison, are we to make of the American experience nearly a century removed?
Oh, but we are a nation free of class conflict, we tell ourselves daily, and live with the illusion that everyone with a job is somehow middle class. Our core, motivational narrative is that anyone with gumption and good luck can rise to a comfortable tier. They don't call that the British Dream.
(More here.)
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
Like everyone else with a perverse curiosity about a castle-bound community fussing over whether to use a bouillon or a melon spoon, I've been consumed by the turns in "Downton Abbey," the latest export from England to keep American public television afloat.
In a season of haute-soap plot twists, the story of the working-class Irishman, Tom Branson, whose marriage to Lady Sybil gives him a life leap in upward mobility, is worth examining for what it says about class, then and now. Branson is still "the chauffeur" to a family living on moldered wealth, and his brother the car mechanic is "a drunken gorilla" for asking if there's any beer in the House of Lord Grantham.
But if someone with grease on his hands and an accent from a workaday neighborhood can rise to an estate management position in the rigid British class system, what, by comparison, are we to make of the American experience nearly a century removed?
Oh, but we are a nation free of class conflict, we tell ourselves daily, and live with the illusion that everyone with a job is somehow middle class. Our core, motivational narrative is that anyone with gumption and good luck can rise to a comfortable tier. They don't call that the British Dream.
(More here.)
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