More Downton/Whodunit Abbey Ruminations on the Mysterious Thomas Barrow

Having now watched Episode 8, the final one of Season 4 of Downton Abbey, I now wish to add to my two earlier posts (read them consecutively for best sense)….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/downtondonwellwhodoneit-abbey-did-bates.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/tweaking-of-my-earlier-answer-to-big.html

..(which I wrote after watching Episode 7) the following additional observations:

*****************************SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 8**************************

*****************************SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 8**************************

Nothing I saw in Episode 8 has changed my opinion, expressed in my above linked posts a week ago, that, in some way as yet unclear, Julian Fellowes intended his audience to pick up on the Iago aspects of valet Thomas Barrow, which have been there throughout the entire run of the series, and to connect his Iagoishness to the mysterious death of Green the evil rapist valet of Lord Gillingham.

I was watching Episode 8 like a hawk this time for any clues of any kind that bore even indirectly on that theory, and this was not in vain.

It was no surprise to me, e.g., when Thomas not only appeared in several scenes in Episode 8, which might seem to have little to do with Green’s murder, but which do clearly remind us of Iago. Most prominently, Thomas intrusively and angrily spies on Tom Branson, of course the former chauffeur (and surviving widower of the late Sybil Crawley). Thomas carries some unfounded and slimy innuendoes back to Lord Grantham, as to Tom’s budding relationship with the idealistic young schoolteacher he met at a political meeting. There’s no question that Thomas’s words, to both Tom and to Lord Grantham, are meant to remind a Shakespeare-aware audience of the Iago who is so bitterly resentful of Cassio’s promotion ahead of him, when Iago felt he deserved it much much more. Revenge is a dish Thomas enjoys cold, just as does Iago, spiced up with some sexual malice.

So, it’s up to us to wonder whether Thomas’s continuing hounding of Baxter for information about Bates and Anna is more than just Thomas’s usual generalized angling for useful intelligence. Might it have to do with Green’s death? If we think back to Episode 2 of Season 4, Thomas and Green actually were engaged briefly with each other in some testy exchanges of words and looks downstairs, during the memorable card games upstairs in which Edith’s heroic Nazi-confronting lover saves the Crawley family’s financial butt, with some daring counter-card sharping.

But in that scene, and throughout Season 4, Fellowes is very careful to always misdirect the audience away from Thomas, as if Thomas’s actions are somehow disconnected from, and less important than, the otherwise overpoweringly dramatic triangle of Bates, Anna, and Green, which exploded in Episode 7 with Green’s death.  And yet, as I suggested in my first post, aren’t Bates and Anna oddly reminiscent of Othello and Desdemona, at least as to his violent temper, and her initial cavalier friendliness to Green? Has Barrow, somehow, some way, offstage, been priming this pump ever since opportunity knocked in Episode 2 when Green showed up? Has he been distracting himself from his boredom, bitterness, and envy at Downton by taking some exquisite delight in pulling the emotional strings on three susceptible characters, to subtly lead them to act out roles which endanger (and in Green’s case, end) all their lives? Barrow, the vampiric puppetmaster, planning his greatest production?

Again, I don’t know how Fellowes is gonna do it, and I frankly want to enjoy watching it unfold along with everyone else next year, but I know now for sure that Fellowes has not made Thomas a giant red herring, all this winking was not for nothing. There is method in this screenwriting madness, and the payoff will be big in audience satisfaction if Fellowes pulls it off, as I believe he will.

I’ve also found some additional backup for my claim that Barrow has always been Downton Abbey’s Iago, long before Green bit the Piccadilly dust. I found six different blog posts written during the first 3 seasons, in which each blogger, independently, referred to Barrow as the Iago of the show, as if it went without the need for explanation.

So, in that regard, I really love how Fellowes chose this climactic moment near the end of Season 4 to take one of Barrow's Iago-ish plots "underground", after years of showing us Barrow behaving like Shakespeare’s malignant hater in pretty overt ways. E.g., as we all watched Barrow overtly try to blackmail Bates with his wife’s murder in Season 1, now, I suggest, Fellowes merely hints that Barrow is going to try this Iagoish trick again with Bates, Thomas being a very determined fellow, like Iago.

In that exact vein, this online article yearned for the old Thomas of prior Seasons….

http://www.today.com/entertainment/doubting-thomas-downton-abbeys-love-hate-character-loses-his-charm-2D12107622

…not realizing that he never really left, but this time around we viewers needed to put on our own sleuthing hats to detect all the ways he’s being Machiavellian.

In hindsight, Fellowes has been a major tease about Thomas, and he must be enjoying all the criticism he has received recently for being heavy handed, in seeming to repeat the motif of Bates being accused of murder in a cliched way. He has been very careful not to give any explicit cue for the audience to connect Thomas to Green’s murder. But rest assured Fellowes has all the same been hiding this Iago subtext in plain sight for the entire season. In ways that I am confident will be revealed in Season 5, Barrow was already involved in some murky way with Green downstairs, and we are all going to go “Doh!” when this is shown explicitly.

Think about it---the best revenge Barrow can get against Bates is to make Bates’s own wife doubt him, to make his own bosses doubt him, and to drive him mad, which is the revenge that Iago takes on Othello for giving the promotion to Cassio instead of Iago. I don’t say he will succeed, but I do say he’s giving it a go!

Fellowes plays with the criticism that he writes glorified soap operas, and so gives his critics what they wished for, but should have been more careful before condemning, and they have pretty much all taken the bait.

But he will have the last laugh next season!

Let me finish with a more general but related observation. The whodunit aura, which sprang into full bloom with the mystery of the shocking death of Green, was only enhanced by the thinly veiled sendups in Episode 8 of both (a) Conan Doyle’s “Scandal in Bohemia” (which of course was also the source for Series 2, Episode 1 of Sherlock) which was so nicely interwoven with the Bates/Green mystery; and (b) Bruno Heller’s The Mentalist, which is slyly evoked when Bates picks Sampson’s pocket, an act which has the secondary effect of resolving Lady Mary’s moral dilemma about turning Bates’ train ticket over to the police---I was reminded of how often Patrick Jane has done that trick so many times. So Fellowes fondly stole a chapter out of that playbook as well, and shows he can play in the same league.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Kitty A Fair But Bowdlerized Maid

In Janeites, Rita Lamb wrote the following in connection with my ongoing discussion with Christy Somer about my claims that the Kitty Riddle and the "Prince of Whales" charade in Chapter 9 of Emma cannot be reconciled with a nonsubversive Jane Austen: 

Rita: "So is Jones secretly purveying porn to the Regency young?  I really don't think so. I think his book is evidence that however sordid a past might be claimed for Kitty, by 1822 at least she had become quite innocuous - harmless enough to pop up in a respectable, middle-of-the-road book aimed at improving the minds of the young.  So why denounce her appearance in the hazy memory of poor old Mr. Woodhouse just a few years before?"

First, Rita, and this is important not to be flip or casual about, I'm not denouncing Kitty and Fanny. They are the Riddle’s symbols for the many real life female victims of this horrific sexual abusive practice that was considered “normal” by many powerful men. But of course I know you also would not mean to be flip about such a serious subject. I just want to set the stage for this discussion properly, by emphasizing that this was not about solving a word game puzzle, this was a terrible practice extant in JA’s lifetime, which, I am certain, outraged her.

 But now to answer your question:

When JA wrote Emma, there were already out there in print Bowdlerized versions of Garrick's Riddle extant (your link is to one of them, but there were others, too, the same or very similar), which were sufficiently sanitized so as not to be obviously about sex with virgins as a cure for some disease.

The Riddle is written from the point of view of one of the narcissistic men who perpetrated such depraved acts without losing sleep over it---who seems in some lines to find  it rather funny, but at other times comes near to acknowledging the horror of what he’s describing. The creep factor  from reading a complete unBowdlerized version of the Riddle is off the charts.

So as to those later sanitized versions of the Riddle, of course, there were those who read them and did NOT automatically think, hmm, this is about sex with virgins to cure syphilis. It was possible, by 1816, for someone who treated it purely as a riddle, who didn’t even know about any earlier versions, but who just enjoyed solving word puzzles, getting to the safe answer (chimney sweep), and truly overlooking the concealed, horrible meaning entirely.

Which……..is precisely why Jane Austen very pointedly gives not one, not two, not three, but FOUR connected clues to her NOT being among those clueless but innocent readers and purveyors of the Riddle!

Here’s the relevant passage from Emma, which contains all of those four clues:

[Mr. Woodhouse] “…But I can remember nothing;—not even that particular riddle which you have heard me mention; I can only recollect the first stanza; and there are several.

[First stanza of Riddle]

And that is all that I can recollect of it—but it is very clever all the way through. But I think, my dear, you said you had got it."

"Yes, papa, it is written out in our second page. We copied it from the Elegant Extracts. It was Garrick's, you know."

"Aye, very true.—I wish I could recollect more of it.”

Let’s look at each of the four clues to Jane Austen’s understanding of the subversive subtext of the Riddle:

ONE: Identifying Garrick as the author: none of the latter sanitized versions I have ever found refers to Garrick as the author, whereas those earlier (mid 18^th century) versions which DO connect the Riddle to Garrick also contain the most sexually graphic, telltale couplet:

Each day some willing victim bleeds

To satisfy my strange desires

TWO: Mr. Woodhouse specifically states that there are SEVERAL stanzas. That means at least 3 stanzas. None of the latter sanitized versions has more than TWO stanzas, but the earlier versions, which include that damning couplet, contain THREE stanzas.

THREE: Mr. Woodhouse says “it’s clever all the way through” ---so, again, as with Clue TWO, the  reader is alerted to not stop reading carefully after Stanza One, but to be sure to search for the “clever” parts in Stanzas Two and Three, as well.

To believe that JA really innocently included the Riddle without awareness of its subversive subtext and provenance, even though she KNEW these three interesting facts from that subtext and provenance, is to me simply not rational.

But then Jane Austen, mistress of irony, could not resist a final ironic zinger:

FOUR: The Riddle is supposed to have appeared in Elegant Extracts. Elegant Extracts, as has been discussed in these groups and in scholarly books and articles, was a compendium of no racier than PG rated material for the delectation of an innocent audience. Sorta like Reader’s Digest in the present.

In point of fact, despite diligent search, no scholar has ever found any version of the Riddle in any edition of Elegant Extracts. So there are two ways of understanding the meaning of that curious error by Emma. Either Emma is repeating Jane Austen’s own editorial mistake, or Jane Austen knows the truth, but deliberately causes Emma to make a false claim.

To believe that this is Jane Austen’s mistake is to somehow reconcile in your mind two opposite things: that Jane Austen demonstrated a learned knowledge of the provenance of the Riddle having, in its original published versions, been attributed to Garrick’s authorship and having had three stanzas, and was very clever all the way through, but then blundered badly by placing the Riddle in an absurdly, grotesquely inappropriate contemporary publication venue.

Which one do YOU believe is the correct explanation? It is a mark of the sorry state of current Austen studies, when it comes to Austen’s subversive subtexts, that David Shapard’s recent annotated edition of Emma actually, with a straight face, has an annotation for the Riddle that concludes as follows:

“…Emma is not the sort of person to misremember the source of something she just copied or to lie about it, especially since such a lie would serve no purpose. Jane Austen, however, could easily have mistakenly recollected seeing the poem in Elegant Extracts, for it is the sort of piece that does appear there.”

And Shapard, even though he does reproduce the telltale couplet, utterly ignores all of JHS’s scholarship on the Riddle. Whether this is just gross negligence in doing research for this particular annotation, or is a deliberate editorial omission of dangerous material that Shapard and his publisher don’t want to bring to their unknowledgeable readers’s attention, I cannot say for certain, but I do lean in one direction.

At first, as I read Shapard’s annotation, I am strongly reminded of Deirdre LeFaye’s annotation for JA’s statement in Letter 57 that “Mr. Floor is low in our estimation”, in which Le Faye opined that Mr. Floor must have been a dyer in Southampton.

But whereas I do believe LeFaye, with her tin ear for JA’s irony, just plain missed JA’s joke in Letter 57, my guess is that Shapard’s omission was entirely intentional. Why? Because the alternative would mean that he somehow managed to overlook THE most notorious annotation in all of Austen studies during the past 15 years, bar none!

While Sheehan’s articles about the Prince of Whales charade are still, I believe, unknown to many Austen scholars, there are few Austen scholars who haven’t read or heard about the Kitty Riddle as discussed in JHS’s article and book, since they have been very high profile since 1999.

Shapard published his annotated version of Emma in 2012. Even if he had limited his research to Googling “Kitty Frozen Maid”, he would have found several hits pointing to Jill Heydt-Stevenson’s research pointing to very bad things in Garrick’s Riddle.  And this is an annotated edition of Emma published by Random House. I mean, really.

And so Shapard and/or his publisher, it appears to me, chose to avoid addressing an obvious and quintessential example of JA’s razor-sharp irony. I.e., JA puts on Emma’s clueless tongue the hilarious equivalent of a suggestion, in modern terms, of a monologue by Andrew Dice Clay popping up in the Reader’s Digest or Good Housekeeping, and an innocent reader of Good Housekeeping taking delight in this unbecoming conjunction!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Letter 140: Jane Austen’s Old Friends & Daily Visitors, Mrs. Austen’s Headaches, & Shylock’s Blade

As our group read of Jane Austen's surviving letters reaches its final 10%, Diana Birchall wrote: 

“…to announce the death of Mrs. Elizabeth Leigh, Cassandra's godmother, sister of Rev. Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh Abbey, at age eighty. Jane utters a few conventionalities - lost a valued old friend, death of someone of such an advanced age, ready to die, not to be regretted. She has left a token twenty pounds ("a little remembrance") to Mrs. Austen, who is "not quite well" and "seldom gets through the 24 hours without some pain in her head."

Diana, I perceive two strong satirical implications just under the surface of these comments, which, while superficially about Elizabeth Leigh, really hit much closer to home, in terms of the health of two other single women much more closely connected to Jane Austen----i.e., her own mother and Jane Austen herself!

By this immediate segue from sensibly pragmatic (and not merely conventional) comments about Elizabeth Leigh’s time to die having come, to Mrs. Austen’s (who at that moment is 76, only 4 years younger than Elizabeth Leigh) daily headaches, the association to Mrs. Bennet [of  course, from Pride & Prejudice] is unavoidable. And this sort of superficially haphazard change of subject  is classic Jane Austen writing strategy—JA makes it look as if the segue was accidental, seizing upon the fact of the “little remembrance” from Elizabeth to JA’s mother. But I see JA drawing a vivid, strongly implied contrast between one elderly woman who realized that reaching 80 in those days was about as good as it got, and another elderly woman who has been making everyone around her (most of all her two daughters) miserable every “24 hours” for God knows how long, forcing these unwelcome visitors, her headaches, on them! I.e. her phantom headaches become major pains in the butt of those who are forced to “entertain” them!

And then, given that JA is writing Letter 140 at age 40 (or half the age, more or less, of both Elizabeth Leigh and Mrs. Austen), and perhaps beginning to feel the symptoms of the mysterious illness that would kill her only 15 months later, perhaps she would be beginning to process the cruel irony that she had a whole lot more wrong inside her body than “some pain in the head”, and that she might end up having been granted only half the life that her mother had already been given. Certainly we who read this letter must register this irony, and honor Jane Austen’s venting of her very justified spleen at all of this.

And then, just look what subject JA “haphazardly” addresses next:

“I have had a letter from Scarlets this morning, with a very tolerable account of health there.”

So there’s a third elderly woman’s health being discussed during the first section of this short letter---Aunt Leigh-Perrot, mistress of the Scarlets estate (which I believe was slyly alluded to by Jane Austen inP&P with the name "Rosings"---because roses are scarlet, as we all know)---who is at that moment “only” 72, but, we know with perfect hindsight, will enjoy a life span of 92 years before she checks into the Kleptomaniac Comfort Inn the Sky, with special guest privileges at the Hypochondriac Hilton next door. In other words, another elderly woman who does not know to be grateful for her great good fortune in health and longevity.

So, again, I believe JA, whose portraits of narcissistic hypochrondria (Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, Mary Musgrove, who am I forgetting?) are among her greatest satirical achievements, is subtly showing that she is actually deaf to the complaints of those who have no reason to complain. Little Caroline will not get this subtext, but  probably her real intended audience, James Austen, also will not, because, after all, he was Mrs. Austen’s first-born & favorite, and he was intended to be Aunt Leigh-Perrot’s heir. As in the recently discovered Scrap of a sermon I believe JA wrote herself, James talks the moral talk, but does not walk the moral walk. And finally recall that when James died 3 years after Letter 140 was written, it was HIS first-born son, JEAL, who inherited Scarlets from Aunt Leigh-Perrot.  

So, you can bet your bottom pound (do the English say anything like that?) that Jane Austen intended every part of the above satirical subtext to be noticed by the sharp eyes of sharp elves. Her true feelings had to be given expression, even if by implication, and even if these implications were not understood when they were initially read. Writing her truth was a sacred act for JA, and she would not be entirely silenced—and I hope she hoped that these letters would one day be read by those who would really understand her outrage.

And, speaking of the outrageous, here we go again with Mrs. Austen:

“Your Grandmama is not quite well, she seldom gets through the 24 hours without some pain in her head, but we hope it is lessening, and that a continuance of such weather as may allow her to be out of doors & hard at work every day will gradually remove it.”

The irony is inescapable—a woman of almost the same  age has just died, apparently with resignation  as to the inexorable course of nature, and now JA repeats, with more detail, her account of Mrs. Austen’s daily headache complaint, which may be alleviated by her being able to be “hard at work every day” which will “gradually remove it”. 

I mean, really! How sick can Mrs. Austen, age 77, be, if she can do what the 17 year old Fanny Price cannot do without being exhausted, which is work hard in the garden in April!

Translation: “My mother is Mrs. Bennet, with her headaches being Jane Austen’s “old friends” due to their daily “visits”.  She should just be grateful that at 77 she is healthy as a horse, and able to work hard in a garden, while pretty much all of her peers are either dead or dying!”

Recall this one-liner from Letter 63 about Lady Sondes: “…provided she will now leave off having bad headaches and being pathetic, I can allow her, I can wish her, to be happy."

I also recall it being suggested in the past in these groups that Lady Bertram’s laudanum addiction was in no small part based on that substance being Mrs. Austen’s drug of choice for her endless headaches. So when we hear that, in 1817, as JA lay dying, she had to lay dying on three chairs side by side, while Mama (who had nearly a decade still to live) had the sopha all to herself, we really can better  understand why Mrs. Austen didn’t like MP so much!

Diana also wrote: Jane says they are "almost ashamed" to ask Caroline's Mama "to be at the trouble of a long ride" because they "must wash." Presumably the house was turned upside down during a grand wash... It's a good point that Ellen makes that Jane is flattering Caroline's mother Mary here with solicitousness hoping to get her to bring Caroline to the children's party.”

I take it precisely the opposite—there is a combination of two veiled satires here:

(1)   JA’s hinting that Edward Austen Knight and Fanny Knight (who else would be part of the Godmersham party? Perhaps the younger daughters, too?) are, like Mrs. Churchill, very picky about the beds they sleep in, and don’t want to catch any diseases from the ill-laundered sheets of their “vulgar” cousins? It also reminds me of the “fleas” joke about little niece Cassy.  

(2)   JA subtly discouraging Mary Lloyd Austen, who was not JA’s favorite sister in law by any stretch, from visiting, and giving Mary a polite “out”, since she probably doesn’t want to visit any more than JA wants her to visit!

And then there’s the rather large elephant in the room that we might overlook in reading Letter 140 according to what it  says—it’s what  it doesn’t  say that puts it all in a special context.

In April 1816, JA must be deeply into the writing of Persuasion (which she’s been working on for a few months now, and will finish only four months later), suggesting  a very fast compositional pace, even for this, one of her two short novels. My guess is that she already feels sick, is already worried that she won’t be able to finish Persuasion properly, and so she is racing through the writing of it.

So, the last thing she needs, under that scenario, is to be entertaining half the Austen family at Chawton, especially if she’s also not feeling well herself, and having to deal with her mother’s incessant whining about her phantom illnesses to boot. There are almost no surviving JA letters from the 3 month period during which she finished Persuasion. My sense is that she was a woman on a maniacal mission to finish that novel, come what may.  

Now, she can’t avoid the major hassle of the visit of Edward and his harem (as she referred to him and his daughters 3 ½ years earlier), because Edward is the man who (in Mr. Bennet’s droll words) “may turn the Austen women all out of this house as soon as he pleases”. Be sure JA, creator of Fanny & John Dashwood, never forgets that possibility for one second.

And she can’t get away from her mother and her damned headaches! But otherwise, JA’s narrow focus is to finish Persuasion, and she does, and the Janeite world must be eternally grateful for JA’s final, relentless pursuit, and achievement, of literary perfection. 

In conclusion, I note that Ellen Moody wrote “Mrs Austen her usual hypochrond[r]iac self but writing to Caroline Jane takes Grandmamma's unwellness seriously in tone. But read the content and it's says she always has a pain in the head - perhaps it is less[en]ing and working outside hard will help her recover. I think were Austen in strong linguistic spirits there would be irony here but I don't feel it.”

And I reply to Ellen that she got it spot-on re Mrs. Austen’s usual hypochondria, but, as is so often the case, Ellen simply cannot hear Jane Austen’s irony----even (ironically) in a case such as this, when Ellen correctly identifies all the conditions precedent to JA’s deployment of irony. My entire post, above, is absolutely characteristic evidence of the kind of quiet, subtle web of irony that JA wove a few thousand times in the course of writing her letters and her novels.

Jane Austen’s satire cuts so cleanly without drawing blood, in fact, that she’d have saved Shylock’s butt in that trial, if he’d her in his entourage as his “banking moyl”, if you will, because she’d have taken Antonio’s pound of flesh off (that uniquely masculine part of his anatomy that I’ve always known the Bard was hinting at) without losing a drop of his blood, a goal any self-respecting moyl would aspire to.

In short, Mrs. Austen’s true character has been completely exposed, and yet, if questioned, JA can still smile and say “Who, me?”  ;)

And finally Rita  Lamb wrote: “Hard to believe this world-class novelist is having to divide her energies between organising multiple family visits and doing the wash.”

Amen, sister! That is the pithy version of what I am saying, above.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode onTwitter

Tweaking of my earlier answer to the Big Question: Who Kill Green in Episode 8 of Downton Abbey?

I just watched Episode 8 of Season 4 of Downton Abbey for the third time, this time being acutely focused on anything, however fleeting, that appears onscreen that bears on my claim that the most likely suspect in the murder of Green is Thomas Barrow, but with Anna Bates as suspect # 2 on my list, and Bates a distant third, along with Gillingham, and far ahead of other theoretical possibilities which I've seen mentioned, like a hypothetical other rape victim of Green, or a true accident, etc.

What i did ascertain this time around, with some degree of certainty, is that Lady Mary was NOT involved if Anna was the killer, not even as a tacit supporter of Anna doing  the deed. As we see when Mary speaks to her latest love interest, she thinks it was Bates, but she's not going to give him up.

But if I have to make one choice, it is clearly Barrow, our favorite Iago in the show.

And if it is indeed he, then, as I briefly mentioned in my long post, what exquisite irony that it is then quite possible, that Anna is worried that Bates did it, and Bates simultaneously is worried that Anna did it. So they're each worried that the other will be caught, and neither will confide in the other what they're each thinking, because they love each other so much.

Now that's about as suspenseful and romantic, at the same time, as a storyline can get, isn't it? Each will do anything to protect the other from punishment for a crime neither of them actually committed!

The best touch of the episode, however, was the very very brief glances that Bates and Barrow exchange right after Lord Grantham has greeted everyone, and before the cut to the next scene.

What does Bates know about Barrow's scheming? What does Barrow think Bates knows?

This is going to play out VERY richly sometime in Season Five, you can be sure!

But as I've said repeatedly now, this raises Julian Fellowes tenfold in my estimation of and appreciation for his screenwriting skill. This is really first rate subtle mystery writing, and he shows his great self assurance as a writer by being content to leave all of what I've been outlining completely subterranean, waiting patiently for next season to make it all explicit, even though he hears criticism of the literary quality of Downton Abbey every day.

Just as I imagine was the case with Agatha Christie, and still is the case with Stephen King, he seems unconcerned with the criticism of those dull elves who don't even realize he is having the last laugh on them this time! 






Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter