Lady Edith Crawley

[osprey_archer]

I feel bad for not liking Edith Crawley more. She’s the middle sister in Downton Abbey’s troika, and in classic middle child fashion she’s constantly overlooked. She isn’t as charming and poised and beautiful as her older sister, Mary; she isn’t as clever and political as her younger sister, Sybil; she isn’t, in fact, much of anything, except lonely and pathetic.

It’s because of this loneliness that I feel bad for not liking Edith more; I want to make up for her isolation by liking her as a viewer. But while loneliness can be an appealing quality, being pathetic isn’t, and in the first season Edith is pretty pathetic. She’s miserable where she is, both physically and mentally, but she doesn’t have the guts or the vision to get anywhere else.

Despite being inferior to Mary in essentially everything their society considers important in women, Edith nurtures a rivalry between them. Mary is more than willing to act as Edith’s rival, and her needling cruelty to someone so inferior to her does her no credit, but the fact that Edith continues such a lopsided contest makes Edith look like a fool. Edith’s one success, engaging the affections of Sir Anthony Stralin, feels less like a triumph than an exhausted relief: finally someone likes her!

And then, of course, Edith’s own actions come back to destroy this success. In a fit of rage, Edith writes to the Turkish embassy about Mary’s liaison with Kemal Pamuk, hoping to wreck Mary’s reputation. It’s an astonishingly cruel act, as bad as Thomas’s and O’Brien’s quest to get Bates fired. Maybe even worse; Thomas and O’Brien just want Bates out of the way, and attempt to do it in a way that will incidentally ruin his life, while for Edith ruining Mary’s life is the point.

But despite the magnitude of this act of cruelty, Edith still can’t ascend to the dizzying heights of tragic, romantic evil. She’s still essentially a small person, motivated by petty jealousy and self-absorption. When Mary catches her out, Edith offers excuses. The embassy had the right to know what happened, she claims, voice quavering, and she sounds like she’s trying very hard to believe her own rationalization.

Compare Mary’s revenge: she lies to Sir Anthony Stralin, telling him that Edith has been regaling them all with the tale of the silly old bore (Sir Anthony) who is going to propose to her at the garden party. Sir Anthony flees, Edith stares after him in devastation and then glares at Mary, and Mary raises her glass in a toast.

Even at cruelty, Mary beats Edith hands down: more stylish, more incisive, and not inclined to offer mealy-mouthed excuses. No wonder Edith hates her guts. How could she help being miserably jealous?

Edith is a living representation of the idea that no one will love you if you don’t love yourself - which I hate, by the way; how are you supposed to learn to love yourself if no one loves you? Love doesn’t exist in a vacuum! But the fact that I don’t like the saying doesn’t mean that it’s false; it’s hard to see how anyone will find value in someone who rates herself as low as Edith does. Even what modest qualities she has are eaten up by jealousy.

Fortunately for Edith, in the second season she finds people who - if they don’t love her - at least appreciate her: the farmer she flirts with in episode two (which shows a shoddy side of her character, but nonetheless boosts her confidence. I should write something about cross-class relationships in Downton Abbey), the wounded soldiers who convalesce at Downton - I bet she was devastated that Downton didn’t become a permanent convalescent home.

It doesn’t make her prettier or more perspicacious - she’s all too ready to believe a wounded soldier who claims he’s Downton’s lost heir - but it does mean that when she tells Sir Anthony Stralin in the Christmas special that she’s not giving up on him, it finally sounds like she really wants him, and isn’t just settling because she’s desperate for anyone to love her.

Comments

[silksieve.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of Mary, who's a bit whiny and bratty to me (not sure what Matthew sees in her!) and like Edith even less, I think for the reason you say, that she's petty and a little pathetic (in the formal sense of the word.) I adore much of the downstairs cast. Anna hits my self-sacrificing, tragic heroine buttons. :) And Sybil hits the tomboy princess ones. :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I didn't like Mary at all in Season One, but I liked her better in Season Two. It was like she spent the whole season doing penance for her behavior in Season One, and I liked that she just *bore* it rather than saying, "Oh to hell with this!"

--But I did rather wonder what it was that Mary and Matthew saw in each other, other than that they both challenged each other (which is something).

[silksieve.livejournal.com]

It's very true that Mary matured noticeably in the second season. I think all three girls did, to a certain extent. I guess that's why we keep coming back for more! :)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I do like Mary, because there's such complexity to her flaws: she's capable of being awful (the Anthony Stralin thing, for instance), but sometimes she has unexpected bursts of humanity, like the scene in the first episode where she impulsively apologizes for going through the servants' rooms. Her impulses are often good - it's like she actually tamps down her good qualities.

All this said, it's not entirely clear to me either what Matthew sees in her. Perhaps he realizes that she has the potential to be a much better person than she often is?

But I think part of it is that she's just awfully pretty.

Yes Anna! And I also have a soft spot for Daisy, even though I want to shake her sometimes for being silly (especially in season 2 when she goes around and around on the William thing), but she's so adorably naive.

And tomboy princess is the perfect description of Sybil.

[silksieve.livejournal.com]

Yes, Daisy! I love her, too, and her naivete. Poor gel.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes: I think something your thoughts here have reminded me of is that being put upon, overlooked, and downtrodden do not, in and of themselves, make you an appealing character. We can agree that we don't want anyone treated badly, but still find a person to be whiny and unpleasant--which is how Edith seemed.

I think the good thing about her growth in Season II, where she decided to learn to drive and to get involved with the convalescing patients, was that she finally decided to *do* something rather than just waiting around for something good to happen. She wasn't quite as gung ho as Sybil, who went and became a full nurse, but to the best of her ability she helped out, and really made a difference.

The thing about her letter to the Turkish embassy that I found so unbelievable--or else such a sign of her monumental stupidity--was that she didn't seem to realize that ruining Mary as thoroughly as that letter would have ruined her, had it been allowed to come out, would also have ruined her, Edith.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes! There's a point in season 2 where Mary comments that Edith is "ever so much nicer than before the war," and she's absolutely right: before the war Edith was immature and awkward and miserable, and during the war she found purpose which helped her grow out of all that.

She's still rather awkward, but by the end of season 2 it's more a charming kind of awkward - I'm thinking particularly of the scene where she tells Sir Anthony that she still likes him.

About the letter to the Turkish embassy - Edith writes it in a rage, and she's immature enough not to have thought through the consequences at all. Perhaps more important, immature enough to imagine that the consequences might have no effect on her. She ought to know better, but I could see her wanting to send that letter so much that she deludes herself into believing that it won't affect her if it comes out.

Alternatively, Edith thinks her prospects are so bad that she doesn't care about forfeiting them as long as she can ruin Mary in the process. But I don't think she's quite that self-loathing.

[amanen.livejournal.com]

I wanted to like Edith so badly in the first season, but it's like you said: despite being as miserable and downtrodden as she was, she was also plenty rotten herself.

She reminds me of a character in this other show, Dream High. The character, Baek Hee, starts out as this simpering girl who mimics everything her best friend does and idolizes her best friend, who is successful, while she, Baek Hee, is never encouraged by her parents and hasn't had a chance to shine at all. And then her best friend stabs her in the back and discards her. I wanted to cheer Baek Hee on, but she then went into this character spiral where she decided the best route was lying and backstabbing. It's funny -- in a way, she was still just mimicking her best friend. Anyway, though, she became such a miserably cruel character that no matter how awful her circumstances were at first, I couldn't sympathize with her until they redeemed her.

I missed the Christmas Special, but I'm definitely going to have to see it. I was so sad when Sir Anthony Stralin got tricked by Mary.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The Christmas special is a lot of fun! There's a lot of payoff for things that have been building up for the last two seasons, so it's good.

I have high hopes that Edith's character arc will soar in season three and then finally I can really root for her.