This post discusses plot points from the February 3 episode of Downton Abbey.

This is one of the few times that Downton Abbey has picked up almost exactly where the previous episode left off, but despite the attention that the hour pays to how Sybil’s death is resonating through her family, it’s one that raises a more interesting question: how do you wrench yourself out of the station you’ve spent your entire life occupying? For the most part, the show answers that question in a rather old-fashioned way, by suggesting that good intentions and concern for others can provide you with a path forward, but only if you’re brave enough to take it.

Ethel, struck anew by the loss of her own child after Sybil’s death, is determined to do right by her patroness by improving the cooking that Isobel finds inedible, even correcting for her grief. She enlists Mrs. Patmore’s help, and the doughty cook defies Carson’s edict to avoid Crawley House as long as Ethel is present to help her with salmon mousse, pork chops, and a pudding. “You’ve done well, Ethel. Maybe you’ve also done yourself a favor,” Mrs. Patmore tells Ethel of her hard work.

And Ethel’s attempts to make a place for herself inspire other small rebellions among the Grantham women. When Robert storms in and demands that they leave lunch where Ethel is serving, Cora makes the subtext of her complaint against her husband clear, declaring “Robert frequently makes decisions based on values that have no relevance anymore.” And Violet’s response makes plain her strength, using the acid linguistic dexterity of the nobility to sneak hard truths into the conversation, and telling her son—while also affirming the quality of Ethel’s cooking—”It seems a pity to miss such a good pudding.” And back at home, Mary identifies her father’s actual concern, and the reason he’s doing something he might never have done in another circumstance: humiliating someone in service. “You’re angry, but not with Isobel or Ethel,” Mary, always her father’s favorite, tells him. “I think you’re angry because the world isn’t going your way, at least not anymore.” Even the most conservative member of the Crawley family is willing to defend Edith’s reach for something better.

Then there’s Daisy, who has always been reluctant to benefit from William’s death. First, she was uncomfortable accepting his pension, even though marrying him on his deathbed, despite her ambivalent feelings for him, let him die with a measure of peace. Now, she’s offered an even more significant chance at independence than that small supplement to her income: William’s father wants to make her his heir. “There are widows who take on a tenancy. And you’re liked the in big house. They’ll not refuse you,” he tells her, encouraging her to strike out on her own. “My dream would be if you were to come here and live with me so I could teach you.” It’s not just that he’s telling her she can dream better of the life in service she just always assumed was her: she has to. “You’ve forty years of work ahead of you,” he cautions. “Do you think great houses like Downton Abbey are going to go on for forty years? Because I don’t.” It’s a fascinating opportunity: Daisy’s being presented with a rare chance to bolt for a higher class status. The question is whether she’s bold and ambitious enough to take it, overcoming her own anxieties about seeming greedy or grasping.

And then there’s Edith, still considering whether to take the offer of a column, and contemplating other small usefulness in the meantime. “I sometimes wonder if I should learn to cook,” she ponders. “You never know. It might come in handy someday.” And while she’s not an outspoken advocate in this matter, she sticks to her chair at lunch at Crawley House, refusing to abandon Edith, Isobel, or her mother. Hopefully she can be inspired by the women below her in station, who live on a narrower margin, and who are reaching for gains for smaller than anything she already possess. All Edith can grab for is her own happiness. But it’s no less valuable a goal.

Last night, Encore began airing the miniseries adaptation of The Crimson Petal and The White, Michel Faber’s novel about Sugar (Romola Garai), an enterprising Victorian prostitute, William Rackham (Chris O’Dowd), the industrialist who becomes infatuated with her, Agnes (Amanda Hale), William’s anorexic wife who becomes convinced Sugar is her guardian angel, and Sophie (Isla Watt), William and Agnes’s daughter, who bonds with Sophie. The series, which continues tonight at 8 PM, weaves a rich tapestry out of the contradictions of Victorian sexuality, the ways in which the rigidity of gender roles damaged both men and women, and the importance of writing for people who were constrained from speaking freely to each other by social mores. As Sugar is drawn deeper into William’s life after he first buys the right to be her sole customer and then moves her into her home, she learns both the limits of the man she believed could rescue her from a life in London’s worst quarters, and the value of her mother, Mrs. Castaway’s (an astonishing Gillian Anderson) bitter perspective on life, even as she summons the courage to truly make a life for herself.

I spoke with The Crimson Petal and The White‘s writer Lucinda Coxon about the challenges of adapting Faber’s extremely dense novel, the meaning of writing for her characters, and the medical abuse of women in Victorian England. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

This is very much a miniseries about writers. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the characters’ relationship to their writing. That scene where William, who dreams of being a famous novelist instead of working for his father’s business, is just awful to his mentally ill wife Agnes about her intentions to write as a novel struck me as really one of the saddest scenes in the series.

Agnes, it’s something we develop slightly more than in the book, is that Agnes will write on anything. She’s writing on the windows in the steam of her own breath. I think it’s fantastic that these characters who are incapable of actually speaking to each other and confiding in one another and expressing themselves in any way to one another are all busy desperately committing their passions to paper and imagining that somehow that means they told somebody something, or they’re fulfilled in some way.

I think it is a story about stories, in a sense. It seems to me it’s about whether you can write your own story, whether you can escape the hand you’ve been dealt by writing your way out. And Sugar is, in a sense, writing her way out. She brackets the whole film in a sense. That voiceover is in a sense part of her writing…She’s taught herself to read as kind of a survival mechanism. It’s how she bonds with William in the first place. It’s how she seduces him. She realizes he fancies himself as a writer and that’s what she deploys.
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I’ve been watching this season of True Blood, not out of any particular affection for the show, but because I need something to do on Mondays when I’m cleaning out my Google Reader. And while I think overall the show remains not very good (though it is marginally less racist than last season), I found myself unexpectedly struck by two stories in this most recent episode: Salome’s remembrance of being pimped out by her family as a young girl, and Pam’s reflections on how she came to know Eric while working as a prostitute shortly after the turn of the century. True Blood‘s always been a show deeply concerned with sex, but this episode was one of the first times it’s considered the issues that were threaded into Game of Thrones all season, and that reoccured in Deadwood: what happens when women either don’t have control of their own sexuality, and what risks do they face when they turn their sexuality into a commodity.

“We die alone, in the dark,” Pam, still human, told Eric. The pair met after Pam, the mistress of an upscale brothel, discovered that one of the women who worked for her had been murdered by a serial killer. Eric saved her from the same man, and intervened again when he found Bill Compton and his maker Loretta glamoring another woman who works for Pam so she’ll give them consent to drain her dry. Eric’s protective, but even as he develops a tentative relationship with Pam, who, though human is surprisingly accepting of Eric’s unusual abilities, he still holds her at a distance. When she asks him to turn her into a vampire to save her from the fate that awaits both working prostitutes and the women who have ascended to supervise them, Eric tells her that the bonds between maker and made vampire are too sacred to be entered into lightly. Pam remains a disposable to him. Eric may respect her and enjoy her company, but he’s still treating her like a prostitute, a woman who falls into a separate category from women he might actually consider forging a long-term relationship with. Pam forces his hand by slashing her wrists, forcing Eric to turn her if he wants to spend more time with her.

Joanie Stubbs, the prostitute who plays a similar role first in the Bella Union and then in her own establishment in Deadwood, has no such promise of a magical escape, and fewer emotional resources than Pam. When Joanie considers suicide by gunshot, crying out “What am I Lord, that I’m so helpless,” she means it. She’s alone in the room with that pistol. There’s no one to persuade, or frighten into transporting her into a new life. Pam, when she turns into a vampire, is able to reclaim her sexuality for herself, and ends up working with Eric to run a bar where people can meet on equal terms, rather than as client and prostitute, with all the inequalities and vulnerabilities that implies. It may take a while for Joanie to make good on what she tells Cy Tolliver, the owner of the Bella Union, and her former boss, that “I don’t want to run women no more,” but she eventually does. But she doesn’t have the luxury of living from one era into the next, from sexual constraint into sexual liberation.
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Over the weekend, Audrey Bolt, Miss Ohio caused a bit of kerfuffle during the Miss USA pageant when, asked to name a movie she thought portrayed women positively, named Pretty Woman and gave this explanation:

I think it depends on the movie. I think there are some movies that depict women in a very positive role, and then some movies that put them in a little bit more of negative role. But by the end of the movie, they show that woman power that I know we all have. Such as movie Pretty Woman. We had a wonderful, beautiful woman, Julia Roberts, and she was having a rough time, but, you know what, she came out on top and she didn’t let anybody stand in her path.

Mediate and company have juiced the story by saying she thinks that a prostitute is a positive role model. That kind of misses what is wrong with Pretty Woman. It’s not that being a sex worker inherently shuts you out of inspiring stories. I’m finding Connie Riesler’s efforts to get clean on The Shield compelling. One of the most fun side characters in Hysteria is a former prostitute. I could go on.

The problem with Pretty Woman as a positive portrayal of women is that the “woman power” it shows is limited to being vivacious and sexually attractive. Vivian (Julia Roberts) does demand that she be treated with basic decency, whether she’s trying to convince Kit to stop using and to get away from her pimp, or refuses to submit to the advances of Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander). Those are good things to demand and to aspire to, and I appreciate that the movie insists that being a sex worker doesn’t mean surrendering your right to consent.

But the movie is relatively lazy about a fundamental point: Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) essentially purchases a new life for Vivian, starting with a dress, scaling up to a new wardrobe, and finally an amount of cash that is meant to function as Vivian’s escape velocity from her life. It’s a nice fantasy of salvation if you can get it, and perhaps if you’re competing in pageants, you can (Pretty Woman‘s fantasy of a man picking a woman out from a crowd has much more in common with beauty pageants than with actual sex work). But it’s more a portrait of a man seeing something in a woman that she doesn’t see in herself than it is of empowered womanhood.

This post contains spoilers through the second season of Game of Thrones.

“The King won’t give you any honors, the histories won’t mention you, but we will not forget,” Varys, the Master of Whispers, tells Tyrion Lannister halfway through the finale of the second season of Game of Thrones. Tyrion knows he’s been scarred, he’s been stripped of his role as Hand of the King, he’s worried he’ll lose his lover, and worst of all, he’s been insulted by a suddenly-resurgent Grand Maester Pycelle, who’s transfigured Tyrion’s kind gesture to Daisy earlier in the season into a profound insult, flipping a coin at him “For your trouble.” Varys has introduced another possible misery to Tyrion, and articulated what’s powerful about Game of Thrones for those of us watching from aeons away: this is the secret history of Westeros, the filth and blood that will be smoothed away into the official record, expunging dwarves, and bastards, and little girls along the way.

In an episode that ends with the rise of the unbelievable, it’s fitting that two pivotal characters spend their appearances in the episode fretting over belief in the same God, and their ability to follow Him. Stannis Baratheon is devastated by his defeat on the Blackwater, a calamity that has him feeling retrospective guilt. “I murdered my brother,” he confesses to Melisandre, author of his will in that matter, refusing to share the blame that eats at him. And at the first sign of Melisandre’s failed prophecy, he questions her to the point of asphyxiation, attempting to choke an alternate truth out of her. “You promise these things, but you don’t know,” he despairs. “None of us know.” But Melisandre, despite letting slip that she sees only glimpses of the future, seizes the opportunity to turn Stannis into a true believer, helping him look into the flames. It’s the first time his grimace has relaxed—even when impregnating Melisandre (no other word really seems to capture the grimness of it), he’s been locked in his own misery. Now, she’s given him not just a promise for the future, but a sense of wonder.

Arya wants to believe more badly than Stannis does, but finds she’s unable to, at least not yet. She has an unexpected chance to say goodbye to Jaqen after she finds him waiting on the road after her escape from Harrenhal, though he won’t quite explain to her how he know she would be there. And he has a future to offer her. “To be a dancing master is a special thing. But to be a faceless man, that is something else entirely,” Jaqen promises her. “The girl has many names on her lips…Names to offer up to the Red God. She could offer them one by one.” It’s a tantalizing future for a girl with so much blood to spill, but Arya has other obligations, telling him “I want to. But I can’t. I need to find my brother and mother. And my sister. I need to find her, too.” But Jaqen is playing a longer game than Melisandre is, giving her a coin, but warning Arya “It is not meant for the buying of horses.” “Then what good is it?” asks the girl who has lived because she is so much more than she seems, but has yet to recognize that quality in others.

There’s something heartbreaking about Arya’s insistence that she has to find her family, even Sansa, who she believes betrayed them, when Sansa, offered the opportunity to escape by Petyr Baelish, tells him “King’s Landing is my home now.” It’s not necessarily that I believe that she’s given up on her family, but living in what counts for luxury in Westeros, Sansa has so many fewer resources than her little sister, and the one asset she had is about to become a tool to wound her, to render her unable to use it again to her own advantage. “We’re all liars here, and every one of us is better than you,” Baelish tells her, after warning her of what her immediate future holds after Joffrey puts her aside in favor of the vastly more politically convenient Margeary Tyrell, a woman who knows enough of womanly wiles and men’s appetites to tell the boy king that “those tales [of his courage] have taken root deep inside of me.” “‘He’ll still enjoy beating you, and now that you’re a woman, he’ll be able to enjoy you in other ways as well,” Petyr warns her. “Joffrey’s not the sort of boy who gives away his toys.”
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