I’ve not written before about “Downton Abbey” because, well, it’s basically a soap opera and as such, exhibits a lot of tired tropes that don’t interest me. But today I found myself thinking about the performative quality of the women’s lives in that era and social class. Everything was about appearance: dress, manners, conforming to the expectations of others in behavior and life choices. The upper class exemplified by the Crawley family lived like animals in a zoo, constantly gaped at and commented upon by others. Yes, the bars were gilded and the trappings were plush, but it was a prison nonetheless.

In her book Queen Bees and Wannabes, Rosalind Wiseman wrote about how the social rules for high school girls are enforced by the “mean girls” of the school (the movie “Mean Girls” is based on this book). The chief mean girl is the queen of the school; she’s usually the head cheerleader, the prom queen, the “popular” girl who patrols the halls with her entourage looking for girls who don’t fit in, whom she belittles and taunts while the girls standing safely behind her laugh. Her role is twofold: first, to show everyone else what the patriarchy wants girls to look like (pretty and fuckable) and how they are supposed to behave, and second, to identify and punish any girls who don’t conform to those ideals. She’s there to warn any girls who want to go their own way that such behavior is not acceptable.

The girls who follow her only do so because it’s safer to stand behind her than in front of her. They don’t trust her not to turn on them–knowing she will the moment they slip up even a little bit. So she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t see other girls as her peers, only as people she needs to control. Her “popularity” is based on fear, not liking.

Wiseman likens the queen bee to a trusty in a jail. A trusty is a prisoner whom the jailers think they can trust–or perhaps more precisely, have convinced to act for them through bribes of special privileges. The trusty is given a small amount of power which they are to use solely to control the other prisoners. The trusty makes it possible to run a prison, especially when other prisoners cooperate with the trusty in hopes of gaining privileges as well. Because the truth is that there are not enough guards.

A patriarchal system needs to constantly keep a large proportion of the population cowed and obedient, but it can’t devote the amount of resources needed to do this out of its own ranks. Therefore, it relies on trusties to do most of the work, like the cadre of new Congresswomen with long blonde hair (the time-honored mark of the queen bee) who are doing their best to deny autonomy to women. Like the queen bee, they know where the power is, and they want to believe they are part of it; they will step on other women to get it.

I never liked Lady Mary. She’s a mean girl. She’s the queen bee of Downton Abbey, following in the footsteps of the Dowager Countess who, having served the establishment long and well, still exerts power even though she was seemingly deposed when her son married. Not so. The current countess is an American, an outsider, and so not fit in the eyes of the Dowager or her grand-daughter to ensure that Downton stays true to tradition. Therefore it is up to Lady Mary to patrol the halls and keep a sharp eye on her sisters’ performances to make sure they are up to standards. She also rebukes her own mother frequently for not understanding how things are done in England, making it clear that the countess is “not one of us.”

Lady Mary constantly belittles the middle sister, Lady Edith, for not being as pretty/fuckable as she should be. But with her attention on Lady Edith, Lady Mary fails to see that it is the youngest, prettiest sister, Lady Sibyl, who is nursing rebellion in her heart–and who will set in motion great changes at Downton when she runs off with the chauffeur, a low-class Irishman. (While Lady Edith marries UP, to everyone’s surprise, becoming a Marchioness and outranking her own parents–and also has a career running her own magazine)

In the end I became rather sorry for Lady Mary. She achieves her ultimate aim–to become the mother of the next Earl–and gets to stay at Downton. But she has been let down by pretty much all the men she tries to please. She has held herself apart from her mother and Lady Edith so she does not share in their loving connection. She has no women friends at all apart from her maid, who always has to do what Lady Mary tells her to do. We can imagine that she will pour all her energies into trying to keep Downton the same as it always was, patrolling the halls, keeping a constant eye on her children to make sure they perform as expected, lashing them with her sharp tongue when they don’t. She will be a loyal trusty and trustee to the end of her days.

But I don’t think she’s happy.