Such Good Luck

cyrillah:

fromlaughter:

“Are you feeling a bit less groggy?”

This is Mary, true, honest, and steadfast—Mary as clearly as we’ve ever seen her. There are no feathers in her hair, or elaborate necklaces, or shimmering bodices. There are her features, open and unadorned. The filming of Mary in this scene gives us her face as this canvas of hope and fear, as an image of Mary’s thoughts and emotions as owned by her, rather than those facets she prepares for society. It’s as though this is another moment of Mary in the mirror, but the mirror here is Matthew, an unprejudiced partner, in whom she sees despair, and to whom she reflects back strength, balancing their positions. She’s confined by the limits of her relationship with Matthew, but she’s never looked more free, to be herself, to open her heart.

This scene definitely shows yet another aspect to Mary’s character, substantiated, as you note, by her bare and simple features. However, I think there is much more conflict in this scene. While there’s the appearance—the “canvas” of freedom, abandon, it is just an illusion. Mary isn’t able to show him her real feelings (she cries facing away from him). Matthew, similarly, isn’t able to see her unbiased due to his war wounds. Furthermore, his conception of her at this point, this scene, is unclear, even later on in the series.

I agree, it’s not abandon or freedom, it’s just “stripped down to the essential”: this is not Lady Mary Crawley, eldest daughter of an Erl, here’s just Mary, a woman desperately in love with a man who’s now broken, hopeless and who can never love her back. She sits by his side, tries to ease his pain, to give him a little hope.

“Blub all you like. And then, when Lavinia’s here, you can make plans”

I believe this line is the key of Mary’s behaviour toward Matthew in his first days at the hospital and even later, when he’s a guest of the convalescent home at Downton: she means to be his support, his stick, but she never once believes she’ll get anything back because of it. She just wants for him to get better and be happy on his own because she knows that she doesn’t fit in the equation, not in the long run and not anymore.

silvestria:

cyrillah:

How young she is and so vulnerable. It’s that hint of fear and shame.

She always had that. She was never really the cold and careful Lady Mary Crawley, was she?

I was reading today in The Madwoman in the Attic (that seminal volume of feminist criticism) about the subterfuges, barriers, manipulations that women over the ages would create about themselves in order to survive the patriarchy. Rebellious, thinking, feeling women who stifle themselves, who hide themselves away, who create fictions and delusions of and about themselves in order to avoid facing head on the truth of their powerlessness.

Mary darling, you are sublime and complicated and I just have no words.

One of the things I like the most about this show is the fact that with each passing episode - year, really - that edge, that constant need of manipulating people, especially men, of being more attractive, wittier, more single-minded than her sister, her family, everyone around her, that edge slowly wears off. Years of regrets and worry and sorrow shape her character and make her become so very different from the person she was (and maybe even from the person she wanted to be) back then.

(Source: anteeosome)