Brideshead and Jewel, as Charlotte Brundson argues, are uncontroversial signifiers of
quality mainly because they incorporate already established taste codes of literature,
theatre, interior decoration, interpersonal relationships and nature: ‘Formally unchallen-
ging, […] they produce a certain image of England and Englishness which is untroubled
by contemporary division and guaranteed aesthetic legitimacy’ (Brunsdon, 1990, p. 86).
In a similar way, Freedman argues that heritage films like A Room with a View, display:
an image of splendid Englishness that offers all the ruling-class elegance and beauty of the
Edwardian age cleansed of the socialist, feminist, and other unpleasantries of Edwardian
politics and society. In that image, the English Imaginary achieves an almost unambiguous
triumph. (1990–1991, p. 103)
Considering the cultural work of TV series today, it seems relevant to analyse the use of
nostalgia in these performances of Englishness. Nostalgia can be considered both a
cultural phenomenon and a personally subjective experience, thus operating in both a
public and private domain (Wilson, 2 005 pp. 30–31). Specifically, collective nostalgia
can promote a feeling of community that works to downplay or deflect potentially
divisive social differences (class, race, gender and so on), even if only temporarily
(Bennett, 1996, p. 5). When nostalgia is produced and experienced collectively, it can
promote a sense of ‘we’, thus serving the purpose of forging a national identity (Wilson,
p. 31); collective nostalgia recognizes something (a person, a time period, an event, a
cultural object, etc.) as good and worthy of emotional investment and, in that recognition,
positively evaluates the past. Indeed, nostalgia is really less about the past than it is about
the present; in this regard, Benedict Anderson’s pivotal work that explains how narrative
is related to national identity and nationalism in Imagined communities (1983) could help
us frame the past as Downton Abbey imagines it, idealized through memory and desire.
Though nostalgia depends on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact
and appeal, its affective power derives from its quality to transform the idealized (and
therefore always absent) past into a site of immediacy, presence and authenticity
(Hutcheon, 2000, p. 195).
Nostalgia is a very frequent trope in contemporary English literary and cultural
production. Further, much English social criticism, both radical and conservative, has
been couched in a complex discourse of nostalgia, articulated within a dichotomy of the
country versus the city, or analogically, of the past against the present (Baucom, p. 175–
176). Specifically, as Christine Berberich argues, Englishness and nostalgia are two
associated concepts, as ‘Englishness inevitably appears tinged with nostalgia and
consistently evokes pictures of an older, more tranquil England, an England of times
gone by’ (2006, 207). It does not seem surprising, therefore, that Downton Abbey gained
its popularity at a time when the English sense of ethnicity suffers from a ‘loss and
mourning for the cultural unity and centrality they once had’ (Hutcheon, 2000, p. 202).
Moreover, following Svetlana Boym’s(2001) distinction between restorative and
reflective nostalgia, Downton Abbey seems to promote the latter type. Its emphasis is
not placed on an evocation of a national past and future, but on individual and cultural
memory. Reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home
(Boym, 2001, p. 50): ‘it is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself’ (Stewart, 1984,
p. 145). It does take itself too seriously (as restorative nostalgia does), so it can be ironic
and humorous. As we will see later, some of the characters in Downton Abbey perform
this ironic function regarding a nostalgic view of English national culture.
National Identities 3
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