This episode was all about social changes with many characters pushing and pulling at their station, or each other. One would think that of all the social classes in the Edwardian-era, that aristocrats know their place and what is destined for their lives. The working class can move up if they can, but a family born into a peerage has pretty much made it. This may apply to the men folk, but certainly not for the ladies unless they marry up. I was moved by Lady Mary's plight. She has come to the grim realization that she is powerless. A pariah. Her conversation with her cousin Matthew says it all. "Women like me don't have a life. We choose clothes and pay calls and work for charity and do the season, but really we're stuck in a waiting room until we marry." Lady Mary knows that her mother and grandmother's efforts to smash the entail are futile. Her father, Lord Grantham, has accepted the inevitable. She will not inherit nor be an heiress. She is frustrated and angry. Cousin Matthew has been accepted as the heir and is now the son that her father never had. "Matthew, Matthew, Matthew." (Shades of Jan Brady in the 1970's sitcom The Brady Bunch, whining "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.") Her mother isn't much help either. She thinks her daughter is a lost soul, and she is right. Mary took a lover with no thought of marriage. She is a ruined woman if it is made public. Ironically, I was reminded of a great quote from Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice by Mary Bennet. Set one hundred years prior to events in Downton Abbey, not much has changed in regard to woman's worth and reputations. Reputations are still brittle, as Lady Mary well knows,
and her sister Lady Edith even more so. She will use Mary indiscretion against her for revenge. There is nothing more painful than sibling-icide. It's as old as Cain and Able, and just as ugly.
