WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

When I tend my Netflix queue, I look for BBC murder mysteries first -- the kind with an excessive and rather dark hero, like “Cracker.” Then I look for Westerns, the really good ones. I esp. liked both “Broken Trail” and “Open Range” which were from the same team. I’m careful to avoid BBC comedies but I’m not quite sure why. They are so exaggerated and LOUD. I guess that’s it. But I love a nice big BBC costume drama with favorite actors, maybe Helen Mirren or Vanessa Redgrave. Thus, I tripped and fell on “Mothers and Daughters.” The ad for it kept popping up on other DVD’s.

So -- it was really quite excellent and had all my favorite things: old stone villages, marshes and fields, long vistas over the British hills, exceptionally good horses -- the tiger of a bad guy rides a remarkable sleek black horse and does it VERY well! It’s Empire -- which I learned to pronounce Owm-peer when I sewed up the costumes for “Quality Street” at EaglesMere generations ago. Very flattering for the slender little girls in these stories. And FAB hairdos. Hours and hours went into ribbons, flowers, braiding, hairpieces, and so on. The characters are those usual village characters, a little extreme as though they had just come from “Wind in the Willows,” very much about the sociology and power plays of families and class, a little intensified by the first inklings of Darwin.

The heroine was quite as earnest and father-longing as “Anne of Green Gables” and her father in this story is a doctor, both tender and ferocious -- just what a girl wants and needs. Except that she can hardly be his wife, and thereby hangs the imbalance that drives the story when he chooses Francesca Anis (who wouldn’t?) who is a bit addled in the manner of the mother in “Pride and Prejudice” but quite a bit more sexy.

This miniseries DVD, which takes two evenings or half a day to watch, as though it were a book to read, includes an entire disc devoted to the life of the author, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, daughter of a Unitarian minister and wife of another as well as (late-in-life) a very dear friend of a younger American Unitarian writer, Edward Eliot Norton. (Lucy Maude Montgomery was also the wife of a minister, which is probably significant, except that her marriage was not so happy. Rev. Montgomery, who was more of a Calvinist, was a victim of depression.) Edward Eliot Norton’s family included at the edges T.S. Eliot and Thomas Lamb Eliot, founder of the Portand, OR, Unitarian church.

On this disc the Elizabeth Gaskell Fan Club, a game collection of characters fully as assorted as the characters in the actual story, trek through her various locations, around the abandoned hellhole factories of Manchester through Wales where she honeymooned and along the sandy bay where the tide comes in dangerously fast, making a central plot device for a short story. They go to the small charming house where she lived her last years and died in mid-sentence at 55, holding her teacup as she sat on the sofa. (The guide thinks she had probably drunk all her tea first, as otherwise there would be a terrible mess.) Her last word was “Rome” and the last scenes of the explanations are also in Rome which she enjoyed with her young writer friend. The Fan Club is careful to leave their coins in the fountain.

One watches these remarkably detailed and vigorous films and comments with affection and amusement, plus a familiarity with the actors, who are old friends. Sometimes they play parts so different from previous roles that it’s hard to place them. It wasn’t until one of the old maid “Miss Brownings” was speaking out of character that I realized she had been Cracker’s wife! Michael Gambon was in TOP form here, making us love a rather ridiculous old man. It’s repertory theatre in all its British glory.

Beyond that, for all my love of prairie, I have a kind of genetic recognition and yearning for the British landscape -- the foxglove and the Queen Anne’s lace, the topiary and the long sheep meadows. I have to clench my hands in my pockets to keep from buying those books of “Stately British Houses” they sell, featuring the same graceful places as the ones in these movies. (In fact, you know, Cleghorn -- Elizabeth Gaskell’s middle name -- is the name of the “castle” of the Macfies -- Macfie being Bob Scriver’s mother’s maiden name and his own middle name.)

Mrs. Gaskell was writing in Manchester, where her husband and she worked to alleviate some of the ghastly destruction of the new industrial machinery, tearing and starving and stunting people, destroying their families. In those days people lived on narrow lanes streaming with horse dung and human shit. Most of their children died, often of starvation. Modern Manchester features in the Helen Mirren/Robson Green murder mysteries -- still sinister and inhuman.

Mrs. Gaskell’s stories, at least this one, are idyllic in setting and mostly about upper-class social strategies. (I’ve ordered “North and South” which is about the factories.) It is as much about the past as it is about any place. But the deeper difference is that between those progressive, optimistic, ever-helping Unitarians and today’s cynicism, self-protection, and expectation of doom, one way or another. When I first found the Portland, Oregon , church in 1975, it was solidly social-activist in spite of being battered by splits over the Vietnam War. By now, it takes much more of a “therapeutic” and avoidance tack, like most of the mainstream denominations. Instead of signs at UU churches declaring they are Peace Sanctuaries, one finds prohibitions on wearing perfume into the building.

Pundits keep telling us we’re in a new Gilded Age, but we manage not to feel any responsibility for the recurring dark side of extreme wealth and status. (Terrorism, illegal immigration, drugs, huge prison populations -- in case you need reminding.) What’s really weird is that educated privileged people, when they are confronted with accounts of the dark side that are convincing in detail and intensity, are able to suppress them by declaring that the authors are “fake” -- didn’t really go through all that stuff themselves. (Maybe that’s because few survive and those that do rarely write.) Yet the way to get an Oscar is not to play country duchesses in satin -- the actors must appear to be suffering in some dramatic way. Misery in foreign countries, revealed in scandals, wins prizes.

Well, at least there’s Michael Moore.