‘Downton Abbey’: Lady Mary Was a Deceptively Revolutionary Leading Lady

When Downton Abbey premiered in 2010, it wooed American viewers by bringing them an opulent British drama complete with all of the greatest narrative hits of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater. There were corsets, love affairs, love triangles, bullied younger sisters, ambitious ladies’ maids, loyal housekeepers, and references to major events like the Titanic sinking. However, Downton Abbey biggest narrative gambit was its leading lady.

As played by Michelle Dockery, Lady Mary Crawley was a different kind of period drama heroine. She wasn’t an underdog or poor relation, a clever younger sister or orphaned saint. She wasn’t the plain governess with a soul as big as her employer’s or spirited woman caught in a loveless marriage with a cruel, older man. Instead, Lady Mary Crawley was a chillingly beautiful heiress who waltzed through life with hauteur and ambition. She would treat others with disdain, and actively mock her jealous younger sister. She had the best in life, and still yearned for more. She was a wild, willful hurricane of a woman in a statuesque lady’s costume. Lady Mary Crawley was deceptively revolutionary.

In other stories of its ilk, Lady Mary would be doomed for a fall from grace. The narrative would be designed to take such a haughty woman down, all to instruct viewers that an ambitious woman is an ugly, amoral thing. Instead, Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes turned Mary into his muse. She mades horrible mistakes — you know, like having an illicit one night stand with a foreign dignitary who dies in her bed, and then she tries to cover up their tryst in such a way that implicates her in his natural death —but these only humanize her for the audience. Mary was allowed to be wrong, but it never doomed her to an unhappy ending.

In fact, Lady Mary’s complex, contradictory, ever-evolving persona is what makes her one of TV’s most beloved anti-heroines. Whenever she gets tied up in a tit-for-tat game of cruel attrition with her sister, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael), she is acting like any jealous sister would, rich or poor. When she plays it cold and then hot and then cool again with Cousin Matthew (Dan Stevens), she is showing the complex tango between a woman’s heart and her pride when it comes to romance. And over the course of six seasons, she shows growth in thawing ever so slightly. Still, she gets to keep her perfect veneer, her carefully chic ways, and her place at the top of society’s pecking order. She is never punished for being herself, flaws and graces and all.

In many ways, Lady Mary is an anti-heroine. For all her gorgeous glamour poses, she’s not actually the ideal turn-of-the-century heroine. She’s not an underdog trying to help her family escape poverty, nor is she an unhappy heiress in a gilded prison waiting for a poor charmer to rescue her. She is a member of the landed gentry, and she’s proud of that. She can be cruel and insulting, cold and calculating, and most of all, rebellious. While her sister Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay) might have scandalized the family by running away to Ireland, Mary is constantly getting herself into tricky situations with suitors. Be they Mr. Pamuk or the imperious gossip rag magnate Sir Richard Carlisle or her potentially scandalous hookup with Viscount Gillingham, Lady Mary flirts with fire in her relationships. Modern audiences can understand her tastes, but she is behaving quite against the moral code of her times.

At times, Lady Mary is behaving against the moral code of our times. We still hunger to drag successful women down from their pedestals, and demand that women walk a tightrope of perfection to be likable. Lady Mary never bothered with being likable, and she certainly was never going to give up her place on the top. Yet, she is one of the most iconic television characters of the 21st century, inspiring ardor and loyalty in her fans. As Downton Abbey prepares it to hit the big screen, it should come as no surprise that Lady Mary Crawley is being positioned as the film’s starlet. She is, after all, the indefatigable fire of Downton Abbey.

Lady Mary always gets to win.

Where to stream Downton Abbey