"I envy you, you know: Thoughts on Barrow, Bates, and Privilege

[lavender_sage]

 

 

I’ve enjoyed all the ruminations about Thomas fans vs. Bates fans over the past week or so, but it’s occured to me that a lot of what I’ve read has been about Bates fans’ perspectives posted by Thomas fans. I have seen several comments from people who dislike Bates because he is “too good,” and that’s a valid enough point, but no one that I’ve seen has made that complaint about Anna or Mrs. Hughes, both of whom strike me as being far kinder than Bates.

Personally, my issue with Bates is that, for all his dwelling on his misfortunes over the past three seasons, he actually has it made in the shade. He has a household full of people who respect him, an influential employer and doting wife, both of whom are willing to go to the end of the earth to have him safe at home, and his own private residence.  All of the characters who persecute him–and where would he be without them?–are actually less privileged than he is: gays, divorcees, petty criminals. This seems to be an issue in the show at large, given that so many storylines attempt to persuade us that the very privileged (Lord Grantham, the Anglo-Irish) are actually victims, while villifying those who actually are marginalized, like Ethel, Thomas, and the Irish-Catholics. (I do think Ethel’s storyline is handled the best out of three because she is presented as a victim, not just of individual men, but of a misogynistic system).

I bring all this up not because there's anything new in the suggestion that Bates is privileged but because I think his disavowal of the privilege he enjoys plays a role in his decison to help Thomas.  When Thomas tells Bates “being nice is what got me into trouble,” he's  comparing the wages of his marginalized sexuality to the bounty of perks Bates’ assures him.  And Bates doesn’t like it one bit.  Suffering is the lynchpin of his identity, and Thomas’s comments about his privilege–“Everyone so pleased for you”–challenge his belief that the world is against him. This seems to cause a kind of identity crisis for Bates.  Think of the reasons he gives for helping Thomas: “I wouldn’t wish [prison] on any man;” “I know what it’s like to feel hopeless.” He advocates for Thomas in a way that draws attention away from the cause of Thomas’s problems, homophobia, and puts it on his own experience, prison.  He thereby rejects Thomas’s reading of his identity as defined by privilege and recreates one defined by suffering.

Bates’ rhetoric imposes a false equality on his and Thomas’s situations. In fact, he privileges his in the sense that he has acually been in prison while Thomas is only threatened with it. What gets erased in his account is the fact that while Bates is imprisoned for a matter of months for something no one who knows him believes he did, Thomas has been silenced and condemned for his entire adult life because of who he is. 

What I will never understand about this show is why Bates’ sanctimonious martyrdom is regarded among most of the characters and many of the fans as so much more valuable than Thomas’s sense of self-worth. Thomas does his best to reject his victim status; instead choosing to take responsibility for standing up for himself and others he sees as oppressed, in the case of Edward Courtenay and Jimmy.