I found this scribbled in a notebook after bingwatching Upstairs Downstairs last year. Rose Jean Marsh, her smile a straight line, plays Rose, the parlor maid on Upstairs Downstairs. The house where she works is everyone’s large, impatient family that doesn’t care whether you stay or leave, and the indifference makes you hang at the doors. It makes your eyes dart for ways to please. It’s like waiting in an alley as the movie star sweeps into a limousine and you tell yourself you have been seen. Richard and Virginia Bellamy say the servants are family and will always have a place with them. Rose entrusts her savings to Richard’s son James, and after James gambles it in a rickety investment scheme, Rose’s nest egg is lost. Ruby, the kitchen maid, works for the Bellamys for 15 years, and when Richard sits down to write her a reference, he doesn’t know her last name. It is a matter of honor for him to believe he cares about the servants and a matter of who he is not to know who they are. In the final episode, Rose is the last person in 165 Eaton Place, and she haunts the rooms, no one demanding she fetch a tray or answer a bell. The house has been sold, and the gentry have moved on. Rose stands by the windows and looks back inside, but the rooms without furniture look like old men in a nursing home without their trousers. The house has lost its power, and Rose will leave, finally, through the front door instead of the servants’ entrance, but where will she go, and will it feel like freedom or a different form of servitude?
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 23:37:19 +0000
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