If you haven’t checked out “Downton Abbey,” the smash English drawing room drama now in its second season on PBS, you might want to give it a look. Set in and around a humungous country manor house in the early decades of last century, it is what you might call British upper-class porn. Tune in and indulge in a luxurious existence where lords and ladies dress for dinner served by a staff of solicitous servants and life is just one refined pleasure and which-pearls-to-wear quandary after another. If the Great Depression had Busby Berkeley movies as escapist entertainment, The Great Recession of today has “Downton Abbey.”

What, you ask, does this have to do with paralysis? Everything, it turns out. As the second season opens, World War I is raging on the Continent and sucking life as we know it down a gaping foxhole. The heir to Downton, a dashing young heartthrob named Matthew Crawley, signs up for the war, like all patriotic Brits, and comes home a few episodes later paralyzed from the waist down. As he convalesces at the family compound, we get a sober glimpse at what it meant to be paralyzed before antibiotics, the ADA, and all the other advantages, physical and emotional, of our relatively enlightened age.

First, a little history. World War 1 was a hideous field of carnage in which hand to hand combat, mortar blasts, poison gas, shrapnel, and living in rat-infested trenches for months on end created the cruelest injuries imaginable, not the least of which was paralysis. Tens if not hundreds of thousands on both sides were paralyzed and their fate was grim. The rate of mortality for paraplegic soldiers was close to 80% -- 80%! – and the survivors were thought of as useless, helpless wards of society. Most paralyzed fighters died within three weeks of injury, killed by infection, usually right there in the cesspool of the war zone. No on-the-spot Medivac unit sped them to a state-of-the-art field hospital for treatment, a la Iraq.

Matthew, being an officer, not to mention an important character in the drama, survives without infectious complication. Unlike those burned or disfigured by shrapnel – see “Boardwalk Empire” – he is not a grotesque. What he shows us is the mental fallout of becoming paralyzed in 1918. He is, in his own mind, without hope or value. He repulses himself. If he can’t sire an heir to carry on the family legacy, no woman should want him. If he is like most paralytics at the time, he will spend the rest of his life in institutional idleness. He’s rich so his institution is a stately paradise. Most such vets withered away in medical snake pits or on the street.

Crawley is a lot like Lord Chatterley, the paralyzed husband of Lady Chatterley in the classic D.H. Lawrence novel of the same name, published in 1928. Also injured in The Great War, Chatterley sits idly by while his sexually-frustrated wife takes lovers to the third floor of their country estate before running off with the virile gamesman. This lord is, to Lawrence, a symbol of all of post-war English aristocracy – morose, impotent, and useless.

We don’t know what will happen to young Mr. Crawley as he copes with his condition. He probably won’t kill himself, a common remedy for paralytics of the age who lasted more than the typical three weeks. He has at least two women who love him madly, injury or no injury, and he will never have to work a day in his life, even if he wanted to. Like FDR – same period, same resources – he could end up doing extraordinary things. Hopeless and embittered as he currently is, he is made of “good stuff” and will probably prevail.

The whole brilliant series often plays like chocolate cake of the mind, but watching this character struggle with paralysis is humbling to me. I ask myself, “How would I have dealt with paralysis under those circumstances?” The stigma and the shame, I think, would have done me in. Or I would have bumped my knee on the commode, broken some skin, and died of infection in a month. When Mr. Crawley wallows in self-pity, I get it. In fact, everyone at Downton Abbey gets it.

In 1918, paralysis was not simply a misfortune that a hundred years of science and social progress have helped mitigate. It was, in the parlance of the time, a bloody curse.

© 2012 Allen Rucker |