Sunday, October 28, 2012

Call the Midwife

I blogged before about how, in Downton Abbey, the writers' decision make the nobles in this series kind and reasonable to their servants allows more interesting stories to be told.

I think the same is true for Call the Midwife, but rather than an idealized noblesse oblige, we have an idealized integration of newly-arrived outsiders.

In the opening scene, when the newly-graduated Nurse Lee walks into the neighbourhood for the first time and sees the poverty, crowding, and fights breaking out on the street, I thought I knew what to expect.  I thought the locals would disrespect her for being middle-class and educated, and she'd be totally out of her depth.  When she arrived at the convent and told them she hadn't realized it was a convent she'd been sent to, I thought the nuns would look down their noses at her for being worldly and for perhaps having come from a less austere quality of life than they themselves maintain.  I figured she'd find her place eventually, but we'd be in for a season of awkward and humiliating moments before that happened.

So I was very pleased to see that the series only lightly touched on that arc.  The nuns were glad to have the secular nurses around because they needed all the helping hands they could get, and had no problem whatsoever with their secular colleagues being secular.  The expectant mothers were glad to have midwifery care, and the midwives were respected in the neighbourhood and by doctors and hospitals.  Everyone is professionally competent; sometimes newbies need to call a senior midwife, sometimes midwives have to call for backup for a complicated birth, and sometimes they need to call in a doctor, but no one loses face for doing this. Even when the posh and awkward Chummy shows up, she's still competent (and not just at midwifery - when she discovers that they don't make uniforms big enough for her, she shrugs and reaches for the sewing machine), only the meanest one of the nuns says anything judgemental, and she's integrated well enough by the end of the episode.

This all sounds very happily-ever-after, but, like Downton Abbey, removing the expected primary conflict allows the show to spend more time showing us its universe - everyday life in postwar working-class East End London and the practice of midwifery in that context.  Which is the whole reason why I'm watching in the first place.

I hope this is the start of a new trend, because in historical fiction (and science fiction and fantasy, for that matter) I particularly enjoy immersing myself in the universe of the story, and I often find that the primary conflict comes barging in and disrupting that universe before I've gotten to spend enough time there.  (Which may also be why I like Star Trek.)

1 comment:

laura k said...

I haven't seen Call The Midwife (in fact, this is the first time I've heard of it), but I agree about Downton Abbey. I'm the first one to criticize and loathe the class system, but using the upstanding noblesse oblige type of nobility makes for more complex and interesting stories. It gives the two groups - upstairs and downstairs - more opportunity for meaningful interaction.