4 - Space and Place

Summary

Period drama's encounter with the people and places of the past is frequently discussed in terms of mise-en-scène and location, particularly its grand houses and pastoral scenes. This is illustrated in Sarah Cardwell's outlining of the genre conventions of classic novel adaptations, which includes ‘generic “heritage landscape” long shots’ along with set piece scenes of ‘ballroom, or at least “dancing”, sequences; scenes of refined conversations over afternoon tea; sequences where characters travel by carriage or horseback across rolling countryside’ (2002: 121). The heritage debate's reading of 1980s period drama asserted that period film and television's settings and visual style were frozen, inherently ‘nostalgic’ and conservative, a reading that retains a tenacious hold on discussions of the genre. Andrew Higson diagnosed a preoccupation with the visual splendour of privileged lifestyles, arguing this overwhelmed the films’ narrative critique of these worlds or their storytelling alignment with outsiders’ discomfort (2006 [1993]: 96). As Claire Monk highlights, this ‘fixation upon the “fetishization of period details” … shaped a critique which seemed to treat visual pleasure itself as politically suspect’ (2012: 21). Subsequent programmes and post-heritage scholarship problematised these readings, and Cardwell asserts that ‘[w]e cannot assume that nostalgia is the only possible response to the gaze as re-presented in classic-novel adaptations, just as “heritage” is not intrinsically reactionary’ (2002: 138). This chapter's focus on space and place leaves behind, or at least complicates, the well-established critical frames of heritage and nostalgia to approach period drama from different angles.

I use ‘place’ to refer to locations and settings – a mansion, a factory, an office, a farm, a living room, a village street and a city – and ‘space’ to refer to how place is organised through mise-en-scène, movement and narrative. This chapter expands beyond the dominance of the grand house and rural space in existing work on period drama, drawing out the genre's engagement with urban space. It also offers some con-sideration of the gendered and racial politics of space. I demonstrate how period drama's rendering of space and place blends the ‘visual (and aural) spectacle of pastness’ (Vidal 2012a: 9) with television's intimacy and its serialised returns. This chapter considers period drama's space and place through the grand house, rural spaces and the city.