Watching "The Durrells in Corfu" on Sunday evening, as one does, I spotted this jumper of Margo's, worn a number of times throughout the episode, including in an earlier scene, which is a better view of the jumper itself but darker because it's indoors at Spiro's house --
Margo has at least one other knitted jumper, in this scene from episode 4 this season (the one with Larry's friend the Indian prince) --
but it was the mustard-colored one that caught my attention, partly because unlike the striped one it looks hand-knitted, and because it immediately reminded me of one in Marion Foale's Classic Knitwear book --
Foale's version is clearly inspired by the 1930s, and hers -- called "Badminton" in the book -- is so like the one that Margo is wearing that I wouldn't be surprised if the series costume designer used Foale's pattern, just trimming some of the 1980s hem to a more 1930s length.
Actually, all of the clothes in the series are very good, and the high-waisted, slim 1930s lines suit Keeley Hawes especially well, though I'm sure that she would look lovely in pretty much anything.
I love this hat. I do not have much of a "hat head," but if I saw this hat in a shop I would buy it at once.
Louisa also has a number of very pretty blouses, many of which I would happily wear -- certainly this one, both for its simplicity and that lovely raspberry color.
As it happened, the first thing that came up while I was looking for photos for this post was a review on “Frock Flicks,” the gist of which was “if this were my family, I’d have run screaming into the night.”
Why are they such shits to each other? Why do they stick together if they hate each other so much? There’s no sense of familial affection or tradition or anything holding them together, and they don’t have any money, there is literally no reason to be together when they’re all such assholes to each other (except for Gerry, the little boy, who isn’t a total jerk, and obviously, being so young, does depend on his mom).
Admittedly, I missed some episodes here and there – including the very first one – so, fair enough, I might have missed the “long, tedious stretches of people being awful jerks to each other, and not in a fascinating or revealing way”. But I am coming away from the series with a vastly different impression. The Durrells in the series certainly take the famous English eccentricity to rather drastic heights, but I don’t at all see a family who hate each other, I see one in which at least three of its members are almost completely self-absorbed, which leads to them giving their own wants a far higher priority than anyone else’s, and with a mother who is indulgent to a rather amazing degree, especially for the 1930s – but this isn’t hate, or even dislike. It can certainly lead to exasperation with siblings and/or parent – and yes, “selfish bastard” behavior – but is a different emotion altogether.
The English have a tendency to not run away from unpleasant things, which at one end can lead to the sort of attitude shown during, say, the Blitz, having a cup of tea on the rubble of one’s bombed-out house before setting to work cleaning up the mess, and on the other to – in the past, at least, less so now – sticking with a family one doesn’t much like (or even actively dislikes) because they are one’s family. This I think is part of the Durrells’ situation here – they have all come to Corfu, even though Larry at least is old enough have stayed in England on his own, but presumably he goes with his mother and siblings partly because he is lazy and self-indulgent enough to not want to bother supporting himself (he writes constantly but hasn’t published anything) and make a home on his own, but partly simply because his mother arranges to move the whole family. (By the way, the real Lawrence Durrell was married and possibly – depending on whether you read Gerald’s or Lawrence’s Wikipedia articles – already living on Corfu when the rest of the family moved there.) And again, the series family pretty clearly don’t literally hate each other, so the easiest thing is to acquiesce to their mother's notion and go to Corfu, albeit complaining about it most of the way.
Much of what’s irritating about the story is the hugely ethnocentric attitude this British family has toward the people around them in Corfu. Aside from two characters, naturalist Dr. Theo Stephanides and cab driver/all-around good-guy Spiros Halikiopoulos, the local Greeks are treated as strange foreigners, indecipherable oddities, merely obstacles to be dealt with, not legitimate independent people who should be understood on their own terms. And really, Dr. Theo and Spiros are only there to serve the needs of the Durrells and act as go-betweens with other Greeks. Most interactions the family has with the locals are of the ‘we’re British, we know best’ variety. It’s a genre that’s been done to death.
In fact, I rather appreciated that the series doesn’t shy away from the reality of that English ethnocentricity, which was still in full form in the 1930s. There have certainly been some expatriates throughout history who dove pretty completely into their adopted cultures, but most took that “little corner of England” with them to at least some degree, whether traveling or living abroad. It can be more than a little dismaying for us to see that attitude now, especially when it manifests itself in overt racism and subjugation – which it does not in “The Durrells in Corfu” – but personally I find it more out-of-place to see a character who is anachronistically broad-minded and tolerant, someone “modern” in a “period” setting (one of the reasons, in fact, that I increasingly found Claire Randall Fraser in the Outlander books to be a bit jarring). It may very well be that from series 1 alone, this is all the impression that we get of the Durrells – except perhaps from Gerry – but there it is. It also should be remembered that the series is clearly not holding up the Durrells as sterling examples of model behavior, either, and thus their British-is-best attitude is not being condoned here, but mocked.
Perhaps part of the problem is that the characters are, like real people, taking quite some time to develop and mature. In episode 6 this season, Larry, during a disastrous attempt by their mother to throw a birthday party for Gerry (she literally doesn't remember that he is turning thirteen, not twelve, and has wrapped up a knitted bunny toy for him more suitable in fact to a four-year-old), shows her some of Gerry's zoological notes and says to her, "Gerry's going to be a really good writer" -- one of the few times that Larry has said something really generous, or shown a real awareness of any of his siblings as a person. I have been watching the series partly because it is filmed so beautifully and partly because it's hard not to think "what kind of idiotic things are these people going to do next?" but I'm enjoying it this season even more because the Durrells, while still as the English would say, completely mad, but also are, slowly but surely, growing up.
