Idealising the English Village

2.3 Idealising the English Village

The English rural landscape is a fundamental element of the Midsomer Murders series; each novel and each episode is set in a village or rural location in the fictional county of Midsomer, while large towns and cities are notably absent. It is important to note that the rural setting is contemporary, which marks a distinction from period dramas that are set in the past. I would suggest this means that rather than using “time” as a instrument for idealising the past, the Midsomer Murders series uses “place” for idealising the past. This is achieved by suggesting that the English village is still a place where past ways of living still exist and carry ideals that have been lost in the modern urban world. I will argue that the rural landscape is constructed as a nostalgic trope in the Midsomer Murders series, and in this section, I will attempt to address the subjective nature of nostalgia by exploring cultural and psychological aspects that will help understand the nostalgic appeal of the English village.

To suggest that villages are nostalgic simply because they are associated with a past way of living would be to overlook reasons that they are desirable to an urban audience.

Discussing the problem of perspective, Raymond Williams observes that writers for centuries have been nostalgic for a rural past that has somehow changed or disappeared, and notes that “Old England, settlement, the rural virtues – all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different values are being brought to question” (Williams 12).

Nostalgia for a rural past would seem to be a historical constant, but the underlying changes that arouse nostalgia are not. To understand the present context, I would agree with David Matless who argues that “the rural needs always to be understood in terms relative to those of the city and suburb, and approached as a heterogeneous field” (Matless 17). This is because, as he states, there is “a powerful connection between landscape, Englishness and the modern” (Matless 16). Williams expresses this connection as a tension, identifying that:

[…] the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present. The pull of the idea of the country is towards old ways, human ways, natural ways. The pull of the idea of the city is towards progress, modernisation, development. In what is then a tension, a present experienced as tension, we use the contrast of country and city to ratify an unresolved division and conflict of impulses […]. (Williams 297)

We have already noted Santesso’s view that eighteenth-century poetry produced a great deal of nostalgic tropes in response to the upheavals of early modernisation, which indicate at the very least unease towards the changes of the Industrial Revolution. But a greater part of today’s audiences have never experienced the rural lifestyle of the past, and even the experiences of today’s rural people is vastly different from that of the past. This

begs the question then, why are they nostalgic for a past that they have not experienced? I will attempt to answer this from both psychological and cultural perspectives.

It is important to firstly mention some of the conventional ways in which the rural country has been represented in art and literature. Timothy Edensor lists a number of aesthetic elements that are held to epitomise Englishness:

Parish churches, lych-gates, haystacks, thatched or half-timbered cottages, rose-laden gardens, village greens, games of cricket, country pubs, rural customs, hedgerows, golden fields of grain, plough and horses, hunting scenes, and a host of characters including vicars, squires, farmers, gamekeepers. (Edensor 41)

We can note from this a long list of icons that are instantly recognisable as rural, which reflects Santesso’s observation of the tradition of using familiar tropes to create a sentimental reaction in readers. Williams suggested that the “rural innocence of the pastoral, neo-pastoral, and reflective poems” (Williams 46) was achieved by contrasting the country as “nature”

with the city depicted as “worldliness” (Williams 46). Typically, this involved featuring

“fields, the woods, the growing crops, and animals”, in contrast with “the exchanges and counting houses of mercantilism, or with the mines, quarries, mills and manufactories of industrial production” (Williams 46). Other depictions of the countryside also featured “The magical country, yielding of itself, […] seen as a working landscape filled with figures: the mowers and haymakers, the ‘Villagers in common’ coming to graze their cattle” (Williams 56). Williams argues that “the contrast between country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society” and that there is a temptation to “reduce the historical variety of the forms of interpretation to what are loosely called symbols and archetypes” (Williams 289).

This suggestion of symbols and archetypes is particularly relevant to Fredric Jameson’s postmodern concepts of the “Pastiche” and “schizophrenia”. Jameson describes pastiche as being “like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry […].

Pastiche is blank parody” (Jameson 114). I would argue that the symbols and archetypes that Williams alludes to, are repeated in cultural texts as pastiche, that is, repetitions void of satire or commentary. The persistent repetition of these symbols and archetypes detaches them from meaning. This can be understood as a process which Jameson calls schizophrenia, and he illustrates this with the example of children who repeat a word to the point where the word is reduced to an incomprehensible sensory sound. He makes the point that “a signifier that has lost its signified has thereby been transformed into an image” (Jameson 120). In this respect, many of the cultural images of rural life, for example grazing animals and people making hay, might continue to be repeated in cultural texts, but the reality of industrial farming and mechanisation may be far removed these rural images. The effect of this pastiche then, is to mythologise rural life through signifier images that no longer represent the signified reality. In this way, the Midsomer Murders series can employ pastiche images of the past to construct a village with the qualities of an undefined past, and thereby rely on a cliched understanding of the past to evoke nostalgia.

As noted earlier, Tiffany Bergin argues that “one of the central reasons for Midsomer Murders’ global popularity is its deliberate evocation of the British crime fiction/drama […]

‘Golden Age’” (Bergin 86). While conventions of the genre are beyond the scope of my analysis, I would point out that in line with my analysis of nostalgia, the Midsomer Murders series could be understood as a pastiche of Golden Age crime fiction and thus a metonymically historical or nostalgic series in the same way that Jameson describes Star Wars as nostalgic for the Saturday afternoon serials of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s

(Jameson 116). As Bergin points out, the Midsomer Murders series seems “particularly inspired by Christie’s Miss Marple novels, which were also set in chocolate-box English villages” (Bergin 85), which suggests that nostalgia possibly overlaps both genre and setting.

Urban audiences may have other reasons to be drawn to the rural setting; I would argue that rural landscapes have a psychological appeal for urban audiences who are primed for a positive emotional response to nostalgically constructed rural settings. A study into the status of urban-rural differences in psychiatric disorders in 2010 found that “even when controlling for a relatively large number of confounders, the urban environment seems to be associated with the prevalence of psychopathology” (Peen, Schoevers and Beekman 91). While their research is not able to identify the reasons for this correlation, their analysis nonetheless suggests that urban living in some way negatively impacts mental health. Their findings are also supported by a 2011 study which used functional magnetic resonance imaging in three independent experiments, and showed that “urban upbringing and city living have dissociable impacts on social evaluative stress processing in humans” (Lederbogen, Kirsch and Haddad 498), suggesting that their results “identify distinct neural mechanisms for an established risk factor” (Lederbogen, Kirsch and Haddad 498).

These scientific findings lend credibility to the premise of there being underlying or general anxieties associated with living in urban areas which do not necessarily manifest as mental health problems. Therefore, it is plausible that nostalgically imagined past ways of living, such as those found in English villages and rural landscapes, might offer some relief for the anxiety of urban living. And there is research to support this view; a 2008 report recognised “the vital importance of nature in effective cognitive functioning”, and showed that “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control” (Bergman, Jonides and Kaplan 1211), and importantly, that even “viewing pictures of nature produced cognitive improvements” (Bergman, Jonides and Kaplan 1211). This

perhaps suggests then, that at least for viewers of the TV series, they may feel some cognitive benefit just from watching the English rural landscapes.

However, it is not merely the physical landscape that is potentially appealing for viewers, as the social structure of the village and rural life may also have some appeal. There is perhaps a perception that small villages provide a stronger sense of community because of the stereotype that everybody knows everybody among a small population. There is evidence to suggest that community is considered an important aspect of well-being in the United Kingdom. In 2010, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) conducted a nation-wide debate to establish which factors should contribute to the measurement of the “national well-being”. It received around 34,000 contributions, coming in the form of completed questionnaires, blogs and comments, contributions on social media, and discussions from 175 events held across the country. The key question asked was “what things in life matter to you?”; if we assume that the answers express anxieties about the present day, and if those anxieties can be considered in Dames’ terms as a “dislocation”, then I believe that the responses could provide important indications for the appeal of certain nostalgic elements.

Based on the responses, the report highlighted the importance given to themes of “health, relationships, work, and the environment” (Office for National Statistics 6). Interestingly, the majority of comments relating to the environment “focussed on the importance of access to good quality local green spaces rather than wider environmental issues” (Office for National Statistics 6), which indicates that people might generally feel dislocated from nature because they have a lack of access to it, giving further credence to the notion that merely viewing natural landscapes is desirable as it provides some psychological benefit.

Another important factor that was widely brought up was community spirit, which was considered to be “very important, but lacking” (Office for National Statistics 6). Interestingly, a dissection of the different age groups showed that “some older people were concerned

about the loss of a sense of community” (Office for National Statistics 7), which offers some explanation for a perceived desirability of village life, where a strong sense of community seems possible in such a small population. Howard Newby claims that a “powerful tradition of cultural Romanticism” has supported the view that English villages are ideal communities characterised by social harmony and meaningful social intimacy (Newby 23). Perhaps it is the text’s intimate examination of the community, enabled by the police murder investigation, that allows a reader or viewer to feel immersed in the fictional community and thereby provides them a catharsis for their real-world loss of community spirit.

Newby further claims that “ideas about the English countryside as a visual phenomenon and ideas about the English countryside as a social phenomenon have therefore merged” (Newby 23; emphasis original). This suggests that an inconsistency has emerged between the perception and reality of rural life. Since the start of the twentieth century, the proportion of people living in rural areas has remained relatively consistent at around 20 percent. However, the last century has seen a dramatic change to the social fabric of the village, and therefore its culture. The landscape has also had to change to accommodate a growing population, which has grown by more than 80 percent since the start of the twentieth century. The experience of living in rural England has drastically changed; the modernisation of agriculture and transport are perhaps the two most significant factors that have impacted rural life and have fundamentally changed the social structures. Mechanisation made many agricultural jobs and skills redundant, and the development of cars and roads meant that people could be socially and professionally active across a greater geographical area, and more critically, that urban workers could live in rural areas. This brought a change to the social structure of the village and introduced new tensions and problems. Not only were rural workers struggling to find work because of mechanisation, from things such as tractors and combine harvesters, but they were also increasingly being priced out of living in their village

because of the influx of urban workers on higher wages, leading them to move to urban areas for work and accommodation. Thus, the image of old agricultural ways in contemporary texts can be understood as a form of pastiche because of their empty parody of an imagined past that is nostalgic for an imagined rural way of life that no longer exists.

Urban newcomers also brought a new social division that cut across the social classes.

According to Newby, those who moved to rural areas because of cheaper housing did not feel it necessary to “adapt to the hitherto accepted mores of the village” (Newby 165;

emphasis original) and their indifference to the sensibilities of the local population caused much friction. But at the other end of the spectrum, some newcomers were “oversensitive to what they believe the needs of the village to be” (Newby 165; emphasis original), as they sought to protect their preconceived stereotyped expectations of rural life and landscape in their search for the mythologised rural life. According to Newby, “what has been ‘lost’ from the countryside has been the village as an occupational community” (Newby 191) because of the underlying changes in the economics of agriculture. Importantly he notes that when the village was an occupational community, people “identified closely with the other inhabitants, deriving both standards of behaviour and a sense of self-esteem from their neighbours” (Newby 191). This reveals that the reality of living in a present-day English village is very different from the past, with not only a changing landscape, but also a more discordant social structure. While the Midsomer Murders series may play on some of the social disharmony, it is the resolution of the crime that provides a return to an idealised harmonious village community.

I would argue that an idealised view of rural life is the primary driver of nostalgia for the TV series, but the novel has a more intimate focus on moral behaviour by establishing nostalgic village community ideals based on conservative and Christian values. I will focus in particular on what I see as the novel’s use of a narrative device that mimics social gossip

to promote Christian social norms of sexual behaviour. I will argue that gossip is employed in the novel to construct knowledge about socially normative standards of sexual behaviour by demonstrating the hazards of transgressive behaviour. Gossip can be “broadly defined as communication about the behaviour of others” (Peters, Jetten and Radova 1610) and understood as “a certain recognizable discourse; the mutual interpretation, evaluation and moral judging of a particular kind of knowledge” (Jerslev 182). In line with this understanding of gossip, I would maintain that the novel utilises gossip to establish discourse and moral judgment of particular kinds of behaviour, most notably sexual behaviour, which would be in agreement with Clare Birch’s assertion that “knowledge is socially constructed and determined” (Birchall 12).

To understand how accepted standards of behaviour can be learned through gossip, research in the field of psychology has suggested that “Gossip can be understood as an extension of observational learning, in the sense that people can learn about the complexities of social and cultural life by hearing about the successes and especially misadventures of others” (Baumeister, Zhang and Vohs 120). This suggests that when the novel mimics gossip, it is enabling an instance of observational learning for the reader. Kim Peters et al. claim that

“people who engage in deviant acts make an important contribution to the functioning of societies by drawing people’s attention to, and clarifying their understanding of, the existing social norms” (Peters, Jetten and Radova 1618). This suggests that identifying behaviour perceived as transgressive in the narrative provides an opportunity to clarify and draw attention to the socially accepted norms of the village, which I will claim are informed by conservative and Christian ideals.

So, looking at the idealised village of Badger’s Drift in the Midsomer Murders series, there are different layers of analysis to be explored. My premise is that there is a nostalgic construction of Englishness in the series, but the appeal of that nostalgia is not just towards

a past ideal, or wistful nostalgia as Bergin suggests, but rather as a response to a present-day malaise felt by both urban and rural dwellers alike. Within the construction of this nostalgic Englishness, we should also consider that an appreciable majority of audiences are not longing for a rural past that they themselves have experienced, but rather an imagined rural life that has been mythologised in cultural texts and well-established tropes. Whilst we cannot definitively say that English villages are nostalgic, this section has tried to address the subjective nature of nostalgia by offering a reasoned perspective which supports the view that the village setting can be widely understood and experienced as nostalgic.