Happy Valley: Compassion, Evil and Exploitation in an Ordinary ‘Trouble Town’

Piper, Helen

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-55506-9_13

Cited by 32 publications

References 10 publications

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‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

Thornham

2019

Feminist Theory

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This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it ‘a female voice’ (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal.

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‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

Thornham

2019

Feminist Theory

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Intersections and/in Space

Massood¹,

Matos²,

Wojcik³

2021

Media Crossroads

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In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau suggests that the city can be seen from diff er ent perspectives: from above, as looking at a map or panorama, or from the ground, through the experience of walking. While the view from above produces a legible picture for a voyeur-what de Certeau calls theoretical space-the view from below is social and immersive, lived and experienced, rather than viewed from a distance. The pos si ble paths taken by a walker are myriad and dependent on factors such as race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, and gender. Walkers, for de Certeau, "create networks of. .. moving, intersecting writings [that] compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces." 1 Indeed, a city can provide "a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties" that intersect and connect and yet differ depending on the space, the repre sen ta tion, the group, or the individual. 2 Along these same lines, critics such as Henri Lefebvre have further noted that "any space implies, contains, and dissimulates social relationships-and this despite the fact that a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things (objects and products)." 3 Spaces not only shape the connections and relationships that manifest in their confines, but the spaces themselves are si mul ta neously inflected by the very social interactions and intersections staged within them. Consider three seminal and differing cinematic views of urban space, each mapping a distinct experience of New York City. First, Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) consciously glorifies the city. 4 In an opening voice-over,

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“Where Do Aliens Pee?”

Morse¹

2021

Media Crossroads

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Happy Valley: Compassion, Evil and Exploitation in an Ordinary ‘Trouble Town’

Cited by 32 publications

References 10 publications

‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

Intersections and/in Space

“Where Do Aliens Pee?”

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