Even though William was on his death bed, did he and Daisy have to find some way to consummate their marriage so that it wouldn’t be annulled and Daisy wouldn’t be denied her widow’s pension?
Who would call for the annulment? His father seems to love having her part of the family.
Daisy didn’t even want, and refused to accept her widow’s pension.
Why would the marriage need to be consummated to be valid?
The only way not consummating a marriage would be a problem, is if one of the couple wanted a divorce, then they could use it as grounds.
I think it’s pretty clear that it was not consummated. Daisy was lukewarm on William at best, and doesn’t seem the type to offer a deathbed booty call.
Not only is Daisy not the type, William was in no condition to accept even if the offer was made.
An annulment has to be asked for by either party in the marriage or someone with legal interest in the marriage such as a parent if either is under a certain age. Daisy has no living parents. William’s father likes Daisy and was happy with the marriage. Daisy wouldn’t ask for it because she would see it as a bigger betrayal than the marriage was in the first place.
But she said that they were married for “six hours…seven.”
What in the heck did they do in that amount of time? Play Go Fish?
He was DYING FROM FATAL INJURIES FROM SHELL BLAST WOUNDS TO THE LUNGS, aka “pulmonary barotrauma”.
Even speculating about whether a man a few hours away from death due to barotrauma would be interested in a bit of end-of-life copulation feels really creepy-sick to me. Isn’t there enough non-deathbed sex in Downton Abbey to keep the gossips happy?
That’s not the important question. The important question is whether or not they played Go Fish.
This poster is obsessively fixated on the actress and character of Daisy. It’s all s/he seems to talk about. Other character sex just will. not. do.
Then s/he needs to be more patient. I too would think it very nice for Daisy if she did find some hot sweet lurve on the show, but by all realistic standards of interpretation, it hasn’t happened yet.
But did she love him or didn’t she? When William and Matthew were missing she seemed much more concerned about him than anybody else did, even though she kept denying that she was worried about him “like that”.
It seemed to me that Daisy’s infatuation with William had cooled. If he’d lived, she probably wouldn’t’ve married him. But to make a dying friend happy, she did marry him. There are all kinds of love. When she knew their “happily ever after” was going to be less than a day, it would seem selfish not to give that to him.
StG
My take on it was that she cared for him as a person and felt flattered and to some extent obligated by his attachment to her.
But she did not find him romantically attractive. The guy she was actually attracted to was Thomas, and that didn’t end up being such a great advertisement for romantic attraction.
The idea that Daisy would have been at all tempted by the idea of instituting marital sexual relations with William’s soon-to-be-cadaver, even if he impossibly had been in any physical or mental condition to wish for such a thing while he was dying of painful and debilitating injuries, is just skin-crawlingly repulsive.
Let’s hope that instead the momentary spouses did manage to share a couple companionable hours of Go Fish (or some more period-appropriate two-handed game like picquet or cribbage).
From the 2011 Christmas Special:
DAISY MASON
I led him on. When he was wounded, I let him think that I loved him.
VIOLET
Why?
DAISY MASON
I thought it’d cheer him up, give him something to live for.
How do we know that prior to William’s condition really going downhill Daisy didn’t do him, thinking that it would “give him something to live for”?
Claire98909 - In your little fantasy world, you can have that happen. In the story as it was told, it didn’t. It’s fiction, not reality. And your version is fan-fic, not canon.
StG
I was really hoping for spoilers from this season of DA in this thread. We poor Americans have to wait until January to find out what happens. After last season’s killings, I’ve decided I’ll happily take all the spoilers I can get for this one.
FYI, I sincerely think Daisy is still a virgin even after her marriage.
What about Daisy and Thomas? Back when Daisy had her crush on him, was she sexually attracted to him, or was it just an innocent crush based on his handsome face?
What a peculiar question. Do you seriously think that “sexual attraction” and “an innocent crush” inspired by a “handsome face” are somehow two unrelated entities?
The most innocent of virgins is capable of developing a crush based ultimately on sexual attraction, even if the innocent virgin doesn’t consciously recognize the nature of the attraction.
To take the question seriously, it seems to me that the character of Daisy is written and portrayed as heterosexual but almost entirely inexperienced in every type of sexual awareness or activity, as well as being quite shy, inarticulate and emotionally immature (and she was even more so back at the start of the series). Add to that the fact that she’s living in a quite prudish segment of a socially very conservative culture in which sexual awareness and activity among the unmarried, especially young women, is considered shameful if not actually ruinous.
Consequently, we can reasonably infer that Daisy’s infatuation with Thomas probably sprang at least in part from normal sexual attraction, but that she had no clear mental image of any explicit sexual activity with him and would probably have been quite shocked and upset if anybody had tried to describe such an image to her.
Likewise, Daisy’s genuine sympathy and compassion for William’s unrequited love don’t imply by any means that she would have considered “doing him”, as you put it. That’s kind of like suggesting that a modern young woman might consider cheering up a lovelorn rejected suitor with a thing for geriatric voyeurism by having gangbangs with all his elderly male relatives so that he could watch the video. I.e., it would seem to her not like a kind affectionate gesture, but horrifying, socially unacceptable, shameful, slutty, and just plain icky. You just can’t assume that fornication in the Edwardian era was socially or culturally equivalent to the casual hookups of nowadays.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’d rather bow out of any more discussions with you about Daisy’s love life. I’m sorry if I’m misjudging you, but I just get a really strong creep vibe from what appears to be your fascination with imagining an unambiguously sexually inexperienced fictional character in an actively sexual role. If you enjoy making up sexytimes for an erotically awakened and aggressive version of Daisy in your mind, that’s your business, but I’m not interested.
As StGermain indicated, you have left the topic of discussing the life and personality of the character as portrayed in the show, to wander dreamily in the realm of fanfic. There’s nothing wrong with that and there are plenty of like-minded people you can talk with about it elsewhere.
But if you’re going to ask questions here about what other posters think actually happened or will happen in the show as written, they are going to get annoyed with you if you keep dismissing or ignoring realistic opinions in order to drag the conversation back to fantasy-Daisy.