Breathing spaces? The politics of embodiment, affect, and genre in Mare of Easttown and Happy Valley

This article explores the similarities and differences between Mare of Easttown (HBO 2021) and Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–16), the series which served as a model for Mare. It argues that both series succeed in deploying the detective genre to centre a maternal subject who confronts both personal and communal loss, eliciting an affective response to the way in which she responds to the physical, political, narrative and generic world in which she is positioned. Both series succeed in creating “breathing spaces” which interrupt this most masculine of genres with a sense of embodied subjectivity that is also relational, compassionate and ethical. The difference between the series, it argues, lies in what, politically the two series do with these moments. In Happy Valley, it argues, they are tied to a critique of the forces that produce the losses to which they respond. Mare of Easttown, however, dilutes both the attack on neoliberalism and the feminism of Wainwright’s series, placing its emphasis on individual failure rather than structural inequalities. In doing so, it attempts to retrieve once more the promise of the “good life” offered by neoliberalism, ignoring the structural inequalities on which it is based.