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Okay! #Bridgerton 
! I have watched it! I have thought about it! I have slept on my thoughts about it! This is still half-formed and probably meandering, but here we go. (Spoilers probably ahead, so mute the thread/hashtag/whatever if you don’t want them.)
! I have watched it! I have thought about it! I have slept on my thoughts about it! This is still half-formed and probably meandering, but here we go. (Spoilers probably ahead, so mute the thread/hashtag/whatever if you don’t want them.)
Firstly, I enjoyed it a whole lot. Hot people in beautiful clothes falling in love in beautiful houses is very much the shit I want as we close out this cursed year.
This is not to say that there were not some obvious problems – clearly they were, and we'll get to those – but I am very here for people smouldering at each other and slowly removing each other’s gloves and angstily brushing fingers and eventually fucking in the library.
Secondly (and unfortunately unsurprisingly), the spectre of historical accuracy has reared its head in The Discourse™. It’s clear that #Bridgerton has taken the Reign approach – I mean, there’s a string version of Thank U Next at a ball! – but here we are anyway.
has taken the Reign approach – I mean, there’s a string version of Thank U Next at a ball! – but here we are anyway.
I am far from the first person to have said this, but when historical accuracy is invoked, it’s always worth looking at what kind of history, and related by whom. History is a broad church, and there are many kinds of it – TL;DR there are levels and layers here.
I think it’s useful to look at historical fiction in the way we look at sci-fi and fantasy, in that a great deal of effort needs to go into worldbuilding. As in these kinds of fiction, we need to understand the rules of the storyworld.
#Bridgerton does its worldbuilding work, and sets up its Reign-esque version of 1813. IMHO, internal consistency matters far, *far* more than historical accuracy, and the world as presented is internally consistent. Everything makes sense within the rules of that world.
does its worldbuilding work, and sets up its Reign-esque version of 1813. IMHO, internal consistency matters far, *far* more than historical accuracy, and the world as presented is internally consistent. Everything makes sense within the rules of that world.
Appeals to historical accuracy often – not always, but often – are about something else (cough upholding the status quo cough). There are two linked concepts here: verisimilitude and pleasure.
At the benign end, you might have a criticism about the colour palette. Perhaps a certain dye just didn’t exist in 1813, and that punctured the historical verisimilitude for some (essentially, they couldn’t suspend their disbelief).
#Bridgerton clearly prioritised aesthetic over accuracy when it came to fashion and many other elements – the string versions of Thank U Next and Wildest Dreams are good examples. It revelled in this anachronism and sought to generate pleasure via it.
clearly prioritised aesthetic over accuracy when it came to fashion and many other elements – the string versions of Thank U Next and Wildest Dreams are good examples. It revelled in this anachronism and sought to generate pleasure via it.
This worked for me. I am on record as not really giving that much of a shit about historical accuracy – you will never hear me criticising the colour of the drapes or the shape of the teapot as long as it looks cool – but mileage varies here. Which is fine.
The malignant end of this appeal to verisimilitude, though – the extremely not fine end – is when people claim that didn’t you know that all of history was white, actually, and I’m not racist but it’s just not *realistic*.
Verisimilitude, importantly, is not about something *being* real or true, but about something *seeming* real and true. It is, IMHO, closely linked to suspension of disbelief – how far am I willing to go to buy into a storyworld?
Game of Thrones was a good, if depressing, example of this. You had a section of the audience willing to buy into ice zombies and face-changing assassins, but defending the repeated assaults of women as historically accurate – an appeal to verisimilitude in a world with dragons.
There might not be dragons in #Bridgerton , but when historical accuracy is invoked in a world in which Thank U Next is played at the ball, everyone has perfect teeth & no one has any STDs, it’s worth thinking about why it’s been invoked about a particular aspect & not another.
, but when historical accuracy is invoked in a world in which Thank U Next is played at the ball, everyone has perfect teeth & no one has any STDs, it’s worth thinking about why it’s been invoked about a particular aspect & not another.
A lot of this is to do with pleasure. There’s a lot to be said about the Regency as portrayed in a lot of historical romances and Heyer and Austen and her adaptations as a fantasy of whiteness targeted at an audience of white women. Like, *a lot*.
I don't have room to get into that in detail here, but I do want to talk about pleasure, because I think it’s fundamental to historical romance – and all romance, of course, but inflected in particular ways in historical romance because of the worldbuilding.
In #Bridgerton , as in a lot of historical romance, the world set up is explicitly patriarchal. It’s highlighted over and over again how little agency Daphne has over her own future (especially via Eloise, who yearns to tread a different path).
, as in a lot of historical romance, the world set up is explicitly patriarchal. It’s highlighted over and over again how little agency Daphne has over her own future (especially via Eloise, who yearns to tread a different path).
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that #Bridgerton is aimed at a demographic of primarily female viewers – so what is the pleasure of representing patriarchy to that particular audience? (At a more extreme end, we might ask the same question about The Handmaid’s Tale.)
is aimed at a demographic of primarily female viewers – so what is the pleasure of representing patriarchy to that particular audience? (At a more extreme end, we might ask the same question about The Handmaid’s Tale.)
I wrote about this a bit in the chapter on historical romance in The Consummate Virgin/my PhD. It’s a complicated question, but broadly speaking, there’s pleasure to be found in modern viewpoints being found to be true and correct against a backdrop where they were not espoused.
For instance, we know that women should have agency and control over their own lives – and seeing that viewpoint be espoused, and for women to get what they want, in a storyworld where that is not really supposed to be possible is deeply pleasurable.
But this, of course, leads us to The Scene. This is #Bridgerton ’s greatest failure, because this is where the pleasure of the text is (arguably irrevocably) punctured.
’s greatest failure, because this is where the pleasure of the text is (arguably irrevocably) punctured.
We as modern viewers *know* how important consent is, and Daphne not only violates Simon’s, but also never even comes close to recognising how horribly she has violated it. Instead, the emphasis is on her desire to have children.
The Scene is notably rejigged from the book, in that there Daphne already knows the deep-seated reasons why Simon doesn’t want to have children and takes advantage of him when he’s drunk. But I don’t want to call it an improvement when it still sucks so badly.
(And they *never talk about it again*! How on earth do they never talk about what a terrible thing she did to him?! How does she never APOLOGISE, even?!)
The narrative needs that point of ritual death (per Pamela Regis, the moment where it seems like the protagonists cannot be together), but because this one was not adequately navigated, it really soured the whole experience of the back half of #Bridgerton .
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So I was thinking about what alternatives there were, and I kept circling back to two facts: 1) withdrawal is a notoriously poor method of contraception, and 2) Simon is very, very keen on PIV sex for someone who doesn’t want to impregnate anyone.
You could definitely generate a point of ritual death out of that! Simon thinks he’s been so careful, but Daphne’s pregnant anyway! He has to explain to Daphne what he meant when he said he couldn’t have children, and she gets to be furious that he withheld key information!
Plus, you get a much more multifaceted commentary on the state of sex education in the storyworld. It’s highlighted repeatedly – through Eloise and Penelope as well as Daphne – that women get no sex ed in the world of #Bridgerton , but…
, but…
…the men are off fucking willy-nilly with apparently not a care in the world, so why not expose that their sex ed is also a bit lacking? That would have the *extremely* pleasurable effect of balancing out that man-as-knowledgeable/woman-as-novice sexual power dynamic a bit.
Plus, imagine how Lady Danbury would laugh when she found out that Simon thought he could avoid knocking Daphne up by pulling out.
And then, we get a multitude of pleasures: 1) we get a very modern endorsement of the importance of comprehensive sexual education, and 2) no one violates anyone’s consent in a way that so aggressively punctures the pleasures of the text. /fin
