Why think when you can watch Bridgerton?
By: Frankie Faunet
Tags: Bridgerton, Netflix, Television, Fiction, Culture

The new Netflix series reveals our shallowest fantasies

Oh the high romance! Bridgerton is out now on Netflix.

Now normally I focus on writing about fantasy ideas of France, but why not take a brief detour to Fantasy England with the latest buzz series on Netflix?

Spoiler alert! Spoiler ALERT! Bridgerton is a steamy pile of poop.

The official series Twitter account calls it like it is: a market.

Taking place in a nominally Georgian London, this new and exceedingly light drama purports to take us to the world of so-called high society through a narrative that revolves around girls coming of age and debuting as eligible brides. Thus, the show begins with the beginning of “the season,” ie. the season of getting newly of-age girls married off, and young girls being presented to Queen Charlotte.

You might be forgiven for expecting a new take on Jane Austen, but instead you should get ready for a lightweight mix of 2 parts Gossip Girl and 1 part Marie Antoinette (the Sophia Coppola iteration), shaken with crushed ice and served with a peacock feather for a stirring rod.

On one hand, this stuff is L-I-G-H-T — light. Will Daphne please the Queen as she is presented? Who will be her gentleman callers? What of poor Penelope, as charming a soul as she is overlooked for her roundness? And if the Duke of Hastings will never marry? And how shall they deal with the unexpected success of Marina Thompson?

The soap opera-esque tangle of narratives might sound convoluted, and they are, but a real lack of ballast keeps the themes floating like slightly underfilled balloons. The dread of ending up a “spinster,” for example, is evoked at several points, but after a few episodes (mea culpa, I haven’t seen more than the first few, and I doubt very much I’ll be able to finish the season, even for research purposes) we never see it. The spinster is a horror completely in theory, never embodied, and so toothless.

On the other hand, there is something truly terrifying about Bridgerton, more more terrifying than becoming a spinster — and that would be what it reveals about people’s desires and aspirations. As visual junk food, the series focuses almost entirely on the petty concerns of aristocratic society, where the cruelty of class is displaced for pretty costumes, love affairs, and play acted political positioning.

Let me be clear, the series does want to appear contemporary in its values, even if it wears supposedly period clothes. For one, the show portrays people of color, including black nobles and courtesans, suggesting a more cosmopolitan England than was historically the case, but without much fuss.

Yes! It is absolutely true 19th century London was significantly more diverse than we tend to portray it, and there were definitely black people of rank and reputation in British society. What’s a-historical here isn’t the presence of blackness, but the ways in which it is totally unproblematized, presenting few difficulties for the people depicted. UPDATE: Yia Vue deals really well with the issue of race in Bridgerton in this article.

In a similar way, the show takes pains to make some show of feminist consciousness without much to back the performance. There are several ways in which gender issues are raised, including characters who periodically engage in questioning about the role of women in society, one woman who actually wishes to pursue her studies rather than a husband, and the strategic use of alternative forms of power by women.

While this is better than we might have expected from 90s television, the politics are still abysmal, even if the series displays these showy features. And I, personally, fully support the decolonization of the imagination, allowing our dreams and fantasies to be stripped of the whitewashing that has blanched our historical realities.

At the same time, the real values of the show are always pulsing at its core. We might hear woman questioning the fairness of what is essentially a marriage meat market for newly of-age girls, but a scene or two later, we will be asked, as spectators, to admire a man for beating up another man in defense of one debutante’s honor.

To put it more bluntly, the show asks us to swoon for a man who uses violence in order to defend a girl’s reputation as being a virgin, as if virginity was an unquestionable virtue, and as if punching another man was a way of establishing the truth. In other words, we’re still dealing with virginal purity and trial by combat. Medieval Icelandic sagas were slightly more progressive in that they suggested some disputes could be settled by arbitration.

Oh, and if I could just point out something as a necessary aside: it completely undoes any celebration of a female character who prefers studying to suitors if she is also portrayed as a naïve ignoramus when it comes to how women become pregnant, while all the boys giggle at what they have learned simply by visiting a farm.

There is also the bald fact that there are only the thinnest of gestures towards the issue of class — a girl from more modest origins, but still connected to an aristocratic family, speaks in defense of honest working people while those same people serve as set decorations for the scene — and most of the time we are asked to project ourselves into these circumstances, to imagine ourselves at their balls, to relate to the characters with their individual tribulations.

We might think that showing the brutal inhumanity of aristocratic relations would be enough to make us dream of something entirely different. Maybe it wouldn’t have to be an egalitarian communist utopia, but at least something other than a crushing patriarchy of oppression on everyone without a posh accent.

It seems our fantasies can’t sidestep the desire for wealth and power. As long as the black characters sound vaguely like they studied at Eton, and as long as the young women have some agency in finding true love with a dashing Duke, we are euphorically happy.

Granted, the series debuted on Christmas Day, a sugary stocking stuffer for the most commercial of holidays, and who wants to see socialist realism while drunk on eggnog? But as Bridgerton sports an early 7.0 on IMDB at the time of writing this article, and a solid 74% on Metacritic, I have to wonder at how vapid we’ve become.

Or how vapid we’ve always been. Despite a few exceptional moments in history, we continue to believe we would be happy if we joined the upper class, we continue to believe that virginity is something to value, we continue to think that simply offering a seat at the table of power is all that there is to achieving racial justice. And so, our fantasies? Black Dukes, willingly kept women, and an army of servants to do our bidding.

If anything, Bridgerton is only proof that we need to broaden our definition of pornography.