don't think about the Bridgertons

uh oh I thought about the Bridgertons

Dear readers,

Spring is here, and with it the return of Bridgerton, the stupidest show of this and any other season. I adore Bridgerton: it’s just the right kind of stupid, in my opinion. In fact I think that—much like True Blood—the show is dumb in a way that’s deliberately designed to mock any attempt at serious critical appraisal. Bridgerton’s historically innacurate costumes drive fashion experts to madness; the colorblind (and generally excellent) casting instigates a yearly round of takes regarding whether a racially diverse Regency romance is progressive, or offensive, or a secret third thing. I really don’t want to fall into the trap of discussing the politics of Bridgerton; I just want to discuss the already perfect memes (h/t to Jaya for finding these diamonds). But when it comes to politics and art I have an established Problem, and the show has tricked me into its stupid abyss, and even the dumbest media in the world can tell us something interesting about contemporary social expectations, and no more so than a show set (“set”) in a time period obsessed with social expectations.

I usually dislike Regency romance. I’m even somewhat cold on Jane Austen: I think to love her and her bad imitators you have to find the Regency period interesting, and its wealthy male heroes appealing, and I mainly find the whole situation creepy and dishonest. One of the oldest critiques of Austen and romance novels more generally is that they are about the romance of money, not the romance of love—critics noticed this about Fifty Shades of Gray but it’s always true, and they seem to discover it anew each time. Whether the hero is Mr. Darcy or the various hunky Bridgerton lords or a billionaire stalker or whatever, money and class standing remains the real attractive force in most of these novels (certainly, the heroine could never be happy with a man who didn’t also happen to have a good income). It’s notable actually how fast the romance novel evolved from being centered around comfortable country gentlefolk to the landed aristocracy and the richest imaginable men on the planet—i.e. the highest stakes, the maximum amount of money and station. That’s the attraction, and that’s the goal: not so much the physical body and absolute devotion of the sexy jerk who’s been tamed through love, but the perfect safety of his money.

The Brontës—who criticized Austen on the exact grounds that her books were more about the romance of money than love—work much better for me, because they openly recognize that there is something very dark and fucked-up about rich assholes (a fucked-up-ness that they also eroticize.) The money, and where it comes from, is unclean in their novels and has to be purified: Charlotte and Jane Brontës’ weird or outright monstrous heroes are (arguably) destroyed by money and colonialism in one way or another. There must be some sort of background colonialism happening in Bridgerton, but the show isn’t interested in addressing or punishing the limitless wealth on display. The Bridgertonian multiracial aristocracy only works if you imagine a perfect rainbow of oppressed lower classes in various countries around the world, happily producing the goods upon which all the glamorous on-screen wealth depends. You have to imagine it, because it’s never shown: few servants or lower-class people have any speaking parts or storylines. Season three features a class mobility plot where a bar owner and his wife are suddenly elevated to the aristocracy thanks to a rich dead relative (and the timely existence of a male heir). Race may have been eliminated as a meaningful category in Bridgerton, but class and gender—and specifically British constructs of class and gender—are immutable. The entire global upper class is apparently fine with adopting British customs and British manners, with no strain and no complaints. It’s all really fucked up if you think about it, which is again why Bridgerton works best if you don’t think about it at all.¹

Bridgerton also works best if you don’t think about why, in a show clearly aimed mostly at women viewers, misogyny happens to remain as fixed as the stars. Proto-feminist characters like Eloise Bridgerton might complain about male domination, but the patriarchy is the central engine of the Regency romance, which can be symbolically though never literally defeated by the heroine’s conquest of the wealthy hero’s heart. This is also why Bridgerton is absurdly straight, even in situations that don’t call for it. Eloise herself is obviously a lesbian; she and Penelope Featherington (played by Nicola Coughlan, a.k.a. the Wee Lesbian in Derry Girls) are so clearly a couple that the writing and the camerawork strains to deny their love. Penelope is even slated to end up with Eloise’s brother, a classic inverse of the gayest 19th century novel trope, in which the hero ends up with the sister of his male best friend (“best” “friend”) as if we didn’t all know what THAT means. But of course, if Eloise and Penelope somehow ended up together in the show, it would impact inheritance rights: and that, in turn, would invalidate the central romance of the genre, since money and property is what it’s really about.

Of course, race in a 19th century context was also uhhhhh very much about money and property, which begs the question why, if Bridgerton could decouple one axis of oppression, why ignore the others? Other alternate history or fantasy narratives have taken similar routes to Bridgerton: plenty of contemporary fantasy novels and video games have taken out racism or shifted it wholly onto fantasy creatures (much easier tricks of worldbuilding to accomplish when the entire history of a world is made up and human skin color was never racialized in the first place). And it’s also common for contemporary speculative fiction novelists/game designers to excise misogyny or homophobia, sometimes with a good deal of Bridgertonian la-la don’t think about it and sometimes through reimagining how property and inheritance would work. But the bedrock consequences of property and inheritance—i.e., class—generally stay put. Historically-flavored fantasy worlds, no matter how radically reimiagined, tend to have class stratification: the existence of lords and peasants or gentlefolk and tenants remains part of what gives these stories their “realistic” grounding and depth. “Realistic” of course, never really means actually real, since plenty of writers can easily imagine away racism and misogyny and homophobia. “Realistic” just means that which we’ve decided can’t be imagined otherwise. The poor are always with us, even in our dreams.

I don’t quite know what this means, except that class functions a bit differently from other oppressions, at least in imaginative terms. Getting rid of the divisions between rich and poor just isn’t part of the public fantasy, not yet anyway. It hasn’t been eroticized, or at least not as thoroughly as wealth has been eroticized. As it stands, it’s hard to watch something like Bridgerton and not lust after the houses, the jewels, the excessive and not remotely historically accurate gowns. And that’s partly because beautiful things are beautiful, and partly because a real alternative—a sexy alternative, an irresistably reproducible erotic alternative to the romance of wealth—hasn’t really been imagined yet.

1. Supposedly the Queen Charlotte spinoff addresses how racism was ended through love in the Bridgerton world but there is only so much cringe I can take.