Reviews often depend on expectations. If we consider Bridgerton, recently issued on Netflix, merely a Christmas show, a well packed fruit salad made of a bit of Gossip Girl, a bit of Pride and Prejudice, a pinch of Little Women and flavoured with some drops of Les Liaison Dangerous, I could even venture to say: “well, a tasty fruit salad”, but if the show has the presumption of being defined a historical drama, well, Bridgerton is absolutely ridiculously disappointing.
Bridgerton is based on the fortunate series of novels written by Julia Quinn and it is set in the early nineteenth century, that is Regency time, have you understood? Regency. That time which has become iconic thanks to Miss Austen’s characters like Mr Darcy and his Elizabeth Bennet, Mr Knightley and Emma Woodhouse , Capt. Wentworth and many others, remember? That time. In Quinn’s novels I think it was, actually, Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, whom I had never had the chance to hear about before – my fault -, to have captured the creative genius of Shonda Rhimes. Why? Because some historians swear that this queen had black blood running in her veins and an accurate analysis of her features in her portraits proved for many this hypothesis.
By the ways, that was enough for Shonda, to imagine and I want to repeat it, imagine, an interracial society where black and white enjoyed the same rights, indeed, the former held the dominant stations in that aristocrat society, in fact, besides the Queen there is the Duke, the central character of the story, an uncommon species of man in the likeness of one of the doctors of Shonda’s hit, Grey’s Anatomy, doctor Jackson Avery. Of course, such strong revision of Regency times, as nothing of the kind is even mentioned in Quinn’s book, as many other such choices, make the drama so fastidiously inaccurate, that I thought, it ought to be a reason, a message of some kind, that is why I watched the entire season: to find that reason, which eventually I did not find. What I found is a series of imprecisions I was mostly annoyed with.
1) Setting. The story is set in London, but from the very first shot you clearly understand that we are in Bath ( and I am Italian!). It is as if somebody wanted to convince me that we are in Rome, while the hero is feeding the pigeons at St Mark’s Square in Venice, after all, what all the fuss is about Bath or London, it’s always England, after all.
2) Clothes. It seems they did accurate research about the Regency style of clothing, studies that they must have thrown away as soon as they started to shoot. The dresses are too colourful and shiny. Pages and pages about Lydia Bennet’s scheming about her laces to find here matrons attending balls with their boobs well exhibited and squeezed in corsets. By the ways, there is a lot of lingering on the pains caused by wearing corsets, but the dominant Regency fashion style was imperial, hence, there was no emphasis on the size of the waste and no such dreadful corsets were needed.
3) Dirty talk. I understand the necessity of modernizing stories to be more appealing and particularly refresh the dialogues a bit, but could you imagine Darcy whispering to Elizabeth, when they barely knew each other, if ….she gave herself pleasure and how? During that dance at Netherfield, for example, when Darcy finds himself wordless and so, to fill that silence he asks: “Miss Elizabeth, has it ever happen to you…hem… to touch…, you know what I mean”, could you? Well, Shonda did.
4) Interracial society. No need to say that there was no black aristocracy at the time, but the point is why such a choice? What did she want to demonstrate? Because those black in the show are actually white, but born black. There is no cultural difference at all, the theme of ethnicity is not even touched, maybe once, but just slightly by the Duke’s father. Besides, the interracial society represented in the drama is far more advanced than ours, of the kind we won’t reach even in a hundred years, I am sure. It has recently become customary to see white characters played by black actors on movies, as Anne Boleyn will be, but again, but I don’t understand the point. Let’s take a classic like “Amistad” for example, or “Roots”, would it be the same if some of the slaves were played by Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Matt Damon, for instance? I guess it would not.
5) Beauty. The Duke is not only the most powerful man of the lot, but also the most handsome. He is the lighthouse whose blinding gorgeousness obscures all the other characters both male and female, even her beloved, Daphne, whom Jane Austen would have defined nothing more than… plain. For some reasons the viewer cannot understand why she is admired and desired by everybody, but it is clear that Shonda’s intent was to put in the limelight her hero rather than her heroine.
Hence, had the show been a fantasy, I would have had nothing to say, but when you claim it to be a historical drama set in Regency time, you must admit that there is but one queen, Shonda, and that’s Jane Austen. There is no place for anybody else.
It is dawn. In the darkness three silhouettes are on the run: Helen Graham, her son and a trusted servant. They aim at leaving behind a life made of vexations suffered from an egoist self-conceited man, Helen’s husband, to face all the troubles of an uncertain future. Their destination is Wildfell Hall, Helen’s family house. Helen Graham is the protagonist of Anne Brontë’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, a novel which can be considered in all respects a feminist milestone, as the authoress’ s intent is clearly that of vindicating the necessity of women’s emancipation, a “real” one.
At the time of publishing, that is 1848, the word emancipation for a woman still coincided with marriage: a girl left her patriarchal structured family to emancipate herself and join another one, whose prevailing role naturally pertained to the husband. It was truly a peculiar way of emancipating oneself from our modern point of view, particularly, if we consider that before the Women’s Property Act of 1870, once married, women lost their rights on their properties, profits, they had no legal custody of their own children and could not sue or divorce. Therefore, emancipation meant actually leaving a cage to fly lightly into another one, hopefully on the wings of love. “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance” warned a more realistic Charlotte Lucas and she was right, as too often those girlish Prince Charming fantasies crashed against the reality of that long awaited “emancipation”. That “unpalatable” truth had to be made known and Anne did it, in her own way.
Helen Graham, in fact, is one of those women who married for love. Being her reason blurred by her feelings, she is blind to her beloved Arthur’s tricks and wicked nature and she is determined to have him despite her family’s warnings. Pretty soon, once clouds disappear and Helen recovers her better judgement, she understands that under the ruins of what she believed marriage was, nothing remains but abuse and fear. She is bullied and mistreated, in fact, by her husband Arthur, but only when she realizes that their only son has begun to be the object of his ill-treatments too, she decides to leave the marital home going against all the moral and social laws of the time and take refuge at Wildfell Hall, her brother’s house. She will become, hence, a “tenant”, that is displaced. The word tenant reinforces, in fact, the concept that society did not conceive a place for a woman without a man by her side. Those places were all filled by men. Helen is well aware of that, in fact, she introduces herself in the new neighbourhood as a widow, thus providing herself with an acceptable justification for her present situation to the eyes of strangers.
e was not what Helen had hoped to be and her story was that of many other girls: painful truths often untold for shame or fear. Anne meant to give voice to those silent cries, but, naturally, that voice at those times had to belong to a man to be heard, that is why, just like her other sisters, she published her works using a male pseudonym. The novel was a hit, but popularity often attracts bitter criticism too and this was exactly the case. That is why she felt compelling to add a preface to the second edition of the novel, where she claimed that it was time somebody revealed the truth. That was her mission:
It’s been only 3 months since the beginning of school and I have the impression of having lived at least seven lives. I’ve become old, all of a sudden. Whatever I do, whatever I have been asked to do, turns out to be eventually pointless, useless, frustrating. I feel like a caterpillar which is, despite all its efforts, unable to turn into a butterfly. Yes, I feel like a caterpillar, but I remember I was a butterfly once.
e-Tinkerbell 