Harriet Cains as Philipa Featherington and Bessie Carter as Prudence Featherington in season three of “Bridgerton.” By Courtesy of Netflix
By Serena Jampel, Crimson Staff Writer
“Bridgerton,” a Regency-era romance series by Shondaland, can safely be categorized as a class-A phenomenon and the bona fide show of the summer. With its first and second seasons coming in fourth and tenth in Netflix’s list of most streamed TV shows of all time, the show has established a passionate fan base since its original release in 2020. However, with season three now available for streaming, it’s time to discuss the flower-festooned elephant in the room: Why isn’t “Bridgerton” more feminist? Though the series features a cast of leading ladies not afraid to speak their minds and desires, “Bridgerton” has become increasingly restrictive on just how far its women can venture outside the status quo.
In feminist terms, “Bridgerton” is a contradiction. The show aggressively builds a repressive society around the female characters while striving to grant them the ownership and agency that modern audiences expect. Having already attempted to update the Regency-era setting in numerous ways that have already been extensively covered and debated, like the centering of queer characters in the spinoff series “Queen Charlotte” or the infusion of at-times contrived diversity into lily-white British nobility, “Bridgerton” tries and fails to grant modern viewers a convincing depiction of female agency.
The more egregious restrictions on bodily autonomy stem from the extent of the series’s obsession with marriage and specifically, marriages that result in children. Simply put, “Bridgerton” has a track-record of upsetting depictions of marital rape. In season one, Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) rapes her husband, Simon (Regé-Jean Page), in an attempt to become pregnant. The show’s choice to include this controversial scene from the books caused a stir. In last year’s “Queen Charlotte,” we saw Lady Agatha Danbury (Arsema Thomas) repeatedly coerced by her grotesque and misogynistic husband out of a sense of marital duty. Time and time again, the women of “Bridgerton” reveal their harrowing lack of sexual education and experience repeated instances of abuse or rape. And yet, these traumatic instances are never anything more than a quick sad backstory, an attempt at levity, or an oddly-contrived historical note.
Roe v. Wade — the U.S. Supreme Court decision that protected the federal right to have an abortion — was overturned on June 24, 2022, making season three the first to be written and released in a post-Roe world. That this season is obsessed with pregnancy and the militant surveillance of women of childbearing age — wherein most of the women are judged, valued, or mocked based on their ability to get pregnant — seems eerily connected. Worse still, the limitations that “Bridgerton” imposes on its leading ladies go virtually unnoticed, or are dismissed as humor.
Two out of three “Bridgerton” seasons so far have included a significant plot line based on sexual reproduction, particularly of a male heir. It’s no secret that the romance genre often preoccupies itself with sex, but it is the laser-focus on successful pregnancies resulting from stable, heterosexual marriages that feels dystopian. At the outset of season three, the Featherington family finds themselves in an engineered dilemma in which they need to produce a male heir in order to keep their family title. This spectral fetus looms large over the vigorous subplot. The audience is treated, first things first, to the show’s now-familiar sexual naivete trope when the elder Featherington sisters and their queer-coded, foppish husbands reveal a shocking lack of understanding about how babies are made.
Prudence (Bessie Carter) and Philippa (Harriet Cains) first reveal that they don’t enjoy sex (for reasons so frivolous as to arouse suspicion like “it flattens the hair”), only to be convinced by their mother to submit to potentially unwanted sexual relations with their husbands for the sake of the family fortune. This subplot is couched as humorous, with Philippa and Prudence exchanging petty swipes that take only a bit of unraveling to reveal an underlying misogyny. In one memorable exchange, Philippa says,“if we use our minds to read, there may not be enough wits left for the baby,” to which Prudence swipes back “Mama must have read a great deal when she was pregnant with you, then.” Why yes, not only are women stupid, but their uteruses have the capability of bestowing ignorance if they read too much. Gentle reader, I do hope you are well versed in sarcasm. The issue with “Bridgerton” is that it does not treat these jokes with self-aware, satirical nuance; instead, it uses their humor to generate laughs at women’s expense.
Cressida Cowper (Jessica Madsen), another character who is seldom taken seriously, makes a real bid for personal and bodily autonomy this season, and is utterly crushed. Trapped in an arranged marriage plotline full of more dead air than her skyward-soaring sleeves, Cressida takes matters into her own hands. She has nothing and no one to help her escape sexual subservience to the humorless Lord Greer (Richard Durden). So we cannot help but root for her when she chooses social ruin over her marriage, or when she resorts to extorting Lady Whistledown for money. That’s why the final scene of Cressida being shipped off to her cruel aunt’s house by her parents to save their reputations is so damaging. The only character who really made an attempt to live outside of her repressive society and take physical control of herself completely failed.
And even our leading lady, Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan), or Lady Whistledown herself, is not free from the rules “Bridgerton” insists on imposing upon women’s bodies. Although she ends the season triumphant and with a bright literary future, Penelope ultimately fails to escape the societal expectations that she has so often grated against. It is Penelope who gives birth to the next Lord Featherington, the spectral fetus of the season made corporeal through the efforts of the main couple. In the last 10 minutes of the series, Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) gives an impassioned speech about how thrilled he is to be the husband of a successful writer, only for the camera to jump ahead — it is Colin who becomes the successful writer twice over, in the travel diary she’s helped edit and in the name signed on all of her pamphlets (Bridgerton).
Several characters give impassioned proto-feminist speeches throughout the final episodes of season three, but it is not nearly enough. For all of its anachronisms, the historical point “Bridgerton” is most committed to is, sadly, the subjugation of women. The show itself seems to mirror the sentiment of ex-radical feminist Eloise Bridgerton, who explains her acquiescence to the banality of court life as “I lost the battle, and I have no appetite for the war. I’ve joined the winning side.”
There is an irreconcilable disconnect between the opinions characters profess and the show’s actual depiction of female bodies. Whether pawned off as humor (the Featherington sisters), villainy (Cressida), or triumph (Penelope), the Bridgerton women are allowed intellectual and social freedom but not bodily autonomy. This is our post-Roe nightmare. That we will reach the highest echelons of success and power and still not be treated as agents of our own bodies, and worse, that it will be those who most readily spout feminist language that enforce it.
