On (not) watching Bridgerton
This year has been one long setback, as the effects of my January round of COVID have slowly but surely played out. The timeline and symptoms are almost identical to previous experiences, so you’d think they’d be less distressing or at least less surprising at this point, but you’d be wrong. There is still so much to learn, all things I wish I didn’t have to know. This time I’m learning that I actually can’t manage my symptoms by cutting out activities. I have brain fog no matter what I do or don’t do. So I might as well do some things I like, to the extent I can. Hence, a newsletter.
Perhaps it’s fitting, then, to write about something I’m not doing: Watching the third season of Bridgerton. I wish I could scrub the first season from my brain; I don’t want to get too graphic (a concern the show proudly doesn’t share), but let’s just say I found it distasteful and disturbing that a character involved in many (many) sex scenes didn’t know the basic biological facts of reproduction. And yet for some reason, I went back for the second season. I will not be fooled again.
I’m a bit sad about this, because I like Nicola Coughlan, whose character Penelope gets her star turn this season. I also like the dresses, the hair styles, and the show’s commitment to putting hot actors of various skin colors and body shapes in the dresses and hair styles. However, I hate the lazy explanation for this “inclusive” version of Regency England, which boils down to now the queen is Black so we happily stopped doing slavery and empire even though they’re the cornerstone of our economy and wealth. (Just don’t explain it!! No one would have cared!!!) I hate that this frothy, bubbly show doesn’t even grant me the gift of allowing me to put down my work, and instead makes me obsess over what might be going on in Jamaica, or what the geopolitical relationship between India and England is supposed to be. But most of all, I hate Eloise Bridgerton.
Eloise is your classic “not like other girls” pseudo-feminist, an obnoxiously obvious viewer avatar who loudly chafes against marriage being the only life path open to women of her class, but even more loudly disparages all the women around her and the things they want and enjoy. Apparently it only gets worse this season. To quote a recent essay by Cassidy Percoco:
But unlike Penelope, [Eloise] represents a really, really common type of character in historical romance: the thin and conventionally attractive heroine who believes strongly in women’s rights but does very little to advocate for them, can’t stand everyone’s focus on getting married but ends up hitched to a man of her rank or above, doesn’t care about clothes but dresses well, and loathes, absolutely LOATHES, embroidery. In a scene from the current season, she stands in a group of young women at a ball, listening to them list their favorite embroidery stitches in disgust.
If Bridgerton hadn’t already made my head explode many times over, this scene would have done it. I cross-stitch, so naturally I’m armed with tiny scissors, ready to stab out the eyes of anyone who dares to disrespect my beloved craft. But Percoco is an actual academic expert in fashion and textile studies, so let’s hear more from her. In texts like Bridgerton, embroidery is:
Almost always either forced on independent-minded women to make them be inactive and stultified, or done eagerly by insipid and unintelligent women whose brains can’t handle anything more complex…In reality, though? Women’s embroidery was a very popular hobby and form of folk art, and actual historical women who advocated for their own rights did not disparage embroidery, but rather defended and praised it.
Read the full essay for more from these women (“there is a monotony in X stitch and a cheerfulness in forming the various shades that soothes my mind” — I see you, Mrs. Anna Larpent!) and why we, and Eloise, have become so eager to hate on them and their favored pastime. If I could tell Eloise one thing, it would be this: I cross-stitched through most of season 2, and I’m not sorry.