Bridgerton – How Privilege Makes You Blind

Have you watched Bridgerton yet? If not, why are you here? Also, I’m about to spoil a little bit of the plot, so go watch it and then come back.

Obligatory Trailer Here

So Bridgerton is about … well, it’s about a lot. Right now, I want to talk about privilege and the way it blinds us to the realities of people that do not have our privilege. Specifically, I want to talk about Colin and what he says towards the end of the season to Marina.

Her pregnancy has been revealed and he realizes that the only reason she was going to marry him was to avoid scandal. We’re not here, though, to moralize on her. In the early 1800s, as much as I really just don’t like Mrs. Featherington, an unwed pregnant woman has only so many options.

Colin tells Marina that if she’d only come to him, only told him the truth, only told him what she needed, he’d have married here then and there. She clearly feels bad about deceiving him and we’re supposed to feel like – yeah, you should have come to him. Love! Love! Everything about the framing, including how it works symmetrically with the resolution of Daphne’s and Simon’s plot arch frames for us that sympathy is with Colin, not Marina here.

He is speaking the truth and she should have trusted him because of love.

This Is Where I Call Bullshit

Colin is speaking from a place of privilege that Marina doesn’t have and he’s blind to what her reality really is. They’re in a world where a woman is expected to keep herself so pure that just being alone with a man she’s not married to or related to is scandalous (whether or not anything happens) and she may or may not even know how sex is supposed to go on her wedding night (cough cough Daphne cough cough autumn rain cough cough).

There is no reality in the 1800s where a woman would believe for one instance that a man would not shame her and reject her the moment she said she was pregnant out of wedlock. There is no reality in the 1800s where a woman wouldn’t expect that such a revelation if it didn’t bring shame and rejection would have the man answering with a sense of entitlement to her body as soon as he decided he wanted it. After all, she’s already given it to one person. Why not him too?

Marina was not wrong to not confide in Colin. She’s not Penelope, where she’s grown up with this young man her whole life and knows his values and personality so well. Hell, even that is no guarantee for a young woman that a man wouldn’t reject, shame, and/or take advantage of her. That is not a reality in the 1800s that she can trust to exist.

Because everything about that society says that, no, he wouldn’t have acted so lofty and noble. Nothing in that society suggests that he wouldn’t at best turn her away and reject her with no additional harm added onto her situation.

What’s really sad is that you can tell if you pay attention to her expression and the way she hesitates a couple of times, that she wanted to tell him.

Privilege Is Blinding but I Still Find Fault with Colin

Daphne teaches us something very simple in her interactions with the villagers at … mumble, mumble I don’t feel like looking up the name of the Hastings homestead mumble, mumble. She can tell that she offended the villagers. At no point, though, does she look at them and say, “But I’m a good-hearted person. If you just told me that I made a mistake, I would have fixed it then and there. You should have told me because this is what it is to be NOBLE!”

No. When she found someone who was sympathetic to her, she asked them. When they told her what she did and why it did harm … Daphne said she would make it right. Recognizing that she had a blind spot, she sought out information instead of blaming others for just not telling her what she didn’t know.

I Don’t Fault Marina or Penelope

Like I said, I’m not going to moralize on what Marina did. A woman has only so many options in that society and she wasn’t left with any good options. Even hoping that George was true, when from her point of view she had heard nothing from him beyond the fake letter Mama Featherington made (the only person in this situation that I can find any kind of fault with as Marina was always reluctant to entrap anyone), was a hope that her society would have set up as vain at best.

To me, the revelation that George was true was less about how she “should have trusted love” and more about how his brother’s proposal would be good for her. Like his brother, he was aiming to be honorable.

Penelope is someone else that I can’t fault. Yes, she is the one who revealed Marina’s condition. Yes, jealousy most definitely played a part in that. At the same time, she knew the deception that her mother had dragged Marina into doing – and that such a deception was going to be on her friend. She tried to tell Colin without revealing the pregnancy and he didn’t get the hint that he should back off. Jealousy or no, she was protecting her friend from deception, at the risk of her own reputation, something that you’ll come to understand, she understood the effect of only too well.

Well, I can’t completely not fault her. She was reckless with Marina’s fate. She had no way of knowing that things would actually work out for Marina in the end. That … that was bad and a demonstration of her own blindness from privilege.

So there you go.

My thoughts on the first season of Bridgerton. It’s a good show.

Warning – White Girl Talking About Race a Second

I don’t want to go too deep into the weeds on racial stuff, in part because I’m not sure how much criticism about that is in good faith. In part because, well, it’s not my conversation to have. I’m not the one harmed or bolstered by the racial presentation in the show or the backlash outside of it.

That said, I do have a few thoughts, for what they’re worth. On one hand, it is nice to see what an integrated Regency society would look like, where people of color had the same kind of social mobility and wealth that white people had. That said, it didn’t escape my notice, that such social mobility was only because of the Queen and was hanging on a thread because of it. I took the hint very well of what Lady Danbury meant about why she took on the kind of countenance that she did in society. Racial injustices still exist in Bridgerton’s Regency London world.

There is a reason we tell stories about the way we’d like things to be or the way they could have been.