Preface: Contains major spoilers for Bridgerton season 1, discussion of nonconsensual sex, and minor spoilers of Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey.
There is a problematic scene in the first season of Bridgerton. The heroine, Daphne, is having sex with the hero, Simon. Their marriage of weeks is already brittle because Daphne discovered that Simon’s declaration that he cannot have children is based on a vengeful vow rather than a physiological limitation. As Simon reaches climax, Daphne ensures that he cannot pull out. He tells her to stop and she does not. This attempt to get pregnant against his wishes pushes their marriage from brittle to broken.
Browsing the internet, there are many reactions to this scene. First is the in-world discussion of whether or not this is rape. Personally, I don’t think it matters too much whether or not we give it that label. Whether Simon realized what was going on early enough to object or didn’t realize Daphne’s goal until 10 seconds later when the deed had been done, she chose to knowingly violate his desire to not have children. That is her sin against him. Within world, she clearly wronged him and her legitimate grievances against him do not excuse that.
A second class of criticism of this scene is that the creators should never have let it be. Rape is so far beyond pale that it should not be depicted in media—or at least shouldn’t be anything one of our main characters engages in. I disagree with this criticism. Sexual violence, like both sex and violence apart, can be used gratuitously. However, they can also be used in ways that are integral to the plot and development of characters. Daphne’s attempt to get pregnant was critical to the plot as was her choice to violate her husband’s trust to do so. This scene was not gratuitous. (And I’ll note that the episode, at least when I saw it, did have a content warning about sexual violence.)
Some people may decide that having a major plot point revolve around non-consensual sex means the show is not for them. That is fair. I personally try to avoid gory movies even when that gore is appropriate in context. It ruins my ability to enjoy the piece. No one should be forced to watch something they object to.
What I don’t think fair, however, was the class of criticism that condemned the creators of the show for putting the scene in. We can criticize art for using sin in an ineffective or inappropriate way. We can criticize it for not appealing to our tastes. But one purpose of art is to explore humanity in all of our complexity, and part of that complexity is our ability to sin.
In this particular case, part of the strong negative reaction that this scene shouldn’t have been seems to come from the fact that it is our heroine who is betraying the trust of her husband. I think this is significant in a way that goes beyond “rape is bad”. To explain why, we will need to take a detour into Pride and Prejudice.
Rest assured, dear reader, I am not about to compare Bridgerton with Pride and Prejudice. Bridgerton is delightful froth. Delightful froth that was both more self aware and more progressive than I expected, but froth nonetheless. Pride and Prejudice is an amazing social commentary that makes itself palatable by wrapping it up in romance.
Rather, I want to talk about Elizabeth Bennet and our feelings about her. We tend to see Elizabeth as an utterly delightful character. To a modern reader, her flaws—her independence and her outspokenness—only serve to make her more appealing. It takes modern adaptations to help us understand something closer to how she would have appeared at the time of the novel’s publication.
One of my favorites for this purpose is The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (LBD). LBD was one of the first—if not the first—in the mid-twenty-teens trend of literary vlogs. Literary vlogs take classic works of literature and adopt them to a modern setting and a vlog format. It is a fascinating method of storytelling in its own right because these works need to deal both with the modernization of storylines that cannot be directly translated to today and they need to deal with the limitations imposed by the format.
Both of those challenges are relevant to our discussion. In LBD, the creators worked hard to make clear that Lizzie is not supposed to be fully likable. While we can criticize Darcy (both in this variant and in P&P) for failing to look beyond his initial impressions, we can also see that his criticisms of her brashness has some merit. One way that is communicated in LBD is Lizzie’s growing realization of the harm she is doing by airing her family’s grievances on a vlog that is public in-world as well as in our world.
At the time that LBD was being released, some fans objected to this depiction of Lizzie as a character with deep flaws. Because her flaws in P&P are ones that make her even more admirable to the modern reader, we resist the conclusion that Lizzie is partially to blame for her sister, Jane, getting thrown over.
We deeply desire our heros, women and men, to be fully admirable. They can be flawed, but those flaws must be of the type which emphasize our admiration for them. For Lizzie, we see her outspoken independence as a sign that she was a woman ahead of her times. For Daphne, we applaud her ability to punch a man who is molesting her or to have a conversation about masturbation. These women are inappropriate by the standards of their time, but kickass by the standars of ours.
Modernized ideal is not the only way in which flaws can be used to highlight a character’s admirability. Another trope is the delightfully scheming woman, as illustrated by Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary Crawley. Lady Mary demonstrates some aspects of the modernized ideal pattern: one of her early flaws is having sex outside of marriage. However, she’s also portrayed as scheming and mean in ways that make us like her less but also make us delight in her lack of conventionality.
What is common between these two types—modernized perfection and the scheming woman—as well as their many cousins is that we expect the women in these roles to stay in these roles.
Which brings us back to Daphne. Daphne is supposed to fit into the trope of idealization, one where her personal imperfections only make her all the more delightful to a modern viewer. So what do we do when we see her do something that is truly wrong? Do we blame the creators for ruining our idealized character? Or do we accept that this character can do real wrong, not the pretend “wrong” of violating the standards of their setting?
I believe we should do the latter. Seeing idealized characters sin, without excuse and without the softening lens of modern standards, does what art is supposed to do: it can make us think upon our own lives. It can make us wonder about the darkness inside each of us. It can make us ask ourselves, “What would have to happen to me to cause me to do something that terrible?” To know ourselves is to not just understand how we respond at our best, but also to understand how we respond at our worst. And so we must let characters we admire go down the path of sin, true sin and then reconcile who they are with whom we want them to be.