Shondaland’s Regency Era: On “Bridgerton”
Patricia A. Matthew explores the multicultural Regency era in Shonda Rhimes’ new Netflix series Bridgerton.
The MOST compelling young woman in Shonda Rhimes’ new series Bridgerton is Marina Thompson, the country cousin of the fashionable and glamorous Featherington family. All of the young women looking for marriage in London have something to offer, and each is lovable in her own way, but Marina’s story elevates a series that would otherwise be entertaining but largely predictable. She’s beautiful, self-possessed, smart, and playful, and Ruby Barker’s charming and subtle performance of her as experienced, naive, resourceful, yet vulnerable all at once makes me hope we see her again for another season. She is a woman of color, and in the hands of another storyteller, this could have turned her into a queer symbol with a predictable narrative arc, especially in 1813 England. But this is Shondaland’s Regency England, so Marina is not alone; she is not even the only mixed-race character in the series. There are black actors among the servants, the streetwalkers, the merchant class, the young members of the aristocracy and their mothers. The queen is black (Queen Charlotte, played by Golda Rosheuvel). The dashing duke at the center of the love story is black (Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, played by Regé-Jean Page), and so are his parents (Daphne Di Cinto and Richard Pepple).
The aristocracy’s most feared governess, Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh), is black. With such a diverse cast, Bridgerton not only enters the contemporary Regency lexicon at a time when contemporary black writers, artists, critics, and scholars have succeeded in breaking down myths about its homogeneity, but it also gives us a multicultural world that feels organic and allows its young characters to have their own skin color. In other words, the black characters in this world are not servants of diversity in the story or servants of the white characters in the novel. They are equals. The floor of Lady Danbury’s ballroom is decorated with spirals that weave around the phrase Non scholæ sed vitæ discimus (We learn not for school, but for life). This is an aphorism that speaks to both young black women and men and their white counterparts, in the story and at home. Marina Thompson is certainly not the only black heroine to appear in contemporary stories about Regency England. Most recently, Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sanditon takes the silent West Indian heiress Miss Lambe (Crystal Clarke) and gives her as complex a backstory as the story’s white heroine Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams). While she never speaks in the novel, she roars in Davies’s translation, and no reasonable viewer could blame her. She is desired only for her wealth, her guardians are rigid, and most of the coastal community she is forced to join consider her an oddity. She is loved for her tenacity, and her friendship with Charlotte is as interesting to watch as her clandestine encounters with her lover Otis Molyneux (Jyuddah James). In Amma Asante’s 2014 Belle, the biracial heroine Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) also has wealth to show for it, a friendship with her cousin, and outrage at her plight and the fate of enslaved black men and women. Marina is in a different kind of story than any of these young women. Sanditon and Belle are heritage dramas in the BBC/PBS tradition; Bridgerton is a period drama whose scenes and characters are drawn from history. At times it feels more like a play than a drama.
