Is Lady Violet the Oracle of ‘Bridgerton’?

Lady Whistledown, a writer who specializes in high-society gossip, may be narrating episodes of ‘Bridgerton,’ the Netflix Regency drama from Shondaland, now in its second season. Unmasked as Penelope Featherington last season, the young writer runs in and out of carriages, hides in maid’s cloaks and speaks in a fake accent at a print shop, played by Nicola Coughlan and voiced by Julie Andrews.

But Whistledown isn’t pulling the strings, she’s just describing them.

Despite its increasingly diverse cast, the world of ‘Bridgerton’ remains a patriarchal one, where men rule and (heterosexual) marriage matters a lot.

For women, it is the only thing, the only way to improve their living conditions and hope for survival—which makes the fall of the Featherington family after the death of the head of the family all the more desperate; the women of the family are dependent on one man after another.
However, in this world, we have many examples of strong women doing everything they can to create change: most notably the Queen (Golda Rosheuvel), Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh), and Lady Bridgerton. The Queen has the most obvious charisma of the women, although she mostly uses that charisma to throw parties and interfere in marriages. And one of the women, Lady Bridgerton, seems to have her own, almost prophetic, power.
“Bridgerton” focuses on the Bridgerton family, who have a lot of money and a lot of children. The first season belongs to eldest daughter Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) and her eventual and inevitable marriage to Simon (the ever-so-slightly handsome Regé-Jean Page), a handsome and aloof Duke who resembles Mr. Darcy. This season’s Mr. Darcy is the eldest Bridgerton son, Anthony (Jonathan Bailey), who has been objecting to and thwarting his sister’s marriage prospects in the name of protecting her. Regency romances really love their Mr. Darcys. And behind every Darcy
Lady here is Lady Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell). In the first season, the Bridgerton mother is essentially raising her eight children (yes, eight). She tries very, very, very late to talk to Daphne about sex—on her daughter’s wedding night. Lady Bridgerton’s sheltered upbringing does not help her daughter. She hesitates, embarrassed, red-faced. Her efforts are futile, to connect with her daughter, to help her.

Lady Bridgerton is genuinely kind. This means she is ignored, rejected. And, like Daphne’s sexual talk, she sometimes gets it wrong, clumsily.

But she quietly and consistently does her best, despite her limited ability to help and her limited position in “the upper echelons.” As a widow, her primary responsibility is to ensure her children are safely out of the nest—though Anthony’s future wife replaces her as head of the household.
In the second season, we learn more about Lady Bridgerton’s young widowhood, and are given a glimpse of the true love she and Lord Edmund Bridgerton had for each other, before it was cut short. Lady Bridgerton was heavily pregnant at the time of her husband’s sudden death. The birth scene and its aftermath are emotionally difficult, both because of the sheer anguish on Gemmell’s face and because of the precariousness of a woman’s life at this point, in a body that doesn’t really belong to her, not in terms of decisions (feel familiar?). Young Anthony is put in the impossible position of not being able to choose between his mother and his newborn sibling: A doctor tells him to make the decision for her, if the birth goes badly. The postnatal depression that Lady Bridgerton may suffer after giving birth to her dead husband’s last child, a child who will never know him, feels very real. It’s also an opportunity for Gemmell’s delicate, emotional performance to become dark, profound. The word that best suits Gemmell is vulnerability. She risks a lot, including the possibility that the audience might turn away from her during the next stage of Lady Bridgerton’s grief, which is anger. But all she could do was feel.