This morning, I share a guilty pleasure, and I think there are several of us who share it – although it is practiced alone I imagine, each in front of their little computer. I named : The Bridgerton Chroniclesan American series broadcast for several years on Netflix, whose red logo reflects when viewing that of my own shame, unless it is the opposite.
For the blessed who do not know or who only have contempt for the thing, I tell: the Bridgertons are a family who lives at the dawn of the 19th century in a fantasy town in England, a family of nobles, like most of the others around them, and whose main activity is matrimonial: mothers look for suitors for their offspring, fathers go hunting, ruin themselves or do business, sons go to the club but are also looking for the mother of their future children, the girls play the piano, fiddle with fabrics at the milliner’s, sometimes read a book while sighing at the window. And all these little people meet up and gossip in events which tirelessly punctuate what we call the season: garden parties, croquet games, and above all, of course, balls. All in a candy box aesthetic, colors and flowers everywhere until they burst.
Put like that, what’s new you might say, well that’s the whole question. The Bridgerton Chronicles stir in the spectator, and probably especially the spectator, a completely serious and complicated matter: in a time when we are, more and more collectively concerned and enlightened on questions of gender and sexuality, and on the way in which we represents them, how can we desire to look at this?
It must be said that we are smart among the Bridgertons, we are biased. The series created by Shonda Rhimes, popess of bon ton pop culture, multiplies the safeguards to stand out from the sub-Austenian soap opera, featuring without concern for historical verisimilitude black characters in all social strata, up to the Crown , by portraying young girls who are apparently free, who have no use for marriage and who are desirous, and by showing sex, within reasonable limits.
Let’s not lie to each other
Each season contains in its very story little tips and tricks which deny the romantic romance – in the last, the first half of which has just been put online, we discover a new young Bridgerton whose turn to be the best part of the season, Francesca. She’s as pretty as a heart, but her only interests are silence and playing the piano, she’s a geek in a Victorian envelope. She therefore falls under the spell of a young man who, like her, loves nothing more than silence, and with whom she spends the best moments of her life motionless and silent on a sofa. The series has therefore completely integrated a character who can no longer stand the talkative and shrill fiction that generated it.
However, let’s not be fooled, let’s be honest with ourselves: what interests us in the Bridgerton chronicles is not what the series invents pseudo diversions from the romantic form, that is at best the small shoe foot which slips us unsuspectingly into the eternal slipper of vair – and we are once again, before the moral and vaguely erotic turpitudes of Colin and Penelope, as we were before Cinderella: eager for shimmering dresses and fiery princes. Basically, this series is an excellent standard meter, which allows us to measure the persistence of our archaic little girl reflexes.
