Dear Reader, let’s talk Bridgerton and *that* scene
I read Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series around 10 years ago. The fact that I am even old enough to refer to an event that happened more than 10 years ago is wild to me. The first season is based on the first book, The Duke and I which chronicles Daphne Bridgerton’s official introduction to society (aka the marriage-mart) and her subsequent fake-turned-real courtship with Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings.
A few years ago, it was announced that the book series had been optioned by a production company and I was momentarily excited. Being optioned doesn’t necessarily mean that the book will be turned into a movie/series, but rather that the production company has a claim on it for X amount of years. There have been dozens of times over the years when my fav series have been optioned and nothing has come of it. As a book lover, you know not to get your hopes up. Fast forward to finding out it was going ahead and Shondaland was producing it, the excitement was real.
I reread The Duke and I and was reminded why it was one of the few Regency books I didn’t like to reread. I don’t want to give too much of the story away because if I start trying to explain the entire plot then I won’t be able to stop. But if you haven’t read the series or watched it on Netflix, then major spoilers ahead.
Trigger warning: rape.
I HATED THE RAPE SCENE. I hated that it happened, I hated that it was glossed over, I hated that most people didn’t even realise it happened.
In the book, the series of events were slightly different to the Netflix adaptation. In the book, Daphne realises that the Duke pulling out during sex is purely because he doesn’t want children, not that he cannot have them. A fight ensues in which Daphne accuses him of betraying her and Simon argues that he made it abundantly clear before marriage that he could not give her a child, a fact that he was willing to die for instead of marrying her. Things are tense between the newlyweds and so Simon goes out to a tavern and gets completely drunk. He stumbles home to Daphne; she helps him get into bed and because of his insistence, she joins him to sleep.
He was in her control, she realised. He was asleep, and probably still more than a little bit drunk, and she could do whatever she wanted with him. She could have whatever she wanted.
She decides that Simon will give her a child, whether he wants to or not. This was difficult to read:
His eyes pinned upon her with a strange, pleading sort of look, and he made a feeble attempt to pull away. Daphne bore down on him with all her might.
When Simon realises what Daphne has done, he is devastated. He argues with her, begins to stutter and then leaves her. After a period of brief separation, Simon realises he loves her and wants her back. Daphne shows no remorse over her actions but insists that he betrayed and left her. Simon explains that he left only because during their fight, he began to stutter, something he hates losing control over.
Daphne’s head tilted slightly as furrows formed in her brow. “Is that why you left?”
He nodded once.
“It wasn’t about — what I did?”
His eyes met hers evenly. “I didn’t like what you did.”
“But that wasn’t why you left?” she persisted.
There was a beat of silence, and then he said, “It wasn’t why I left.”Daphne hugged her knees to her chest, pondering his words. All this time she’d thought he’d abandoned her because he hated her, hated what she’d done, but in truth, the only thing he hated was himself.
Daphne does not apologise. She privately ruminates over the wrongness of her actions, but just as quickly, puts it down to his lies forcing her to act out of character.
Reading the book again with fresher, more knowledgeable eyes, I was so sure that the Netflix adaptation would amend this storyline. I was quickly proved wrong. In the TV series, Simon (played by Regé-Jean Page) is not drunk and at that point he is completely unaware that Daphne (played by Phoebe Dynevor) knows about his contraceptive method. I don’t know if this change was an attempt to lessen the severity of the moment, a small change to signify hey, at least he wasn’t drunk! Well, it didn’t work, and it was still incredibly problematic. After Daphne’s sexual coercion, she immediately goes on the offense, confronting him for taking advantage of her non-existent sexual education. And that’s it. There is no apology, no acknowledgment and not even a second of self-reflection.
Aja Romano wrote a great article for Vox about the way the scene was portrayed in the adaptation. She touches upon the racial dynamics of the actors, an aspect that adds another level of insidiousness to an already awful scene. You can read the full article here.
It was super disappointing to watch that scene, especially when the rest of the series encompassed everything I love about Regency romances. The fake-lovers-to-real-lovers trope, the slow-burning love, the tortured hero, the extravagant parties, the waltzes, the dresses.
I wish they had either omitted that scene altogether, or at the very least, addressed it in a more responsible manner. The screenwriters clearly put a lot of thought into consent (as seen in Daphne’s interactions with Berbrooke) so is it really a far stretch for them to have deployed this same level of thought into the Simon-Daphne storyline?
