Higher Ed Musings 4.

On Bridgerton as Post-College Fantasy

Perhaps the most interesting recent show on college life — or rather the fantasy of life after college that college is selling — is Netflix’s Regency-era fantasy Bridgerton, a Shondaland production featuring the voice of Julie Andrews and based on the romance novels of Harvard alumna Julia Quinn. The big-budget second season (2022) broke all streaming records and the record breaking third season just ended this summer.

I should state up front that there is absolutely no mention of higher education or college life or scholarship in Bridgerton. And yet it is a remarkably compelling fantasy of life after a university education nonetheless. So what do I mean.

Bridgerton is about a rarified group of individuals and families known as the “ton,” helpfully defined by a Netflix cheat sheet as: “the who's who of British high society during the Regency era [1811-1818]. These aristocrats and upper-crust gentry are named after the French expression bon ton, or good manners.” The stories revolve around the Bridgerton family, the widowed Dowager Viscountess, her son Anthony (the Viscount), and seven other children, some already “out” in society and of marriageable age. The Netflix show departs from Julia Quinn’s books by introducing race: a good portion of the ton are families of color and part of the draw for today’s audience is that the various members of the Bridgerton family fall in love and marry across the color line — an inaccurate statement because there is no color line and the hue of the love interests goes entirely unmentioned. (The longstanding rumors that Queen Charlotte, 1744-1818, may have had African heritage, grounds this change.) Since 2021 much has already been written on this aspect of the show, see here, here, here and scores of other places.

But none of this is what makes Bridgerton a post-college fantasy for its tens of millions of overwhelmingly female viewers.

What I want to point to is the particular fantasy of being part of a privileged and implicitly educated group guided by pageantry, where everyone has clearly studied hard and practiced countless rituals (all those dance steps!) and yet those hours of work and study are not part of the story. Apart from a marriage partner, nobody is striving to get something they don’t already have. The offscreen labor and practice is the price of having what you were born into. (In Bridgerton there is no downstairs. It is all upstairs.)

There is a strange egalitarianism among the ton — among the women, particularly, nobody is better than anyone else, really. Everyone dresses and dances equally well. Everyone is an amateur at the arts. There are none of the small frictions and competitions of meritocracy, where among one’s peer group some might have gone to a higher ranked school or belonged to a more elite sorority or had a more prestigious internship or job waiting after college. There is no jostling for anything but a possible match and a win at lawn games. The show offers all the pageantry of an educated life without the insecurity and precarity. (I’m bracketing off the Featherington family situation because they survive.)

None of the men talk about having been to university or intending to go to university. Poetry is mentioned as a conversation topic; one of the younger Bridgertons mentions his Latin tutor; the vaguely feminist Eloise Bridgerton laments there is no other life for her beyond the ton and is given by a printer some radical books to read. But these are minor moments and subplots.

Of course every show leaves some things out. It doesn’t really matter how Lady Whistledown / Penelope Featherington learned to write so expertly or where the tutors and governesses are, though they must be somewhere. What matters is the uselessness of education to the plot of Bridgerton. The show is about being part of a privileged community, not about how to enter a privileged community and keep your place once you get there, which is what higher ed is selling hard in the twenty-first century.

Bridgerton is a fantasy of post-college life in that it is selling adherence to public pageantry and ritual among select individuals who may have different pigments but act the same, whose attention is not on an uncertain future but on a privileged present.

It matters most of all that Bridgerton’s setting is Britain. Here I turn to Elisa Tamarkin’s excellent 2008 book Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, which examines American’s love of all things British, particularly and notably among African Americans from Frederick Douglass onward who were made to feel at home among the abolitionist aristocracy and whose gentle manners drew from British sources. Anglophilia, Tamarkin argues, is not just “elite nostalgia,” but also devotion to traditions that speak to “fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics.”

The most interesting chapter of Tamarkin’s book is on how American colleges and universities borrow so heavily from British traditions. The regalia! The floppy hats! The official crests and banners! One doesn’t have to have been to an Ivy League graduation to realize that’s it’s all a 100% British import. In the nineteenth century, Tamarkin argues, universities

asked students increasingly to locate the significance of college in its social forms: from literary societies, fraternities, and intramural sports, to rituals of celebration and dress, the life of college came to reflect an appreciation for the bonds that students forged to each other through attachments to their institutions. The rise of student clubs and societies indicated just some of the ways that college sentiment was first organized and codified in antebellum America. The period gave us the first yearbooks, college reunions, college songs, and college novels. Commencement and other annual rituals took on new status as ceremonial performances of college feeling toward alma mater— all of which also served to distinguish a “Harvard man” or a “Princetonian” by reminding students that they owed their identities to the local culture of their respective colleges. From the broader anthropology of these identities, we discover how the social rituals made it possible for college in America to function as an institution of social identity in the first place; for the expectation that college life should have a distinctive character at all is a lasting consequence of this period. To say that this character is English is to suggest that behind the sense of college as an institution that we sentimentalize and love is an English understanding of how individuals belong to society, and it to them.

But why? And why still now?

Because it all works. Or has been mostly working, even as doors have been opened wider and wider to diverse individuals across the country and globe. Who hasn’t wanted to feel a sense of belonging to an institution that has been granting status apart from the work it took to get there and the work required once there? And yet afterwards. What remains?

For years Facebook was the after-college party and it still is, for many, beyond class reunions and sorority/fraternity gatherings. But the rise of alternative social media and the fragmentation of so many institutions means belonging is harder to achieve. Add to this the rising anger at institutions to be different, to divest from this or that terrible thing, to not set strict rules about how to act and what not to say. Anger at the beloved queen, at the alma mater, collapses the whole enterprise.

Does the current state of higher ed in the US have anything to do with the popularity of Bridgerton? I say it does. And if so, the popularity of Bridgerton may be increasingly showing higher ed in a poor light by contrast and we’d better take note.