Credit: Netflix
Entertainment
“Bridgerton’s third season is finally letting middle-aged women shine”
By Meg Walters
9 months ago
4 min read
In season three, Bridgerton’s middle-aged women have become some of the most fascinating characters in the series. Writer Meg Walters explores why she loves seeing their storylines on screen.
We tend to think of Bridgerton as a show about the thrills of young love, a show that’s primarily concerned with its fresh-faced debutantes and their dashing young suitors. However, in its third season, it’s the show’s middle-aged women who are emerging as the most fascinating characters.
It is through these characters that the show subtly subverts the entire foundation on which romantic period dramas are built: the notion that marriage and a cursory little ‘happily ever after’ marks the end of a woman’s story. As the show’s older female characters illustrate, marriage is rarely the tidy ending it often appears to be.
Credit: Netflix
Now this is not to say that marriage isn’t important. In fact, these middle-aged mothers are the only people who can fully comprehend just how vital it really is.
Lady Violet Bridgerton, the Bridgerton matriarch, has always had a tough job on her hands; with eight children, the widower finds herself saddled with the difficult task of ensuring each of their futures. For her daughters, this means finding them a match. After all, unmarried women have little security and even less money. This season, we’ve been offered a peek into the stress of this endeavour as Violet tries desperately to find someone suitable for her daughter Francesca. Watching Francesca’s quiet affection for Sir John Stirling has been delightful, but even more endearing has been watching Violet realise and accept that her daughter cares for John (even though she can’t quite understand why).
Marriage is rarely the tidy ending it often appears to be
Violet may have a lot going on with so many children to deal with, but she is in a relatively fortunate position. The Bridgerton fortune is secure and plentiful, and none of her children will really suffer if they fail to marry.
Lady Portia Featherington finds herself in a similar predicament, although her circumstances are perhaps more dire. With no male heir, Portia risks losing her entire estate if one of her daughters does not have a son – and fast. Last season, the ever-savvy Portia managed to secure suitable husbands for her two eldest daughters, Prudence and Priscilla. However, she now finds herself having to urge them to, well… get busy in the bedroom.
Later in the season, Portia is thrilled when Penelope announces her unexpected engagement to Colin. However, although Penelope may have grand ideas about her marriage – that she will be able to keep her column and have a husband – Portia brings her back down to reality.
“Women don’t have dreams,” she tells her daughter. “They have husbands.”
The mothers of Bridgerton offer a dose of reality
Then there is Lady Araminta Cowper, Cressida’s mother. In the second part of season three, her story shows us just how awful marriage can be: when women need to make it down the aisle to secure their financial futures, they aren’t always blessed with a ‘love match’. In our first glimpse inside the Cowper residence (or rather, as Cressida calls it, “mausoleum”), we get a peek at the grim reality of the family’s situation. It’s clear that Araminta was forced into marriage with a gruff, older man, and now she is living a bleak, loveless existence as a result. Nevertheless, she has no choice but to push her own daughter towards the same fate.
The mothers of Bridgerton offer a dose of harsh reality. They have lived through their own debutante seasons and their own marriages. And although each of their experiences has been markedly different, they’ve all come out of it knowing one thing: there is no beating the system. Each mother-daughter duo – Violet and Francesca, Portia and Penelope and Arminta and Cressida – serves a sobering reminder that although this world may look frilly and fun on the surface, the women are in a cycle of self-sacrifice. And after the frothy delights of early courtships, things tend to get very real, very fast.
Credit: Netflix
This is something of a trope in period dramas. After all, who could forget the marriage-obsessed Mrs Bennet of Pride & Prejudice? But in Bridgerton, this is not the middle-aged woman’s lot. This season, Violet has been given the glimmer of a romantic arc of her own – and (sorry to the Polin fans) it’s already promising to be far more intriguing and nuanced than many of the more youthful romances in the show.
If the show’s third season teaches us anything, dearest gentle reader, it is this: while the passion and uncertainty of young love may be thrilling, both the joys and pains of lived experience can offer something far more profound. With the second part of Bridgerton’s third season, the show has finally found its heartbeat in its older female characters, thrumming away in the background and bringing unexpected weight and meaning to the frothy romances bubbling away on the show’s surface.
Images: Netflix
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