August 14, 2023
Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is a brilliant example of 21st-century storytelling. Part of its cleverness has to do with how it plays with facts. Even though Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is a Regency-era historical romance, it departs from the historical record in ways that are rewarding for a contemporary audience and therefore reveals something about the connection between creativity and meaning-making in the 21st century.
Both the official website of the British Royal Family and the Smithsonian Magazine offer the historically accepted versions of Queen Charlotte (19 May 1744 – 17 November 1818). However, since Netflix’s Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story isn’t interested in facts, where do its sympathies lie?
One of the criticisms of Netflix’s version of Queen Charlotte is that she wasn’t black and racial-economic slavery made the wealth of the Regency period possible. This focus on the historical inaccuracies and slights of hand of the limited series is like being angry that your math teacher can’t teach you to write an English essay. It’s asking the wrong question and therefore missing what’s truly insightful about this series. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is fantasy. It takes a real historical period and imagines a logic for why there are Black aristocrats. Essentially, it is working through what inclusion looks like in an elite predominantly white space, and you can’t get more elite than that British monarchy. Just ask Megan Markle. The audience of the Netflix series isn’t from the Regency era either. Rather, the audience is contemporary Americans living in a nation that is working through what inclusion and belonging look like in elite spaces and how people who aren’t white and privileged get access to those spaces, and why. Think of the recent Supreme Court case on admissions at Harvard University and UNC, Chapel Hill. Shifting our perspective to the present allows us to make sense of this cultural artifact so we can learn something about ourselves and our contemporary historical moment.
Once we stop asking a television show that isn’t attempting to teach us history why it isn’t historically accurate, we can now focus on what the show can actually offer us. One of the reasons why I like fantasy and science fiction written by Black writers from across the diaspora is that this writing explores other possibilities in different imagined universes. This literature works through questions like what Black liberation and wholeness look like. It is my contention that the Netflix series is actually doing this in a semi-recognisable world given that Shonda Rimes as the showrunner and writer is a Black woman. Yes, we aren’t transported to a mythical African landscape via Marlon James’ Dark Star Trilogy (which is a must-read if you haven’t already) or the Africanfuturism of Binti: The Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor (another must-read). Neither of these book series is interested in the West, its ideologies, and its systems. But in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, we are still in a Western construct; however, on a different historical path. It wonders what are the conditions of possibility for Black aristocrats, and it assumes that there was something so pivotal to make an impossible idea possible: the mental illness of King George III and the political and social implications of his health at a time when mental health was particularly misunderstood in Europe. This is where the inventiveness of the series is most apparent: in the departure from the historical record to explore truths about the human experience, especially through the lens of a Black woman and other middle-aged women, however privileged, who are always hitting up against systemic gendered limitations.
Regardless, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story explores how one Black woman navigates a hostile space to eventually triumph. We see Queen Charlotte’s rage at being married off with no consultation, her desire to escape the unknown King George on the day of her wedding, her hurt as a result of his perceived rejection, their immediate desire and eventual love for one another, her determination to make the best out of the severe limitations of King George’s mental health, her eventual disappointment and bitterness with the progressive nature of his mental health, and how she institutionalized Princess Augusta’s experiment of granting titles to prominent Black families. This Netflix series doesn’t shy away from imagining the complexity of Queen Charlotte and King George III’s relationship. Just like the actual historical figures, Queen Charlotte married the English king a few hours after arriving in England, they found affection with one another, had many children, and King George III’s increasing mental deterioration was transformative for them. It is ingenious how Shonda Rimes takes the specious claim that Queen Charlotte was black to depart from the historical record to explore what the series calls “The Great Experiment” of diversifying the aristocracy.
Queen Charlotte isn’t the only character who is developed with enough nuance to probe the full range of human feeling. There are: King George III, who struggles with shame over, and tries to hide, his mental illness; Lady Danbury, a Black woman, who is an influential member of the new Black aristocracy; Dowager Viscountess Bridgerton; Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales; Brimsley, the queen’s secretary; and Reynolds, the king’s secretary. We experience the intricacy of all their stories without emptying any of these characters of their complexity and contradictions: King George III, who undergoes a series of harsh and humiliating treatments in a failed bid to recover his mental health; the bittersweet opportunity of Lady Danbury’s marriage to an older man who is misogynistically unkind to her; the Dowager Viscountess Bridgerton, who misses the companionship of her late husband and desires to be in another relationship despite her age; the fierce and protective mother-love of the Dowager Princess of Wales for her mentally compromised son, King George; and the secret same sex relationship between young Brimsley and Reynolds that is a source of comfort years later for the older Brimsley. It is the best installment of the Bridgerton series because it traverses more complex territory than: two young people like one another, there is an obstacle to their getting together, they overcome this challenge, and get married. The Queen Charlotte prequel not only proves that older women have more and richer stories to tell because they’ve lived more life but also grants every character his/her complexity. It takes the situation of Queen Charlotte and King George III’s marriage and portrays their union from all of the perspectives of the characters listed above, their individual understanding of their experience of themselves and their interpersonal relationships, and their emotional hopes and fears.
Beyond the exceptional writing, another reason why I love this series is that it navigates the minefield of race in a way that doesn’t reproduce the burden of racism that seeks to limit Black people’s actualization. Once Princess Augusta, King George III’s mother, realizes that Charlotte is Black, she grants titles to several prominent Black families that eventually results in diversifying the British aristocracy. When Charlotte becomes the queen, she settles the question of succession for the newly minted Black aristocrats whose titles will now be inherited by their children. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story probes possibilities that are emotionally true for us as humans, like Lady Danbury being bombarded by other newly titled Black families on the question of succession when her husband dies as well as Lady Danbury and the Dowager Princess of Wales’s witty repartee and skillful negotiation with one another. The latter’s interactions are a brilliant example of how two women develop resilience in the face of experiences they ultimately don’t control: the death of a husband and the mental well-being of a son. Yes, their actions are driven by a mix of maternal love and selfish interests, but their selfishness has larger social and economic implications that end up benefiting a class of black families. One of the quiet subtexts of the Netflix Bridgerton series is the persistent feminist desire to realize and seize the day. I don’t know how much of this is the Netflix reimagining or the original book series, which I haven’t read; however, the element of race is a creation of Rimes. As a Black woman watching this series, I could comfortably enter into this fantasy world without holding my breath because I know it is working through questions that I navigate living and working in predominantly white spaces. If one gets past the big hair and even bigger attire, one can realize that its meaning is about the present, and consider what we can learn about ourselves from this “fiction inspired by fact.” Taking as a given from the series, the setting aside of systemic racism, to focus on the interpersonal, we can see how personal desires can have a larger socio-economic and transformative impact.
And this is what I wonder if AI can do. These Large Language Models (LLMs) that underpin ChatGPT and Bing have been trained on the internet and that includes all that is unsavory about us as humans. Because they are premised on patterns, their responses might only reproduce the racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia that is rife on the internet, as has been documented again and again. One of the questions for right now is: What kind of prompt engineering can offer us a liberatory work of art given the source material? We currently know that the creative potential of humans to mine our history to imagine liberatory possibilities is unlimited if that is the purpose of the artwork. However, if all we are interested in are cliches and reproducing what has been done before, AI can give us that kind of artwork (which is now the subject of several class action lawsuits). The question is: What kind of art do we want as the 21st century continues to unfold? Art can do what art has historically done for us: To explore the complexities, nuances, and contradictions of the human experience to help us make meaning of our experiences. Or do we want art that mines and mimics what we’ve done for the financial benefit of a few and seeks to displace artists who have something to say about our lived experiences?
As someone who has a Ph.D. in English and teaches literature, I hope that whatever path we as a society decide to take with AI (because it is ultimately a choice we make), it’s not a path that marginalizes artists, women, and Black people even further. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without the truly disruptive brilliance of the creative minds of women and Black artists, because their work has fed my mind as a Black female immigrant and helped me make meaning of my experience in this American experiment.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Jeannette Lee-Parikh for Intrepid Ed News.
