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A literary novel being branded as a ‘classic’ is a rare and, I would imagine, honouring feat. To be a classic, a novel has to be unique and creative, it has to say something meaningful about the state of society, it has to be...

entirely unlike Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton: The Duke and I. I’m sorry, Bridgerton fans, but this novel just really didn’t do it for me. Was it the portrayal of female pleasure in the bedroom? No! Was it the unashamedly steamy sex scenes that were clearly aimed towards indulging a female audience? Of course not! Was it everything else?...Maybe. 

Despite the recent surge in women realising that “you’re not like other girls” is not a compliment, Daphne ‘I’m-not-like-other-girls’ Bridgerton seems to have captured a number of hearts. In one of the first pages of the novel, we’re conveniently informed of Daphne being told, ‘you’re just not like regular females. You’re positively normal’. 

Yeesh, it’s one thing to position your protagonist as interesting and desirable – it’s another thing to simultaneously insult every other female character that exists. But the predictable tropes don’t end there! Simon ‘I’m-constantly-threatening-to-kill-peole-including-my-love-interest’ Hastings is your typical bad boy who can only be cured by the innocent and naïve Girl Next Door. ‘Women positively shivered’ at the mere sight of him, because a point must be made about his shockingly good looks, and that point apparently can’t be made without the generalisation that all women are lustful beings awaiting nothing more than a good-looking man. 

Quinn’s novel is full of tropes that I’m sure we’ve all read before in many, many FanFictions – the fake dating AU, the oops-there’s-only-one-bed AU, and best of all, the sex-is-a-magical-and-never-painful-experience AU, where men can simply use ‘one powerful thrust’ to enter a virgin woman’s body and, what do you know, it didn’t even hurt her! As a side note, who are these potentially dangerous unrealistic portrayals of sex really helping, anyway?

I believe it is because of all these reused and predictable tropes that Quinn’s novel has repeatedly been labelled ‘shallow’ and ‘vapid’, with Aja Romano even calling it a ‘historical Gossip Girl, with even less depth’. Ooft.

Now, I’m not saying the book is all bad. Its drama can be noteworthily page-turning, but a classic novel must contain more than that. To be labelled the modern Jane Austen for a novel that contains little more than already-seen tropes and cliché character archetypes? Sorry again, Bridgerton fans, but I can’t imagine myself ever placing this book into the same category as works like Pride and Prejudice – this one is heading for the trash pile. 

References

1. Romano, J (2020) ‘Netflix’s New Regency Drama Bridgerton is as Shallow as the Aristocrats it Skewers’, Vox, accessed 20 September 2020.