Having your Duke and diversity too
Okay, I haven't actually been watching Bridgerton because we really only get absolutely bog-standard what used to be terrestrial channels, pretty much, and anyway, I hardly ever watch television, so getting to grips with streaming is really low down on my list of priorities.
But anyway, there has been so much about it over various bits of social media that I feel I have a general sense of what it's about and the things people are discoursing (personally I was aghast at the intelligence that they had introduced a gas-cooker into a Regency kitchen, you may imagine me going the full Edith Evans Lady Bracknell on 'A GAS-COOKER?')
But anyway, I understand that they have been doing a little jiggling of the original books (which I haven't read, either: I did actually skim the preview of one on Kobo and decided it was NQMT,D) in order to produce a diverse cast in a somewhat AU version of the actual early C19th.
And, me, I have been thinking (whistles innocently) that surely you could have a diverse narrative of romance and intrigue and contrivance and dramas at that period without you did undue violence to actual history -
(La, 'tis but a thought-experiment!)
- but to do that you might have to venture beyond the as it were Heyer-derived canon of Dukes and the upper-however-many-it-was, and their strict social codes that provide the kind of structuring to certain kinds of fiction that particular verse forms provide in poetry.
And presumably what people want is the balls and the fans and the frocks and the ritual and the bowing and the dowagers looking daggers and whispering, and all those appurtenances.
(I know there are novelists working in the romance genre who are pushing against/subverting those constraints and assumptions.)
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