It’s not the most feminist decision to agree to be a rich guy’s mistress instead of his wife or girlfriend. But it would have been the most pragmatic one.
Netflix’s sudsy Regency Era relationship drama Bridgerton, about the goings on (or goings in) of the titular large and wealthy family and other members of the high society known as the ton, has always been one that celebrates female sexual empowerment.
Even when those actions are problematic—such as the season one storyline involving eldest sister Daphne’s (Phoebe Dynevor) determination to get pregnant with or without her husband Simon’s (Regé-Jean Page) full consent—the Shonda Rhimes–produced adaptations of Julia Quinn’s best-selling novels are steadfastly matrifocal. The newly released fourth season includes the yearnings of the family’s widowed matriarch Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell) and the sexual confusion of naive and shy Bridgerton sister Francesca (Hannah Dodd). But the season’s main love interests are second son Benedict (Luke Thompson)—the family libertine who spent last season in a clandestine throuple—and Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha), a headstrong maid who would sooner lose her job at a country mansion than submit to the pressures of the estate’s heir, a douchey nepo baby from Benedict’s friend group.
But, as progressive as it may be in supporting the female gaze, Bridgerton is still a show set not just in a patriarchal world, but in a classist one, too. The first half of the fourth season, which premiered January 29, ends with Benedict and Sophie enjoying a quick (but effective) tryst on a staircase in the help’s quarters before he pops the question: “Be my mistress.” It’s as jarring and unromantic to audiences as you might imagine, dearest gentle reader.
Sophie’s immediate reaction is to throw a metaphorical middle finger and leave him for a night at the pub with her friends and fellow commoners. From a modern-day feminist standpoint, this is the obvious and only respectable response. In today’s parlance, the word conveys a negative stereotype about gender and power dynamics. “This word is sexist,” wrote Kelly McBride of the nonprofit journalism organization Poynter Institute in a 2019 essay aimed at dissuading newspapers and magazines from using “mistress” in stories about the women involved in public relationships with influential men. “It lacks a male equivalent, and reduces women to their sexual relationship with men” even if it “is a convenient term [because] it implies sex, lies, and secrecy and it rolls off the tongue.”
But what would all it’s implications have been in early 19th century Britain?
Instyle asked Sarah Richardson, a professor of modern British history at the University of Glasgow, who has written about the proliferation of affairs and STDs in Regency England. Mistresses and courtesans of the upper class may have caused a scandal but they were also common, if not expected, she says, both before and after the era of Bridgerton. She notes that London’s National Portrait Gallery displays images of many of these women. There’s a Mrs. Fitzwilliam, who is described simply as a courtesan, sitting properly with a fantastic hat for a mezzotint circa 1777, and Emily St. Clare, an actress and mistress of Sir John Fleming, Baron De Tabley, showing a bit of shoulder circa 1800-1810. Nell Gwyn, the bawdy and dry-witted actress and mistress of Charles II—she reportedly called their son a “little bastard” until the king gave him a proper title and also held the kid out of a top-story window when Charles was passing by so he would be forced to notice him—is seen in many paintings, topless or cleavage-baring.
These women were professionals, in various senses of the word. They may have benefited from some financial or societal perks as a result of these relationships, but they also had options.
“I think the difference might be that Sophie is a maid,” Richardson says via email. “Most of the women in the [National Portrait Gallery] were prostitutes or actresses or had some independent existence before becoming mistresses. They had some bargaining power and were not necessarily reliant on their suitors.”
This was true of Siena Rosso (Sabrina Bartlett), the opera singer whom eldest Bridgerton Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) dated before he met his eventual wife, Kate (Simone Ashley). That affair ended when Siena told Anthony to stick to the women of the ton.
Being with Anthony may have brought Siena temporary financial security, but where would she be if they broke up? Would she be able to go back to her career or would she be unhireable? And even if they were to marry (which was highly unlikely, given his station as the head of a prominent family), she knew she’d never be accepted in high society.
Servants in Regency Era England, however, weren’t thought to have these same kinds of freedoms to decide their own life and career paths, Richardson says. Sophie would probably continue to work as a maid and their affair would be a blemish on the family’s name.
“Maids were virtually household property,” she says. “So whilst there were plentiful liaisons between masters and maids, it is unlikely that Sophie would have been elevated to the status of a mistress. More normal was either to sack maids if they got pregnant or keep the liaison secret.”
Maids also couldn’t turn down their employers’ advances and Bridgerton doesn’t ignore this quandary even if the Bridgertons themselves want to. No matter how progressive Benedict may be in the bedroom, he is still the clueless rich boy who doesn’t get why Sophie was immediately exiled from her job when she disobeyed some blue blood’s lecherous advances at a party—or why this action is one of the reasons she’s scared she won’t find future employment. Technically, it’s even a risk for Benedict’s well-meaning cottage caretaker Mrs. Crabtree (Susan Brown) to tell her employer that he cannot truly have Sophie’s full consent if they do get together; Sophie’s rank is so disposable and her livelihood so precarious that she must go along with whatever he wants.
Bridgerton is a story built on fairy tales; none more so than this season. Season four is directly lifted from the Cinderella folk story about an abused domestic laborer and her wish for security (which, because of its time and place, only happens when she marries a rich man). There have been hints that Sophie may be more than the orphaned and illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man who wrote her out of his will; that she has more financial and societal power coming to her. Audiences will have to wait until the second half of the season premieres on February 26 to find out for sure. But as it stands right now? She would have had no choice but to accept Benedict’s offer, lest she be cast out (again) like a spoiled pumpkin.
