I’ll confess I was a late arrival to the Bridgerton fandom. When the show first debuted, plenty of people recommended it to me with glowing praise. “You have to watch it,” they said. “You’ll love it.” Maybe that’s what kept me away, my rebellious nature’s knee-jerk reaction to not being told what to do and definitely not being told I have to like what everyone else likes.
So, I stayed away, even as the momentum behind the show mounted, even when I was left out of Bridgerton conversations among my friends, even when my curiosity nearly sucked me in.
Then one night I was flipping through suggestions on Netflix and there it was. “I’ll just give it a try,” I told myself. “One episode. That’ll probably be enough to reassure me the show is indeed shallow, predictable, and oversexed, just as I’ve suspected.”
By the end of Episode 1, Season 1, I was hooked. I lost plenty of sleep over the next few months watching “just one more episode” on many a night.
I’m not going to go into all the reasons why the show inevitably succeeded in winning over this once-dubious fan, because everyone I know who watches the series has their own reasons for loving it. But when discussing the jubilant fantasy world that is Bridgerton, I almost never hear people talking about one element that is particularly enticing to writers like me.
There’s this character named Lady Whistledown (the perfect name for a gossip columnist). In the beginning, Lady Whisteldown’s identity is unknown to viewers. Oh, we all speculated, and no doubt some of us correctly guessed which character wielded the poisoned pen, but mostly we just reveled in the sheer joy of being greeted in each episode as “Dearest Gentle Readers” in the unmatched voice of Julie Andrews.
Maybe for writers, the most alluring and realistically impossible fantasy in the world of Bridgerton is the idea that a writer, any writer, could write with total anonymity and freedom whatever the hell we wanted to write! And, yes, like Lady Whistledown, sometimes we’d write things we’d later regret, and sometimes we’d get things wrong, and sometimes we’d hurt a friend. But other times, we’d reveal a harsh truth, or call out an injustice, or change society while changing ourselves. Or maybe at times, we’d simply entertain our readers and revel in watching them climb over each other to grab up our latest offering.
It’s impossible to imagine any writer ever enjoying that sort of anonymity in the world in which we currently live. Even pen names offer no protection anymore. And with the internet and social media making it easier and easier to take our words out of context, and with our inner journeys continuously illuminating our own misperceptions and prejudices, it’s terrifying to release anything into the world at all.
Ah, but to be Lady Whisteldown for just one day! To tell the stories we’ve held back our entire lives for fear of hurting or offending someone we hold dear, to reveal our true selves on the page (warts and all), to push every boundary we’ve set for ourselves and the ones that’ve been set for us, and to do so knowing our work would be gobbled up by the masses. That’s the unspoken fantasy of Bridgerton for many a writer.
And I imagine that fantasy does not just belong to writers. Many of us would love to find a way to create without ever holding back, in whatever form we choose. Many of us would love to have a secret way to tell our friends or loved ones what we really think of their choices, or tell our spouses exactly why that thing they do bugs us so dang much, or simply to stand up for our core beliefs without fear of being judged or canceled.
It’s all a false fantasy, of course, because even Lady Whistledown learns the hard way the power of the pen. In the end, she wishes she’d shown more restraint with her words, that she’d used them more often to build people up instead of tearing them down. In the end, she makes an impossible promise, to continue to be herself on the page but to do better by society.
And there we are, back to the central dilemma for all creatives, how to say what’s in our hearts without breaking hearts, including our own.
But for a few hours, while watching a TV show that reminds you at every turn that the world it has created is over-the-top fantasy, it’s fun to imagine that somehow you could be the one to change the world with your pen, if only no one knew who you were.
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