Nearly two months after the release of Netflix’s Bridgerton, I do not know a single person who has yet to watch it. When I have found myself in conversations about the show, most of them focus on how “sexy” the Duke, Simon Basset, is or how the romance he and Daphne Bridgerton developed throughout the show was magical. And while yes, Simon is definitely not hard to look at, we need to talk more about Eloise Bridgerton. Eloise is a feminist before her time and that needs to be acknowledged.
Bridgerton, a show set during the Regency era in London, follows the eight Bridgerton children as they navigate the social scene towards finding love and marriage. A majority of the female characters on this show devote their lives to going to balls and on dates with men. Marriage, settling down and having children are the most important things to all of these female characters.
The only female character who is portrayed as deviating from the norm is Eloise Bridgerton, the fifth Bridgerton child. Throughout the series, she makes it clear that she does not care for dressing up for balls to be shown off to men. She wants her life to revolve around writing, traveling the world and going to university – something that was uncharacteristic for females at this time.
Through spending the entire social season in search of attracting a husband, the female characters in Bridgerton show that domestic life was at the forefront of women’s thoughts at this time. Daphne was the central female character of this show and served as a representation of the traditional life females led during the Regency era. She spent her days hoping a suitor would show up to her house, and she spent her nights putting on fancy ball gowns and makeup, hoping that a desirable man asked for her hand to dance. In contrast, Eloise exhibits more of a modern outlook on life with an unexpected feminist twist. She does not feel fulfillment through attracting a suitor or looking pretty for a ball. Instead, she wants to live her life for herself. She has ambitions of her own and is unwilling to throw them away for fitting the social norm. In her era, Eloise may have been a minority for having her own ambitions, but she is very characteristic of a modern feminist.
While I enjoyed watching Simon and Daphne fall in love and find what Daphne was searching for throughout the entire series, I found myself drawn to Eloise’s feminist storyline. She was a refreshing modern character in a period drama that focused on female characters living their lives in pursuit of finding and satisfying a male.