Bridgerton Season 4 Review | Can Grief Overpower Class Conflict?

Benedict’s (Luke Thompson) offer for Sophie (Yerin Ha) to become his mistress marks the end of the first part of Bridgerton Season 4 and the beginning of the second. The fifth episode, “Yes or No,” straddles the push and pull of a love untethered to society and craving legitimacy. Sophie cannot say yes, for the fear of her dignity and trauma becoming frivolous; yet staying away denies her the right to fall in love with whomever her heart desires. This season makes us believe that shrinking her world to accommodate society’s rules and strictures is a greater tragedy than the prospect of an unfulfilled romance.

But how to accomplish the difficult task of keeping Sophie’s faith alive (unbeknownst to the spectator, of course) in seeing a future with Benedict, and in turn, safeguarding the spectator’s belief that Sophie would indeed receive all—love, belonging, pleasure and acceptance—especially in a series where the class divide seems to be the only real conflict? 

Bridgerton takes tremendous delight in rewriting history’s segregation and discrimination of people along racial and ethnic lines, imagining a marvellous world of equality and inclusion. But the world it builds is quintessentially elite, in which capital, private property, money and imperialism organise people’s positions in society. This social ordering, based on class, allows a few to amass large portions of wealth and power at the expense of the many, sustaining the larger dream of flattening White supremacy.

A love story between a nobleman and a maid at the centre offered the series a chance to reflect on the limits of its own world, a chance to critique class hierarchy and the invisibility of labour performed by the working class, without disposing of its usual tools—desire, allure, and intimacy. This was something the fourth season promised at the start.

But the later episodes depart from this course, and romance, the backbone of Bridgerton, languishes as class relations are not reworked but avoided in the face of Sophie and Benedict’s love story. One registers sublime terror in this season, where love—which had conquered all tensions and differences in the previous seasons—is rendered weak in the face of class conflict. As if to ultimately imply that the chaos of class restructuring is not intrinsically pleasurable, the fantasies we cherished all along for a love transcending social stratification feel nothing short of contrivance.

While scepticism gradually begins to saturate the narrative, the love story becomes intangible. A series of absurd plot points begin to appear—Sophie’s father’s will is recovered, mentioning a sizeable dowry to soften the blow of poverty, not to mention her ridiculous imprisonment, and Araminta (her stepmother) is cornered for embezzling funds in the said will to allow Sophie to use the surname “Gun,” a shorthand for nobility. This charade is so poorly executed that Queen Charlotte’s riotous laughter upon hearing it is the only relief for the spectator.

However, the season’s most difficult theme is the parallel between love and loss, neither of which is met with grace. The condition of possibility for Benedict and Sophie’s union is the untimely death of Francesca’s husband, John Kilmartin. Her grief, along with that of Michaela and the respective families, momentarily suspends class struggle and questions of rank. A rupture in the characters’ psyches, as a result of mourning, creates a window for the main protagonists to come together through yearning and sexual attraction.

The discomfort is not about a death here and a blossoming of love there, but about the categorisation of this particular love story as an anomaly in this process. In other words, rather than creating narrative and cinematic space for individual resistance to customs and practices, their love story appears as an aberration. The tragedy is the evacuation of pure hope. History can no longer be strong-armed and seduced into behaving in this segment of the Bridgerton franchise, as power now recklessly sides with the elite, surrendering fantasy—the major driving force of the series—at the altar of birth and status.