The Virgin Plot

One of the cardinal laws of romance plots is that they must be forbidden. Romeo and Juliet’s families are deadly enemies, Mr Rochester of Jane Eyre fame has a secret wife in the attic, Anna Karenina has a not so secret husband, Mark Antony was considered a traitor for loving Cleopatra. There’s a practical dimension to this. It’s not very interesting to read about smooth, uninterrupted love affairs. In a talk I went to recently with the French writer Colombe Schneck, she remarked that she had tried to write a happy love story, eventually published as La Tendresse du Crawl or Swimming in Paris, simply because no one ever does. She was midway through a nine-month relationship and totally besotted. For once in her life, love seemed easy. After she sold the concept to her editor and started working on it, her boyfriend broke up with her abruptly. Suddenly the happy love story became a story about dashed hopes, obsession gone wrong, about Colombe stalking Gabriel at the pool hoping he’ll see her and fall back in love with her all over again. 

It used to be easier to create forbidden love stories when social relationships were more strictly governed by rules and taboos. Vivian Gornick argues at the conclusion of The End of the Novel of Love that novels have lower stakes now for this reason. Couples can just date, just have sex, just break up, just cheat, just divorce. Even if there are some social consequences, they are generally not ruinous. Raymond Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh, originally published in 1923, is entirely constructed around an illicit teenage love affair. The girl’s husband is away fighting in the First World War. The boy is still in high school, too young to fight. Left behind in the countryside, they start sneaking around. All the dramatic tension of the book comes from the thrill of secrecy, of jealousy, and the potential consequences of getting caught—all the elaborate architecture of adultery. To compensate for this, modern romance tends to invent problems: petty, interpersonal issues, social standing, poor communication, or diverging politics. 

It also perhaps accounts for the meteoric rise of historical romance. The book which is generally credited with the invention of the “bodice ripper” genre, The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss, was published in 1972 and quickly became a bestseller. It remains in print today. The book is set in the early 19th century and features a poor but scrappy heroine who, while escaping from an attempted rape, is mistaken for a sex worker and abducted onto a ship. There, she is raped by the ship’s captain, who realizes afterwards that she was a virgin. He continues to rape her, although with a softer attitude, and eventually she falls in love with him. They have a baby, get married, and after some setbacks, live happily ever after. 

This trope is ubiquitous in historical romance, although generally in a more oblique form now. In Outlander, Claire Randall is transported back in time to the 18th century and the first person she comes across attempts to rape her. She has to be rescued by the brooding Scottish boy with whom she will go on to have a passionate love affair. What is charming about him partly is this frisson of danger. He could rape and subjugate her. It’s the 18th century and everyone thinks she’s a witch. But instead, he chooses chivalry. “I think there’s an appeal for self-styled feminists,” writes Emma Green on Outlander, “[...] to fantasize about “traditional” romantic and sexual roles. [...] For 18th-century women, who had no choice but to marry manly husbands and be charmed by their chivalry, this is patriarchy. For relatively liberated feminists, though, it’s a little… sexy. It’s transgressive.”

Unlike in “dark romance,” a growing genre of outlandish kink-driven novels that make 50 Shades of Grey look chaste by comparison, rape isn’t really a distinct fantasy in historical romance. Instead, its constant appearance functions more as a benchmark of patriarchy, a lazy shorthand to demonstrate what women are up against. The alternative is to find a man who will protect you. When rape is more explicitly fantasy,  as in The Flame and the Flower, it is justified theoretically by the sexual mores of the time. In a world where women are punished for premarital sex, punished for experiencing pleasure, or being too into it, the appeal of having someone else take the choice away from you is permission to enjoy it. If this seems like a bizarre reversal of real world patriarchal dynamics, it is just mass market genre fiction in the end. It plays to our libidinous desires. 

It is perhaps a sign of how vexed these romantic politics are that Bridgerton has emerged as the star of the genre. The novels by Julia Quinn are pretty traditional. They are peopled by young women in frippery searching for husbands, at once feisty and virginal, and by rakish womanizing men who actively resist being pinned down until it comes to that one special girl. But the show is a mashup of genres, sometimes more rom com than romance, cultivating minor characters, playing with eras and timelines. It’s spiritually most similar to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a lavish visual feast of historically inaccurate dresses and dances with some sort of steamy encounters along the way and some sort of feminism baked in. 

Bridgerton is unusual for its color-blind casting, where actors of all different racial and ethnic backgrounds mingle freely against an 18th century London backdrop. It has floated an upcoming queer storyline and romance plotlines for the older women in the show. The young women tend to be bluestockings. They sit around and think about feminism. The men support them unconditionally. The most recent season featured a young lord at a dance in a wheelchair and a Deaf debutante using sign language, albeit so vanishingly briefly that you could easily have missed it. It also featured Nicola Coughlan as the romantic lead, whose body type may not have been especially out of the ordinary as a bombshell in the 18th century but is certainly unusual in contemporary period drama.

If this world sounds progressive, it maintains a traditional and fundamental obsession with virginity as a plot point. Daphne of Season 1 has to marry her reluctant suitor after she was compromised by being alone with him and is so innocent on her wedding night that she doesn’t realize he is pulling out to prevent pregnancy. In Season 3, one of the Featherington sisters, months into her marriage, realizes that she and her husband haven’t been having sex at all, just kissing and dry humping. Meanwhile, Penelope, somehow more enlightened than her sisters, has premarital sex with her fiance, Colin, a reformed rake. He is shown earlier in the series having threesomes with sex workers before deciding he is in love with Penelope. She is so shy she covers her breasts with her hands. After they have finished the act, she asks him how she compares to the women in Paris. He laughs it off. 

Virginity functions as an obvious plot device in Bridgerton to maintain tension and drama. The couples can’t just easily pair off because they have to go through a whole courtship ritual first. But it also works on a deeper level as a fantasy about “fixing” a promiscuous man incapable of settling down, usually because of his deep psychic wounds, and about being inducted by fire as it were into the pinnacle of romantic and sexual bliss. Penelope and Colin kiss in a carriage, only the second time she has ever kissed anyone, he swiftly goes down on her and she finishes before the carriage stops. It’s a simple fantasy. This really sought after experienced man suddenly decides he’s madly in love with you and gets you off in a carriage before proposing to spend the rest of your lives together. Easy enough to understand. 

The problem in Bridgerton is that the stakes of virginity are so low as to feel negligible. Nothing bad ever really happens to anyone. The characters who transgress figure it all out. Marriage is a happily ever after salve. Marital rape, when it occurs, is played off as a gag or as kind of hot. One character remarks that all the rules of the aristocracy, all their social codes and policing of each other’s behavior and elaborate terms of engagement, have the sole purpose of keeping the marriage market churning. Once married, you are free to do as you please. This indirectly acknowledges the purpose of marriage in this society, shoring up power and property, but elides this definition in favor of a fluffier and more sanitized version, one in which pairing off with your perfect match is the ultimate purpose of the rich. 

The tradition from which Bridgerton derives, sprawling, gossipy, centered around the social and sexual lives of women, owes a lot to its real 18th century counterpart: Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. Published by Samuel Richardson in 1748, the novel was intended to be a “conduct book,” a didactic guide to morals and behavior. Richardson apparently fretted over whether the moral really landed. That it arguably didn’t fully land is perhaps one of the reasons Clarissa is considered an abiding classic in its own right. It’s a big epistolary novel, bringing in a polyphony of voices and gossip and perspectives which make it feel grounded in a buzzing social world.

The plot is basically this: Clarissa’s family tries to force her into an arranged marriage with a man she hates by isolating her. Trapped in her room, she starts a correspondence with another suitor of hers, a libertine named Lovelace, who seems like her only way out. She elopes with him but refuses to sleep with him since she is still suspicious of his motives. Her family disown her in response and she stays with Lovelace for months, resisting his increasingly machiavellian attempts to seduce her. Eventually, she tries to run away and in response, he drugs and rapes her. Clarissa falls into a manic state and becomes sick. Lovelace tries to rape her again but when she threatens to kill herself, he is fully convinced of and impressed by her moral purity, and decides that he does want to marry her. However, Clarissa is repelled by him and instead wastes away from stress and depression until she dies. Lovelace is killed in a duel shortly thereafter. 

What rescues the book from primness is Clarissa’s voice. She is staunchly committed to virtue, but not simply as an abstract. She reads conduct literature herself, devoted to being a good woman, but also a good person. She lights her own fire in the morning because she gets up before the servants. She shows a kind of self-reliance and authority that is not usually granted to women in writing of the era. Rita Goldberg writes in Sex and Enlightenment that Clarissa’s one misstep, running away with Lovelace, can be read either as a fatal lapse in judgment, or as the result of being a victim caught between a rock and a hard place. “Out of this essential ambiguity have arisen many of the readings and misreadings that have made Clarissa such an important document in the literary (and indeed moral) history of women).” 

In other words, this space for ambiguity, the space where Richardson may be said to have failed at spiritual didacticism, is where Clarissa becomes literature. The heroine comes to value her own self-determination, her own authority. Marriage is not only unwelcome because she dislikes the first suitor and distrusts the second. It also represents an intrusion into her life, a monopolization of it. In reclaiming her own voice and describing her numerous experiences of violation, she becomes not only a narrator but also an author. She is allowed to speak. 

This is also the point of Penelope’s arc more or less. She cannot give up her anonymous and wildly popular gossip pamphlet even when it threatens to destroy her life, because it is her only chance to be heard. When her secret is revealed, her fiance, whom she has already slept with, decides against calling off their engagement because he has too much respect for her and for proper conduct. He briefly ices her out but quickly reconciles, admitting his wild admiration for her success, bravery, and popularity, and his jealousy for her writing skill and wit. She is feted by high society and lives happily ever after. 

Penelope has no particular values and therefore no particular moral crisis. She routinely writes nice things about her friends and mean things about her enemies. When another young woman tries to come forward as the gossip columnist to escape a forced arranged marriage to a vicious and controlling elderly man, she is ostracized and treated as ridiculous. Penelope writes a quick rejoinder to her attempted column, making it clear that the other girl is nowhere near as talented. Maybe she should have gotten that arranged marriage. She has no brains after all. 

It’s not that I think Penelope should be abandoned by Colin and made to die of a mysterious wasting illness. It’s a romance story. The whole point is fluff and pointless tension that is easily and lovingly resolved. But the problem with setting up the structure of traditional sexual mores without any of their stakes is how appealing it makes it all seem. It’s patriarchy sugar-coated on a spoon. Why shouldn’t a man whisk you away to live in his huge palace and you can be pretty and wear dresses and have a million servants and a million babies and oh, by the way, he also loves your writing. It falls into the Outlander trap that Emma Green describes in the passage quoted above. It makes traditional gender roles seem romantic and sexy and transgressive because it grants the young women in the story the illusion of choice. They are choosing to be in love and get married and be impregnated a bunch of times and plan balls and stuff. 

The only intrusion upon this fantasy is in the second season when the most contrarian and least marriage-minded Bridgerton sister, Eloise, develops a crush on a printer’s assistant, who gives her a pamphlet he has written about the case for women’s liberation. Now here’s a real cause, he says. Eloise is reflexively defensive of her scene, critical of his approach. When he ends up being surveilled because of her and she ends up in the gossip papers for meeting with “political radicals,” the brief romance ends. Eloise however suddenly wants to fall in love. She does not develop class consciousness or any more political radicalism from of the encounter. Instead, she realizes that it can be kind of nice to talk to a man who gets her. 

Which, sure, it is. And valorizing that love and intelligence or love and radicalism or love and feminism are mutually nourishing is a worthwhile and comforting idea. But without any sustained consideration of what such a relationship could look like under the constraints of Regency gender roles, all such a vision does is expand the basket of patriarchal dominance, suggest that it can coexist with a little bit of liberation just as long as it’s not too much.

But in the face of all its other progressive casting and attempt to incorporate storylines and ideas that are uncommon in historical romance, the show’s obsession with virginity feels starkly regressive. George R. R. Martin was widely criticized, when asked about the ubiquity of rape in Game of Thrones, for claiming that he wanted to be historically accurate. Game of Thrones has dragons. Bridgerton has a string arrangement of Pitbull and no colonialism. That sexual violence (with which the vigilant guarding of virginity and refusal to offer sexual education forms a continuum) is a constant across fantasy worlds is dismaying. 

Ultimately, although much contemporary romance has gotten more flak, especially the recent dubiously consensual, kink adjacent type, in the end it is perhaps more honest about what it’s really trying to do, more honest about sex and desire and repression and patriarch. Perhaps the “bodice ripper” genre is not really salveagable into anything but retrograde fantasy.