"A Part of the Furniture": Class & Georgetown Comparisons in Bridgerton’s Fourth Season

Image Credit: Netflix

Letting my bookbag drop to the coffee-stained floor, I opened the refrigerator door, annoyed to find that once again the Brita had been emptied by someone and returned to its home on the shelf empty. As I dragged the jug over to the sink, one of my roommates walked through the front door. I asked her how her recent date went, and she began describing their inside business school jokes, dreamily sighing, “He asked me if I would prefer to buy a yacht or a helicopter.” Mouth agape, I stared at her, water trickling out of the Brita like a bubbling fountain, and I reasoned I must have misheard her. Attempting to keep my tone even, I asked her if she knew how class-coded her comment was, and she cocked her head, eyes brimming with confusion, and asked, “How so?”

Our conversation continued to replay itself in my head as I started this season’s first episode of Bridgerton, the Netflix British Regency romantic drama known for its inclusion of non-white lords and ladies instead of relegating such cast members to servants and lower-class characters. Having watched the first three seasons and the six-episode prequel series Queen Charlotte, I was intrigued the moment I saw the fourth season’s opening scene. Unlike Bridgerton’s previous seasons, which centered on the budding romance between members of royalty, viscounts, and dukes, the first scene of this recent season followed the Bridgerton household butlers, maids, and cooks preparing for their employer’s arrival at the commencement of the match-making season. In the midst of controlled chaos, cooks peel mountains of vegetables, maids repolish tables and mantels, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson, calls orders and organizes the humongous household, creating a serene environment by the time Lady Bridgerton arrived in her high-waisted silk dress and perfectly coiled curls. No thanks were offered to Mrs. Wilson nor any of the servants, despite the fact that it is Lady Bridgerton and not the staff who ultimately receives the compliments for her splendid mansion and solidifies her reputation among the “ton” (high society according to the show’s characters).

Such thanklessness towards the staff who cook, clean, and ensure that Georgetown students can be as productive as we can is all too common on the Hilltop. It is not unusual for students to walk past each and every dining hall worker without so much as a greeting or an expression of gratitude as we swipe for our meal. Nor is it a rare sight for students to ignore the custodians cleaning our bathrooms, occasionally aggravated when the Lau toilets are temporarily closed while a worker is cleaning up someone else’s mess. But as a show that primarily targets young women like many Georgetown students, Bridgerton’s fourth season forces us to confront the classism here, where according to the New York Times, twenty percent of the student body comes from the top one percent of U.S. income-earning households. The wealth disparity is so vast on campus that we have the privilege of acting like it does not exist.

We see this theme most clearly in the season’s female protagonist Sophie Baek, the first non-ton member to play the show’s romantic lead. Sophie, the illegitimate daughter of a lord, has been forced into servitude by her cruel and Cinderella-esque stepmother Lady Penwood. After receiving the blame for one of her stepsisters losing the mask she spent three weeks crafting for the Bridgerton’s masquerade ball, Sophie returns to the dimly lit kitchen, lamenting to her fellow servants that she is not, like her employer snidely implied, envious, but rather enraged. “I am angry,” she brims, slamming her wooden boxes of sewing equipment down onto the kitchen table, “because they will attend the ball and not enjoy any of it. They will come home complaining of something, disappointed in the decorations or how all the other gowns are inferior to theirs.” She pauses for a moment, and nearly whispers, “Can’t you imagine how beautiful a ball would be? I would give anything to go to a ball, dancing in a beautiful room instead of cleaning it, being looked at like you belong in there instead of being a part of the furniture. Just to have that feeling for one glorious night.” Dressed in her faded eggplant cloth gown, jet-black hair pulled back into a high, haphazard bun, Sophie looks longingly into the distance, envisioning the bejeweled and bespelled Bridgerton mansion where golden carriages arrive en masse. So simple and sufficient, her words establish a pivotal shift at the start of the season, eloquent enough to come from the show’s narrator, Lady Whistledown.

Thus far this season, such declarations have not come from Lady Whistledown, the author whose high society gossip column has all of London wrapped around her pen, nor the woman behind the nom de plume, Penelope Featherington Bridgerton. In fact, much of Penelope’s column has been occupied by the titled “Maid’s War,” which began after Lady Penwood fired Sophie and began bribing other lady’s maids and servants to work for her for higher pay and improved benefits. Such strife has most members of the ton concerned, prompting Lady Bridgerton to ask Mrs. Wilson if she and the other servants are content in their household, the first time she is ever shown asking about the welfare of her household staff. Other members of the ton are not as aware of how easily they could lose their servants nor how much they rely on them, including Lady Featherington. When her housekeeper, Varley, asked for a raise for the first time in two decades, she responded innocently, “Varley, it is inappropriate to discuss money amongst family.” Lady Featherington’s comment implies that Varley’s labor is not really labor but rather a charitable service she offers to the Featheringtons. This renders her small salary and few benefits not the other half of her contract but as an act of kindness towards an impoverished family member, giving Varley no room to bargain and no social respect of her own outside the Featheringtons.

Lady Featherington’s remark reflects the way we Georgetown students tend to view and treat the people who perform such personalized services for us here on the Hilltop. Cleaning our horrendous communal bathrooms after Homecoming, working holidays at Leo’s so that we might have something to eat, and fixing the elevator yet again in Leavey so that we can see our friends in the INDY office are not acts of charity but labor. Their labor is labor, the same as our professor's research and our own internships, classes, and consulting clubs. As a university community, we must treat our staff members more kindly, more respectfully, and must begin acknowledging their presence as human beings with their own good days and bad days. Without them, we could not finish that ten-page paper we procrastinated, typing another paragraph while a staff member prepares our Epi’s quesadilla. We could not make that Tombs night after our internship without the GUTS bus driver spending the evening away from their family to ensure our safe and free ride home. We could not walk across campus safely after January’s snowstorm without the souls who shoveled, salted, and cleared the pathways for us, endangering their own safety to secure ours. So the next time you tap your GoCard at 5Spice or spot a custodian leaving the restroom, do what Sophie asked: see them as though they belong here, because they do, just as much as we do.

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Kami Steffenauer is a senior in the College studying Anthropology and Women's & Gender Studies. She is waiting for her fairy godmother to replace low-rise jeans with empire-waist dresses, the superior fashion selection.