Bridgerton Season 4 Part 1: A Review of East Asian-Anglo Societal and Psychological Themes

I am a big Bridgerton fan. I love to watch this show that allows me as an ethnic minority to participate in the anticipation, excitement, and belief that I can be a princess, be extraordinary, and be seen. I believe we all want to feel worthy and capable of donning a beautiful ballgown and go to a glamorous ball where anything can happen.

Season 4 features a female lead of East Asian descent. Sophie Baek is Korean. Although I am not Korean, Sophie looks enough like me that I can see myself and my stories being played out on a major television series and it feels like the whole world is Seeing me. Sophie is also British-Korean, which I am not. I am Taiwanese American so our stories and experiences will not be the same down to the detail. However, so much of what I see in this season as an East-Asian American speaks to me so profoundly that I conclude there must be strong universal themes within the East Asian-Anglo experience. What you will find below is my review of East Asian-Anglo societal and psychological themes – aka Our Stories- that are being shared with the world through Bridgerton.

If you have not yet watched Season 4 Part 1, please do not read this article until you finish! I don’t want to spoil anything for you!

Terminology Breakdown:

East Asian: Referring to Asians whose origins are from the geographical area including China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. East Asians are typically phenotypically lighter skin than South or Southeast Asians. East Asians have some different cultural themes than South or Southeast Asians, which is the most important reason to distinguish the group for this review. Bridgerton Season 2 displayed many cultural and psychological themes unique for South Asian women.

Anglo: Referring to the cultural world with origins from the British culture. This refers to countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom where the cultural values will share similar themes

Note: As I am Taiwanese American and not British, I will relate to this series from my Chinese and East-Asian American perspective of history and culture. I have not made an attempt to study British East Asian history or sociology and will not be doing so for this review.

The Association with East Asians and Domestic Labor

Bridgerton Season 4 is a Cinderella story. The Cinderella archetype is one where a woman is made to do grueling domestic labor and her worth and freedom is diminished. The most compelling psychological fact about Cinderella’s state is that she accepts this treatment and others’ determination of her status and opportunities. This state of low self-worth and conditioned servitude are mirrored in the historical and present circumstances of women and that of immigrant East Asian Americans.

Throughout Chinese American history, Chinese Americans faced heavy discrimination, from state laws and labor boards that prevented them from seeking work in a lot of industries. This period of time occurred around the 1870s to the 1920s and it was extremely difficult or impossible for a Chinese American to become a doctor or lawyer or hold other blue- collar jobs such as being a licensed plumber, electrician, carpenter, or union factory worker. Any job where you would need to get licensed or join a union was out of the question. Which were all the good jobs that would provide the economic wealth for social mobility.

What ended up happening is that Chinese Americans had no choice but to concentrate their labor into domestic industries such as the restaurant industry and the laundry industry. White America allowed this because these are jobs that they didn’t want to do themselves but were essential for daily living. Funnily enough, cooking and doing laundry are two jobs that are also primarily associated with women. These domestic tasks are invisible labor because there is no lasting outcome from this labor. Food gets eaten immediately and clean clothes become dirty soon enough. However, we need someone to regularly perform these invisible labor tasks even if no credit or acknowledgement is given. The group who becomes selected to perform invisible labor also becomes invisible in the eyes of society. Universally, that group is women. Chinese Americans also joined that group due to having no other option but to perform domestic service work.

Bridgerton Season 4 centers on Sophie Baek, who is an East Asian woman who is also a domestic servant. This archetype is loaded with history and discrimination. It is also insidious and invisible. This dynamic is witnessed through how all of the nobility in the ton treat their domestic servants. The servants are treated as if they are not there, but when nobility has a need, the servant is ever present and ever attentive. What does the servant internalize? That their personhood is conditional upon the needs of those superior to them and their own wants and needs and emotions are nonexistent. I want to create that juxtaposition regarding this invisible human experience that all domestic servants have at their job, and the invisible human experience that East Asians experience just living in their own skin. Invisibility is racially internalized, and the individual ceases to see themselves in the full spectrum of humanhood because their East Asian appearance and societal identity.

Invisibility as a Safety Mechanism

When we take a look at Sophie and her stepfamily, we witness some cultural dynamics that are very similar to real-life East Asian collective behavior that I have experienced. Sophie is not blood-related to her stepmother and stepsisters, but she is of a similar racial background, as they are all East Asian. In the Bridgerton-verse, characters don’t stick to spending time with each other specifically because of race, so the fact that Sophie and her stepfamily are the same race is a deliberate choice.

From my lived experiences and in culturally-Confucius countries like China and Korea, the East Asian collective is highly competitive. In Chinese culture, this stems from the meritocracy dream: that any man, regardless of class background, can become a Confucian scholar or bureaucrat if he studies hard enough and achieves academically. This idea that one can become upwardly mobile is a compelling dream, not just for East Asians, but for everyone. However, this behavior of competition is stronger and more vicious than bonds of cultural or racial kinship. The individual hunger for survival beats out more heart-centered community building. Even though Sophie and her stepfamily are of the few East Asians to reach a nobility status, Lady Penwood (the stepmother) has no feeling of cultural kinship for Sophie. Lady Penwood is focused on her own daughters and their prospects of being the best in the competition to marry well for survival and security. What could have been a lovely stepmother-stepdaughter relationship between Sophie and Lady Penwood instead becomes an example for us to view the legacy of economic hardship in East Asian cultures that allows competition and survival of the fittest to be more important than touted values of “family” and “loyalty” that East Asian cultures like to advertise themselves as.

One of the critical moments in the stepmother- stepdaughter dynamic is when Lady Penwood tells Sophie that she will be demoted to being a domestic servant now that her father had died. Lady Penwood tells her “Being a maid is the best you can hope for. It will make you invisible.” In this exchange, Lady Penwood is echoing East-Asian American history by implying that Sophie’s best and only choice is domestic servitude, which is also an extension of being invisible.

Lady Penwood presents this idea that invisibility is desired. In my lived experience as an East-Asian American, I know that sometimes invisibility can be desired if you stop being seen as a threat for competition. If the price of being someone’s competition is so dangerous to one’s wellbeing that it can result in physical violence or death, then invisibility becomes desired and is a solid safety mechanism. But let’s take a moment to reflect that if these are the choices that Sophie immediately has on hand, then she is very far away from being empowered as a human, from recognizing her worth, and taking action to live her own vibrant life.

Sophie makes the choice that feels like the best way for her to survive, which is to be a maid and thus be invisible. Sophie dons on a mask of emotionless neutrality whenever she waits on her stepfamily. This is a survival necessity because in an East Asian environment where emotions are seen as weakness, maintaining a neutral face expression prevents you from getting hurt. That is the deeper meaning of Lady Penwood’s statement to Sophie at the graveyard: “Become invisible or else I might have reason to hurt you because you are a threat”.  It is forced invisibility.

I am not extremely educated in Polyvagal theory, but I’d like to share my insights and thoughts on how Sophie’s forced emotional suppression might be hurting her mental health. In Polyvagal Theory, an emotionally expressive person would have a healthy social engagement system. Someone who is emoting through their eyes, facial muscles, voice, and expression is someone who feels safe in their environment. Conversely, someone who presents with a neutral or frozen expression, will indicate that the person does not feel safe in their environment. That person would have a disrupted social engagement system. In the show, Sophie is actively forcing her face to become frozen, which might send reverse signals to her nervous system. She might be sending continuous feedback to her nervous system that her environment is perpetually unsafe. By doing that, she shuts the door to her body being able to access relaxation and pleasure, which require the nervous system to feel safe to unlock. By choosing to do this, Sophie is conditioning her body not to expect rest, leisure, or safety. This consequence is seen later in the show when Sophie has a difficult time being at leisure, not just because she is used to working all the time, but because the nervous system has been set to an extremely high hypervigilance point.

What Sophie illustrates for us is a condition that many East-Asian Americans have. East-Asian Americans have been taught to numb their emotional expression which leads to a perpetual state of vigilance in the body. This cultural pattern has recent roots in political trauma such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Korean military dictatorship periods (1945-1987) and Taiwan’s White Terror period (1947-1987). (I do not mention Japanese events because I haven’t personally observed enough Japanese Americans to come to any conclusions.) These political events trained their citizens that it was not safe to express their emotions or opinions, especially an opinion that went against the government. Entire cultural groups shifted to normalizing blunted emotional affect as a safety mechanism against their own leadership. With this deep political intergenerational traumatic dynamic being expressed on the big screen, I hope we can all wake up to the devastating emotional impact incurred by basically all East Asians and actively work to heal our nervous systems.

Remembrance of Self-Worth

Sophie has been living in a household where her stepmother constantly minimizes her labor and always finds fault with the quality of her work. Due to this, Sophie has internalized a negative self-worth. I now shift the lens to one surrounding labor and worth. Lady Penwood is eroding Sophie’s self-worth on purpose because the invisible domestic labor Sophie does is valuable. The only reason any oppressor has to hurt others is from the fear that the oppressed will recognize their value and leave the abusive relationship. This dynamic is seen in the history of Chinese American labor, it’s seen in gender relations between men and women, and it’s embedded into the whole story of immigrant labor. Lady Penwood does not want Sophie to recognize how much value she provides and she does not want Sophie to get any ideas that leaving to join another household will actually provide Sophie with more respect and better compensation.

When Lady Penwood dismisses Sophie and kicks her out of her own house, she finds herself in the position of needing to hire a replacement for the work that Sophie used to do. Lady Penwood ends up needing to hire four maids to replace one Sophie. This economic reality tells us that Sophie’s labor is in fact, very valuable. The once invisible labor now becomes visible. And the labor costs. Sophie’s departure from the Penwood household triggers the Maid Wars, where the whole ton begins scrambling to secure qualified domestic servants. This is revolutionary because the collective group of domestic servants are able to recognize the value of their invisible labor due to the scarcity of it. The domestic servants began to negotiate for higher wages, which is a right that any person should be able to do if they are not enslaved or otherwise indentured by the economic system.  We are able to witness this in the employer-employee interaction between Lady Featherington and Ms. Varley, the housekeeper. Ms. Varley chooses to resign from the Featherington household and work for someone who is evidently offering her a higher wage – a monetary appreciation for her labor. Ms. Varley communicates to Lady Featherington that she has developed a fondness and loyalty for the Featherington household and would ideally like to keep working there, but under economic conditions that better reflect the worth that Ms. Varley now knows she possesses due to the Maid Wars. Lady Featherington is unable to recognize that she is about to lose her housekeeper because she is unaccustomed to viewing her employees as people with needs and feelings that matter. All of that is rendered invisible by the very structure of the domestic servant role. Through systemic inequities, Lady Featherington is conditioned to view others in a dehumanized lens. I am excited for Sophie when she finally realizes that she is the one responsible for a whole group of humans waking up to their worth and advocating for better treatment.

Choosing Yourself and Your Highest Timeline

At the end of the day, social conditioning and brainwashing cannot ultimately take Sophie’s humanity away from her. She is a person with feelings, wants and desires. We see this in her anger and jealousy when she perceives others trying to court or claim Benedict Bridgerton as their own. She wants to be the one that is seen and loved by Benedict. Wanting to be loved signifies that she is also wanting to love herself.

Bridgerton’s story is a good story because Sophie does not allow herself to be dehumanized by racial perceptions, employer abuse, and class status. The beginning of this story is when Sophie chooses to go to the masquerade ball even though it will mean that she breaks all of society’s rules and Lady Penwood’s household rule that she must be invisible and compliant to be safe. Even though her choice to go is very dangerous, she does it anyways – because she chooses to see herself as a human who has dreams and the right to pursue her happiness. This is a lesson for all of us: despite systemic oppression and all the negative things we have ever internalized about ourselves, we are worthy as humans, and we have a right to live a full life.

Now, that choice to self-actualize by going to the ball does bring consequences. After all, she broke all the rules set by the oppressors and she will be punished. She is fired from the Penwood household with barely any money to her name. While this seems like a punishment, we have to understand that Source often brings about circumstances that we find undesirable or unsavory, but which ultimately lead us closer to our highest timelines. The uncomfortable circumstance often involves standing up for oneself and refusing to be dehumanized any longer. For someone like Sophie who has been conditioned to be invisible and kowtow for so long, it could be so easy for her to debase herself in order to appease Lady Penwood. However again, she cannot be anything less than the human she is. She tells her full truth to Lady Penwood and claims her home and her worth. This is the first time that she stops suppressing her emotions in front of Lady Penwood. In this moment, her full self is coming back online. Sophie met this challenge well and although she is kicked out of her home, she walks one step closer to meeting Benedict Bridgerton, which is the Divine orchestration that we can’t always see in the moment.

Love Between Two Very Differently Privileged People

When Benedict Bridgerton meets Sophie at the ball, he does not know she is a maid. Benedict assumes she shares equal nobility status to him and treats her with respect that she has not had in a long time. She shares her discomfort with active participation in dancing at the ball. She is not used to being regarded as anything more than furniture in the room (her literal words!). Her discomfort is conditioned because she is so unpracticed at being the human who gets to claim and pursue enjoyment. All of this continues to create parallels for the current situation of East Asian-Anglo people and women. Treating ourselves as people who deserve enjoyment must be a practiced effort because there are so many systemic forces encouraging us to be furniture. As Benedict and Sophie’s relationship unfolds throughout the show, we see that Benedict is a very good person. At My Cottage, he sees that Sophie has difficulty relaxing and taking leisure and actively encourages her to be the one to fly a kite while he becomes the observer. What’s perhaps even better is that even when he knows that Sophie is a maid, he still conveys to her that she is worthy of leisure and enjoyment.

However, the different class statuses of Benedict and Sophie present major issues to their relationship progression. Benedict has affection for Sophie but is unsure how to navigate the roles of society segregating social classes or the sexual power imbalances that he, as a nobleman, holds over Sophie who has limited ways to protect herself or her reputation if he pursues a sexual relationship with her, consensual or nonconsensual. In short, Benedict doesn’t know how to love Sophie without accidentally oppressing her. On Sophie’s end, there is so much she cannot say to him for fear of losing her means to economic survival or physical safety. For the marginalized and oppressed, we sometimes find ourselves in impossible circumstances where muzzling ourselves becomes the only readily clear path to safety.

In interracial relationships, we should all take care to be aware of what different systemic factors impact our respective abilities to safely express ourselves. The partner with higher systemic privilege is often a good romantic partner, but without awareness of systemic issues, can still feel distance in the relationship because they’re unaware of all the systemic barriers that their marginalized partner has to contend with.  

To Be Continued

We have only witnessed half the story between Sophie and Bridgerton and I will be excited to see how the East Asian themes, self-actualization themes, and the overall romance evolve in Part 2!