Queen Charlotte’s determined love

Is the backstory better than the original? Bex Chapman reviews Queen Charlotte, Netflix’s blockbuster, and finds a determined love story with a lesson.

Bex Chapman

Bex is a freelance journalist and consultant who writes about culture, the church, and both government and governance.

A regency queen and king stand beside each other looking pensive.

India Amarteifio and Corey Mylchreest play Queen Charlotte and King George.

Shondaland.

Regency romance is very definitely back, if indeed it ever went away. Fans of Bridgerton will be aware how very binge-worthy the Jane Austen-meets-Gossip-Girl world brought to the screen by Shonda Rhimes is. But her new spin-off prequal has outdone itself. Since it landed on Netflix on May 4th, 307 million hours of Queen Charlotte have been watched – especially impressive given it only has six episodes – and now it looks set to become one of Netflix’s most popular series of all time. All the fun and frivolity of the Bridgerton world is here – sumptuous costumes, compelling drama about strong women, electric chemistry between the two leads, supported by a strong and diverse ensemble cast, shown in stunning period locations as they dance at elaborate balls… and all set to a soundtrack of modern pop songs reimagined as orchestral anthems.

Gentle reader, prequals can be something of a curate’s egg – they can provide the joy of returning to a much loved, familiar world to learn more about favourite characters. But there might be the devastating discovery that the world you love has become disappointingly plodding, or worse, been leveraged for profit – would this prequel be a Better Call Saul or more of a Cruel Intentions 2?

Thankfully, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is that rare thing – a backstory that betters the original, with more emotional heft as it shows us how several much-loved characters developed. We see the context for how the Bridgerton world came into being - controversially described previously as colourblind, in this new show race is part of the story as ‘the great experiment’ unfolds; Queen Charlotte is a love story that supposedly leads to a societal shift.

This is a very modern love story, with a difference. It remains frothy and funny, but there is a serious focus and insight too.

While the two leads may be familiar from history lessons, the show opens with the dulcet tones of doyenne Julie Andrews reminding us, in her role as Lady Whistledown, that Queen Charlotte:

“is not a history lesson. It is fiction inspired by fact. All liberties taken by the author are quite intentional.”

We all already know how this story ends – and yet as we spend time with such compelling characters the suspense builds all the same. This is a very modern love story, with a difference. It remains frothy and funny, but there is a serious focus and insight too. This is still a swoon-worthy romance, but here women grow in their power as they understand themselves, and each other, better. Whether or not you have someone to sweep you off your feet (or help you over the garden wall!) that understanding is something we can all aspire to.

Meanwhile, many of the men in the Bridgerton world have their own challenges to work through (from abusive fathers to more loving ones who die in front of them), and this show is no exception. Juxtaposed with the lightness, banter, and of course the love scenes, there is a heaviness and darkness here too.

We see George struggling with his mental ill-health such that though he has fallen head over heels for Charlotte from the moment of their meet-cute, he feels he must hide himself away from her to avoid hurting her, and then undergoes a shocking, traumatic series of ‘treatments’. Having seen their relationship from her perspective, we have our eyes opened from episode 4 as his attempts to hide his illness are revealed, first to the viewer and then to his beloved. His devastating illness is shown compassionately, but despite the empathy, it is still hard to watch. This is storytelling so strong that it has left many with a passion for a character they previously thought of as the ‘mad king’ from Hamilton who tried to prevent American independence!

This level of narrative ability is perhaps why the legend that is Julie Andrews called Shonda Rhimes ‘one of the most powerful creative forces in film and television today’. We live a world where we see many romances on screen just as they are getting started – we see from the meet-cute to the declaration of love or the ‘I do’, ending as we reach a happy ever after. Yet Shonda Rhimes has been clear that she is not interested in telling the ‘sort of romantic story of a marriage where everything's perfect’. Each of us knows we are not perfect, and we know that nor (even in the first flush of romance!) are those we love. The Book of James in the Bible reminds us that ‘we all stumble in many ways’. But we choose to love anyway. In this show, love is not just about a belief in destiny, being deserving, or mere attraction. Lecturing her son, Charlotte reminds him:

“Love is not a thing one is able or not able to do based on some magic, some chemistry. That is for plays. Love is determination. Love is a choice one makes.”

From arranged marriage to meet-cute, from working through an unconsummated marriage to having 15 children and devastating long-term mental ill-health, we see a love that remains constant despite the challenges; Charlotte shouts at George ‘I want to fight with you. Fight with me. Fight for me’ when she thinks him indifferent.

he actress who plays young Charlotte, India Amarteifio, beautifully noted that ‘unconditional love is the river that runs through their relationship’. Even as George descends deeper in his madness, Charlotte meets him where he is at (frequently literally as well as figuratively!) to be with him. As fan-favourite Lady Danberry observes:

“what matters madness when true love flourishes? For them, the weeds are all part of the process”.

This is a love that acknowledges the challenges, the imperfection, the pain and the sacrifice, but it persists. How do any of us find the strength to love like that? We may not all be King George, but we are all imperfect, and flawed – we all make mistakes and must ask for the forgiveness of those we love. For those with a faith, there is the hope of God with us to help us; the Bible says ‘we love because he first loved us’. The Dutch priest and psychologist Henry Nouwen powerfully wrote:

‘our life is full of brokenness – broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live with that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and again to God’s faithful presence in our lives’.

In a world filled with perfect-looking screen romances, the bittersweet depth of Queen Charlotte touched me far more than any aspirational happy ending. This was far more interesting, more powerful, and more complex. Part of romantic love is attraction and feelings, but also choice and action; hearts and flowers if that’s your thing, but also being a team, wanting what is best for them above yourself, supporting one another to be your best. To quote the passage from the book of Corinthians and so often quoted at weddings, this ‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’. In a world filled with perfect-looking screen romances, this depiction of love as a daily choice, made with courage and compassion, is what I long to see more of. But I’ll happily take it with a side of regency glamour – it wouldn’t be Bridgerton without it!

Review

Books

Culture

29 April 2024

6 min read

Are we being anxious about anxiety?

Haidt's diagnosis of a 'doomed' youth is off. Instead, we should learn from them.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A child sits atop a bunk bed holding a phone in front.

It’s common these days to hear about social anxiety, health anxiety, or climate anxiety – but I think I can see that a new pathology is beginning to emerge: anxiety anxiety. This is where parents, politicians, academics, or just members of society in general, start to get anxious about the fact that everybody is anxious. Diagnosis rates of clinical anxiety have shown a steep increase in the past decade, and numbers, we assume, don’t lie.

Of the many outcomes of ‘anxiety anxiety’, one is going to be people who (with the absolute best intentions) want to suggest solutions. One such person is Jonathan Haidt, with his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

From the spaceman on the cover to the opening vignette about sending our children to Mars, Haidt’s premise is clear: smartphones are the alien invaders of our society. These electronic parasites are feasting on the brain matter of our young people, directly causing what is now an epidemic of clinical anxiety and depression.

I’m quite ready to read a sensible analysis of the impact of smartphone culture on mental health, so I was disappointed to find that Haidt’s book falls so far short of that. From a scientific perspective, the argument is a barrage of statistics, arranged to the tune of ‘correlation equals causation’. Given Haidt’s seniority in his field, this approach is surprisingly unsubtle, something which has already been heavily criticised by peer review. Numbers, it seems, do lie – or at least they can be easily curated to prove your point.

But even if we accept Haidt’s point – which is that rates of smart-phone use (particularly social media) and rates of young people being diagnosed with anxiety disorders have increased over the same time period – what can be done? Haidt’s solution is to ban young people from owning smartphones at all until the age of 14, and from using social media until the age of 16, or even better 18. In this way, owning and managing one’s own device and its access becomes a rite of passage into adulthood. But note: whilst parents are urged to implement these unyielding boundaries for their children’s device-habits, Haidt does not ask grown-ups to make any changes to their own. Adults can continue with their current norms of smartphone use, ostensibly because their brains are fully developed, and they therefore have the maturity to handle their own risk to mental health.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate.

Of course, it does not suit Haidt’s argument to analyse why adult mental health is also seeing an increase in diagnosis of anxiety disorders. It may be true to say that rates are rising more quickly amongst young people, but there is still no consensus as to how much of that can be attributed to young people simply being better informed about mental health and more empowered to seek help than the generations before them. Noticeably, young people today have a language to talk about anxiety that simply didn’t exist when I was a teenager in the 1990s, and ironically enough, it is social media that has made that possible. Although suicide rates are on the rise, they are still quite significantly lower among young people than they are for those aged over 35, and it should be noted that a proven pathway to suicide prevention amongst young people is access to self-help via smartphone apps.

So whilst I am quite ready to believe that smartphone culture is one of many factors impacting the health and wellbeing of young people today, I think characterising smartphones as alien invaders, or as invasive parasites that have been selectively bred by Silicon Valley billionaires to infest the minds of our young people, seems to be a disingenuous response – and one that only serves to increase parental anxiety by implying that smartphones are sly, sentient beings, and out of our control.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate and a perfectly natural human desire to seek out entertainment and culture. True, technology and software are developed by billionaires, and marketing and algorithms can influence our choices – but at the end of the day, any developer will tell you that products only ever evolve in response to what the market demands. Adults: we have the money in our pockets; we are the market.

As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture.

In other words, we (the adults) selectively bred these ‘aliens’ ourselves – and rather than try (and no doubt fail) to lock up our experiment in a lab (or, as Haidt suggests, a lockable phone-pouch) we, the adults, have more than enough agency to continue that process of developing smartphones into devices that meet needs and provide entertainment in the way that they were always meant to do. In his defence, Haidt does refer to this approach briefly, but still only with a view to making the phones be for ‘us’ (the adults) and not ‘them’ (the young people) by removing content that appeals to a younger audience. To me feels like we are victim shaming the youth of today for the fact that they have inherited a problem created by their parents.

One day when Jesus was teaching a crowd of followers, he advised them “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own?” His point was about hypocrisy – it is far easier to judge someone else’s behaviour than it is to take responsibility for our own. Where did any of us last read or hear terrifying information about the decline in young people’s mental health? Was it on our smartphones?

Here are a few things that Haidt’s selection of statistics doesn’t say about the youth of today. They are the most compassionate and empathetic generation that we have seen for decades (Konrath et. al., 2023). They are able to wait longer for rewards than their parent’s generation (Protzko, 2020), they are also less lazy, less narcissistic, more cooperative and more intelligent (Kriegel, 2016). In addition, whilst obvious damage is done by ‘filters’ on Instagram photos, making some young people strive for unattainable standards of beauty, it was the previous generation of smartphone users who began this trend, and it is the current generation of young people who can be credited with the #nofilter #nomakeup countertrends. This same generation is now fuelling the rise of insurgent social media sites such as Bereal, which emphasise the importance of authentic photos and meaningful connection with friends online.

Overall, perhaps instead of restricting and controlling our young people’s online lives, as Haidt would have us do, we ought to be talking to them? As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture and develop it towards solutions to the problems that we ourselves created.