And she is right on that front! But she never reckons with the violating behavior she committed on her way towards her happy ending-which, yes, eventually involves having children with her Duke. She’s convinced that he shouldn’t let his father’s toxicity infect his current happiness. As they struggle to find their way back to each other-and she hopes for a pregnancy that will compel him to stay by her side-she continues to accuse Simon of lying to her. TV Daphne never apologizes for taking advantage of her husband, and the pair quickly become embroiled in trying to help the rest of Daphne’s family escape another scandal. It’s a misstep for a series trying to provide frothy, addictive holiday entertainment that puts female desire front and center. But Daphne keeps going.īridgerton attempts to sidestep tackling this toxic plot point by asking a question it never intends to answer. Though somewhat inarticulate, Regé-Jean Page as Simon is clearly in distress and says “wait, wait” according to the closed captioning. This delights him until it horrifies him. She becomes the sexual aggressor when she and her husband reach the bedroom and, in a move familiar to fans of season one of Game of Thrones (which has its own issues with marital rape), she rolls on top of him and takes the wheel. ![]() Actress Phoebe Dynevor plays it as if Daphne is plotting her move all through dinner. ![]() For one, Simon is neither drunk nor asleep when his wife does what she does. ![]() Netflix, understandably, handled the scene a bit differently. just because it was a guy doesn’t mean it’s not rape!!!!”įor her part, Quinn wrote very explicitly and progressively about consent throughout the rest of the Bridgerton series. The top review, which gives the book zero stars, reads: “why would you ruin a perfectly good romance with a rape scene. If you check Goodreads for reactions to the novel from contemporary readers, you’ll find a good deal of disgust levied at this plot development. The Duke and I, however, was written 20 years ago-and it seems clear from context that what Daphne does to Simon is assault. As the larger conversation around sexual assault has shifted, that trope has largely started to fall away. The trope of the rapist who is "reformed" by his love for the heroine and eventually marries her became as common as they come in historical romances. Publishers, adhering to the social mores of the day, once believed the only way audiences would accept pre-marital sex was if the woman was forced. There’s a long history of rape, “rape fantasy,” and other permutations of lack of consent in the romance genre, tracing back to the early days of The Sheik (1919)-or even further back to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Readers quickly get Simon’s point of view: “Daphne had aroused him in his sleep, taken advantage of him while he was still slightly intoxicated, and held him to her while he poured his seed into her.” Quinn writes Simon as blatantly traumatized by what has happened to him: "This complete loss of speech, this choking, strangling feeling-He had worked his entire life to escape it, and now she had brought it back with a vengeance.” So read on only if you’re ready to know how it will all play out for Daphne Bridgerton and her titular duke. How did Shondaland handle the story line in the series? Well, that would be a spoiler. (One might call it A Very Sexy MCU.) But despite Quinn’s success, the first book in the series- The Duke and I-is controversial, thanks to a central plot point that hinges on a very disturbing sex scene. In some ways, Quinn’s popular Bridgerton series-a nine-book interlocking saga focusing on the love lives of various members of the Bridgerton clan-is an ideal choice in the age of franchising. On one hand, it was thrilling to see Rhimes, one of the most well-respected and powerful TV showrunners in the business, bringing an unabashedly sexy romance novel to the screen-doubling down on the success of Starz’s Outlander adaptation, but with a series untempered by bloodthirsty Scotsmen. ![]() When the world learned that Shonda Rhimes would kick off her lucrative Netflix deal with an adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Regency romance novel The Duke and I, the reception in the book community was decidedly mixed.
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