Against Facts, Dreams. The Fabulation in Queen Charlotte: a Bridgerton Story
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2421-454X/21852Keywords:
Fiction, Chronotrope, Historical imagination, Bridgerton, NarrativeAbstract
In the present article, we propose an analysis of the Queen Charlotte series: a Bridgerton story (Netflix, 2023). Much of the critical reception of the work, produced and scripted by Shonda Rhimes, addressed the fact that the author was based on historical facts about British royalty and explored the public's curiosity regarding what was real or fictional in the story. One of the most discussed issues – and which caused a lot of controversy – concerns Queen Charlotte's racial identity. Was the idea of attributing the leading role of a Western monarch to a black personality just poetic freedom or a decision based on evidence that the queen was of African descent? Rather than entering into this controversy, we are interested in reflecting on this fabular gesture, this movement that resituates the past at the same time as it provokes the present and acts to outline possible futures. In the path around this central theme, we seek to characterize the narrative world constructed in the series, based on the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope, to reflect on this fabulation, in our view an act of counterfactual historical imagination.
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