Historical Fantasy, Modern Horror: Traumatic Childbirth in The House of the Dragon and Bridgerton
by Sarah B. Rude
The past year has seen no shortage of dramatic and often traumatic birth scenes in popular media from Handmaid’s Tale to Fleishman Is In Trouble, but two stand out for their striking narrative parallels: HBO’s The House of the Dragon (HOTD) and Netflix’s second season of Bridgerton. The early episodes of both shows feature wealthy, socially powerful white women in labor. During their deliveries, these women suffer life-threatening complications, and in these moments of crisis, neither woman is consulted for decisions about her own health. Instead, male physicians demand that male relatives — their husband or eldest son, respectively — make high-stakes decisions about the survival of her or her child.
Among the recent spate of traumatic birth scenes in modern media, HOTD and Bridgerton also stand out in that they seek to evoke the past. While the presence of dragons continually reminds us that HOTD is fiction, the setting and costuming strives to recreate medieval Europe; similarly, the attention to aristocracy and manners in Bridgerton imitates Regency England. This added layer of historical representation complicates their traumatic birth scenes, as viewers must interpret what the medieval or Regency setting contributes to the shows’ messages about reproductive rights. While the buffer of history may open the door for productive conversation about issues surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, it also risks suggesting that the terrors portrayed in a historical fantasy are of little concern to modern audiences. Just as problematically, the lure of glamorizing and romanticizing the past may lead directors to focus on the horrors of what they consider premodern medical practices and to muddy the very message that they might wish to convey.
Although they are both fictionalized depictions, audiences may interpret these childbirth scenes as a representation of actual historical practices. As Paul Sturtevant points out, even the most informed person’s knowledge of history is full of gaps, and the mind subconsciously fills those gaps with information gathered from popular culture — books, movies, and shows like HOTD or Bridgerton. For this reason, it is important that trained historians point to historical records and show that, until the past century, childbirth was the domain of midwives and female relatives, and that historical medical treatises nearly always prioritized the life of the mother over any unborn children; the portrayals of “medieval” maesters or white-wigged Regency doctors are therefore inaccurate on very fundamental levels.
If we mistake historical fantasy as historical fact, we risk the post-feminist mindset that dangerous births like those portrayed on HBO or Netflix are a thing of the past. Viewers may comfort themselves by imagining that while Queen Aemma (Sian Brooke) and Lady Violet (Ruth Gemmell) may have given birth at home with little medical assistance and callous male doctors, women today can go to the hospital where they will be safe and respected. Unfortunately, childbearing and childbirth is still a dangerous process, especially in the United States (among developed nations) and especially for women of color. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the last four years have seen a steady and alarming increase in maternal death rates. The work to ensure that mothers of all backgrounds experience respect from their providers at all stages of pregnancy is clearly not complete, and it would be wrong to assume that HOTD or Bridgerton depict reproductive terrors limited to the distant past.
HOTD has received a lot of warranted criticism for the scene in which King Viserys orders an emergency C-section for the barely conscious Queen Aemma. The show purports to have a more feminist storyline than the original Game of Thrones series and leans into Aemma’s words to Rhaenyra that “Childbed is our battlefield.” However as Amanda Hess observes, the birth scene is nothing more than a “tangle of cliches posturing as insight” with camera angles that place the audience as a distant, perhaps unwelcome spectator to this intensely intimate and painful moment. Furthermore, as Kathryn VanArendonk and Erica Gonzales point out, if the childbed is a woman’s battlefield, it should be empowering at least some of the time. Yet none of the several birth scenes from the show — least of all the one portraying Aemma — feature a weary-but-triumphant woman holding a newborn, despite the fact that Rhaenyra has more children than birth scenes in the show. Apparently it is not compelling enough TV viewing to see women succeed even on their designated battlefield.
Much of this criticism can be traced to the ways that HOTD invokes medieval history. Playing with its historical matter, the makers of the show decided that the most important elements of a medieval birth scene are the helplessness of the woman in labor and the horrific use of surgical tools better suited to a battlefield. Perhaps most frustrating is the complete lack of agency Aemma has in the scene. By the time Viserys arrives, the maesters inform him that they have given her “milk of the poppy,” that all-purpose medicine in the Game of Thrones world that relieves pain and aids sleep, but also clouds mental faculties. Due to her drowsy state and the dual facts of her being a woman and married to the king, the maester gives the choice of the C-section to Viserys, who makes the fatal decision for her. Aemma’s lack of agency is highlighted by the intercut tournament scenes in which knights’ agency is on full display: in one shot, Prince Daemon ruminates on his choice for his next opponent, and in another shot, the herald announces that “Prince Daemon Targaryen wishes to continue in a contest of arms.”
These carefully staged moments of Daemon’s decisions contrast sharply with Aemma’s own drugged, delayed, and brutally ignored wishes: “What’s happening…Viserys, please. I’m scared…No, no, no.” As the camera lingers on the knife that will be used for the procedure and the subsequent gouts of blood on bed and skin, the scene shifts focus from the atrocity committed against a woman to the grief that her death brings Viserys. In this crucial moment, the show’s creators could villainize Viserys and the maesters, making clear that overriding Aemma’s plea is the original sin for the series and providing essential, productive commentary on their actions and by analogy the actions of modern healthcare workers, but they do not, nor does the event receive meaningful dialogue in later episodes. Even while the episode has all the narrative pieces to contribute productively to the conversation on reproductive rights, its horrific glamorizing of the past ultimately creates just another way that the Game of Thrones franchise inflicts senseless violence on women.
Where HOTD mishandles its use of history and commentary on maternal deaths, Bridgerton excels. The scene is strikingly similar, but several key moves ensure that the show makes a point without unnecessarily shocking viewers. First, the scene is brief: a mere two minutes and forty seconds compared to HOTD’s nine-minute saga. The brevity allows the scene to make an impact without forcing viewers to participate in Lady Violet’s pain for longer than is required. Similarly, there is no more “historical” gore than required for the scene: there is no blood, and no parading of knives, despite the C-section that the doctor suggests to Violet’s eldest son Anthony. In fact, only the doctor’s wig and Violet’s white dressing gown suggest that the scene takes place in a time other than the present day. Gemmell’s performance makes viewers perfectly aware that the ever-composed and demure Violet is in labor through her disheveled hair, sweaty face, and periodic moans.
Most importantly, though, Violet remains clear-headed through the whole scene and specifically calls out behaviors that would be harmful to her own health and safety — and that of her family. The doctor’s first words to Violet in the scene are an admonition that she should not be standing, but rather lying down. Here, Violet owns her experience in the matter — “I’ve done this seven times before, I know this well” — and remains in her active posture of power. When the doctor attempts to pull Anthony aside for the discussion of the C-section, Violet demands to know what they are talking about: “What are you saying to him? I told you, you may not speak to him — speak to me!” Even when the doctor tries to bring Anthony out of the room for a private conversation, she abandons her usual polite decency and outlines the decision for her wide-eyed, teenaged son, finally insisting that “It is not your choice to make; it is mine.” As Anthony beats a hasty retreat from the room, he sides with his mother, telling the doctor to “Do what she wants, whatever she chooses.” While the show may capitulate to patriarchy in this one moment (the doctor’s actions still hinge on Anthony’s choice to let his mother decide), Violet’s experience is honored throughout the scene and her self-advocacy is effective. Viewers leave the scene and episode knowing that these kinds of events happened in the past, that they should be aware of them in the present, and that it is important to stand up for one’s rights even as, especially as, a childbearing person.
In the end, it is perhaps not surprising that both Bridgerton and HOTD sought to capitalize on a cultural moment when maternal death rates are troublingly on the rise. But the relevance of the moment should not preclude the issue’s careful treatment. Audiences should not be left to wonder if they are seeing something that only happened in the past, nor should they be exposed or re-exposed to such trauma, especially if the show’s goal is simply to sensationalize “historical” childbirth as yet another frontier of violence. With the Dobbs decision triggering several laws that closed clinics providing prenatal care to the most at-risk populations in the United States, the risk of premature births and maternal deaths will only increase: women deserve to know both the kinds of risks they are exposed to as well as strategies that they can use to advocate for themselves and others. In this, Bridgerton succeeds with its two-season history of engaging topics relevant to reproductive health — the biology of conception, the importance of female sexual pleasure, and now women’s autonomy in childbirth decisions — while HOTD is clumsy at best and voyeuristic or pornographic at worst. On this essential topic for this fraught historical moment, delivery matters.
Sarah B. Rude is an assistant professor of English at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, SD, where she teaches classes on medieval literature, medievalisms, and artificial intelligence. Much of her research considers ways of seeing and processing knowledge in late-medieval romance, and her recent publications can be found in Arthuriana, Mediaevalia, and Speculum. Her other work on medieval dance in romance and fabliau can be found in the Cursed Carolers in Context.
