What about the crisis? What’s the point? For ‘Bridgerton,’ the word ‘orgasm’ would not quite do
LONDON (AP) – Francesca is dissatisfied in Season 4 of “Bridgerton.”
That’s because the sixth Bridgerton sibling is on a personal journey to understand the secrets of female pleasure, and she keeps using the word “pinnacle” to describe the orgasm she can’t seem to get.
Part two of the fourth season continues Benedict Bridgerton’s fairytale love story with the mysterious, disguised Sophie, while also providing updates on the rest of the expansive family’s romantic exploits.
Francesca, newly married to the Earl of Kilmartin (Victor Alli), realizes she has no idea what happens in a four-poster bed and wants to learn the mysteries of sex from her married friends and relatives.
“I wonder if that was a bit of a workshop with, like, what word they were going to use for it?” Dodd mused during an interview.
The answer is yes.
Jess Brownell, the showrunner, admits that they investigated and discussed which term to use. A thesaurus was helpful.
“It felt like ‘orgasm’ wasn’t a word that was used in that time period,” according to Brownell. The drama, based on Julia Quinn’s books and produced by Shondaland, is set in Britain’s Regency era, the early nineteenth century.
“Pinnacle” was eventually deemed obscure and amusing enough for the character to employ.
So, did that word hit the spot?
According to Jessica Cale, a novelist and sex historian, the term “pinnacle” is not historically accurate, but it is “very effective.”
The term “orgasm” was in use at the time—the Oxford English Dictionary dates it to the late 1600s—but it was mostly employed as a clinical term; the first instance of its use in medical literature dates back to 1671 by physician George Thompson.
Euphemisms have existed for ages. Cale mentions popular sexual writing like “Fanny Hill,” also known as “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” which was published in portions in the late 1740s, long before the “Bridgerton” era.
The novel by John Cleland refers to orgasms as “the point.” “The critical phase, ‘the die-away moment,’ and—this is the greatest one—’the critical ecstasy, the melting flow, into which nature, spent with an excess of pleasure, melts and dies away,'” Cale continues.
Whether Francesca’s plot ends in a physical or figurative crisis, her character’s apex of another kind is still to come, since Dodd is slated to play a larger role in a future season.