During this incident, when he was four years old, stuttering and trying to talk to his father, his father said, “All those years of praying for an heir, and now it’s all for ruin. By the time he was four years old, his father was angry that he would not talk. Beginning when he was two years old, Simon’s father began to question why he wouldn’t talk. Because his mother had died, Simon was left in the care of his nurse while his father went to London. Although Simon’s birth is celebrated due to the dukedom being able to remain in Basset’s hands, his mother passed away shortly after the delivery. Simon was the first baby to be born alive from his mother, “And his father, the ninth Duke of Hastings, had waited years for this moment” (Quinn 1). The Duke and I opens in the prologue with a description of Simon’s childhood since Simon becomes Duke before the proper beginning of the novel, this is our only exposure to the previous Duke, Simon’s father. This popular novel turned Netflix show has been all the talk since its release, but not enough people are talking about how well they portray the long-lasting effects of childhood abandonment and family estrangement. This statistic may account for family estrangement’s presence in pop culture – most pertinently, in The Duke and I by Julia Quinn. It is a startlingly prevalent phenomenon: one US study found that over 40 percent of respondents had experienced it at one point in their lives (Conti 34). The Duke and I – A Troubled Family Historyįamily estrangement can be defined as distancing or loss of affection that occurs over time. We’d like to take a look at what makes this relationship tick in the novel and then discuss how the show’s lens of race deepens and nuances this relationship. In consequence, the duke’s abuse drives Simon to swear on never having children. The former Duke of Hastings is the reason Simon is so emotionally cold, the reason he initially chooses not to marry Daphne, and is ultimately a source of great discontent in their eventual marriage. In the novel The Duke and I, later the series Bridgerton, much is made of Simon Basset’s relationship with his emotionally abusive, uncaring father.
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