The Bachelor as Novel of Manners

Why do smart, critical viewers who are actively harmed by the systems of domination that The Bachelor upholds continue to watch the show? The most common answer served to any who ask this question is that we're just turning our brains off — we want to watch something silly that doesn't require effort to consume. But I think that something else is going on, some invisibilized pleasure that keeps us watching a show that seems the definition of something we should dislike. Might we articulate a phenomenology of Bachelor-watching that delves beyond the idea that it is a guilty pleasure?

To answer this question, let's take a cue from Austen scholars. Why? The mediaverses of The Bachelor and Jane Austen occupy startlingly similar places in contemporary consciousness, all romance, drama, and rings.1 Sure, one elicits visions of corseted dresses and orchestral music while the other evokes beaded gowns and teary breakdowns, but both contain enough romance to be considered feminine, and are considered feminine enough to be deemed so-called guilty pleasures. The Jane Austen and Bachelor mediaverses are treated as sanitized tufts of frippery which require little brain power to consume. But in both cases, these reductive reputations prove to be misleading, disguising the works' substance.

Scholars have argued that Jane Austen's works are best categorized not as romance, but as novels of manners. Novels of manners "[re-create] a social world, conveying with finely detailed observation the customs, values, and mores of a highly developed and complex society."2 These novels not only chronicle social worlds and their minute particulars, but serve as exemplars of authors' moral views. In a novel of manners, every detail becomes a potential vehicle for an author's opinions and politics.

Yes, Austen writes courtship storylines, but the bulk of her novels are made up of finely detailed social renderings. Laced into the seams of Austen's meticulously reproduced social worlds are threads of the author's censure, approbation, and derision, all of which carefully nudge us into an understanding of which characters' actions and ideas are right and whose miss the mark. But we aren't just given these opinions — we must decode them by learning how to read Austen's heavily ironic wit.

After engaging with more than one of Austen's works, readers start to notice the significance of details that previously seemed unimportant. We develop a sense for her sentiments and improve our ability to decode her discourse. The novels become fuller: we get to laugh at the jokes we missed on a first pass (Darcy prefers to mend his own pen, guys), or we notice that an aside which seemed innocuous actually serves as damning evidence of a character's moral depravity (why else would Frank Churchill travel to Londonjust to get his haircut!). Along with this comes a sense of satisfaction — each new layer of meaning we excavate from the novels is like a reward, payoff for the work of properly calibrating our noticing faculties.

We have to put in work to discover whether something is being lauded or laughed at. This active linguistic decoding creates a sense of agency; we feel like we've figured something out for ourselves. I argue that this sense of agency makes the moral judgements which are opinions of Austen's extremely convincing, much more convincing than they would be if they were told to us outright.  We have a stake in these ideas. They seem like things we've worked out for ourselves, through the power of our own wit. The self-indulgent swirl of satisfaction we get from decoding veiled jokes and judgements creates a positive feedback loop which encourages us to keep buying into this system, to continue viewing characters' actions through the perspective Austen endorses. By the time we are sussing out Wickams from Wentworths, we have already bought into Austen's system of judgment.

When we watch The Bachelor, we engage in the same active process of parsing out the heroes from the villains, a process which similarly brings our opinions in line with the logics of the show. Twenty years into Bachelor media production, each program has a thoroughly developed formula and vocabulary that audiences are well attuned to. Being attuned to the rules of the game, so to speak, is a source of pleasure in itself, the pleasure of being in on the joke, the pleasure of clearly understanding a sort of code, the pleasure of feeling that we are in the right. Each time we watch a new season, our understanding of The Bachelor's framework deepens, and the associations we have with certain phrases and actions are reinscribed. The Bachelor is a novel of manners.

Much like Austen's novels, The Bachelor doesn't merely show us an unadulterated reflection of our society — it pieces storylines and character profiles together in ways that instruct us on how we should feel about what we're seeing. Bachelor Nation has a moral code that viewers are intimately attuned to. Contestants tasked with following this moral code while on the show, and producers weave their behavior into storylines which function as perpetual parables, teaching tools from which audience members learn right from wrong. The Bachelor's moral code is succinctly and effectively codified via show-specific language, a vocabulary which is extensive and recognizable enough that fans have even created comprehensive Bachelor lexicons.3

Offenses in the Bahcelorverse are reified in phrases such as: "here for the right reasons," which is used to discuss a contestant's motivations for coming on the show. There is only actually one singular "right reason" for joining the show — "to find love" — but manifold "wrong reasons," which usually involve joining the show in pursuit of fame. The phrase might be used to affirm or to challenge a contestant's motivations — telling someone that you "don't think they're here for the right reasons" is akin to saying you'll meet them at dawn — a direct challenge of their honor. "Rose-chasing" describes the pursuit of a romantic partner not due to actual interest, but in the interest of securing a rose.4 "Controversial," is a euphemism for problematic contestant behavior, used in the past to refer to racism, sexism, ableism, classism and more! Just like readers of Austen, members of Bachelor Nation must become fluent in these terms to fully access The Bachelor's content.

Another mechanism through which Austen's novels and the Bachelorverse teach their internal logics to readers/ watchers is the modeling of a system of reward and punishment. Critic Leland Monk deepens our understanding of punishment in Austen's works, which often takes the form of "corrective 'mortification'" in the service of "the local micropractices of a disciplinary regimen that goes by the name of 'manners.'"5 Throughout Austen's novels, we see characters who do not perform "manners" properly be punished. "Corrective 'mortifications'" take the form of verbal dressings-down which have potent effects. These are so effective largely because of the smallness and precarity of Austen heroines' worlds. The women she writes about teeter in relative places of social legibility, one indiscreet daliance or male family member's death away from tumbling into the status of "fallen woman" or plummeting in financial status. These small-scale violences correct characters, and readers, into an understanding of "manners."

The Bachelor has its own "disciplinary regimen," its own particular suite of corrective punishments to which cast members are subjected. The Bachelor's vocabulary creates a rhetorical universe wherein the deployment of a single phrase can portend the end of a cast member's time on the show. Cast members must correctly perform manners to avoid being felled by the weekly elimination. Time with the lead is kept extremely scarce, doled out and withheld to reward and punish a specific set of actions. The precarity of their presence means contestants must learn and learn quickly the "right" way of acting. Everyone involved in the Bachelorverse, from producers to cast members, leads, and fans, participates in moral judgements and disciplining activities within this sphere. We enjoy seeing villains punished and heroes rewarded. I believe that this is the invisibilized pleasure of The Bachelor: the addictive rush of consenting to, or perhaps even participating in, its disciplinary regimen.

In her book on the franchise, Suzannah Showler claims that "The Bachelor has recast itself as something not to be consumed, but responded to."6 The way that viewers "[respond] to" the show is with conversational exchange and collective judgment formation. The minute a cast member does something I feel is unacceptable, I turn to Twitter or my favorite Bachelor Instagram accounts. One hundred percent of the times I've done this, I've seen the person in question thoroughly lambasted by hundreds of other angry fans. I derive pleasure not only from the creative nature of others' insults, but by the confirmation via popular consensus that my outrage at a cast member's actions is correct, that it is the appropriate way to feel about the situation.

Retweet metrics and trending hashtags confirm my judgment, and I feel validated in my way of seeing. This process reinscribes my attunement to the moral sensibilities of Bachelor Nation. Watching The Bachelor alongside its internet chatter functions as a morality pop-quiz. Every time I get a question right (in this case, getting a question right means that I experience appropriate affect in relation to a certain situation) I get a kick of dopamine — a reward feedback loop that encourages me to keep my opinions aligned with those of my Bachelor community.

I follow social media accounts dedicated to The Bachelor which heavily criticize the show's racism, fatphobia, ableism, and misogyny — but these are still accounts completely dedicated to The Bachelor. In this way, criticism about The Bachelor does not serve to dissuade people from watching the show, but actually becomes integral to why people watch the show — they want to be part of the conversation. The Bachelor often brings up, intentionally or not, many pressing social issues. In this way, it becomes useful as a primer full of examples which can be used to discuss important topics.

In addition to the similarly extensive linguistic codes found in The Bachelor and Austen's novels, there is another crucial quality they hold in common: the use of free indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse is a style of writing which blends third person narration with the subjectivity and emotional charge of first person judgements. While Austen's novels are written in third person, different lines take on the "voices" of different characters; often a stretch of narration which deals with the actions of a specific character is inflected with the sensibilities of the character in question.7 Attributing sentences to the perspectives of certain characters is sometimes a complicated matter, and continues to spark debate among scholars.8 In addition to lines focalized through particular characters, there are lines of exposition spoken from the perspective of someone outside the events of the novel, an opinionated narrator we might view as a representation of Austen herself. 

The structure of The Bachelor creates an effect that's markedly similar to this mode of narration, as if it were written in free-indirect-discourse-for-television. While television is a medium involving visual as well as auditory content, The Bachelor prefers telling over showing its stories. Yes, actions are recorded and played back to us, but events are always overlaid with in-the-moment (ITM) interviews. In ITM interviews, cast members narrate events to us in the present tense, describing not only what is happening as we see it happen, but bringing us into their interiority, sharing how they are feeling and what they are thinking in those moments. Exposition precedes, is presented alongside, and concludes the actual events which have occurred. Even as we are seeing the date happen, we are being told what we are seeing, and thus guided in our way of interpreting it.

Each bit of narration is spoken through the mouth of a different cast member/ character, lending the story The Bachelor tells the same patchworked perspective we get from, say, Sense and Sensibility. This means that the narration we receive is always already inflected by ideas about how to think about what we are seeing, ideas that are particular to different characters in the story. In addition to bits of narration which reflect the thoughts and feelings of various characters, Austen's novels contain musings seemingly from the perspective of someone external to the narrative, someone who comments on its events from an ironic distance. This narrator also has its Bachelor parallel in the show's host (currently Jesse Palmer, or, if we are fans of @gameofroses, Dark Lord Palmer).

Free indirect discourse within The Bachelor makes us viewers feel like the ultimate insiders. Not only do we see the events that happen — we also get "direct access" to the thoughts of cast members on what they're experiencing as they experience it. We see contestants confess things 'to us', like that they're falling in love with the lead, or some secret they're nervous about, before they confess those things to the other characters in their storyline. This gives us a sense of mastery over the world of The Bachelor, as if we see the full truth, and cast members only get to see slivers of it. The sense of access and control we have over the narrative onscreen is enhanced by the fact that, even as viewers, we can still directly access the lives of the contestants.

This brings us to a place of divergence: while readers of Austen cannot truly reach into the novel and punish characters, Bachelor-watchers can. The not-so-sealed fictional universe of The Bachelor is, to an extent, permeable to us. The structure of The Bachelor allows us to punish and reward cast members, both by proxy and directly. Each season ends with M/WTA (Men/Women Tell All) and AFR (After the Final Rose), which place the cast in front of a live studio audience. During Gabby and Rachel's AFR (2022), The Bachelor, for the first time, allowed fans to bestow a the very first rose of Zach Shalcross's season — a bloom aptly titled "America's First Impression Rose."9

Event beyond show-sanctioned fan actions, Bachelor Nation is able to impact the lives and livelihoods of the show's contestants. One notable example is the way Bachelor Nation massed its power to punish Brendan Morais for his misdeeds on Season 7 of Bachelor in Paradise (2021). Brendan went on Paradise while already in a relationship with Peiper James, who appeared on Season 25 of The Bachelor (2021). He strung along another Paradise cast member, Natasha Parker, as a way to continue getting roses and stay on the show ("rose chasing"), until producers released Peiper onto the beach.

Once Peiper arrived, Brendan quickly dropped Natasha. Worst of all, he was caught on camera complaining about the time he spent with Natasha, calling it a "sacrifice" which had been "getting annoying," justifying his behavior with the offensive remark that Natasha had "no other prospects" on the beach (a "controversial" move). Brendan and Peiper openly discussed their plan to appear on Paradise to gain followers and get a free vacation (telltale signs of being "here for the wrong reasons"). When called out for his duplicitous behavior, Brendan gaslit Natasha and continued to insult her and other women cast members who confronted him over the situation.

Other Paradise cast members eventually pressured Brendan and Peiper into leaving the show. Once these episodes aired, there was an uproar against the pair, but mostly against Brendan.10 Countless fans and members of the Bachelor family came out in support of Natasha. 86,000 members of Bachelor Nation unfollowed Brendan on Instagram, and he lost brand sponsorships.11 Meanwhile, Natasha gained 300,000 followers.12 Leveraging followers into brand sponsorships is one of the biggest ways that fan favorites from The Bachelor can benefit financially from being on the show, and it's no accident that Brendan's "being in the wrong" and Natasha's "being in the right" translated directly into financial loss and reward. Bachelor Nation passed judgment and then balanced the Bacheloristic scales of justice. This broad collective action testifies to the strong moralistic bent of Bachelor Nation and its investment in rewarding those contestants who play by their rules and punishing those who attempt to manipulate the system.

What made Brendan's behavior so unacceptable so unacceptable to Bachelor nation was not just the harm he did to Natasha, but the fact that he thought that he could control the rules of the game. We, the viewers, do not like to feel outwitted. Readers of Emma felt similarly about the unpunished wrongdoings of Frank Churchill (basically the 1815 version of Brendan). Frank publically led Emma Woodhouse on as a way to hide his secret engagement with Jane Fairfax. According to Monk, the real reason we despise Frank Churchill is "not simply for the deception he practices . . . it is rather the perverse and malicious pleasure he takes in his many games that seems most reprehensible."13 We don't just dislike Frank Churchill because he lied about being engaged, we hate that he successfully manipulated the characters around him, and, by proxy, us.

Our deep outrage in these scenarios registers the extent to which we've bought into the mores of each universe. We do not just observe each system of internal logic — we participate in it, whether by vicariously experiencing disciplinary punishment through a form of sympathetic identification akin to what Monk suggests, or by actively perpetrating corrective violences. That participation is a form of investment. People like Frank Churchill, or like Brendan Morais, destabilize the carefully culled system of rewards and punishment, shattering our illusion of readerly power.

We forget that the narrative we see, the material we cast our judgment over, is only ever what the producers choose to disclose to us. This sense of agency is partially fictive, created for us by the true masterminds carefully constructing our perceptions.

Producers of The Bachelor do see us. The show would not have been successfully spitting out content since 2002 if its producers did not understand exactly what fans want to see, the proclivities we bring to the show, and how those can be manipulated. As Showler correctly and succinctly notes, "the Bachelor has a funny way of both tapping and training viewers' desires."14 While we may think that decreeing collective judgements gives us power, those judgements and the affective craze that makes us act on them are carefully cultivated, season by season, and teased out by producers. Austen's uses of irony and caricature lead us to agree with her worldview on levels of which we may not be fully conscious. The real master judgers (as distinct from judges)are those creating the material we consume, those who set the rules of the game. We might not realize it, but as soon as we start doling out punishment, we are already playing and perhaps, being played.

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Emily Bacal is a Marketing Content Specialist at Spektrix, and completed their Master of Arts degree in Performance Studies at New York University in 2022. Emily's favorite Bachelor moments are probably all of the deliciously homoerotic moments between Gabby and Rachel during their season.

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