It’s Raining Men: Bridget Jones and Chick-Lit
Chick-lit is not my forte. Perhaps that is why it will be interesting to write this essay, broadening one’s views, et cetera. Sometimes, it is good to delve into something one would not usually delve into: may it be sand, manure, glitter, gravel… chick-lit? And delve I shall, deep and well, I shall delve and see what I can find and perhaps learn.
It is naught but snobbery deeming some genres inferior to others, or perhaps everything with the tag “genre” attached to it (a whole other can of worms) inferior. That is like saying a zebra is inferior to a penguin, a squirrel, a tortoise, a human, or a hamster. It makes no sense.
There is a jungle of genres, and we should celebrate that rich ecosystem that provides us with the oxygen of literature: stories. The rest is a question about taste and function, not objective quality.
So, Bridget Jones’s Diary has become a somewhat iconic book. Say “chick-lit,” and many would think about that book or perhaps the 2001 film adaptation. First published in 1996, it was a success, and by 2006, it had sold two million copies worldwide. The book is written as a diary by Bridget, a single career woman in her thirties. She writes about her love life and relentless pursuit of an adequate man as her biological clock slowly ticks away.
Bridget is a goal-oriented woman who, besides finding a man, struggles with her weight, over-indulgence in food, cigarettes, and alcohol, as well as her career. Paradoxically, she is self-confident while simultaneously self-conscious about the aspects of her life.
And that was it. Right there. Right there, that was the moment… I suddenly realized that unless something change soon I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine and I’d finally die fat and alone and be found three weeks later half-eaten by Alsatians, or I was about to turn into Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
Not only is Bridget a paradox as a person, but the book is also a paradox of equal parts feminism and patriarchy. At times, it implicitly praises the heterosexual norm and, at other times, portrays it as something archaic and explicitly disparages it. Bridget both praises the patriarchal traditional marriage and chases after it while simultaneously (perhaps partly because she can not obtain it) questioning its merits.
The grass is greener, but not really. That might stem from her being affected by societal pressures from family and friends. She feels they see her as a freak for being single at her age. So the pressure on her for self-actualization and, by extension, obtaining a man is not only based on biological age (feels stupid using that term) but also social factors.
Oh GOD. Why can’t married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn’t rush up to THEM and roar, “How’s your marriage going? Still having sex?” Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, “Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo,” than, “Super, thanks.”
Considering the novel is centered around a woman’s search for a heterosexual relationship, it does not crush many norms on the surface. Yet, perhaps more so under it through not so much practical deeds but thoughts and feelings.
On a side note, Bridget’s homosexual friend is a comically stereotypical portrayal of the heterosexual woman’s gay friend that gives her inside knowledge about men. Not very interesting. Nevertheless, that is neither here nor there, but more about that later.
The dynamics between women and men mostly follow the traditional templates while simultaneously questioning them. Female sexuality is an integral part of the novel and is not swept under the rug while still not being overly prominent. Moreover, with “overly prominent,” I mean when the author makes an unnaturally big deal about it for some freedom fighting chock value.
As earlier mentioned, Bridget is a paradox: on the one hand, she longs for the traditional heterosexual relationship with everything that entails, while on the other, she questions its merits. Bridget spends a whole lot of time doing mental acrobatics to persuade herself that the heterosexual marriage is NOT something to long for while simultaneously longing for it, or perhaps the romantic dream of it.
In the spur of the moment, she might conclude that marriage is not something to strive for, as seen in the previous quote. She inherently understands that her development is intrinsically good, yet she still connects it with attaining a boyfriend.
I will not sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance,complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.
Maria Nilson and Helene Ehriander write that chick-lit as a whole is often criticized for being anti-feministic in the values it represents: patriarchal structures, the nuclear family, et cetera. So, the question is if Bridget Jones’s Diary is anti-feministic.
If feministic thought requires the dissolution of traditional heterosexual roles and values, yes, it may very well be. If feministic thought is about letting women choose their path regardless of societal norms, no, it is probably not. A theme prominent in the novel is being good enough as you are, even if Bridget herself might not understand it initially. More about that later.
Self-acceptance is a message and theme that applies to both women and men, but the novel puts it in a feminine context. Whole and whole, I would say that Bridget Jones’s diary is a primarily feminist work, if that makes any sense. While Bridget follows societal standards of beauty and behavior, perhaps patriarchal, she simultaneously knows she does not have to and maybe should not.
Bridget Jones’s Diary depicts the feminist struggle instead of the feminist utopia. Nevertheless, I do not think most literature is simple enough to be distilled down to one ideological or philosophical thought. In most cases, I do not think it is binary but, at times, conflicting. However, one example of when Bridget simultaneously follows and questions the societal standards on women is greatly illustrated by this quote:
6 p.m. Completely exhausted by entire day of date-preparation. Being a woman is worse than being a farmer — there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised. The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed.
Bridget tries to become a “better” person by quitting her bad habits and, of course, losing some weight and, in the extension, obtaining a boyfriend. Nevertheless, she finds she is enough by being herself despite her self-perceived shortcomings. On her journey up the mountain of self-help, she realizes it is the opposite of self-help she unwittingly tries to achieve.
It is a form of asceticism clad in the illusion of self-improvement. Her diary is a way for her to see her perceived negative traits and accept them. If people can not love her for who she is in her natural state of being, are those with whom she should associate?
Yvonne Leffler writes that the chick-lit genre is an evolution of the self-help “tradition,” which raised the question of what Bridget Jones’s Diary wants to help the reader with. Perhaps it is self-acceptance the author wants to teach her presumably female readers. Accept yourself; the good will come, and you do not need a man. Having one will not be the missing piece of the puzzle that will make your life perfect.
Besides chick-lit dealing with female issues in general, Yvonne Leffler illuminates the idea of it being a genre where seeing oneself in the heroine is paramount and how a very personal writing style achieves that. Bridget Jones’s diary makes a great example with its epistolary form, where the reader gets the impression of reading something very personal, a journal not intended for the world to see. The novel is an individual’s private thoughts about life and being, which creates the impression of intimacy between the character and the reader.
With the novel being presented as a diary, it becomes easier for the reader to absorb Bridget’s thoughts as their own. By doing this, the reading females (I generalize) can draw from the heroine’s experiences and apply the lessons she learned. To some degree, chick-lit can be considered a literary simulation for solving human, primarily female, problems. Interesting.
Bridget tries to follow the ideal woman’s societal standards and somewhat fails at it while understanding that it does not matter, and we are back to the Bridget Paradox discussed earlier. She is acutely aware of the standards imposed upon her and does not wholly agree with them but perhaps sees them as a necessary evil in attaining that elusive boyfriend of hears. The standards are unobtainable, but she is willing to do her damn best to obtain them.
Again, paradoxically, despite knowing they would not bring nirvana, even if so, she somehow managed to become the personification of them. We must imagine Aphrodite unhappy. The ideals of beauty are something that the novel portrays as unattainable and perhaps also the ideal relationship or, by extension, marriage. No perfection, no self-evident values. Is Bridget Jones’s Diary a nihilistic work?
Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature — with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin, Dennis Healey eyebrows, face a graveyard of dead skin cells, spots erupting, long curly fingernails like Struwwelpeter, blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses, flabby body flobbering around. Ugh, ugh. Is it any wonder girls have no confidence?
Moreover, there are the stereotypes. Every work of fiction has them, besides perhaps some surrealistic avant-garde literary novel no one has on their bookshelf. Are they there, the stereotypes?
Yes. I briefly discussed some of them earlier, but those that come to mind are the depressed stay-at-home mom dreaming about what their life could have been, the gay male friend, the arrogant woman preoccupied with status and looks, the male counterpart, and, of course, Bridget, the self-conscious, nice, relatable (insert yourself) still somewhat young woman.
Are they authentic, the stereotypes? What is authenticity but portraying some characteristics existing in humans? That is a somewhat blunt, do-no-god definition as there are billions of people statistically, some of whom would fit almost every imagined stereotype. Perhaps this is a pointless tangent, but there is not the word “stereotype” I have a problem with. It is: “authentic.” Well, I will let that stay. For fun.
Lastly, an interesting viewpoint to finish it all: Kelly A. Marsh writes in her article Contextualizing Bridget Jones about a divide between her interpretation of the feministic elements of the novel in comparison to the general American ditto. There are two main points: Marsh argues that Bridget does not represent a powerless woman unable to achieve the American ideal of the perfected self. Instead, she says it proves Fielding eschews the myth that the self can be completely remade.
Perhaps the “Americans” do not see that Bridget, deep inside, actually likes herself. That her situation is not a tragedy but an essential journey to self-confidence. Fielding also explores the American ideal of self-reliance and how it is a mirage. There is no such thing as total self-reliance, and we should not be afraid to lean on the community when needed, just like Bridget does.
Thank you for reading.
