Authenticity, Convention, and Bridget Jones's DiaryAlison Case © 2001 Ohio State University Press
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In
this paper, I would like to explore the relationships among three
things: 1. the narrative technique of the recent popular novel, Bridget
Jones's Diary; 2. that novel's claim to "authenticity" as the voice of
women of a particular generation and situation and 3. the convention of "feminine
narration" I have argued operated in the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century British novel. I will suggest, in short, that 1 and 2
are linked by 3: that is, that the novel's "authenticity-effect" is in
part produced by its adherence to a venerable novelistic convention of
narrative femininity. In
Plotting Women, I argued that a literary convention I labelled "feminine
narration" governed the use of female narrators in the eighteenth and
nineteenth-century British novel. Feminine narration is characterized by
the exclusion of the narrator from the activity of shaping her
experience into a coherent and meaningful story-or from what I term "plotting"
and "preaching." Instead, the feminine narrator is constituted as a "witness"
who presents experience in a more or less "raw" and unmediated way,
which is then typically given shape and meaning by a male "master-narrator"
either within the narrative or in a pseudoeditorial frame. Feminine
narrators, then, characteristically know less than the reader about the
shape and meaning of their story, and indeed this is part of their
narrative function: they tend to be "more interesting for what they do
not know... than for what they know" (16). I
want to stress that I use "feminine" here in the sense of "conforming to
the gender code for women of a specific culture." Feminine narration is
a literary convention, not an essential or inevitable feature of the way
real women actually tell stories. And as a convention, it can be
violated: not all female narrators in this period are consistently
feminine, nor are all feminine narrators female. Conventionality is
partly a matter of frequency or likelihood, but it is most significantly
a question of "marking" narrators that fit conventional gender norms of
narration tend to be unobtrusive, "unmarked," in their role as
narrators; those that do not, call attention to themselves via their
violation of the convention, and that violation will generally be
evident through other kinds of textual markings as well. Hence women
seeking narrative authority may also be tagged as unfeminine, dangerous,
or evil - or significant textual energies may be devoted to defending
them against such charges - while feminine narration by men tends to be
associated with other conspicuous indicators of a crisis of masculinity.
One of the most intriguing forms of such marking I found was a
persistent association or analogy between a first-person narrator's
capacity for retrospective plotting (the mapping of cause and effect
into a shapely and meaningful narrative) in narration, and his or her
capacity for projective plotting within the story-for planning out
patterns of cause and effect in the future. I
ended my discussion of female narrators in 1899, with Dracula. With
Modernism, I felt, a whole different set of literary values and ideas
came into play, not just about men and women, but about narrative
authority and narrative control, and the extent to which anyone, male or
female, could or ought to achieve them. Nonetheless, I didn't and don't
believe that gendered conventions of narration specifically, a
generalized opposition between female narrative credibility and evidence
of active narrative shaping-simply disappeared in 1900, nor did the
broader if more inchoate cultural resistance to perceiving women as
active meaning-makers (rather than as carriers or embodiments of
meaning) that helped give rise to it though both have undoubtedly been
complicated and qualified since then. So
it was with the sense of a possible connection that I became interested
last year in the much-talked-about popular novel Bridget Jones's Diary,
by Helen Fielding. Much of the publicity for the novel focused on the "authenticity"
of the fictional female voice it offered, with the back cover, for
example, citing a reviewer's praise of it for "channeling something so
universal and (horrifyingly) familiar that readers will giggle and sigh
with collective delight." This claim was loudly reinforced by the large
numbers of women who confessed that Bridget's voice "hit home" for them,
as well as by a strong tendency to conflate Bridget with Fielding
herself. In fact, by far the most common response I got at the Narrative
conference to a short excerpt from the novel was from women who
expressed delight and a kind of rueful identification with Bridget's
voice. What I want to suggest here, though, is that what feels right and
convincing and appealing to readers about this voice has as much to do
with gendered literary convention as it does with any kind of
verisimilitude to contemporary women's lives. To
what extent is Bridget Jones's Diary still infomed by the gendering of
narrative voice in earlier novels: specifically, their linkage of
acceptable femininity with the lack of narrative and material agency,
their founding of readerly pleasure on the experience of reading against
or beyond the narrator's perceptions, and, most broadly, their
resistance to representing female figures as the "authors" of whatever
meaning emerges in their lives or their narratives? The diary form in
itself is one link. Diary and epistolary narration are in fact the most
typical forms for feminine narration, since by their nature these forms
tend to deprive the narrator of the interpretive advantage of hindsight
with which to shape a narrative. This is not to say that there is an
inevitable relationship between these narrative modes and the defining
features of feminine narration. The feminizing of a diary or epistolary
narrative voice comes about through the contrast between what the writer
understands, expects to happen, or intends to make happen and both our
own sense of likely narrative trajectories and actual subsequent
developments in the story. In a case where subsequent developments
consistently affirm the interpretive skills and plotting aspirations of
the narrator - as is the case with Lovelace for much of Clarissa, for
example - diary or epistolary narration may actually underscore the
authority of the narrator. But this is a rarer phenomenon, and there is
in fact a fairly close overlap between feminine narrators and diary or
epistolary narration in this period. Keeping
a diary, though, is also a slightly different kind of narrative act from
writing letters. Since a diary is written to oneself about things one
necessarily already knows, the writing of a diary almost by definition
serves a purpose beyond the purely informational. It represents an
effort to process experience, to order it and make sense of it, and in
that sense, to narrativize it. This is, of course, not an absolute
distinction: fictional letters may perform a similar function for their
writers, and (more rarely) fictional diaries may not, but in general the
emphasis in a diary is necessarily more on efforts of interpretation, on
the search for patterns and trajectories. Female diarists are hence more
likely than letter writers to at least aspire to transgressive roles as
narrative or material "plotters," though their aspirations may be
thwarted by actual plot developments. In
keeping with this pattern, the diary form in Bridget Jones also acts to
call attention both to the desire for control and to its failures.
Fielding calls attention to the narrative's status as a written diary
through a number of devices - Bridget's habit of keeping records on
behaviors she'd like to control better (eating, drinking, smoking) her
use of abbreviations ("v. good") and a telegraphic style to condense her
writing, and at times the use of misspellings and rambling language to
suggest entries written while drunk. The fact that Bridget keeps a
diary, and keeps it the way she does, is an important aspect of her
character - an indicator of her desire to take control of her life, get
some perspective on her more obsessive behaviors, and confide in someone
or something. It opens with a long list of New Year's Resolutions, and
the diary itself is full of plans. Bridget is always plotting her
future, with varying degrees of detail and commitment, and because of
the diary format, we get to see, over and over again, how those plans
work out - which is, almost invariably, not remotely in the way Bridget
hopes or expects. In fact, one need not read far before future plot
developments become highly predictable to a reader, if not to Bridget,
since we can be certain any time she makes a statement like "expect to
become known as brilliant cook and hostess" (72) that disaster and
humiliation are on the way. This pattern actually structures the novel
as a whole, since the list of New Year's Resolutions at the start acts
as a foreshadowing of all the things Bridget will conspicuously fail to
do, with the crucial exception of the only one – "Form functional
relationship with responsible adult" (3) - that is not and could not be
solely in Bridget's own control to accomplish. It
also, frequently, structures individual entries, through
minute-by-minute ac counts of Bridget's efforts to get something done -
and, interestingly, these accounts sometimes violate the mimetic logic
of the diary form. The entry I want to focus on, for "Tuesday 21 March:
Birthday," tracks her preparations for a birthday dinner party in which
she plans to serve shepherd's pie to nineteen people, with the addition,
as an afterthought, of "Char-Grilled Belgian Endive Salad, Roquefort
Lardons and Frizzled Chorizo" and "individual Grand Marnier souffles"
for a "fashionable touch" (72). The
entry proper opens with the 6:30 notation: "Cannot go on. Have just
stepped in a pan of mashed potato in new kitten-heel black suede shoes
from Pied a terre (Pied-a-pomme-de-terre, more like), forgetting that
kitchen floor and surfaces were covered in pans of mince and mashed
potato" (72). Bridget responds, apparently, by sitting down with her
diary and preparing a "Schedule" that will (supposedly) allow her to
accomplish everything needed before the guests arrive at 8:00. This
highly optimistic schedule (five minutes are allotted for preparing
nineteen individual souffles, and ten for the "frisse lardon frizzled
chorizo thing") is then followed by a minute-by-minute account of what
actually happens, which finds her, for example, at 7:35 with "Shit,
shit, shit. The shepherd's pie is still in pans all over the kitchen
floor and have not yet washed hair," and finally, at 7:55, with souffles
and "frizzy salad thing" abandoned: "Aargh. Doorbell. Am in bra and
panties with wet hair. Pie is all over floor. Suddenly hate the guests.
Have had to slave for two days, and now they will all swarm in,
demanding food like cuckoos. Feel like opening door and shouting, 'Oh,
go fuck yourselves'" (73). While it is just plausible, with the first
schedule, that Bridget might have sat down with her diary and mapped out
how she was going to get everything done in the time left, it seems
inconceivable that in the midst of the increasingly panicked rush to the
deadline that follows, she would have stopped periodically to write down
how badly she was doing. This seems, in other words, like a point at
which the textual verisimilitude of the diary is breached. To what end? If
it were important to us to retain the fiction of Bridget as actually
writing the diary (that is, the mimetic verisimilitude of the
narration), we might conclude that Bridget actually writes all of this
stuff after the fact. Such a conclusion would put Bridget in full
control of the irony of this situation - she would not only be
retrospectively recording the absurdity of her effort to get the dinner
prepared, she would be selecting, with some rhetorical
self-consciousness, a method of recording it that effaced her own
retrospectivity for maximum comic effect - she would, in other words, be
writing this particular entry (or this kind of entry) with the same
degree of rhetorical self-consciousness that her author has in selecting
the diary form in the first place. The difficulty with this option is
that it would put Bridget in full self-conscious control on an
occasional and local basis of effects that on a larger scale - i.e.,
between entries, and over the diary as a whole - are clearly out of her
control, and need to be out of her control for the humor of the novel to
work. This
seems like a good point to invoke James Phelan's observation that
mimetic consistency in narration may legitimately not be the highest
priority even in a work of fiction that in other respects clearly
aspires to producing a believably mimetic narrative voice (110). In
other words, most readers would not be disturbed by - or perhaps even
notice - the apparent violations of mimetic consistency in the diary
form here. Instead, they would tacitly accept - again, perhaps without
even thinking about it-that at these points in the novel we are getting
a kind of direct feed from Bridget's consciousness, rather than a
self-consciously produced written record, and that we are to accept them
as such. But note that this technique - the silent shift to a direct
representation of Bridget's consciousness - makes Bridget more of a
feminine narrator, more of an unmediated, unprocessing "witness" to the
events of her life, than even the diary form itself. I
call attention to this particular narrative anomaly not because I think
it should pose any serious problems for a reader but because the
interpretive options it presents to us (whether or not we are conscious
of them in reading the novel casually) seems to me to crystallize the
larger question of how to understand Bridget's relationship to the
comedy of the novel as a whole. And to get at that issue, I'd like to
think about the novel in relation to a comic epistolary novel of the
eighteenth century - Smollet's Humphrey Clinker. Humphrey
Clinker is composed of letters from both men and women, and they are all
funny - but in radically different ways. The men's are self-consciously
humorous - they relate scenes and events they themselves find funny, and
even when the humor is at their expense, they know it, and the reader is
asked to laugh with them. The women's letters, by contrast, are without
exception unconsciously funny - funny in part because they're intended
to be perfectly serious. To laugh at Matthew and Jery's letters is to
feel akin to them, grateful to them for sharing the humor of their
lives, even admiring of them for their ability to laugh at themselves -
and that is one kind of narrative pleasure. To laugh at Tabitha's, Win's,
and Lydia's letters, though, is to feel superior to them, to feel that
we understand their lives and characters in ways that they cannot. And
that is another kind of narrative - pleasure a kind of pleasure I have
suggested is closely associated with feminine narration. Which
kind of pleasure is Bridget Jones offering? The obvious answer would be "some
of each" - lines like "pied-a-pomme-de-terre," for example, are clearly
self-consciously witty, and the novel has many such moments, though
unconscious comedy predominates. But on the whole the question of
Bridget's relationship to her own comedy seems more like an uneasy "both
at once." What, for example, are we to make of a New Year's Resolution
like this one: "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"
(2)? Does Bridget recognize how absurdly contradictory this aim is? It
seems to me that the answer is both "How can she not, being as
self-conscious about her own absurdities as she (often) is?" and "How
can she, and have the novel progress as it does?" A similar tension
emerges in the numerous instances where Bridget appears to be able to
predict in advance events that nonetheless surprise her when they
arrive. A week before the disastrous birthday dinner, for example, she
actually rules out the dinner party option on the grounds that she "would
have to spend birthday slaving and would hate all guests on arrival"
(68), and she herself draws attention to the parallels between Mark
Darcy and Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, though by the time the
detailed plot parallels have been worked through to their romantic
conclusion, it appears to take her completely by surprise. That this
unexpected and largely unworked-for romance should at the same time be
construed as the keeping of a New Year's resolution exemplifies the
novel's ambivalent relationship toward female narrative and material
agency. It is as if Fielding wants to grant Bridget some of the
trappings of agency and self-awareness without really challenging the
conventional opposition between female "control" and feminine virtue or
desirability. I am struck by the way the plot appears routinely to
punish Bridget for attempts to manage her life, while rewarding her for
being out of control - the genuineness that apparently wins Darcy's
heart, after all, is the product of Bridget's persistent failure to
carry through her plans to remake herself in another image, as thinner,
more cool and poised, more intellectual - in short, more like the "laquered
over" women Darcy rejects (207). My suspicion is that women readers are
willing to identify with her because of those trappings - her wit and
(intermittent) self-knowledge - but that a large part of her appeal is
the reassurance that our own failures of control are not only loveable,
they may be the most loveable, because the most feminine, things about
us.
We
often think of authenticity in fiction as the opposite of
conventionality. In placing Bridget Jones in the context of the gendered
narrative conventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I want
to suggest that the "authenticity" of a fictional voice is in part a
textual effect reliant upon literary conventions and expectations. This
is not to deny the undeniable-that many women did in fact experience
Bridget Jones as "like" themselves in a variety of comic or painful (or
comically painful) ways. It is rather to suggest that at least a part of
what makes Bridget seem familiar, and therefore convincing, is that her
relationship to her story and her life, and our relationship to her as
narrator, mirrors the lack of narrative and material agency we have come
to expect from fictional women. Alison Case is an Associate Professor of English at Williams College, where she teaches Victorian literature, the novel, and gender studies. She has recently published Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Her work has also appeared in Narrative, Victorian Poetry, and Clio. |