Keeping Up with Ms. Jones 

By Meghan Daum, Village Voice - June 30, 1998.

Bridget Jones's Diary, the bestselling British novel just out in the U.S., concerns itself almost entirely with the neurotic fallout of popular women's culture. Its narrator is a victim of women's magazines, self-improvement rituals, and much of the detritus that whirls around the Mars/Venus landscape. In effect, the book spits on the Manolo Blahnik shoes of the whole institution. So it's ironic that the American women's media machine has declared soul sisterhood with Bridget. Vogue published an excerpt that mostly chronicled the narrator's obsession with dieting, there have been several comparisons to Ally McBeal, and Jane magazine claimed its readers would be wondering how the author got into their diaries. The novel is, without a doubt, immensely entertaining. But what remains most satisfying about Bridgetmania is that the joke will ultimately be on the hype itself

Bridget Jones, the fictional creation of author Helen Fielding, is a thirtysomething Londoner who keeps a daily log of her weight, caloric intake, amount of alcohol consumed, numbers of lottery tickets purchased, cigarettes smoked and other vices that range from compulsive calls to a telephone service called 1471 (the British equivalent of *69) to wasting hours studying brochures to plan a weekend trip with her boss-ersatz lover, Daniel Cleaver. In her ongoing quest to reduce the quantities of each, she is prone to remark parenthetically on what she terms her "progress": "126 lbs. (excellent), alcohol units 0, cigarettes 29 (v.v. bad, esp. in 2 hours), calories 3879 (repulsive), negative thoughts 942 (approx. based on av. per minute), minutes spent counting negative thoughts 127 (approx.)"

The novel tries to have a plot, and, in much the same manner that Bridget tries to have what she considers a proper life, the endeavor largely fails. But in both cases, the minutiae that fall in between are so hilarious that this shortcoming is easily overlooked. Bridget Jones's Diary began as a column in the British newspaper The Independent, and it's pretty clear that Fielding imposed on her tidbits what book publishers love to call a "narrative arc" in order to pass the book off as a novel. Borrowing from Pride and Prejudice, Fielding has given Bridget a kooky mum who, suffering from "Having It All syndrome" leaves Bridget's father for a swarthy Portuguese man and becomes a lifestyle reporter for a local television news station. Bridget's mother makes repeated attempts to fix her daughter up with an eligible bachelor named Mark Darcy, whose choice of a V-neck, diamond-patterned sweater at a dinner party immediately removes him from Bridget's list of boyfriend possibilities.

Bridget frequently refers to herself as "self" - "hours spent asleep 15 (bad, but not self's fault as heat wave)." And it's the effortlessness with which she falls into this parlance that shows what happens to one's identity and correspondent worldview in a media culture that earns billions of dollars by devising problems for women and then selling them the solutions. In this realm, "self" is less about personal identity than it is about abstract concepts like "wholeness" and "spiritedness;" words that connote good vibes but more often result in empty aspirations. "I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture;" Bridget writes, "have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can't take the pressure." Bridget spends countless hours with her best friends, Sharon and Jude, deconstructing the "emotionally fuckwitted" behavior of single men in London. "Stupid, smug, arrogant, manipulative, self-indulgent bastards" opines Sharon. "They exist in a total Culture of Entitlement."

Like Cosmo culture itself, Bridget and her pals have absorbed much of feminism's vocabulary; it is the precedent that allows them to attach sociological meaning to stereotypically girlie behavior like obsessing over men. But unlike the magazines and self-help books that inform the narrator's world, Bridget Jones's Diary manages to send up the whole genre and effectively indict it as a destructive force without becoming dogmatic. Though her every move - sipping chamomile tea in the bath, experimenting with feng shui, and attempting to woo her lover by ignoring him - seems a direct attempt to apply lessons of "inner poise" and "Goddesshood in Everywoman," Bridget's absurdity is so deftly rendered that smart readers should know better than to take her frivolousness seriously. Fielding has done nothing if not implicated the narrator. For every attack on Smug Marrieds and fuckwitted men, there are countless more occasions on which Bridget chastises herself for shallowness, laziness, self-absorption, failure to exercise, and talking about television shows rather than George Eliot at book parties. Her self-loathing saves her from accusations of misanthropy.

But Americans, particularly those who are introduced to Bridget via the women's media that is so myopically embracing her, are not keen on self-loathing. Even in the U.K., there has been criticism about the protagonist's "feminist" ways, and I would expect that similar umbrage taken in this country will be magnified by way of Bridget's borderline alcoholism and unfashionably prodigious smoking. Bridget calls herself a feminist. But as she knows all too well, the goals of feminism have, in the last 20 years, been superseded by images of "total womanhood" that masquerade as empowerment tools but are merely products for sale. Having talked herself into a pregnancy scare, Bridget muses, "Am starting to get carried away with idea of self as Calvin Klein-style mother figure, poss. wearing crop-top or throwing baby in the air, laughing filled in advert for designer gas cooker, feel-good movie or similar."

Bridget's constant failure to follow through on even the most basic lifestyle tips offered up by her mentor, Cosmo culture, will undoubtedly provoke the disapproval of those who remain devoted to that culture's major tenet, that self-improvement and positive thinking are synonymous with substance. Bridget knows she should relieve stress by performing the Salute to the Sun move she learned in a Yogacise class, but she usually smokes a cigarette instead. She knows she should "develop sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend"; but ends up waiting by the phone. 

In the current climate, such displays could easily be perceived as a slap in the face of feminism. But readers who go too far down that self-righteous path will not only miss out on the fun but deprive themselves of the genuine subversiveness that Bridget delivers. What is truly shocking about this book is not Bridget's unabashed hedonism but how long overdue it still is. When popular literature explores its inner bad girl - Carrie of Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City, Elizabeth Wurtzel's foray into nuttiness and sluttiness in Bitch - the voice is generally so lacking in self-awareness that the effect is more voyeuristic than empathetic. Similarly, female humor too often allows in the empty Häagen-Dazs container of Cathy comic strips and stand-up comediennes ranting about PMS and husbands" dirty socks. The great triumph of Bridget Jones's Diary is the way Fielding has shirked that sensibility for something infinitely more sophisticated and yet made full use of the same kitsch-for-feminists zeitgeist that dogs her narrator. Fielding has figured out a clever diet. She's being extremely well fed by the hand she bit (calories 0, v.v. good).