Up and Down

By Cara Mia Di Massa,  Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 27, 1998

What's a girl to do? Radicalized in the '60s and '70s, tranquilized by the '80s, she emerges in the '90s the victim of an identity crisis. Time magazine recently identified this crisis, suggesting that "feminism today is wed to the culture of celebrity and self-obsession." Bridget Jones, the enchanting figment of Helen Fielding's imagination, is a poster child for the confused woman of the 1990s.

It's worse than being a farmer, she moans, "there is so much harvesting and crop spraying that needs to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated & 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 inhabits a world not so different from our own, where self-help books solve dysfunctions, quizzes measure self-worth and magazines egg us on to "Lose 5 Pounds in One Week" and "Learn to Love Your Body" all at the same time. The hypocrisies that clutter the landscape of our own daily regimens are in evidence in Bridget Jones's Diary and, in Fielding's skillful hands, they are taken to a delightful extreme.

A parody of the epistolary novel, this novel-turned-diary chronicles Bridget's daily - even hourly - bouts of self-examination and captures what it means to be a single thirty-something woman - with all of the requisite complexities, frailties, strengths and obsessive-compulsive tendencies inherent in the species. The diary begins with a dizzying set of resolutions for the new, unnamed year - "I WILL NOT fall for any of [the] following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists; I WILL reduce circumference of thighs by 3 inches, using anticellulite diet, not go out every night but stay in and read books and listen to classical music" - and scrambles through the year from there. Fielding allows readers to be voyeurs into Bridget's most intimate musings, connected to what happens but slightly removed from the scene, hovering at a safe distance just above it.

This is a contagious type of voyeurism, however, and Bridget does not disappoint. She feeds us with even the minutiae of her life; each of her diary entries begins with a list of sorts - kinds of food eaten, calories consumed, cigarettes smoked ("weeds of Satan," Bridget calls them), alcohol units imbibed, lottery tickets bought, lottery tickets that actually paid off, negative thoughts, even her use of Caller ID to check whether the man of her dreams has called and then hung up (he hasn't, usually).

There are the usual hardships: the job that doesn't love her back, the mother who doesn't understand, the younger man who tells her she's "squashy" and the weight that is never where she wants it. The characters in Bridget Jones's Diary are the cut-and-dried clichés that populate any good sitcom or farce: overbearing parents, nosy parents' friends, handsome men who are no good, sympathetic female pals and somewhere, oh, somewhere out there, at least one man who, she hopes, is potential date material.

Bridget doles out the salacious stuff as well. Her romantic life resembles Cosmo's Agony Column much more than the Jane Austen novel she aspires to imitate ("Darcy and Elizabeth are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or rather, courtship,") This is, after all, love in the age of John Gray, when every human behavior must be analyzed, categorized and then analyzed again. When a fellow "Singleton" - Bridget's term for the unmarrieds among us - confesses problems with a boyfriend, Bridget assesses: "She must stop beating herself over the head with Women Who Love Too Much" and instead think more toward Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," which will help her to see him being like a Martian rubber band which needs to stretch away in order to come back." Bridget's opinion of the male species swings back and forth almost as frequently as her weight changes.

When Bridget catalogs the strange diets and habits that go along with her yo-yo weight, we see in her actions an amusing imitation of the self-scrutiny many of us engage in, the justifications we make of our lives and our behavior:

"Breakfast: hot-cross bun (Scarsdale Diet - slight variation on specified piece of whole-wheat toast); Mars Bar (Scarsdale Diet - slight variation on specified half-grapefruit)"

From our safe vantage point, we the observers realize that Bridget has crossed from self-scrutiny, which can be funny, into self-obsession, which can be disheartening; she laments that she has "spent so many years being on a diet that the idea that you might actually need calories to survive has been completely wiped out of [her] consciousness."

It is easy to become so enraptured by Bridget's humorous commentary that one forgets that this is a novel, that things do happen as the year progresses. But positioned as these events are, they mostly serve as vehicles for Bridget's quips. A romance with the boss abruptly ends. Bridget enjoys a brief interlude as a true Singleton until another romance begins; the new object of her affection is Mark Darcy, a regular all-around good guy who patiently waits in the wings as lesser men fall. Bridget, a fan of the BBC's Pride and Prejudice ("The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth"), never really seems to get the joke, however. For all that women have been through since Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, Bridget still wants to be swept off her feet and carried off by Mr. Darcy. And she is.

Parts of a secondary romance, which provide the Diary with a pat, albeit comedic, ending, ring untrue. Bridget's mom, who early on in the year decides "You only get one life" and resolves to spend hers "looking after me for a change," leaves her husband, starts a career and takes off with Julian/Julio, a well-coiffed greasy type. By December, Mom has become a "front man" for Julio's time-share scam, and the police soon catch up with them. This entire escapade is nothing more than a plot contrivance, a device to enable Mark and Bridget's romance. The heroine gets the guy, and the secondary character is saved from a dreadful fate.

But the strengths of Bridget Jones's Diary are Bridget and how much of ourselves we can see in her and her parallel universe. She displays - and discusses - the behavior that we try to keep hidden, often in a fruitless effort to disguise lives that are disorganized beyond belief. Perhaps we have spent a morning recycling bunched-up pantyhose from the laundry, hoping to find one set without a run, or an evening passing off a dinner of blue soup and marmalade as a normal culinary experience. Perhaps we have silently labeled someone a "Smug Married" or a parent's efforts as "Competitive Childrearing," crossing our fingers and hoping that they see the light. Bridget invents a vocabulary for the things that pester her, as if doing so will give her power over them, and there is something familiar about this practice as well.

This is a funny book and is successful being simply that. But it is also a book that can open our eyes slightly wider to what our world has wrought. Bridget's mother, who doesn't buy into the "Feminine Mystique" until the late 1990s, is a vehicle for Fielding to skewer '60s and '70s feminism. Despite her revolutionary intentions, she ends up just as self-obsessed and image-conscious as her daughter. And we adore Bridget, but we fear the woman she has become. Though she at times paints herself as Alice in a wonderland gone awry, Bridget ends the year much as she began it: engaging in numerical self-evaluation, counting fat units on an even par with nice boyfriends and hangover-free days. Fielding is satirizing the modern woman and the dangers of a feminism that has forsaken its activist roots.

So, what is a girl to do? I doubt Bridget could answer that question. But I think that given the opportunity, she would offer the same excuse for not answering the question that she uses for her inability to get ready for a date: "I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, 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."