Bridget Jones's Diary: Confessing post-feminism

Leah Guenther

© 2006 Leah Guenther

In 1995, the British newspaper The Independent ran a then-anonymous column entitled Bridget Jones's Diary. The column, in a freshly ironic and satirical manner, chronicled the daily vicissitudes of a thirty-something London "singleton". In 1996, Helen Fielding, the column's author, emerged with a novel by the same name, a novel that continued to document the title character's obsession with her vices: chocolate, cigarettes, Chardonnay and unsuitable suitors. After the novel's success, the columns were given a new home at The Daily Telegraph in 1997; the original novel was translated into thirty-three languages; and a successful sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, emerged in 1999. Both books were eventually translated into films as well, the original novel being adapted for release in 2001 and the sequel in 2004. The Bridget Jones phenomenon did not stop there, however. The success of Fielding's work is said to have spawned the genre "chick-lit" in both Britain and America: countless first-person novels penned by countless first-time female novelists began to hit the shelves.

Nevertheless, while Fielding's work has enjoyed much commercial success, Fielding's novel and its progeny have been criticized for reinforcing conventional gender roles while pretending to challenge them. Furthermore, detractors lambasted the novel for its adherence to traditional romantic plot devices, criticisms that were helped along by the fact that Fielding modelled the plot of the first novel on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and its sequel on Persuasion - albeit in both cases with a sense of the latent complexity and ambivalence of Austen's women characters' experiences and desires.

The present essay seeks to challenge these frequently dismissive views of Fielding's work. While conceding the persuasiveness of some critiques of the book, it aims to recuperate Bridget Jones's Diary – and its heroine - by offering a new reading of the text as feminist confessional. The first part of the essay identifies and assesses the validity of typical criticisms of the work. It addresses Fielding's choice of the diary form, analysing Bridget's use of the diary as a device of self-monitoring and examining the ways in which the diary serves her as an in-house confessional. The second part of the essay considers the novel's relation to feminism – second and third wave feminism and what has been labelled 'post-feminism' – by inspecting its critics' responses as well as the way that feminism as a category is treated within the text. The final portion of the essay evaluates the effect of this new feminist confession. By moving away from the contentious term 'post-feminist' that has too often been applied to Fielding's work and its successors, the term 'new feminist confession', as used here, connotes some of the complexity of the field of feminism as well as Bridget Jones's Diary's relationship to it. To its credit, Bridget Jones's Diary addresses aspects of both second and third wave of feminism, choosing, as will be argued, not to pit wave against wave but, instead, to merge elements from each in order to form a new brand of feminist confession. In this manner, Fieldings's novel as well as many of its "chick-lit" successors, relies on the first-person female narrative (a mainstay of second wave feminism), as well as the use of comedy and irony (a third wave feminist trademark), to create a new kind and community of feminist authors.

'I am a Child of Cosmopolitan culture'

Bridget Jones's Diary opens with the words 'I will not'. This declarative prohibition, set in boldface capital letters, introduces the title character's list of New Year's resolutions, good intentions that run the usual gamut from vowing not to 'drink more than fourteen alcohol units per week' to refusing to 'bitch about anyone behind their backs' (Fielding 1996: 2). Appropriately, this opening immediately establishes Bridget's desire to perfect what she sees as her inherently flawed self. As much annual goal are notoriously idealistic and thus doomed from the start, Bridget Jones's Diary opens by highlighting not only the idea of self-improvement but also the ever-present spectre of failure that accompanies such an intent. This spectre, Alison Case argues, is further indicated in the novel's form: Bridget, she notes, calls to mind a long line of fictional female diarists who are unable to control their lives or the trajectory of their stories. Case argues that female diary narration has historically positioned the diarist as a mere witness to events as they unfold and, as such, has tended to 'deprive the narrator of the interpretive advantage of hindsight with which to shape a narrative' (Case 2001: 177). Bridget's jurisdiction over her life, she argues, as well as her ability to chance herself into something new-and-improved, is necessarily undermined not only by unrealistic expectations, but also by form.

By categorizing Bridget as just another female diarist, however, Case fails to account for the importance of the historical moment in which Helen Fielding's novel is set. This moment is exaggerated by Fielding's decision to superimpose the plot of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice onto Bridget's late 1990s surroundings. While Fielding's modernization of Austen's novel does highlight similarities between the two worlds such as women's reliance on private spaces of discourse, their ongoing attempts at self-refinement, and a perpetual interest in snagging a man translating her predecessor's work into a contemporary setting highlights an important difference as well. Whereas Austen's heroines bemoan their limited choices, Fielding's lament having too many. Austen's characters are given one cultural directive, to marry, while Fielding's struggle with conflicting social messages that compel them simultaneously to find a man, be independent, build a career, start a family, have sex indiscriminately and be chaste. In this light, Bridget's struggle to control her life and her narrative results not from a literary convention that emphasizes women's economic and sexual restriction, but from a cultural imperative to strive for multiple and contradictory female ideals.

The novel locates much of the cultural confusion over women's self-definition on the pages of glossy women's magazines. Janice Winship refers to the ideology contained on the pages of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire as a 'women's world', one that is replete with messages that simultaneously pay lip-service to female empowerment while promoting women's concern with an image control that is primarily based on the purchase of consumer goods (Winship 1987). Jonathan Bignell argues that women's magazines present a set of representations, concerns and desires that construct a female identity for those who wish to 'buy into it'. Bignell identifies the significance of this wording, noting that 'the turn of phrase "buy into" is appropriate here because of the links established by feminist critical discourse between the textual production in magazines and the consumption practices of their readership' (Bignell 2004: 164). Bridget certainly is not immune to this 'women's world' or its messages. However she is not uncritical of it. She seems conscious of the havoc that such women's magazines have wreaked upon her life. Trying to come to terms with her body image and life choices, for example, she notes regretfully that 'I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture [and] 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' (1996: 59).

Unfortunately, what Bridget does at first appear to take from the 'women's world' of glossy magazines is a notion that the self is not fixed and unchangeable. Bridget's adoption of the 'women's world' message that the self-as-product is something to shop for, try on and adopt at will perfectly prepares her for the genre of self-help books that emerged in force in the 1990s, primarily targeting women. Elayne Rapping notes that while the self-help genre was radical in its ability to open up dialogue on previously unmentionable or embarrassing topics, the publications also tended to depoliticize women's plights, forcing women to treat the symptoms of social problems rather than the problems themselves. Rapping also takes issue with the dependence on religion within self-help, indicting the trend of advising women not to take action against wrongdoers but, instead, to call upon a Higher Power or a Greater Good (Rapping 1996). Trish Todd, editorial director of Simon & Schuster commented on this intermingling of religion and self-help when, in the mid-1990s, she was asked about the mammoth increase in production of self-help titles. She notes, 'there seems to be a hunger for change, for a new age_, and the closer we get to the millennium the more spiritual books resemble self-help books and self-help books are like spiritual books' (Davis 1996: 23).

In Bridget Jones's Diary the line between self-help books and spiritual guidance is nothing if not blurred. Arguably, the self-help books at Bridget's disposal do not hold for her a dominant ideology so much as a dominant theology. Bridget describes self-help books as 'a new form of religion' that helps people to 'start trying to find another set of rules' when religion fails them. She effaces the distinction between traditional religious formats and what she sees as their new incarnations in self-improvement, hence her comment that she has learned the 'importance of positive thought' from 'Emotional Intelligence, Emotional Confidence, The Road Less Travelled, How to Rid Your Thighs of Cellulite in 30 Days [and the] Gospel according to St Luke, Ch. 13' (1999: 265). Moreover, deciding that she must thin out her collection of titles she notes, 'Cannot bear to throw out The Road Less Travelled and You Can Heal Your Life' and ask herself 'Where else is one to turn for spiritual guidance to deal with problems of modern age if not self-help books?' (1999: 264). Bridget's conflation of religion, self-help and confessional self-scrutiny is of note here and brings to mind Foucault's notion of 'technologies of the self' (Foucault 1988) - strategies of knowing and caring for the self which have developed in various historical and spiritual contexts. In a Christian context these emerges as 'a set of conditions and rules of behavior for a certain transformation of the self'. Christianity, according to Foucault, positions itself as a salvation religion, one which claims 'to lead individuals from one reality to another' - as such it has much in common with its secularized scions in the genre of self-help (Foucault 1988: 40).

Foucault argues, however, that 'Christianity is not only a salvation religion, it's a confessional religion'. Within Christianity, Foucault notes, 'each person has the duty to know who he is, that is, to try to know what is hap­pening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires'. 'Everyone is obliged to disclose these things', he argues, everyone must 'bear public or private witness against oneself' (1988: 40). In Christianity, such confessions have historically occurred through varied means; Catholicism has required confession to a priest, in Protestantism, the individual replaced the confessor as the monitor of his or her own self. In Bridget's case, the personal diary serves as her method of self-examination: the itemized lists that begin each day's entry in her diary confess, in detail, her daily intake of calories, cigarettes and alcohol, as well as her indulgence in other practices ranging from making obsessive phone calls to thinking negative thoughts. Bridget's diary is a space m which she bears witness against herself, investigating her faults, temptations and desires. It ultimately serves as an in-house confessional: a private space of self-scrutiny, her diary is where she 'puts herself down', simultaneously recording and critiquing the self.

While the title character's verbalization of the self is imperative to the confessional enterprise that she undertakes on her diary's pages, Bridget's confession is more radical than expected. Crucially, Bridget redeems herself, forgoing penance and simply justifying her own sins. Foucault argues that an individual's ability to use confessional techniques of verbalization 'without renouncing oneself constitutes a decisive break' (Foucault 1988: 49).

At moments, Bridget's diary indicates such a break, adopting a tone of deliberate self-acceptance that has largely been overlooked by the novel's critics.

While Bridget does censure herself at many points, she is far more likely to absolve herself, to accept herself as flawed and unchanging, often using the most outlandish criteria. A surfeit of cigarettes, for example, smoked on 1 February is written off since she 'will soon give up for Lent so might as well smoke self into disgusted smoking frenzy' (1996: 37); an increase in weight on 3 May is attributed to a phantom baby 'growing at monstrous unnatural rate' that she has not, in fact, actually conceived (117). Moreover, there is no consistency to Bridget's judgement, causing the reader to question just how serious she is about the process of reform: twenty-three cigarettes on 3 January is 'v.g.' (17) and on 18 March is 'v.v. bad' (81), just as 3,100 calories on 8 January qualifies as 'poor' (27) but nearly triple that amount on 29 April is deemed 'excellent' (111). Loath to impose categorical and consistent judgement on herself, allowing each day's experiences to shape the way that she evaluates her behavior therein, one starts to believe that Bridget's is a confession of an unreformable self, a self ostensibly striving to improve but incapable, and possibly unwilling, to do so. The confessional diary, then, offers Bridget the tantalizing possibility of personal change while also affording the space in which to record the failure, non-maintenance, or simple rejection of it.

Bridget's subversive refusal to hold herself to consistent standards of judgement eventually leads to her ultimate disavowal of both her self-improvement plan and the self-improvement culture that she almost literally held to be sacred. In a chapter of The Edge Of Reason entitled 'Mars and Venus in the Dustbin', Bridget peruses her forty-seven self-help volumes only to be staggered by their conflicting advice: alongside The Rules is Ignoring the Rules, next to Happy To Be Single is How Not To Be Single, and flanking How to Seek and Find the Love You Want are both How to Find the Love You Want Without Seeking It and How to Find You Want the Love You Didn't Seek. Although she admits that without the books she will 'feel empty and spiritually at sea', she stands determined 'not to weaken', recognizing that she has 'been swayed this way and that by everyone else's idea'. The books she haltingly resolves, are going 'In. The. Bin. I am Going. To stand on. Own. Two. Feet' (1999: 265). By denying her feelings of inadequacy for failing to measure up to conflicting standards, by demoting the self-help genre from its position of higher authority in her life, Bridget ultimately affirms the unaltered self, paradoxically choosing to enact control in her life by relinquishing it altogether. Her diary, then, serves not merely as a tool with which to work through her efforts at self-improvement, but in the end, as a rebellious record of her ultimate refusal to change.

Kelly Marsh, in an article entitled 'Contextualizing Bridget Jones', makes a similar claim in reference not to self-improvement but to consumerism, and asks rhetorically 'Would Bridget Jones be a more admirable woman, a more likeable character, a better role model, if she were a more efficient consumer?' Marsh proposes that by ignoring Bridget's refusal to consume effectively, 'American critics, including American feminists, have not recognized the potential subversiveness of her position' (Marsh 2004: 56). I would add that Bridget is ultimately also a poor consumer of the self-as-product. While Bridget shops for, tries on and adopts various new-and-improved selves throughout the novel she recognizes finally that no project of improvement adequately represents her self and its needs: her ultimate intervention, it seems, is her inability to choose just one self, to 'buy into it', and to change.

'A confessional gender^'

In The Edge Of Reason, the sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary, the title character is given the opportunity to interview film star Colin Firth. Preparing enthusiastically for her meeting, Bridget jots down a few 'easy questions' along with some 'meaty' ones that, she admits, were hastily recorded after a few glasses of Chardonnay. Reading one such wine-muddled question during the interview, Bridget asks Firth, 'Do you think the book of Fever Pitch has spored a confessional gender?' Her puzzled subject responds, saying, 'Well. Certainly Nick Hornby's style has been very much imitated and I think it's a very appealing, er, gender whether or not he actually, um... spored it' (1999: 170). Although the substitution of the word 'spored' for 'spawned' is rather innocuous, the use of 'gender' in the place of 'genre' gets to the crux of the debate surroundings Fielding's novel. A 'confessional gender' is, to many, the same thing as a 'confessional genre': women are seen as effusively confessional creatures in a way that men are not. Moreover, the mention of Hornby's Fever Pitch - offers a wink of recognition to this crucial double standard. Fever Pitch is itself a relentless personal diary, but it is a diary of a football fan. Nevertheless, when Hornby's book emerged, critics were not swept into a frenzy over the dismal state of modern man: when Fever Pitch hit the shelves, there was no high-profile mud-flinging about whether or not an obsession with the stereotypically male subject of sporting events was going to push the male agenda back twenty years. More commonly, praise emerged in response to this rise in narrative introspection, classified by one critic as 'fascinating' because while 'women writers have regularly committed their growing pains to paper …emotionally honest accounts of straight male rights of passage have been rare (Whelehan 2000: 132). Such critics were thus able to see beyond the book's obsessive football framework; they were, for example, able to recognize that football fandom may say things about our culture and the way it both shapes and reflects our selves.

Bridget Jones's Diary and its progeny were never so lucky, the controversy beginning with the very terms used in the debate. The 'chick lit' moniker that classified the first-person, female-authored genre was emptied of its original subversive content and offered, instead, as a partner to its film counter-part, the 'chick flick'. Moreover, the highly-charged term 'post-feminist' was imprudently used to classify the genre, inaccurately implying that the novels sprung up in a world where the goals of feminism had been forgotten or surpassed. The controversy was not limited to terminology, however. Michiko Kakutani, in an article condescendingly entitled 'It's Like Really Weird' adopts the persona of Ally McBeal in order to write to Bridget and tell her how much they have in common, namely their 'imbecility' (Kakutani 1998: 8). Lola Young points out that publishers are simply 'paying photogenic young women to write about who they have dinner with' (Neustatter 2002: 8), a sexist charge that is reflected in Celia Brayfield's comment that young women are getting book contracts because publishers are looking for a 'twentysomething babe … who will look hot posing naked in a glossy magazine' (Ezard 2001: 7). Before long, the brightest of female luminaries had issued their scorn: Beryl Bainbridge called Bridget Jones's Diary a froth sort thing' (Sexton 2001: 16); Doris Lessing lamented 'these helpless, drunken, worrying about their weight and so on' (Ezard 2001: 7) and Fay Weldon, attempting to declare a premature death to the trend, remarked that the books are 'forgettable' and 'the genre is done out' (Wade 2002: 1).

Criticism of Bridget Jones's Diary and its progeny was, perhaps, to be expected, the book coming as it did at the end of a prominent and widely-documented backlash era that had concerned readers on their guard. As feminism tried to regain its footing the last thing it needed was the wide-spread celebration of a woman's diary of weight loss and perpetual self-modification. However, such critiques too easily duplicated the larger debate about women's confessional writing as a whole. Claiming that Bridget is one of many 'helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their weight and so on', merely repeats decades-old claims that women writing about their private lives are narcissistic, solipsistic, vain. Moreover, the notion that publishers were commissioning attractive young women to write about 'who they have dinner with', that young women were getting book contracts only because they later 'will look hot posing naked in a glossy magazine', grotesquely exaggerates the notion that women's self-authority is necessarily compromised through confession, implying that the publisher-writer relationship mimics that of the analyst and the analysand, the confessor and the confessant. Instead of replaying what can certainly be read as an anti-confessional debate, attention might he focused on the ways in which confession may ultimately be associated with, rather than against, autonomy in feminist discourse.

As Alicia Ostriker argues, the confessional writer 'who attempts to explore female experience is dismissed as self-absorbed, private, escapist, nonuniversal' even though what is at the core of such writing 'is the quest for autonomous self-definition' (Ostriker 1989: 58). Interestingly enough, a large portion of Bridget's quest for self-definition in the novel surfaces through her struggle to understand her place within feminism as a whole. Indeed, if, as the above detractors suggest, Bridget Jones's Diary has little to no relation to the greater feminist project, it is not because the title character is unaware that feminism exists. The novel is littered with moments in which Bridget and her friends, Jude and Shazzer, strive toward feminist ideals and situate many of their behaviors within its purview. Shazzer in particular has lofty hopes for feminism's future, particularly in the way it will reform men. She explains that soon:

There won't be any men leaving their families and postmenopausal wives … because the young mistresses and women will just turn around and tell them to sod off and men won't get any sex or any women unless they learn how to behave properly instead of cluttering up the sea-bed of women with their SHITTY, SMUG, SELF-INDULGENT, BEHAVIOR!' (1996: 126-7.)

Bridget herself falls upon 'feminism' when she is trying to see female perspectives, as when, after hearing her mother's plan co leave her father for a younger man, she notes that she 'was thinking it all over and trying, as a feminist, to see Mum's point of view' (54). She also classifies many of her gatherings with her friends as 'feminist rants' and is particularly thrilled when the main object of her affection admits that he's been told she is 'a radical feminist and [has] an incredibly glamorous life' (236).

While Bridget finds herself compelled by the idea of being a feminist, she has a very hard time living up to what she imagines to be feminism's ideals. Much of her frustration stems from the sense of isolation she feels after standing up for herself in the face of cruel treatment by men. Responding to a date who has just told her that their upcoming sexual encounter will not signify his status as her boyfriend, she tells him, ''That is just such crap … How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.' Proud of herself for rejecting his rude behavior, Bridget notes, 'It was great' and triumphantly adds 'You should have seen his face'. However, in the very next sentence, a sentence beginning with a heavy 'But', she states 'now I am home I am sunk into gloom. I may have been right, but my reward, I know, will be to end up all alone, half-eaten by an Alsatian' (1996: 33). Her efforts over the following days to remain 'disdainfully buoyant' to keep repeating the words 'self-respect' and 'Huh' aloud, take place in relative privacy as she wonders at the point (37). Not until she stops trying to be 'Mrs. Iron Knickers', ironically revealing through her word choice a personal confusion over whether to strive for marital union or personal asceticism, does she finally admit her frustration as well as her desire 'to burst into self­-pitying tears' (37). Bridget's main concern with such polemical posturing is that she is not sure that she has got it right: she is ambivalent about what the larger project of feminism ultimately asks of her. During one gathering, for example, Bridget is startled when all of the sudden Shazzer accuses her of abandoning the feminist cause. Bridget explain that: 'It was all turning into a hideously unfeminist man-based row when we realized it was ridiculous and said we'd see each other tomorrow' (1999: 20).

While this particular example shows Bridget choosing friendship over arguing about principles, the longer and less sanitary fight that occurred in one of Fielding's newspaper columns in the Daily Telegraph is not as promising. In that argument, Shazzer erupts, saying, 'The trouble with you, Bridge, … you're not really a feminist.' Bridget privately remarks that she 'Could not avoid feeling hurt. Am feminist, definitely. Believe in equality, give money to third-world women's charity, have own job, independent life and home… So what was Shazzie's point?' Going on to explain exactly that, 'Shazzie' tells Bridget that she's 'obsessed by men' and is 'totally indoctrinated by the media and advertising culture into trying to improve [her]self in every area, fitting into some paternalistic, sales-led ideal.' Trying to lessen the blow, Jude pipes in, offering, 'What you mean, Shaz, … is that your feminist ideals do not encompass the need to be loved. And Bridget is prey to the influence of whatever society and media deem to be loveable.' Bridget, practically in tears, looks at Jude 'all slim in lacy dress with bosoms heaved up by pink lejaby bra' and is utterly confused. She notes that she later forgave the women 'for making self feminism study in manner of laboratory mouse', but still 'could not help, as walked home, feeling failure, not only for failing to live up to feminist ideals, but having wrong feminist ideals in first place' (1998a: 4).

While they throw the word around, it is not clear whether these women - and by extension, perhaps, other women? - have a clear or shared sense of what 'feminism' means. Does, for example, wanting a man make one anti-feminist in a way that claiming not to need a man while wearing a push-up bra does not? Instead of a support system, then, feminism is often depicted throughout the novel in a category similar to self-help manuals. Just as dieting and self-improvement guides espouse multiple and often contradictory patterns for living, feminism too is a loose category with open definitions, often picked at will to suit the speaker. Moreover, feminism, like both the self-help and diet industries, has the tendency to serve as an institutional force in Bridget's life against its tenets, Bridget judges herself and ultimately feels as though she has failed. In this sense, the 'confessional gender' takes on a new meaning. Bridget's diary is unlike the typical female confessions of the past which commonly documented women's sexual transgressions: instead of confessing transgressions of sex, Bridget confesses her sins of gender. Her diary is that of a failed feminist and the community that replaces a supposed feminist community is one that seeks a new feminism to more fully accommodate the full facets of the self.

Chick-lit and 'third wave feminism'

To be fair, the feminism that Bridget holds at a skeptical distance is an unexamined representation of feminism second wave. Third wave feminism of which Bridget Jones's Diary is arguably a part, has often been critiqued for such one-dimensional categorizations of the movement's earlier incarnation. When Bridget, for example, muses that 'Germaine Greer did not have children' and asks 'But then what does that prove?' it is clear that she sees the limitations of taking one self-identified feminist's example as representative of the condition of all women (Fielding 1999:34). Moreover, once it becomes obvious that her own mother has belatedly read The Feminine Mystique, Bridget observes her mother's instant disregard for her husband and children as unnatural and bizarre. Reading Bridget's denunciations of Greer and Friedan provides certain fodder for the inter-generational debate; second wave feminists might argue against Bridget's unexamined rebuff of each author influences, quite justifiably asserting that without Greer and Friedan, Bridget - a childfree, working woman - could not exist.

But second wave feminists do not have a corner on the market of misrepresentation: feminists of the third wave have argued that they, too, feel their generation's goals and ideals are generally misunderstood. While many third wave feminists can find a place within their ideology for wedding dresses, leg waxing and stilettos, their predecessors are often quick to judge these signifiers not as the younger generation's ability to embrace multiple view-points and constant contradiction, but instead as evidence that the new generation has dropped the ball. Moreover, some third wave feminists are viewed by their forerunners as having, possibly a bit too much fun: the irony and sarcasm that weighs heavily within the third wave's project is often misread as a lack of seriousness. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards sum up the difference between the general tone of the two generations in the context of the second wave publication Ms. The magazine, they note, 'is unable to let its hair down because it's so afraid of being fluffy (in its editorial, not its hair)'. 'There are', they continue, 'too many "You go girls", with forced jubilation, and Ms. has yet to be ironic – which means the old girl has something to learn from Bridget Jones' (Baumgardner and Richards 2000: 17).

Within the world of the novel, Bridget's character reflects the bold strokes of third wave feminism, mainly through its refusal to be paralyzed by contradictions and its willingness instead to embrace them. Bridget and her friends, for example, openly deplore unrealistic beauty standards for women at the same time that they congratulate themselves for living up to them; they realize that they do not need men while simultaneously pursuing them; and they are willing to admit that they do not need to 'have it all' even though they cannot quite figure out which part of the equation they could most likely do without. Outside of the novel's world, a community of readers emerged that largely resembled Bridget's own milieu: politically aware if not politically active, these readers were likely to qualify their relationship with feminism by stating 'I'm not a feminist but…'. Jenny Colgan, a successful author whose work emerged in the wake of Bridget Jones's Diary, points out that readers coalesced around the novel and its female-authored, female-centered successors since the novels finally spoke to a group previously unrepresented in contemporary fiction. In contrast, she notes, to the female characters found in the 'thick, shiny, brick novels covered in gold foil' that were a mark of the 1990s, Bridget Jones and her ilk were more realistic, familiar and, quite frankly, younger. Colgan argues that detractors such as Bainbridge, Weldon and Lessing, in their sixties, seventies and eighties respectively, could not understand the lives of many young women today who have grown up with education as a right; with financial independence; with living on our own and having far too many choices about getting married [and] having children', but are still saturated in the 'pressures of magazines, TV, thinness, media celebrity and love (Colgan 2001: 6).

Colgan's is a common third wave criticism: the elder women of the movement's second wave many argue, do not take into account the altered terrain of young women's lives. Third wave writing has developed, in large part, in reaction to this classification, offering personal accounts of personal experiences as a way to explain, first-hand, women's new realities: third wave anthologies such as To Be Real and The Fire This Time highlight the import­ance of the autobiographical mode in the movement with their series of personal essays written in the first-person voice. Nevertheless, critics of the third wave's concentration on the 'I' have argued that excessive personalizing in dangerous to the feminist collective that, as Deborah Siegel sums up, 'proliferation of the personal narrative in feminist theory displaces women with a few writerly I's' (Siegel 1997: 68). While Bridget Jones's Diary never claims to occupy the same category as feminist theory, its reception was marked by a similar distaste for the circulation of the personal. Imelda Whelehan, for example, notes that the fine line created between authors such as Helen Fielding and their characters on one hand 'gives the characters the credibility which makes them so readily identifiable to their readers', but on the other hand 'encourages detractors to see them as of no literary worth at all - as if they are simply confessional outpourings compressed on to the page' (Whelehan 2002: 69).

But what is about the confessional outpouring which renders it 'simple'? Terrence Doody argues that the confession is the 'deliberate, self-conscious attempt of an individual to explain his nature to the audience who represents the kind of community he needs to exist in and confirm him (Doody 1980: 4). A confessor must create his own audience, Doody notes, because 'he usually feels that no available institution, no system or myth, no class structure, profession, locale, or family quite accommodates his full sense of his individuality' (1980: 22). Third wave feminists have engaged in such a practice, using the personal voice to found a version of feminism better suited to their present needs; likewise, writers of contemporary women's fiction have used the first person narrative to tell stories about their modern lives. More than this, however, such a model of community-creation through confession has as its historical precedent in feminism in the highly successful, subversive, and not at all 'simple' consciousness-raising (CR) groups of the 1970s. Siegel concisely explains that 'the primary function of the CR groups was to provide a space in which the isolated 'I' could, by means of identification, collapse into collective, rescuing 'we' (Siegel 1997: 68); the confession of one, in other words, could result in the recognition of many. Siegel notes that 'if the Third Wave can return to the personal and the return to the personal enacts a return to CR, the result is CR with a difference' (1997: 68). This 'CR with a difference' third wave feminists would argue, already thrives within the movement: the third wave text Manifesta describes the female 'dinner party' as a CR group (Baumgardner and Richards 2000: 14); Gloria Steinem refers to the third wave anthology Listen Up as 'a consciousness-raising group between covers' (Siegel 1997: 68); and online websites and zine cultures offer a new form of community where third wave feminists connect, share their experiences, and unite.

Bridget Jones's Diary, in spawning the genre of chick-lit, launched a similar enterprise. The audience that Bridget's confession sought was an audience of single thirty-something women, an audience successful at work if not at love, an audience sympathetic to the same pressures of attempting to achieve idealistic standards but consistently falling short. Opponents of chic-lit argue that whether or not the novels are written by women and about women, whether or not they aim to confess and to unite, they still problematically retain the trappings of a male-ordered society. The pursuit of men, beauty and a non-smudging lipstick are not, they would argue, commonly the stuff of resistance. Moreover, it can certainly be said that even though chick-lit novels are written almost entirely in the first-person, they are not confessional memoirs that call for the social revolutions of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, the sexual revolutions of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, or the political revolutions of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. When Bridget Jones's Diary does engage with the spectre of its revolutionary forebears, its tongue is always partially in its cheek. Bridget, for example, drafts several political treatises to send to Tony Blair, urging him to inform the government that they must stop touting family values unless they plan to start to 'teach all boy children that sharing the housework does not mean twiddling one fork under the tap' (Fielding 1999: 197-8).

Even while it would be inaccurate to argue that chick-lit novels have a collective political mission, the books most assuredly reveal a shared frustration and disillusionment with many aspects of women's lives. What is unique about the genre of chick-lit is the method by which this disillusionment is shared. As Sarah Evans notes, chick-lit novels tend co explore such discontents 'through a sharply satirical view of the world [which] differentiates chick-lit from romantic fiction, where heroines are equally vulnerable but rarely funny' (Evans 2003: 9). The Guardian's analysis of the readership for chick-lit novels reveals that 'after the earnestness of both Mother Earth feminism in the 70s and careerism in the 80s, what most women want is a good laugh – at their own expense as much as others'. What the readers love', the author notes, 'is to find their own terminal dissatisfaction with their men (or lack of), their bums and jobs, transformed from chronic neurosis into comedy' ('Women Want' 2001: 23). Helen Fielding, in a rare moment spent explaining her text, takes on Bridget's telegraphic language in order to fully indulge this claim. She notes:

Point is not that women are retrograde ditzes, but feel that they have to be so perfect in every area that become incredibly hard on selves: trying to live life of non-independent and independent woman at same time, haunted by media images of anorexic teenage models running from gym to board meeting to nuclear family and cooking elaborate dinner parties for twelve. Vision of someone else – Bridget - trying so hard and spectacularly failing, ending up when guests arrive, in underwear with wet hair and one foot in pan of mashed potato is comic release from pressures of overreaching role models. If women really are equal, surely allowed to laugh at selves, mark of confidence etc, etc.  (Fielding 1998b: 5).

Fielding's assessment, proposing as it does that female readers unite around and celebrate Bridget's confession of a failed self, reveals that the community based around the novel emerged when readers recognized Bridget's story as one they themselves might have told. Such a response not only calls upon the CR ideal of self-revelation building community, but it circumvents the typical confessional paradigm normally characterized by an imbalance between the power of the confessor and the impotence of the confessant. The tenor of the response, one built on the humour, parody and ultimate irony in the novels, works to replace a system of judgement with one of shared response.

Although the irony and the parody and the undeniable humour remain, chick-lit has grown into a community of writers and readers who share the goal of telling more stories about women. Answering Bridget Jones's Diary depiction of British life was author Melissa Banks, whose young female lead was depicted working through similar issues within an American landscape. Other authors have exaggerated elements of chick-lit to different ends: Anna Maxted took chick-lit characters' obsession with their weight to a more serious level, depicting a main character working through the crisis of an eating disorder; Sophie Kinsella transformed a chick-lit obsession with shopping into a four-volume series of novels about credit-card debt, and Wendy Holden pushed the context of comedy-of-manners to its hilarious extreme.

Critics who applied the term 'post-feminist' to Bridget Jones's Diary – by adopting a term which popularly connotes a time after feminism, a time no longer in need of feminism – have failed to see the ways in which feminism's longer history played out on the pages of the novel. This complex history can be seen partly by way of Fielding's subversion of gender and genre-expectations, partly by her engagement with long-standing feminist concerns, and partly by her invocations of a female community of readers which formed around a woman's confessional voice. Fielding's dedication of her second novel 'to the others Bridgets' acknowledges this community as well as the new writers and characters spawned, or 'spored', by this 'confessional gender'.