John Mullan on Bridget Jones

Guardian Book Club  

John Mullan | The Guardian - November 27, 2013

Bridget deserves her Mr Darcy… Renée Zellwegger and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason PR

We know Bridget Jones’s Diary is based on Pride and Prejudice, and Bridget half knows it, too. She latches on to the comedy of handsome, aloof Mark Darcy sharing a name with Jane Austen’s paragon of pride. When she first encounters him, at Una and Geoffrey Alconbury’s New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet, she notes the parallel. Instead of mingling happily, he stands with his back to the room, scrutinising the Alconburys’ bookshelves: “It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party.” As bad, she thinks, as being called Heathcliff and spending your evening in the garden “shouting ‘Cathy’ and banging your head against a tree”. Naturally, the distant Mark Darcy is unconscious of his similarity to his famous progenitor, even as he falls into his patterns of behaviour.

Mark Darcy is as dauntingly handsome and rich as his Regency counterpart. Fresh from her discovery of “boyfriend” Daniel Cleaver’s sexual perfidy, Bridget tries to read herself to sleep with Tatler and finds Mark Darcy’s visage “smouldering out from a feature on London’s 50 most eligible bachelors”. She ponders the parallel, having a long telephone conversation with her friend Jude “about the comparative merits of Mr Darcy and Mark Darcy”; they agree that Austen’s leading man – being “ruder” – is even more attractive. Of course, the point (which Bridget does not get) is that she is following the Austen plot, too: the man you think you cannot stand is the one who is destined for you. And willowy top lawyer Natasha, who looks like the modern Darcy’s natural partner, is but a latter-day Caroline Bingley. Her bitchy put-downs of her perceived rival (“Not in your bunny girl outfit today, then?”), like Miss Bingley’s of Elizabeth (“Her hair, so untidy, so blowsy!”), have the opposite of their intended effect.

We recognise all this because we know where the story comes from. And so we know roughly where it must go. The essential sexual geometry is taken from Austen’s novel: the woman is drawn to the conversationally adept charmer (Wickham/Daniel), but has to learn that he is a cad, and discover instead the deeper virtues of his foe. And they are foes: Wickham tried to seduce Mr Darcy’s sister; Daniel slept with Mark Darcy’s wife. When Mark Darcy steps in to avert family catastrophe (Austen’s eloping Lydia is replaced by Bridget’s eloping mother – in the company of Julio, the Portuguese conman who has tricked her parents’ friends out of their savings), he is heading for roughly the same reward as Austen’s Mr Darcy.

Bridget’s posh colleague Perpetua loudly laments that “a whole generation” only gets to know Austen, Eliot and Dickens through television, but Bridget (BA in Eng Lit, University of Bangor) has surely read the books, too. When told that Bridget finds Blind Date as absorbing as Othello, Mark Darcy reflects that she is “clearly a top post-modernist”. Like a top postmodernist, she weaves fiction into her life. “Just nipped out for fags prior to getting changed ready for BBC Pride and Prejudice,” she records. Mr Darcy and Elizabeth are, she confesses, her “chosen representatives”. In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason our heroine discusses her problems with men as her friend Sharon “fiddled with the Pride and Prejudice video to try to find the bit where Colin Firth dives into the lake”. They fall silent before the apparition of “Colin Firth emerging from the lake dripping wet”. Like a good postmodernist, the narrator makes the casting of Firth as Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones film adaptation inevitable.

In this Bridget Jones book the template is not Pride and Prejudice but Persuasion, Austen’s last completed novel. Bridget is persuaded (self-help books and friends’ advice) to fend off Mark Darcy. When she is later horrified to hear from Admiral Darcy that his son is getting married – only to have her heart restarted by learning that this is “our other son” Peter – we are replaying the moment in Persuasion when Anne Elliot is told by Mrs Croft that her brother is getting married – and assumes for a terrible moment that she means Frederick, the man she loves. When, hidden behind a hedge, Bridget listens to Mark Darcy complimenting the alluring Rebecca on her strength of purpose for saying she will always “follow my heart”, we are back with Austen’s Anne overhearing Captain Wentworth similarly complimenting the foolish, pretty Louisa Musgrove. As there is a depressive character called Giles Benwick in attendance, we know that he must be Rebecca’s destined partner, just as Captain Benwick is selected for Louisa in Persuasion.

But Bridget deserves her Mr Darcy. What Fielding most cunningly swipes from Austen is the idea that the proud, superior man whom every girl would like to nab is only interested in the young woman who fails to flatter him. “Bridget, all the other girls I know are so lacquered over,” says MD, plaintively. The very thing that makes the reader love her – the range of her incompetence – makes him love her, too.