Why
I love Bridget Jones
By Francis Gilbert Helen
Fielding has created a contemporary Molly Bloom Bridget
Jones's Diary (Picador, [pounds]6.99), by Helen Fielding, is one of the
most important novels of the 1990s. Not only has its phenomenal
popularity spawned numerous imitations, it has introduced an entirely
new fictional voice. Bridget Jones and its imitations - what I call
"thinnist fiction" because of the female protagonists'
obsession with their weight and because of the novels' light, comic
tone- have been widely vilified: by feminists for trivialising women's
problems and implicitly suggesting that what a girl needs is a good man;
and by literary critics for not being, well, proper literature. Most
recently, Lola Young, chairman of the Orange Prize jury, complained that
these books "tended towards the domestic in a piddling sort of
way". So
what explains this success? Without doubt, the thinnists are plugging a
hole left behind by the diminishing popularity of Mills and Boon. Women
between 30 and 45, the biggest buyers of fiction here and in the US,
seem no longer content to read traditional fantasy romance. Hardened by
the experience of holding down a job, they seek more realistic fiction
set in the workplace. Yet they also want the basic narrative elements of
the romantic novel to remain: the tortuous search for happiness with Mr
Right. Nearly all the thinnists have a thirtysomething female
protagonist falling for Mr Wrong - usually a sexually unfaithful,
sports-loving cad/slob - but finally realising that Mr Right is the
rather handsome lawyer/banker they once dismissed as dull. Yet
what is most interesting in thinnist fiction is the war the protagonists
wage on their bodies and themselves. Fiction excels at dealing with
internal conflict; no other art form can get under the skin so
successfully. The modernists understood this - both James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf used stream-of-consciousness devices to highlight the
morass of conflicting information, feelings and thoughts that the mind
trawls through at any given moment. In Joyce's Ulysses the tension
between the mundane and the serious in Leopold Bloom's mind motors the
novel: the tiniest, trivial details resonate in Joyce's choppy, poetic,
diarylike prose. In
this sense, the thinnists pick up where the modernists left off. They
are, like Joyce, obsessively concerned with the ordinary. The novels are
suffused with the apparent trivia of modern living: the number of
calories in food items, losing one or two pounds, the advantages of 1471
on the telephone, betting on the Lottery, chat-rooms on the Internet.
But, as with Joyce and Woolf's fiction, when the reader puts these small
but authentic details together, a larger, more terrifying picture is
formed of a person at war with herself. In
Bridget Jones's Diary we find this sentence: "I am going to turn
into a hideous grow-bag-cum-milk-dispensing-machine which no one will
fancy and which will not fit into any of my trousers, particularly my
brand new acid green Agnes B jeans." While this sentence is utterly
authentic - it perfectly articulates the heroine's fear of pregnancy -
it is also literary in its devices. It employs two subordinate clauses
and a parenthesis to qualify the main clause and thus reveals, through
its complex grammar, the endlessly qualifying and self-justifying nature
of Jones's mind. The syntax also juxtaposes outlandish imagery (the
grow-bag) with vivid realist detail (the acid green jeans), which makes
the reader conflate the grow-bag with the jeans, creating a doubly
surreal and, ultimately, disturbing image: huge, growing jeans, dripping
milk. At times like these, Bridget Jones seems a contemporary version of
Molly Bloom. Fiction has never seen protagonists quite like Jones before; these heroines are inhabiting bodies that are their enemies. To complicate matters, the thinnists tend to be wonderfully ironic and self-deprecating. Like Lola Young, they really believe that their problems are "piddling". The protagonists may be beating themselves up over the way they dress, what they eat and how they are perceived by others; but the thinnists don't turn their novels into leaden critiques of the world. Rather, they turn the tragedy of modern consumer society - the truth that materially we have everything we ever wanted but suffer even more than before - into an absurdist comedy: an impossible search for a mythical male hero. |