Understanding Bridget Jones. The Staging of Post-Feminist Female Identity in Bridget Jones’s Diary (GB, IRL, F 2001)

The film Bridget Jones’s Diary was an enormous success with the public and the novel it was based on was chosen by Guardian readers as the book that best represents the 1990s with a protagonist hailed as the mother of chicklit and an icon of postfeminism. This is why the film can arguably be treated as a cultural symptom. It is the first time women are portrayed this way showing the cruel reality of self torture that lies behind the façade of female beauty, at the same time anchoring it in a wave of British romantic comedies, yet going beyond these in its form of irony and parody, the treatment of cinematography and soundtrack. In this article I describe the staging of postfeminist identity in the figure of Bridget Jones, a childlike heroine of everyday life. However, by analysing Bridgets relationships, I go further than the common interpretation of the film as showing the conflict between the more political second wave feminists and the more hedonistic third wave feminists, so that the undercurrent of the comedy as a story of the development of a hysteric but also somewhat normal and typical female subject, the integration of drives and split off parts of the self becomes clear. If this is successful in Bridget’s case and the ending is a happy one, a new beginning in a relationship or self denial and fusion with the “ideal” partner, remains an open question. I argue, along Laura Mulvey, that the male view of woman is internalised to such an extent with male fantasies to ward off fears of female permissiveness that it is unclear if the protagonist struggles more with finding a partner or with her body/ego ideal. Self esteem depends on desirability for the male gaze—the gaze of a deprecating mother and cultural superego on a deeper level. The article concludes with postfeminist sensibility (Gill) as a kind of solution which doesn’t come without its own conflicts, namely between critical self awareness and joy.