Looking back to Bridget Jones

[MsAmerica]

Bridget Jones Deserved Better. We All Did.
Helen Fielding’s ditzy heroine was all the rage when she was introduced to American audiences in 1998. Today, her nuttiness and self-loathing read like a relic from another time.
By Elisabeth Egan

Before we tackle the question of whether “Bridget Jones’s Diary” is even remotely amusing in today’s post-Roe, #MeToo, politically polarized world, let’s turn the page back to the summer of 1998, when Publishers Weekly declared, “It’s hard to imagine a funnier book appearing anywhere this year.” Fielding’s British publisher told British Vogue, it’s “not just a book phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon. Like ‘Catch-22,’ it’s gone into the language.”

In her New York Times review, Elizabeth Gleick wrote, “People will be passing around copies of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ for a reason: It captures neatly the way modern women teeter between ‘I am woman’ independence and a pathetic girlie desire to be all things to all men.”...

She was the toast of book clubs, the subject of editorials, a lightning rod for morning-show debate and fodder for late-night comedy. Some readers were charmed by Bridget Jones; others were disgusted.

“Bridget is such a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness, that her foolishness cannot be excused,” Alex Kuczynski wrote in a Times column headlined “Dear Diary: Get Real.” She disliked that the book made “humor out of the premise that being neurotic is cute. That women eat too much. That we succumb to the lure of too many cocktails. That if we don’t enjoy our jobs, we just stick around and, heck, sleep with the boss (who never calls us back).”

For the whole article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/books/review/bridget-joness-diary-helen-fielding.html

I've never read Bridget Jones or seen the films but the article writer seems utterly po faced. I wonder if they are very young?

Why can't people cope with reading (or watching) things with a dated pov?

Well myself and my husband watched BJ the other evening and still enjoyed it. It's meant to be taken light heartedly . There are far more serious and worrying issues regarding women than this film or book.

It was pretty realistic in many ways though - maybe not with human rights lawyers, posh flats in Borough Market and tv careers, just in terms of lurching between relationships and having fun- some good and some not.

Oh, wait...was that not a self help book?

Tbh, judging by the amount of posts on MN about finding a man, losing a man, being helplessly in love with a sleazy bastard man and endless hand ringing about finding a man to reproduce with, it doesn't look as though much has changed in the last 25 years. Or even since Jane Austin actually.

"That women eat too much. That we succumb to the lure of too many cocktails. That if we don’t enjoy our jobs, we just stick around and, heck, sleep with the boss (who never calls us back).”"

Well, apart from sleeping with the boss...

Love makes the world go around so it's not really surprising (or wrong).

Bridget Jones was far more realistic than much of the women’s fiction that was about at the time. I’m feeling the need to reread and see what I think of it now.

I think it was indicative of its time. I watched the film last week and was as much appalled at the amount of smoking in public places as I was at Bridget's desperation. Not so much in a pearl-clutching way, but it feels like it wasn't that long ago, but times have changed so much!

When the book came out, I remember how refreshing it was to read a heroine who not only wasn't perfect but was clumsy, silly, slapstick at times. We passed a few copies around our friend group and talked about it endlessly.

It's hard to think back to that because everything afterwards tried to emulate it - the ditzy girl trope became tired and wasn't backed by the intelligence of Helen Fielding and Jane Austen.

I read it when I was 18 and it - along with mother's hideously patriarchal views - put the fear of god into me that if I wasn't married with a baby on the way by 30 I would be an abject failure.

I would love to have grown up like millenials did rather than that horrifying shit.

(I was married by 29 and had a baby almost to the day I turned 30).

It was certainly a novel of its time.

However even then I was exasperated by the general view that BJ was an object of pity when she had her own flat in central London, excellent friends, a career in TV (I mean FFS) and obviously wealthy parents.

Never saw the appeal back then. Was the navel gazing that especially unappealed. It's ok. Other people can like things I don't like.

I found it very relatable as a woman of a similar age at the time. Worrying about weight, getting drunk, making poor choices. The twee way of talking got irritating but there was some funny parts. It maybe is dated , I definitely remember some inappropriate misogyny that doesn't get called out but that doesn't make it bad. The follow up where Helen Fielding killed off Mark Darcy was pretty poor.

I’m old enough to remember it being a series of columns Helen Fielding wrote in The Times. I think it had come out of the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ fever following the BBC adaptation? Hence Mr Darcy.

I liked the columns but didn’t immediately like the films - found B a bit too much - but they have grown on me over the years.

Yes, the class element of the films never seems to be mentioned. Bridget is definitely a girl from a naice family in the Home Counties!

Ugh I hate this “let’s look back and pick things apart” trend.

It’s of its time! It was hilarious and a bit of fun. Yes it contains dated attitudes, that’s because it is dated.

I loved the book. The film not so much as I’m not a RZ fan.

Bridget’s mother had a similar personality and lifestyle to my mother at the time so I could relate, unfortunately.

Argh - it always frustrates me when people misinterpret Bridget Jones (the novel, not the film).

The character is always beating herself up for being stupid, overweight, etc. But Helen Fielding makes it clear that she's actually quite clever & witty, and also thin. She even puts her actual weight in the diary entries to show us that Bridget has been brainwashed by cultural expectations into thinking she's fat when she's really not. (There's a great passage where BJ realises she has managed to convince herself that eating any kind of food at all is a lapse of willpower.)

Readers tend to take the character at her word and assume Fielding is taking the piss out of a silly young woman. Really she's showing us how societal expectations, and male privilege, undermine young women to the point where they make bad decisions.

Well, I was going to comment, but @Squiblet has summed it up perfectly.

As if anyone other than a lifestyle journo in pursuit of column inches ever took Briget Jones seriously at the time, as a genuine picture of how young single women were!
As I recall, the auther was herself a columnist. These are people who live off of spurious trends that they can claim to observe (if they squint hard enough) and then squeeze a few words out of. I think the novel was premised on some ersatz journo waffle about 'singleton' trends, which it enlarged to the point of deliberate stupiudity, albeit with genuinely funny results.
It's social analysis was on a par with the kind of flummery that you read in today's lifestyle pages about how "everyone" is doing yoga with their pets , eating braised tofu, etc.
It is a complete nonsense to imagine that she reflected anything genuinely characteristic of the position of women then.
Honestly, it is only as you get older that you begin to understand that half of what people say about the past springs from the self-absorbed fantasies of the present.

Perhaps americans were too po-faced to take it with the lightness that its deliberate silliness deserved

I read the first book in my 20s but didn't really "get it" as it was completely unrealistic to my life and I couldn't relate to Bridget at all.
Then I saw the film which I loved - and re read the book and enjoyed it. I think because the film is essentially a comedy and I then realised you weren't meant to take the book so seriously.
I've read all the books and like the fact that although Daniel was unsuitable as a boyfriend he remained loyal to Bridget as a friend - even babysitting her children.

After the Woman of Substance, Scruples, family sagas and bonkbusters Bridget Jones and Sex and the City were a breath of fresh air.

Her friendships featured more heavily in the book - the banker stuck with the shitty negging boyfriend as an example. Perpetua endlessly discussing house prices.

It might not have directly reflected my life but few books do (and I'm not sure I'd want to read them if they did).

I read the book and laughed. We went to the film and laughed! In our puritan modern world we are not permitted to laugh and enjoy ourselves. Times were better in the past!

Agreed. How fucking boring it would be to read stories about perfect people making good choices with no imperfections to engineer a little humour..Fucking yawn.

What sqiuiblet said. Bridget is an unreliable narrator - it’s clear that her weight issues and insecurity are entirely in her head. When she does get down to her ‘ideal weight’, all her friends comment on how ill she looks and how they thought she looked better before!