5 February 2025

Bridget Jones’s hollow feminism

The novels portrayed the working woman of the Nineties as a hot mess. By laughing at her, we laughed at ourselves.

Self-hatred sells. As the fourth Bridget Jones film arrives, I remember Helen Fielding’s creation with the queasy quality of hangover. She passed as a feminist heroine in the Nineties because she had a voice – she really did – and this is what she did with it: self-abasement. “I WILL NOT drink more than 14 alcohol units a week,” is the first line of her manifesto concealed as a list of New Year’s resolutions at the beginning of the first book. She also vows to be kinder, not to read books “by unreadable literary authors”, not to express her own emotions “but instead be poised and cool ice-queen”, and to purge her flat “of all extraneous matter”, though she doesn’t want to. This is a woman crushed from the off: a void.

I reread the books, and they are worse than I remembered. They feel less like a friendly mirror, and more like an attack on the presumption of the luckiest generation of women in the history of the world. We were newly emancipated, but Bridget cannot benefit from this gift: her career break was sliding down a fireman’s pole, flashing her arse to the world. It mattered. This was the generation that was told we could have it both – the job and the childcare – but Bridget isn’t interested in the job. (In the fourth book, we learn that the childcare is beyond her.) This manifests in her obsession with Pride and Prejudice, a world where women cannot work. Her love object is Mark Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Colin Firth, who played Austen’s Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation, plays Fielding’s Darcy in the Bridget Jones films (Renée Zellweger is Bridget) and plays him as the same man. It’s a good joke – and it gilded Bridget asfake feminist heroine – but Bridget is not Elizabeth Bennet, or Anne Elliot (the second book steals from Persuasion). Rather, she is Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey, credulous, infantile, lost: “I’m no good at anything. Not men. Not social skills. Not work. Nothing.”

When we meet Bridget, she is working in a publishing house, longing to “lose weight and change personality”. Literature is her work, but she has no authentic dreamworld, because she has no authentic self. Rather, pretending to read “tedious-beyond-belief manuscript from lunatic”, she longs to be sexually harassed by her boss, the sex addict Daniel Cleaver, who eventually obliges her. Bridget is kind, but being kind doesn’t serve her: “I remember when I first came to London, I used to smile at everyone until a man on the Tube escalator masturbated into the back of my coat.” She is charming – the great British balm, distraction and excuse – but she lives on shifting sands. “Work has become like going to a party in order to get off with someone and finding they haven’t turned up,” she writes.

In the second book, she is commissioned to interview Colin Firth in Italy for the Independent: the newspaper where Bridget was born in a column in 1995. She misses the plane because she is trying on a bikini; asks Firth, “Who is Neacher?”(she means Nietzsche); tries to kiss him; and ultimately submits a transcript rather than an interview. That scene gave me a panic attack: who would do this? (A woman with no powers of criticism, or analysis.) Even so, the Independent likes it: “Anything that gets letters is good no matter how bad it is.” There are hints here of a worse future, for both women and for journalism.

Eventually, Bridget swaps literature for a tabloid TV show, and there she remains (though in the final book she attempts to rewrite Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, which she thinks is by Chekhov). Otherwise, her job is mostly responding to tirades such as: “Bridget, find me the Fireworks Kid with No Penis. Find me the Sixties Guy Fawkes Bobbit. I’m thinking Nationwide. I’m thinking Frank Bough; I’m thinking skateboarding ducks.” Tabloid journalism is her true milieu: thoughtlessly consumptive; monomaniacal and anti-intellectual; expert in feminine self-hatred. Bridget is a journalistic creation, and she knows it: “a child of Cosmopolitan culture… traumatised by supermodels”. The books are evocative – Bridget lives in a tableau of “Agent Provocateur bras, leopardskin ankle boots, Gucci carrier bags, [and] faux Prada handbags” – because they are journalism, and journalism is of its time.

By laughing at Bridget – a working woman as spectacle, or hot mess – we laughed at ourselves. Bridget seeks a man to tell her, “I like you just the way you are.” She cannot feel this for herself. This, for instance, is her testimony on her own body, though Bridget is clearly pretty: “Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature – with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin, Denis Healey eyebrows, face a graveyard of dead skin cells, spots erupting, long curly fingernails like Struwwelpeter, blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses, flabby body flobbering around.” Bridget has an eating disorder, but its origins are unclear: she has no hinterland beyond Cosmopolitan. She is a caricature – a depository – of women’s fear. Her avoidance with men is equally mysterious: her father is a paper saint.

Bridget uses self-help books and dysfunctional friends to find what she thinks is love. Yet, when she manages to trick Cleaver into a relationship by pretending she isn’t interested – courtesy of the self-help books, which she uses into her fifties, and a friend, who tells her that “the only way to succeed with men is to be really horrible to them” – she isn’t happy, because Bridget can’t be happy. She can only be tethered to a man for a while and, when she isn’t, she floats away. Her Cleaver was a tedious fantasy; the real Cleaver bores her. “Another wasted Sunday. It seems the entire summer is doomed to be spent watching the cricket with the curtains drawn. The more the sun shines the more obvious it seems that others are making fuller, better use of it elsewhere.”

After the Cleaver affair she becomes fixated on Mark Darcy. If Cleaver was a child to Bridget, obsessed with her giant “mummy” knickers, then Darcy is a parent. He has the measure of Bridget, and her reader, commenting on the havoc self-help books wreak in her life: “Rubber bands and win-win Martians. It’s like war command in the land of gibberish here.” At the end of the first book, he “carried me off into the bedroom (which had a four-poster bed!) and did all manner of things which mean whenever I see a diamond-patterned V-neck sweater in future, I am going to spontaneously combust with shame”. Shame is a strange response to loving sex for an adult woman, but Bridget has the magical quality of an archetype. Even Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City, Bridget’s American cousin, changed. (She got worse.) But Bridget never changes, or ages, at all.

Darcy’s allure for Bridget, alongside “his capability, intelligence, lack of smoking, [and] freedom from alcoholism”, depend on his chauffeur-driven cars and detached house in London. Elsewhere, she dreams of “a renovated farmhouse in the Cotswolds with poured concrete floors and shaggy rugs, possibly interior-designed by Jade Jagger”. This is Nineties feminism, and it is the greedy, consuming, ultimately thwarted feminism of the self. This kind of feminism – the bogus feminism of the white, upper-middle-class woman – has done incalculable damage, because it has no goal beyond self-acceptance and the slaking of vanity. It is as unserious as Bridget’s politics: “Labour stands for the principle of sharing, kindness, gays, single mothers and Nelson Mandela as opposed to braying bossy men having affairs with everyone shag-shag-shag left, right and centre and going to the Ritz in Paris then telling all the presenters off on the Today programme.”

Darcy is the steady thing here – steady like a house, steady like Pemberley – and, by the fourth book, he’s killed by a landmine, because Bridget can’t be happy. That is not the point of her, nor any woman in Fielding’s world. Smug “marrieds” and “singletons” have twin miseries. A smug married’s description of childbirth – “anecdotes about slashings, stitchings and effusions of blood, poison, newts and God knows what” – repels Bridget, though fellow singletons are thrilled by their escape from this bloodbath: “Jude seemed to have suddenly cheered up, sleeking down her Donna Karan crop-top, which revealed a beguiling glimpse of pierced navel and perfectly honed flat midriff while Shazzie adjusted her Wonderbra.”

There is a feminist character, though she is as mad as the first Mrs Rochester: Bridget’s “bright orange” and “opinionated” mother, Pamela, who leaves her husband, takes a lover, and finds a career. “I feel like the grasshopper who sang all summer. And now it’s the winter of my life and I haven’t stored up anything of my own.” Bridget doesn’t want anything of her own. When Pamela leaves her husband, Bridget divines: “I know what her secret is: she’s discovered power.” Bridget never manages it. Her widowhood – the story of the fourth book and its film, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, in which her daughter parents her, and she has an improbable romance with a 29-year-old – feels like an attempt to make her make sense. What is the unhappiness for, beyond the comic possibilities of prat-falling? It is for us, because self-hatred sells.

Her story ends with her settled with – what else? – a rich toff, a replacement Darcy. They cohabit a large house near Hampstead Heath, and his country pile on weekends. Bridget Jones, the poster girl of Nineties feminism got what she felt was due to her: nothing of her own. There we leave her, an awful spirit of feminism future. Bridget had possibilities, as did we – “I was still in a strange world of my own – nauseous, vile-headed, acidic,” she said of a hangover, which felt more truthful than anything else in the books – but she ignored them for the dependence of a child. She lives on the page, a creature of her time: a cynical creation, punishment for our presumption, and a sump for all our fears.