There’s a new statue in Leicester Square. Fanned before Shakespeare, alongside Harry Potter and Paddington Bear, now stands a bronze Bridget Jones. She was installed on Monday (17 November) as part of Westminster council’s cinema celebration. At the unveiling, author Helen Fielding, star of the films Renée Zellweger and co-star Sally Philips were all in attendance. Zellweger joked, “I think she’s much cuter than me” – the Americanism reminding listeners she’s not actually the bumbling Brit she plays so well.
No one would complain about a Shakespeare statue. And depicting the likes of Paddington isn’t a particularly controversial exercise (unless you present him as a foul mouthed drug addict, then you’ve got a lawsuit on your hands). But Bridget Jones is a different beast. Questions abound. Which era of Bridget are we going for here? Are we depicting the book or film version? And, most crucially, what the hell’s going to happen with her waist line?
These doubts have clearly troubled the sculptor, or rather, the studio 3D Eye which made the statue. As Phillips carefully phrased it at the unveiling, the statue is “Mad About the Boy-era weight with Bridget Jones’s Diary-era clothes.” In other words, she’s slim with a short skirt. Fielding commented, “Her stomach is as flat as a pancake,” before acknowledging “a little bit [of stomach] sort of hanging over.” In reality, the statue is pretty dainty, with a tiny bit of tummy poking out through her cardigan.
Weight is a huge part of Bridget’s world. On the first page of Bridget Jones’ Diary, she declares she’s 9st 3lb. This is presented as a borderline disaster. She forensically lists the food she’s consumed: the number of Milk Trays, cold potatoes, cheese slices. In the first film, they’ve made her slightly heavier, closer to 10 stone. In the opening scene, she declares her New Year’s resolution to be: “lose 20 pounds”.
At the turn of the century, the average woman in the UK weighed around 10st 12lb. Across the pond, it was 11 and a half stone. Loading her trolley with Emmental and Brie, Bridget still would have been one of the slimmer ladies in the cheese aisle. But the magazines and catwalks told a different story: heroin-chic was still in fad, and “does my bum look big in this?” still the go-to changing room question.
Scholars, influencers and journalists have all criticised the book’s approach to body issues. In her essay “Did Bridget Jones Really Liberate Us?” Imelda Whelehan writes: “Bridget Jones and its ilk paint a bleak picture … with women seeking control through the dutiful accounting of the day’s ‘sins’ – calorie intake, cigarettes, alcohol. What is most depressing about the Bridget Jones effect is because people find echoes of their own struggle with femininity in it, it somehow legitimates the measuring of one’s own inadequacies through the body.” But Bridget’s defenders say her unnecessary weight worries were the very thing that made her relatable. She was certainly a mirror, but was it one with a distorting effect?
Zellweger reportedly gained 30 pounds for the first film, presumably because it was the noughties and you’d never dream of casting someone whose weight sat naturally above a size eight. After filming was complete, she’d promptly drop the weight again and tabloids would salivate over which diet helped her shed the pounds. But in this year’s film, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Zellweger was allowed to keep her trim figure. The novel it’s based on begins with Bridget weighing 12 and a half stone, which she quickly drops. Zellweger couldn’t be expected to go through all that weight gaining and losing in such a small time frame, and it’s understandable that producers didn’t want to put her in a fat suit. Yet it did feel a bit of a shame that Bridget spent the latest movie looking more svelte than ever.
With all these complicated dynamics at play, it’s no wonder the Bridget Jones statue is a bodge job. The small acquiescence to Bridget’s inner turmoil, that tiny bit of tummy sticking out, seems to shout “there you go girls: she’s just like you!” In reality, there was always a contradiction at the heart of this brilliant character: she was meant to be an everywoman, but still had to work as a palatable Hollywood heroine. Anyone depicting the physical Bridget is handed an impossible task: because no matter what they do, some people are always going to feel she’s too fat, and others too thin. Perhaps that’s the very thing that makes the character feel like such a lightning rod for modern femininity: we can never quite agree on what she should look like. Maybe we should channel Mark Darcy, and tell every version of our heroine – and every version of ourselves – whether she’s eight stone, nine stone, or over 12: “I like you very much. Just as you are.”
[Further reading: Rachel Cooke’s feminism and friendship]
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