Questions about Bridget Jones’s Diary


These questions are designed: (i) to give us topics to talk about in class (you are not expected to have answers to all of them, but you should select some that you personally find most interesting and revealing); and (ii) to give you ideas for your papers (for which some more specific direction will be given). We can’t handle them all but they should provide interesting and illuminating ways of thinking about both the novel and the movie.

 

1.         Examine the way in which the novel’s episodic sprawling plot (apparently dictated by mere chronology) is given a sense of order (and running jokes) by such repeated scenes:

 

social occasions: e.g. Turkey Curry Buffet (10), birthday party (72), book party (85), TV crew (116), Tarts and Vicars (146), Edinburgh (172), party with Gavin (189), Darcys’ party (199), party with friends and Darcy (233), party with smug marrieds etc.

 

itemized hourly schedules: e.g. birthday (72), leaving flat (79), VCR (130), current affairs, fags, Peter, Mum, Tom (164)

 

lists: there are the lists of new year resolutions (at beginning and end) as well as daily lists, but there are others–e.g. for book party (84), Daniel in flat (96), pregnancy food list (99), food consumed (107), clothes list for mini-break (134), outfit for Tarts and Vicars party (144), list for dinner party (226, 232)


Are there more of these categories that I may well have missed. Feel free to recommend your own.

 

2.         How “real” is the diary? Is its illusion sustained? Does it matter?

 

3.         How random are the names?

 

4.         Is Bridget Jones a “coherent” character?

 

5.         How many subplots are there? What do they contribute to the novel? How many have been excised for the film and what is the effect? Magda/Jeremy; Tom; Julio/Julian . . .

 

6.         How attractive a woman is BJ? How does the film render her a more suitable mate for Darcy?

 

7.         Does BJ “improve”? Can she take control of her life? How do the novel and the film differ? Should we like or love BJ “just the way she is”? Can she be “redeemed” as Rob Fleming is “redeemed” by Nick Hornby in High Fidelity? Is Nick more “real” as a character than BJ?

 

8.         Why was the novel so successful? Was the film successful for different reasons?

 

9.         What is the difference between BJ’s self-presentation in the novel and in the film? What changes are there? Notice the speeches BJ makes in the movie. How do they change her character?

 

10.       Why is popular culture so important?


            Television soap operas, sitcoms, adaptations of great novels for the small screen, glossy magazines, etc. What do the novel and the film tell us about our world? Should we be disheartened? What is the importance of F. R. Leavis’s Mass Civilization and Minority Culture for the movie in which it is mentioned? Leavis, as Cleaver tells BJ, died in 1978: ha ha ha.


            Leavis was a leading English critic who waged war on film–“viewed in darkened rooms in conditions of almost hypnotic receptivity”–and other manifestations of “mass” culture; most critics, except for Harold Bloom, have now reconciled themselves to popular culture; hostility to “mass”–as well as “popular”--culture is, however, still shared by a few. How would you distinguish “mass” from “popular “ culture” in a commercialized world in which the media loom so large? The world has been commercialized, but many would argue that mass media have wrought some kind of transformation of the “popular.”


             In The Independent (London), Judith Williamson has commented that the adherence of the book and the film to the genres of popular culture is a key to its success:

 

The achievement of popular culture has been to provide frameworks–precisely through the repeated formulae of genres–for dealing with strong feelings that may not be worked through anywhere else. The fact that they are dealt with entertainingly doesn’t mean those feelings are not real: rather, that even painful and disturbing emotions can be explored and safely held by the generic structure itself.


Does this, however, result in literature and film lite?

 

11.       Why does the movie make allusions to other movies: To Catch a Thief (with Grace Kelly), Fatal Attraction (Sharon Stone), Working Girl (Melanie Griffith), bar room brawls in westerns?

 

12.       How are BJ’s parents and her urban family differently handled in novel and movie?

 

13.       Would you want BJ for a friend? How much of BJ do you see in yourself (even if you are a male)?

 

14.       The soundtrack of the film is very complex. Try to identify the different categories of music that are used and identify their contribution to the mood of the film? What does the soundtrack bring to the adaptation of the novel?

 

15.       Compare the beginnings and the endings of both novel and film. Why are the opening credits postponed? Do you like the sequence of home movie images that accompanies the closing credits? If so, why?

 

16.       Does Helen Jones make it up as she goes along? (The novel began life as a newspaper column.) How satisfying is the plot of the novel? Is plot, perhaps, less important than sit-com effects in the novel? How does the movie differ?

 

17.       Why is the novel so funny? What does the movie add to its humor? Think why the movie tends towards the komos form of comedy far more than the novel?

 

18.       How does the treatment of sex and love differ between the novel and the movie? Why is there so much “bad” language? What is the significance of the closing kiss with Darcy and the words which accompany it? How does Cleaver’s speech contrast with Darcy’s? (Remember that they have received the same education at Cambridge.)

 

19.       Are there aspects of U/non-U language (toilets, loos, pardon, what) that you find perplexing? Are there other aspects of specifically British class comedy that may not be understood in America?

 

20.       What is the effect of having the actor playing Darcy having played Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? What is the effect of Hugh Grant playing Cleaver? (Notice that both actors are mentioned in the novel.) Is Grant a convincing villain?

 

21.       What is the effect of having the real novelists Salman Rushdie and Lord Archer appear on the screen? (The novelist Julian Barnes appears in the novel.) Salman Rushdie liked Fielding’s novel but he and the novelist Martin Amis were contemptuous of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (which came from the same production team in 1994–but without Fielding). Why do you think that he agreed to appear?

 

16.       What aspects of postmodernism are introduced by questions 14 and 15?

 

17.       What is your own attitude to women and weight, to women and alcohol, and to women and cigarettes? (There’s only one realistic attitude to smoking but the other two categories admit of different answers.) Is BJ a bad grrrl? Is that fun?

 

16.       Helen Fielding has commented: “Bridget’s height is kept deliberately vague, like her age, so people can fill in the rest as they choose to imagine and identify with their chosen level of paranoia.” How does the movie tackle this problem?

 

17.       Fielding has based the story upon Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, remarking that “There’s several hundred years of market testing on that plot.” Does the Diary satisfactorily register that market testing? As a book? As a movie? Explore the analogies if you can.


18.       Fielding has remarked that she wrote the book “just for fun.” On the other hand, she has commented:

 

I’ve talked to women all over the place at book signings–Japan, America, Scandinavia, Spain–and what they most relate to is the massive gap between the way women feel they’re expected to be and how they actually are. These are complicated times for women. Bridget is groping through the complexities of dealing with relationships in a morass of shifting roles, and a bombardment of idealized images of modern womanhood. It seems she’s not the only one who’s confused.


Fielding has also commented that

 

Single women today, sort of in their thirties, are perhaps a new type of woman that hasn’t really got an identity. And that’s all very worrying. Women have said to me: it makes us feel like [sic] we’re part of a club and we’re not the only ones that feel that stupid


            How do you reconcile Fielding’s view of the novel as comic entertainment with her awareness of the complex themes she introduces into it? (Was she, perhaps, cognizant of their resonance only in retrospect?) You might wish to explore parallels between BJD, Ally McBeal, Seinfeld, and Sex in the City. What themes of protracted adolescence are shared with High Fidelity?

 

20.       Why are there so few physical descriptions of people and so many descriptions of things in the novel?

 

21.       Why have so many female readers and critics exclaimed “that’s me”? (How many men make similar exclamations or see the novel as “realistic” rather than “satirical”?)


22. Here are some negative judgments. Bridget is “such a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness that her foolishness cannot be excused” (Alex Kuczynski, New York Times).

 

“An updated version of the old Mills & Boon [=English romance novelettes] formula . . . the only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core porn [!].” (The feminist Germaine Greer; Fielding had unsuccessfully submitted such a romance to Mills and Boon before completing her first novel Cause Celeb; Greer is referred to as “Geer” by Bridget’s mum in the movie, so the last laugh was, perhaps, Fielding’s.)

 

“Just because this pre-feminist angst is delivered in ballsy prose it gets passed off as post-feminist wit.” (Decca Aikenhead, London Guardian)

 

“Bridget Jones is just the kind of ghastly neurotic bore I pray my daughter will not grow up to be.” (Minette Marrin, an old colleague from Cambridge, in the London Daily Telegraph)

 

“BJ has to be hopeless because she is the scapegoat by which all our sins of low self-esteem and secretly fancying bastards can be atoned.” (Laura Tennent, London Independent)

 

“Bridget [as movie character] is a text-book example of neurosis, a 118-minute advert for ‘getting a bloody grip.’” (Grace Dent, London Observer)

 

“It’s a lot easier to think that being female and single is about counting calories and flirting by email than thinking there might be a genuine political reason for it.” (Katherine Viner, London Guardian)

 

“When the reader puts small but authentic details together, a larger, terrifying picture is formed of a person at war with herself.” (Francis Gilbert, London New Statesman, discussing “thinnism” and “body dysmorphism”)


In arriving at your own judgment of the novel’s achievement consider such “feminist” criticism. If you consider such criticisms accurate, account for your own judgment which may, finally, be negative. Here are some positive judgments which attempt to bridge the gap.

 

“Bridget’s post-feminist sorrows could be tedious in the hands of a less charming writer–they include such trivialities as the inability to find a pair of tights in her bureau without holes or bits of tissue stuck all over them . . . [yet] Fielding has managed to create an unforgettably droll character.” (Sarah van Boven, Newsweek)

 

“Bridget is a wonderfully quirky comic creation . . . To come up with a character who is loveable, ingenuous, and a crack social creation called for a mixture of of kooky wit and razor-sharp professionalism. (Shane Watson, Harper’s Bazaar)

 

“Quotation fails this novel. Its humour is not remotely aphoristic; and no quotation can convey Bridget’s claim to be a durable comic figure . . . BJT rings with the unmistakable tone of something that is true to the marrow; it defines what it describes. I know for certain that if I were a young [?], single, urban woman, I would finish this book crying, ‘Bridget Jones, c’est moi.’ (Shulman, Times Literary Supplement)


            You can find many other such endorsements used as blurbs for the book.


            Some of the quotations I have used come from Imelda Whelehan’s Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (New York: Continuum, 2002) which I have already recommended in class. (Refer, too, to her set of questions and to her list of web-sites, that I have already distributed; you might consider buying this very useful book, if you find the BJ “phenomenon” interesting.) Whelehan notes that by 2001 BJD had sold two million copies in the UK and more than eight million world-wide. It has now been translated into at least 33 languages. The novel sold well in France, although there were some scathing reviews of its Anglo-Saxonisms: “We in France prefer to keep quiet about the little miseries of the feminine condition: painful leg-waxing, cellulite, and bad hang-overs” (Paris Match).


            In the novel, B seems no larger than a British size 12; even after gaining 17 pounds (going from 112 lbs to 129 lbs), Rene Zellweger still fitted into 10/12 outfits. For the filming of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Zellweger is currently (January, 2004) under the direction of a “fatness instructor” who has her on a diet of 3800 calories a day: French toast, Caesar salad, crispy duck and chocolate bars, washed down with sugared sodas and milk-shakes. “I have given up exercise,” comments Zellweger.

 

23.       Why does Cleaver call Bridget by so many different names?

 

24.       In your own experience, are there as many unmarried thirty-somethings as BJ? Can you see yourself (as a woman) coming to resemble BJ? Can men expect a different fate (contrast Rob Fleming in High Fidelity)? How does HF (written before BJD) contrast with it?

 

25.       Do you consider BJ fat in the movie? Why, as a corollary, has our image of the sexually attractive woman changed from the 1950s (when glamorous actresses were well-covered)? Why don’t women listen to the men in their lives (or are their men fixated on what feminists have called the “beauty myth”)? Why can men get away with being fat (e.g. Henry Kissinger, Helmut Kohl, Ariel Sharon) get away with being overweight whereas women cannot? Why do women suffer from bulimia and anorexia in an age of obesity?

 

26.       “Love” does appear in the novel (in a way different from the movie). Why did I temporarily forget that? Why did you not remind me? (The question is about Fielding’s style and presentation rather than about my amnesia or your politeness.)

 

27.       Web crawl for BJ. Tell me what you come up with. Or use it, duly noted, in your papers.