No time is harder to see than the present. The past we invent freely, fossicking for the bits that make the right stories. But the present is brimming with what Roland Barthes called the ‘what-goes-without-saying’—the stuff that’s so persuasive, so important to our sense of ourselves, that we dare not speak its name.
I mention this on account of Bridget Jones, who gives me the irrits.
But her ancestor, Elizabeth Bennet, is another matter. I feel bad about it—Bridget is, after all, my contemporary—but I much prefer the begowned and beslippered Elizabeth to her twittery descendant. I understand Elizabeth; Bridget doesn’t make sense.
It is, as Elizabeth would say, very vexing. Helen Fielding (who wrote the books and also has writing credits for both films) has acknowledged her debt to Jane Austen, so you’d expect to find both heroines likeable. In many ways they’re cast from the same mould: Bridget and Elizabeth are single British women of marriageable age; they are middle-class, attractive, reasonably eligible. As Austen shone a light into the minds and manners of 19th-century England, Fielding exposes, and caricatures, the lives of modern single women. But where Austen’s light illuminates, Fielding’s grates.
Bridget is a baffling display of barely amusing foolishness. She ditzes her way between men, whining about being a ‘singleton’, fretting about being ‘fat’ (at 60kg, I hardly think so), getting her geography wrong and spilling things. Elizabeth is poise and reason itself. She rarely complains, and keeps romantic conjecture to herself. Her tongue is as razor sharp as her determination not to be taken in by fools and worthless lovers.
All of which raises the question: surely two centuries after the pioneering feminists, we can do better than Bridget?
Perhaps you are now thinking: oh, please; they’re just stories. And there are those (many, going on the fact that Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Edge of Reason both made it into the top ten at the Australian box office) who find Bridget funny and clever. Bridget’s spin doctors declare her a ‘heroine to singletons everywhere’; the Times Literary Supplement fell only a little short of declaring her the embodiment of her generation. She certainly does her best to send up the hopeless expectation that she will, by her early 30s, be happily married, wealthy, wildly successful on the career front, and ready to get ‘sprogged up’ with her first child. In her modern way—such as when