Bridget Jones, Everywoman
Why Bridget Jones has more to say about men than women.

By Ben Domenech
April 21-22, 2001

et's get one thing straight, right from the get-go: Renee Zellwegger is not, I repeat, not Bridget Jones.

This is not meant, in any way, to fault Zellwegger's abilities as an actress. She's really quite good, and her performance is consistently impressive throughout Sharon Maguire's film adaptation of the best-selling book.

The fact remains, Bridget Jones is simply a literary character of such enormity and importance that she cannot be forcefully assimilated into any one actress's frame. Zellwegger is not Bridget Jones, anymore than you could say that Basil Rathbone was Sherlock Holmes, or Sean Connery was James Bond. The on-screen characters' size and scope ultimately renders any acting skills, however skilful, insufficient.

Bridget Jones rivals such other great characters of film and print for one reason, a reason that one does not have to be single, overweight, British, or even female to comprehend: Women just relate to Bridget. She is Everywoman — or, at the very least, Everywoman during some point in her life. It's that point in life where the entire surrounding world seems frighteningly absurd, a juncture of existence chock full of New Year's resolutions broken, of smug couples and the unfathomable torture of their holiday parties, of idiotically childish parents, of late-night TV, and self-help books about lascivious men and silly men and infantile men.

To live like Bridget Jones is to gather with friends to obsess over your vile twit of a boyfriend. It is to worry at nights about dying alone and being found, months later, half-eaten by an Alsatian. It is to stew over your "status": irrevocably and damnably single.

Some women, of course, do not relate to Bridget at all. If they ever wanted a man, they drove their hooks into him early, and skipped the single life entirely, except perhaps for that short feminist excursion in college. To these women, and to many men, the neurotic power of author Helen Fielding's creation is difficult to understand. Why, they ask, does Bridget obsess so much about things so ridiculously small? Why does she tabulate calories, cigarettes, lottery tickets, alcohol units, etc. in such hideous complexity? Why can't she just take control of her life and stop defrosting chocolate croissants?

Some women relate to Bridget in the most powerful of ways, recognizing at once her description of the worst bits of being a singleton (as Bridget calls them), just as they creep closer to (or past) the age of thirty. (Thirty is when all of the Bridgets of the world find themselves inducted into the knitting circle of eternal spinsterhood.)

The irony of it all is, Bridget Jones has plenty more to say about modern men than she does about women.

The escapist film adaptation seems to recognize this fact — perhaps because director Sharon Maguire was the inspiration for one of the book's foul-mouthed singletons, Sharon (or, as fans will doubtless remember her, "Shazzer").

It's a funny adaptation, and quite charming, but it follows a more hackneyed romantic-comedy script than it should. A significant part of the charm of Helen Fielding's Bridget is the fact that almost every mistake is repeated, usually more than once, and bad choices seem to make quite a lot of sense when understood from Bridget's perspective (NB: The film omits one of the funniest characters from the novel — Bridget's insane grandmother). There is, unfortunately, insufficient space in a 97-minute film for a full portrait of the complex Bridget, and the book's moments of sheer loneliness — drinking alone, eating alone, watching bad TV alone, — don't' get communicated on the big screen.

Still, Maguire deals more extensively with the two men who joust for Bridget's affections: her lecher of a boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), and the stolid, conservative, intelligent barrister Mark Darcy (Colin Firth).

A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The men in Bridget's life sum up the inevitable choice of a singleton — on one hand, the unreliable and suavely egotistical (but always passionate) Cleaver, whose penchant for intra-office romance is positively Clintonesque, and on the other, the less-than-flashy Darcy. In The Edge of Reason, Fielding's sequel to her original book/diary, Bridget is astounded to discover that Darcy votes Tory (the horror!).

When one is a singleton, the population of available men often dwindles to the few who are either frighteningly boring or career womanizers; members of that rare breed of available "nice guys" are nowhere to be found — all of them are either married, uninterested, or gay. And sometimes they're all three.

If there is one thing that Bridget Jones recognizes more than anything else, it's that, for those women who do not enjoy the prospects of single life, it has become increasingly difficult to find a nice guy, let alone an attractive one.

Forget about debonair knights in shining armor; women of today have been forced, through the harsh reality of the relationship scene, to lower their standards to the point where they'll accept just about any fellow who can stand on his two feet without falling over or vomiting on his shoes. Sometimes they'll even settle for overgrown fratboys. Or they'll try to find a substitute for men entirely — Bridget makes such an attempt with her career, first in publishing, then on television, but runs into some difficulties. Her list of objectives before an office party is a good illustration:

Monday 17 April
Am going to work out clear set of objectives…
Not to get too pissed.
To aim to meet people to network with
To put the social skills from the article into action
To make Daniel think I have inner poise and want to get off with me again. No. No. (crossed out)
To meet and sleep with sex god. (crossed out)
To make interesting contacts in the publishing world, possibly even other professions in order to find new career.
Oh God. Do not want to go to scary party. Want to stay home with bottle of wine and watch Eastenders.

Bridget's determination to not "sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend" is admirable. But the pickings are thin.

Through no fault of her own, Bridget and women like her live in a period of time where, if nice guys are scarce, gentlemen have been hunted down to extinction. The true reason that many women empathize with Bridget Jones isn't just because of the embarrassing social situations, the cliquish infighting among friends, or the loneliness of single life, but that they recognize the painful reality of her situation. The number of available men who exemplify masculine ideals and gentlemanly conduct are few and far between. And regardless of the reasons for such a famine, until a significant number of men begin to change, to stand up on their own two feet and treat the fairer sex with respect and honor, the population of Bridget Joneses will surely increase, with no end in sight.

Bridget, like Diogenes before her, is just a nice girl desperately searching the world for an honest man — or, in this case, the last gentleman.