Bridget Jones as the New New Woman: What She Reads and What She Wants; a Postfeminist Literary Criticism

Presenter: Alexandra Fus, English, Clark Honors College

“Chick lit” is not nearly so familiar a term as “chick flick,” but since the phenomenal success of Helen Fielding’s novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary, this popular women’s fiction genre has become the subject of serious debate among even high literary critics. As the ur-text for chick lit, Bridget Jones’s Diary’s protagonist offers a postmodern, postfeminist revision of the New Woman– a cultural and literary female archetype who has been continually re-modified since her emergence at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a symbol for what it means to be modern, liberated, and female, Bridget Jones has been condemned by critics as antifeminist, while writers and fans insist that she personifies empowering possibilities for feminism and popular women’s fiction. Using textual analysis, I argue instead that Bridget Jones’s role as the newest New Woman merits consideration free from either fans’ pride or critics’ prejudice, for its simultaneous rejection and engagement with all the New Women that came before, Bridget Jones’s Diary presents an individualistic reimagining of postmodernist postfeminism. Indeed, Bridget’s alternately anxious and empowering expression of a multiplicity of female identities suggests that women of the twenty-first century have become so modern and liberated that they can now choose not to be contained within any New Woman archetype.