Jane Austen's World as Postmodern Simulacrum in Fielding's Narratives of Bridget Jones (2002)

HELEN FIELDING'S 1998 Bridget Jones' Diary was an immediate international bestseller, charting a year in the life of a single British woman in her early thirties who struggles to balance feminism, the desire to have a boyfriend, smoking, drinking, eating (over the course of the year she loses seventy-two pounds and gains seventy-four), her family's absurdities, and her own insecurities, all as she plays a kind of Elizabeth Bennet, finally gaining her own Mr. Darcy (he's called Mark Darcy in Fielding's novel, but he's a Darcy nonetheless). Fielding's sequel, Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason (1990), kept the allusive connection to Austen's Pride and Prejudice while also aligning its plot with Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion. Comic tours de force, both books also stand as particularly salient and generative reconfigurations of Jane Austen's novels; Fielding uses Austen as a ready supply of reactionary, or nostalgic, or perhaps merely playfully postmodern, contrast for her heroine's late twentieth-century cultural dilemmas. In fact, determining the kind of contrast which is proffered to us by the allusive undergirding of these narratives opens up a variety of implications about why Austen seems so very useful for contemporary readers and viewers, not just in these narratives of Fielding's but also in the flush of Austen films of the 1990s. Further, Fielding's use of Austen offers some clues as to whether at heart contemporary audiences prefer reaction, nostalgia, or play when they make use of the past. I will ultimately suggest that only by distinguishing the heroine's project from the author's can we sort out the Austen employed as postmodern, hyperreal gesture from the Austen whose romance plots seem to be invoked as authentic ideals, either ideals that are possible of attainment (the reading from reaction) or impossible (the reading from nostalgia). Bridget Jones's Diary takes Pride and Prejudice as its starting point and key allusive text, mapping the main arc of the action against Austen's plot. This mapping is not meant to be subtle. Fielding calls attention to her own allusive directness by implication when, early in the novel, Bridget first meets Mr. Darcy at a party, looking over his hosts' bookshelves. Bridget muses: struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting 'Cathy' and banging your head against a tree (Bridget Jones's Diary 12). (1) Even the subtler effects--as when, for instance, Austen's wayward Lydia Bennet transmogrifies into Bridget's henna-haired mother, running off to Spain on a time-share fraud with a Portuguese tour operator--if all into the line of Austen's plot pretty faithfully. allusive allegiance continues in the sequel, Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason, which adds a twisted link to the chain of other twentieth-century Pride and Prejudice literary sequels (for example, The Ladies!': A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty [1922], Pemberley Shades [1949]; Wedding at Pemberley [1949]; Heiress of Rosings [1956]--all basically unreadable unless one doesn't mind the cliches of twentieth-century historical romance). But Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason doubles its allusive force, because it also recasts Bridget as the heroine of Austen's last completed novel, with a recapitulation of central plot elements (one chapter is even called Persuasion, so that the parallels will be plain to all with eyes to see). Fielding even supplies the reader with a new Captain Benwick, absorbed in the soppy literature of his day (where Austen's Benwick was lost in the softer effusions of Byron, Scott, and Burns, Fielding's Benwick reads Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, If the Buddha Dated, and Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, presumably all classics in the self-help line). allusive logic of the sequel piles on, therefore, with Bridget playing both Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot simultaneously, and Mark Darcy playing both Mr. …