Spinsters and Singletons: Bridget Jones’s Diary and its Cultural Reverberations

Feminist commentators have emphasized the regularity with which figures like Bridget Jones (along with those from Sex and the City and Ally McBeal) feature in critical engagements with the single women of postfeminist media culture, noting in particular how this functions to elide other forms of difference and femininities (Gill, 2007). My own choice to focus predominantly on Bridget in this chapter, however, results from the way she continues to culturally reverberate, especially in contemporary press engagements with the ‘problem’ of the single woman. By looking not just at the original novels featuring Bridget but at the ways in which she came to subsequently circulate, taking on an independent symbolic life beyond the pages of Fielding’s original texts, I am able to consider the cultural uses to which the text (or, more aptly, its heroine) has been put. As it is often seen as the genre’s ‘ur-text’ (Ferris & Young, 2006, p. 4), this chapter initially contextualizes Bridget Jones’s Diary within the chick lit genre, before offering a detailed engagement with Fielding’s text (and, to a lesser extent, its sequel and film adaptations), and how its heroine has come to mediate public constructions of women’s singleness from the mid-1990s to the present.