Abstract
This chapter analyses Helen Fielding’s third Bridget Jones novel Mad about The Boy (2013). The former novels, Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), have functioned as touchstones in critical conversations about postfeminism, where Bridget’s subjectivity as a thirty-something singleton was scrutinised for what it could reveal about young women’s lives in a postfeminist social milieu. Mad about The Boy offers new critical possibilities for analysing how postfeminism continues to interfere in women’s lives at midlife and beyond. Some of postfeminism’s harmful outcomes are revealed, both through an examination of Bridget’s world within the novel, and in a study of its reception, each of which exposes how ageist discourses are naturalised as part of this ideology.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See Dan Evon (2013) for a compilation of reader responses to Fielding’s novel titled “Bridget Jones Spoiler: Twitter Furious About Mark Darcy News.” The respondents, including one who states that there is no reason to “live in a world where Mark Darcy and Bridget Jones aren’t living happily ever after” (purpleclaire, cited in Devon) are distraught by news of Mark Darcy’s death. See also Derschowitz (2013).
- 3.
The original quote in the novel reads: “She says she’th thirty-five but she’th really fifty-one” (Fielding 2013, 4).
- 4.
See Ferriss and Young (2006, 1–13) for a comprehensive introduction to chick lit, its relationship to postfeminism and the critical debates surrounding the genre.
- 5.
- 6.
Fielding wanted to write Bridget as a middle-aged, single mother and thus chose to have Mark Darcy die, as she felt that it would be out of character for him to leave Bridget (qtd. in Carter 2013).
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- 8.
The film Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016) is not to be confused with Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries, also published in 2016. While both texts are about a younger Bridget’s pregnancy, and both involve a love triangle, the novel includes the character of Daniel Cleaver. Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) does not appear in the movie adaptation. The confusing chronology of these texts has caused one commentator to remark on the “monetisation” of the Bridget Jones brand (Williams 2016). Further exploration of Bridget Jones as a franchise would be productive.
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Rasmussen, L. (2017). “She Says She’s Thirty-Five but She’s Really Fifty-One”: Rebranding the Middle-Aged Postfeminist Protagonist in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad about The Boy . In: McGlynn, C., O'Neill, M., Schrage-Früh, M. (eds) Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63609-2_9
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