Review: Jones- Fielding & a Diary Pride or Prejudice?

Review: Jones- Fielding & a Diary

Pride or Prejudice?

 Eve of New Year:

 Bridget opened her diary, kept pencil, ruler, pen, eraser and sharpener, beside her. She divided the diary into two. On the right she wrote I WILL, ON THE LEFT, I WON’T…. “Stop ..I SAY, STOP…Helen fielding interrupted from the text. Are you going to rewrite my story without my permission,”  heard an oracle. In order to hide the shame, being caught red handed, I said, “No, no..Actually, I was about to introduce your book to make it more popular though it is not of my langue and parole.” There was truth in it, though a compromise.

This story may be the story of some of us, irrespective of gender, class, caste, age or background. Perhaps it may not be our story, but the story that we can or cannot tell since we know Bridget JonesES. Possibly, this may be the story of someone with whom we may have ties, to whom we are learning to be, deeply in love with , or from whom we wanted to escape, escaped, or still, acting coy mistress play,  the rhetoric being existence. This story confessed itself to be feministic, accepting the constant degradation, Chick lit as the mantra of coronation. Thus the story of a young girl, who wrote a diary secretly, discloses the secret wishlists after a year, where the feelings are no more the feeling, where she rests all passions spent. The novel Bridget Jones’s Diary is the diary of a young girl, ( Not Anne Frank).                                     

The novel in the form of diary begins with New Year’s resolutions of Bridget Jones. It is divided into two sections titled ‘I will not’ and ‘I Will’. This may be the right time to read this novel, since we are bunching our desires, promise ourselves with the wills of future, won’ts, as reflections out of past, and weaving the present for the next year, leading from present to PRESENT. So was Bridget Jones, the Chick lit. heroine doomed to carry the ambivalence pertaining to the existence of every (wo)man of 1990s , when the first issue released, especially that of a self reliant woman, a shopaholic, (alcoholic, chain smoker,) glutton, singleton(?), and meets the criteria of a feminine idol-cosmopolitan woman, when she commences her entry. Just after made the decision to form a mature relationship with a responsible male, she fell into the web of Daniel, her boss, with whom she flirts, chats, and tries to date, but reluctantly shies away. The anxiety is the effect of internalized models of beauty which she feels ideal for a man to love a woman. Her concept of beauty is the notion of her infatuation towards the commoditization in which woman is both a commodity and a consumer. She was badly in need of a partner simply for the sake of exhibition and the element of love is second to this. The equation is corroborated when the image of reluctant female is exposed. When the story unfolds, the consistency of the feminine image is broken and she portrayed the struggle of the individual, to have a unique ideology difficult even for her to explain. This lack of the puritan concept, of purity is a part of the post modern sub culture celebrated through the novel especially through the unofficial problem maker/solver meetings of Bridget and friends. Even after making all the rhetoric of wisdom the estimation of Bridget is too superfluous as she felt like being cheated after she discarded the carnal pleasures of the then hero. She again marked the wealth of the man, Mark Darcy,whom she marries at the end as the mark of his dignity and his exterior i.e. the outfit as the proof of his being a gentleman. The logic of these empowered women will reserve practicality when it comes to the bottleneck of a single relationship.

The looking glass of Chick lit. Woman whether mother or daughter satisfies only by the acquisition of commodities even if she is well aware of it as useless as far as she is concerned. Her foundations will always be in her makeup box. But the rigidity offered by the confidence of financial security and independence is in conflict in the presence of mothers of her own age she met in a party. Lonely in a crowd,  ‘a nightmare scenario’ was she, then a marginalized phenomenon in the midst of ‘powerful mothers’. But on another occasion she calls a mother as “a hideous grow-bag-cum-milk-dispensing machine”.

Career is for money, weightless is weight-full in others perception, a rich man will the partner with all riches, shopaholism adds to prestige, thus goes the exposition of femaleness, rather than femininity in the novel.

Still Jones is being placed, especially today along with Diary of stocks. It serves the entertaining purpose, as it satisfies the lust residing in all to peep into the secrets of others- to the calls of the instincts’ bed rooms, nature’s bathrooms, flavors’ kitchens, gossips’ living space, so to speak. A diary serves it all. Thus Fielding, and Jones…( Not Henry Fielding and Tom Jones…It is Helen Fielding and Bridget Jones’s Diary)