Preview

Bridget

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
19066 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Bridget
http://bridgetarchive.altervista.org/contextualizing.htm

When Bridget Jones 's Diary was published in 1996, Helen Fielding was praised by masses of readers and reviewers for the authenticity of the narrative voice. However, not everyone was willing to accept the hapless comic heroine as the typical thirty-something single woman of the 1990s, and more demanding critics noted the ways in which Bridget 's character and her story are problematic, particularly from a feminist point of view. Bridget sets goals - to get to work on time, to stop smoking, to lose weight, to read The Famished Road - and proves incapable of accomplishing any of them. Her diary revels hilariously in her insecurities, her mistakes, and her failures even as it qualifies her successes; as a result, critics suggest that the humor of the novel is not consciously created by Bridget but rather is generated at her expense. She is criticized for the characteristics that
When Bridget Jones 's Diary was published in 1996, Helen Fielding was praised by masses of readers and reviewers for the authenticity of the narrative voice. However, not everyone was willing to accept the hapless comic heroine as the typical thirty-something single woman of the 1990s, and more demanding critics noted the ways in which Bridget 's character and her story are problematic, particularly from a feminist point of view. Bridget sets goals - to get to work on time, to stop smoking, to lose weight, to read The Famished Road - and proves incapable of accomplishing any of them. Her diary revels hilariously in her insecurities, her mistakes, and her failures even as it qualifies her successes; as a result, critics suggest that the humor of the novel is not consciously created by Bridget but rather is generated at her expense. She is criticized for the characteristics that ostensibly render her the object of the novel 's humor, especially her failure to remake herself and control her life. However, these criticisms are based



References:   The romance element of Possession has made it, too, vulnerable to criticism for its portrayal of women, but Anita Brookner 's Fraud (1993) presents a disheartening alternative

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Juliana

    • 421 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In the prologue of Guns, Germs and steel by Jared Diamond, Diamond seeks to explain why there were different rates of human development on different continents. The author explains and expresses this statement by many different angles, such as evolution, intelligence, climate, location and advanced technology. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for people of different continents? In other words, what steps did different continents take to become who they were and how were they able to take those steps? How did different continents develop faster than others? Could it depend on intelligence? Then again, it was stated that “New Guineas are on the average at least as smart as a European” (p.g 14). Also, for many years psychologists have looked and studied for differences in IQ between different people around the world. Unfortunately, “IQ tests tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence.” (p.g 20), Therefore, should we really base history on intelligence? Or could the answer to Yali’s question be answered based on climate and location? It has been said that “people from northern Europe contributed nothing of fundamental importance to Eurasian civilization until the last thousands years; they simply had the good luck to live at a geographic location where they were likely to receive advances (such as agriculture, wheels, writing and metallurgy) developed in warmer parts of Eurasia.”(p.g 22) Advances? Agriculture? Wheels? Writing and metallurgy? All these advantages were given by location and climate. The “white” people obviously were higher up on the evolutionary scale. Despite, their intelligence; they still had the materials and the location to work with. While New Guineas had it more complex and struggled a lot more because of their location and climate.…

    • 421 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Bridget Bishop

    • 6102 Words
    • 25 Pages

    “The blackest chapter in the history of Witchcraft lies not in the malevolence of Witches but in the deliberate, gloating cruelty of their prosecutors.” When Theda Kenyon made this observation she was thinking about the atrocious behavior and actions that took place in Salem in 1692. During this tragic event neighbors were turned against one another and no bond was sacred. The men and women of Salem faced accusations from all directions and often the accusers were their close friends, business partners, and even their spouses. Panic filled Salem village and suddenly the slightest discrepancy in behavior became a reason to name someone as a witch. One of the greatest examples of how the hysteria brought upon lethal allegations for some of Salem’s citizen is the case of Bridget Bishop, the first person to be tried and executed for witchcraft in Salem.…

    • 6102 Words
    • 25 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Margaret Atwood is once of Canada’s best known literary composers. She is best known for her ability as an author of novels such as Alias Grace, Bodily Harm, Hairball, Rape Fantasies, and the highly acclaimed The Handmaid’s Tale, which was later made into a movie. These works establish her as a feminist writer, raising issues of women in literature, the difficulties associated with being female and the role of women in society.…

    • 1866 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Fay Weldon’s ‘Letters to Alice on First reading Jane Austen’, through the didactic literary form of an epistolic novel, serves to encourage a heightened understanding of the role of women in Jane Austen’s social, cultural and historical context, and also aims to present the parallels of women in both texts. In doing so, it inspires the modern responder to adopt a more sincere appreciation for the perspectives of Austen and Weldon of women inherent in both ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Letters to Alice’. Through the inclusion of relevant contextual information from Austen’s time and didactic assertions of the fictional character Aunt Fay, Weldon implores the responder to accept her opinions on the role of women in both her and Austen’s context. Her discussion of this, which delves into marriage, feminism and the patriarchal influence, transforms a modern responder’s understanding of the themes and context explored in both texts, and moreover, alters the way in which the responder perceives the events and decisions of the women within the novels.…

    • 1643 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Anne Frank Book Summary

    • 754 Words
    • 4 Pages

    It all started on Anne’s thirteenth birth, when she received a diary from her parents. She was really excited because she wanted someone or something, she could tell her thoughts to. Even though Anne had a rich social life, she felt as if people didn’t know the real her. She began writing about daily events, school, boys, etc. Within a month, her entire life changed.…

    • 754 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Through this essay, I will attempt to examine various codes and character portrayals that contribute to the representation of women within the domain of film fiction. My intention is to review exactly how women are represented and investigate whether fictional characters play a part in perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Laura Mulvey will be intermittently mentioned as a pioneering figure of feminist film theory, her discourse will be applied and challenged within the following pages.…

    • 596 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    This bond of female friendship is responsible to shape Eliza’s thoughts and actions to some extent and helped the plot of novel to grow in a significant manner. The theme of sisterhood remains prominent with Foster’s work; The Coquette and The Boarding School can be quoted for example. Such bond of female love and enmity is evident at various junctures across popular romantic novels, where women come to the rescue of each other, but somewhere down the line happen to scrutinize each other for the prospect they are vying as women. Jane Austen’s masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice offers a parallel theme of female love and rivalry, where the female characters, though bears enormous love for each other, but are also competent with each other in pursuit of a better match making for themselves.…

    • 3807 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Anne Frank Journal

    • 255 Words
    • 1 Page

    1. How does the fact that Anne tries to maintain a positive attitude affect the way readers view her?…

    • 255 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Men's Pay Statistics

    • 906 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In the 21st Century the number of women enrolling in higher education institutions is surpassing the numbers of men enrolled. The graduation rates of women from high school and higher education are most often higher than for men. The number of women graduates from most professional occupations, including higher paying medicine, law and business, will exceed the number of men graduates in the near future. In numerous occupational areas with a majority of women graduates, salaries already surpass salaries in occupational areas with a majority of men graduates. The idea that the majority of women are working the same types of jobs, and same amount of hours but still being paid much less than men is causing much concern.…

    • 906 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Women faced many restrictions during the 1800’s based solely on their gender. The Cult of Domesticity served as a basic guide that explained the appropriate ways women of this time period were expected to act. It essentially laid out four proper characteristics women had to portray: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Many authors captured the difficulties in a woman’s life with having to deal with such strict expectations in their writing. These included Emily Dickinson with her poems “I felt a funeral in my brain”, “This is my letter to the World”, and “These are the days when the Birds come back”, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”.…

    • 1008 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Every person’s character is created and formed in background the person grows up in, and is influenced by everything that surrounds him or her, like friends, teachers, television and other media, and of course, family. And if our person is a female, the strongest influence always comes from her mother and their relationship, and this is clearly visible in Jamaica Kincaid’s novels, where mother daughter relationships are fundamental in heroines’ character development, their view of the world, and their life style. The mother operates not only as an embodiment of the personal sphere but also as a mediator of the political and ideological values present in childhood. Motherhood as an institution is universally major theme in writings by black women writers, and Kincaid’s novels are mainly personal narratives about the construction of one’s identity marked by colonial and family oppression. The mother-daughter relationships in her novels reflect the tension between colonialism and nativeness. Kincaid herself experienced cultural and familial displacement, and now neither can she identify with her mother, nor her country (Sklenkova, 6). And as Kincaid states "I write about myself for the most part, and about things that have happened to me. In my writing I suppose I am trying to understand how I got to be the person I am" (Kincaid, interview with Kay Bonnetti) her work Annie John is labeled a fictionalized autobiographical work (LeSeur, 154).…

    • 2296 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Anne Babeau Gardiner. ”Feminist Literary Criticism: From Anti-Patriarchy to the Celebration of Decadence “. First PrinciplesWeb journal , April 2008…

    • 2821 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    For countless years, women have been subject to follow tradition and those who break that tradition would suffer the consequences. However, in literature, there are female characters who have the strength to overcome and break tradition. For instance, the main character and protagonist, Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, and the main character, Dominique Francon, in Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, refuse to conform to what is societies view of tradition in order to achieve happiness. Although both female characters break tradition, they do it in their own particular and unique way.…

    • 1409 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    19th Century Heroines

    • 1621 Words
    • 7 Pages

    By definition, a heroine is a woman who would typically encompass the qualities of nobility, courage, independence and strength. Nineteenth century English women would have struggled to accomplish any of these particular acts of heroism within their social environment as ultimately, their roles within civilisation saw them becoming a good wives and mothers and before that, obliging and caring daughters. Within this ubiquitous discourse of separate spheres, Kathryn Gleadle suggests that women were ‘encouraged to see themselves as ‘relative creatures', whose path in life was to nurture the family and to provide unstinting support for the head of the household' In this respect, the nineteenth century British woman conforming to this ‘path' would prove to be the heroine of that time as a free-spirited independent individual would have been cast aside as socially unacceptable. Essentially, although it would appear that many women wished to lead active, working lives and so make an important contribution, either to their families or to social welfare, ‘the woman's position [was] to preside over a loving home whilst men were to brave the vicissitude and demands of public and business life' Novelists Thomas Hardy and Emily Brontë present us with two strong and independent females Tess Durbeyfield and Catherine Earnshaw. These women are far from the idealistic view of nineteenth century females; Tess, intelligent and strikingly attractive, strives to uphold the values expected of her but outside forces beyond her control determine her fate. Catherine on the other hand begins her life free-spirited, rebellious and of a wild nature. However, her inner desire craves social ambition which, in turn, shows her slowly representing culture and civilisation.…

    • 1621 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Bridget Jones's Diary, written by Helen Fielding, is about Bridget Jones, a thirty-something 'spinster' who struggles to find exactly what she wants in life. Fielding's text, famous for being the beginning of the chick-lit genre, deals with the contrast between the contemporary career woman and the traditional house-wife. Ultimately Bridget Jones's Diary suggests that no woman is restricted by the era that they were born into. The film adaptation of the same name, made in 2001 and directed by Sharon Maguire, is a worthwhile adaptation, as it stayed closely to the main issues and themes of the book, while changing it in order to make a better viewing presentation.…

    • 1178 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays