1When Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary was first published in 1996, the novel seemed to give birth to a new comic heroine, who would quickly receive cult status in Britain and beyond. The film adaptation of 2001 added to an already substantial fan base and Bridget’s iconic status as an Everywoman has lasted well into the twenty-first century. Bridget Jones is a very funny woman and certainly a comic heroine, but she was not technically “new” at the time. As everyone knows, the novel is loosely based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Austen was profoundly inspired in writing her most popular novel by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1599). What transpires, therefore, is not a “new” funny woman but one type of funny woman through the ages. Beatrice, Lizzie and Bridget are three versions of the same comic woman in trouble.
2Both Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have been considered the “two gayest of their authors’ works” (McMaster 156), and all three women have the remarkable reputation that they are loved by (almost) all. Shakespeare’s Beatrice has been called “the most beloved of Shakespeare’s heroines” (McEachern 36); Lizzie Bennet is referred to as “the most beloved character in fiction” (Harris, “Pride” 41); and Bridget Jones was and is “the first truly modern comic heroine” (Merritt), who became an icon for a new generation of women towards the end of the twentieth century. And all three women are the product of a comic incongruity between their conduct and the audience’s gendered expectations, I argue. They are funny, because they subvert conventional constraints of femininity, so their comic trouble is inextricably linked to the fact that they are women. These women are in trouble, because of the socially conditioned role they ought to play, because their respective societies expect that their conduct is determined by and appropriate to their biological sex. Thus, all three authors can make comic use of the principle of incongruity and the inextricable link between gender and comedy across four different centuries.
3The intertextual relation between Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary may be obvious to most. BJD follows the plot of PP more or less closely: it sets up a comic heroine in a sparring match with her obvious comic mate, Mark Darcy, whose rudeness poses the rift that needs to be overcome over the course of the novel. Distracted by a cad, Daniel Cleaver, loosely based on Austen’s Mr. Wickham (who also has a telling name), Bridget fails to see that appearances are deceptive and creates her own obstacles through her misconception of others; most notably, of course, Mark Darcy. Fielding uses Austen’s intricate characterization of a woman in love with her own opinion to keep the comic couple apart until the hero spares neither time nor means to bring about the heroine’s happiness through resolving her most pressing personal concern. While Austen’s Darcy forces Wickham into marrying Lydia and thereby restores Lizzie’s family’s reputation, Mark Darcy’s similar reining in of Bridget’s mother’s folly also presents itself as the selfless gesture that finally convinces Bridget he is in love with her. She chooses him based on the merit of his heroic actions and on the consequent change of her perception of him. He appears in a different light, and Bridget is now able to see, like Lizzie Bennet, that he might be the perfect mate, but the novel stops short of marriage: not only because it obviously allows a sequel (published in 1999), but also because Bridget struggles with the institution as much as her predecessors.
4The relation between Lizzie and Darcy in turn is clearly mirrored on the development in Shakespeare’s comedy, because both women have to arrive at a different mode of understanding the world and the men around them. The “merry war” (MA, 1.1.59) that Shakespeare uses between his Beatrice and Benedick is a strategy of keeping the lovers apart over the greater part of the play that Austen continues for Lizzie and Darcy. She adapts the banter between Beatrice and Benedick that lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s play, but she does not stop there. She creates a one-dimensional villain in imitation of Shakespeare’s Don John. The near-catastrophic events revolve around the virtue of a beloved young relative, and her Darcy has to step up against his own inclinations to save Lydia (Hero) in order to demonstrate his love for Lizzie (Beatrice). There are numerous further parallels between Meryton and Messina, but most importantly, Lizzie mirrors Beatrice’s independence as well as her utter refusal to speak according to the conventions of female propriety. And like Beatrice, Lizzie has to undergo a major reassessment of herself. Both classic comedies thus center on internal, rather than external obstacles. There is no “law” that stands between Beatrice and Benedick or Lizzie and Darcy—quite the contrary, in fact. Darcy especially is easily discernible as the perfect mate from the start. The couples are kept apart to fulfill the comic convention until the end, but unlike most comedies that provide laws or families or both to function as insurmountable impediments for the lovers, in these texts the obstacles are self-made and they are firmly grounded in the heroine’s psychological development. All that is required in the end is insight into the self. Lizzie Bennet’s famous outcry, “Till this moment, I never knew myself” (Austen 202) echoes Beatrice’s self-assessment: “Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much?” (MA, 3.1.108) A new and critical self-assessment is required of these two heroines, whose self-improvement is crucial for both classic texts. As it turns out, such reformation is a comic staple Bridget may forego.
5Comedy necessarily involves trouble. Obstacles need to be overcome and comic characters learn in the process, but the kind of comic trouble that drives the text differs for male and for female characters. The obstacles that have to be overcome revolve around the norms and values of the hegemony and humor is created through an individual’s struggle with a group. Henri Bergson first defined humor as a fundamentally social experience: “Our laughter is always the laughter of a group” (64). He imagined that the social frame that causes such laughter functions also as the reins that bring the comic character back to the appropriate middle, as it were. For Bergson, one crucial source of comedy is that the comic character, for the duration of the plot in whatever form, “abandons social convention”: “The comic character no longer tries to be ceaselessly adapting and readapting himself to the society of which he is a member. He slackens in the attention that is due to life. He more or less resembles the absentminded” (187). In his theory, laughter ends the character’s deviation: “Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it” (187). While Bergson is right to the extent that laughter is inspired by a deviation from society’s written and unwritten rules, whether or not society also “avenges” itself seems more questionable. The social group, he claims, welcomes the corrected comic character back in their midst: “laughter, by checking the outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the person laughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himself inwardly” (Bergson 188). As it turns out, this is only true for two of the three comedies at hand. Laughter is caused by an incongruity between the women’s conduct and society’s conventions, but only Beatrice and Lizzie have to improve themselves inwardly.
6The theory of incongruity as a comic principle belongs to a catalogue of canonical explanations of laughter. Among those, it seems to offer an explanation on the most “neutral” grounds. As Robert Martin argues, incongruity as a comic concept was first established by eighteenth-century theorists, who sought to define laughter on purely “technical” grounds: “[T]he distinctive mark of the theory of incongruity is that it substitutes an intellectual perception for a moral one…. Both parts of the incongruous, whether persons, ideas, or actions, may be perceived objectively without direct reference to ourselves” (Martin 19). James Beattie first defined humorous incongruity in 1764: “Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage, or as acquiring a fort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind takes notice of them” (581). However, Beattie almost buries the crucial point in this lengthy definition, which is the subjective perception of incongruity through the mind. The mind “takes notice” that two ideas are brought together that do not seem to belong to each other, but this depends on the observant mind’s ideas and preconceptions. Moreover, the theory of comic incongruity is only fully explanatory with regard to the elements of expectation and surprise.
7Surprise is crucial to most comedy, Matthew Bevis argues. And surprise necessarily depends on an established framework: “Comedy has frequently been the art of springing surprises, but established routine is what makes surprise possible”:
Cicero observed that ‘the most common kind of joke is that in which we expect one thing and another is said; here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh.’ Immanuel Kant follows this up by stressing the temporal aspect of comic experience: ‘Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.’ (49; original emphasis)
8This means that the perceived incongruity cannot be a neutral or merely ‘intellectual’ notion as Robert Martin has claimed. A comic character’s deviance is easily explicable through pointing out the incongruity of their words and actions, but only in reference to a set of social norms that are already in place. Terry Eagleton has pointed out that “discrepancy is not the same as incongruity. The latter is a question of a thing being inappropriate, incompatible, out of keeping, which need not be true of all discrepancies” (79). Comic incongruity undermines an audience’s expectations, but they will only perceive the incongruity, because they are socially primed what to expect. In this sense, Bergson may have been right when he said, “many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group” (64-65). Those particular social groups have conventions in place that tell them where the incongruity lies and, in effect, what makes it funny. In short, transgressing norms is funny: “[D]eviations can also be ranked as types of incongruity, since they call to mind a norm in the act of transgressing it, thus confronting us with a tension between the two. In fact, the word ‘humor’ originally means one whose temperament diverges from the norm” (Eagleton 81).
9Comedy’s trouble is therefore inextricably linked to the norms that hold its respective society in place. In fact, comic trouble only arises because heroes and heroines break the rules of those society through their incongruous conduct. However, a woman’s deviance constitutes a particular form of comedy. Beatrice, Lizzie and Bridget all defy society’s expectations not only by their critical stance towards marriage, a notion that is not and probably never will be laughable in a male character, but also by their open mockery of those who uphold its values. In the process, they laugh at the mates that are set up as their comic partners.
10Bridget Jones tells us, “although we have discovered our Inner Bitches, we have not yet unlocked them” (Fielding 22). Bridget and her predecessors are funny because they refuse to adhere to the social constraints of femininity in place in their respective societies. Shakespeare’s Beatrice therefore receives the epithet Lady Disdain. Her position in the play is that of an almost choric commentary on the social constraints for women, particularly in terms of marriage:
Benedick: But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted; and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart, for truly I love none.
Beatrice: A dear happiness to women—they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humor for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me. (MA, 1.1.118–126)
11Shakespeare positions the two romantic lovers in a “merry war” (MA, 1.1.59) that is the origin of their trouble and results from Beatrice’s initial rejection of her predestined mate. She defies the conventions of marriage, which goes against the grain of the romantic heroine as a type. Moreover, Beatrice and Benedick seem to be set up as classic examples of misogynist and shrew, Claire McEachern has argued: “[T]he types of the misogynist and the shrew that they can invoke belong to a prominent tradition of a rhetorical debate literature which specifically exercised itself on the question of woman’s worth” (28). However, their complexities far exceed the type, because Shakespeare subverts the literary convention: “this pair are ‘unconventional’ in their shared suspicion of romantic love” (28). Their transgressions are funny, because they go against everything that is expected of the characters both within and beyond the play.
12Beatrice’s critical stance towards marriage is not simply based on a typification as shrew but on an intellectual and verbal superiority that makes her unwillingness to enter into the constraints of marriage almost modern: “Beatrice will not marry because she has no time for the patriarchal order. She is disgusted by the notion that women should take the husbands men provide for them, or that wives should submit to men who are their equals or inferiors” (Maslen 157). Her resistance gives her the epithet Lady Disdain because of her unwillingness to follow the conventions that would make her a suitable wife. She simply refuses to make herself amenable. While any audience familiar with the rules of comedy can easily see that her rejection of Benedick is a sure sign for her comic fate as his mate, it is her refusal to comply that makes her funny. Kiernan Ryan points out that with her “superb condemnation of the marital doom that awaits the rest of her sex, Beatrice seals the comedy fate as surely as Benedick seals his by hubristically insisting that he will live and die unwed” (187) The trouble she is in is therefore inextricably linked to the audience’s expectations of femininity.
13Like other Shakespearean comic heroines, Beatrice is allowed to speak against the expectation of reward, Lynne Magnusson has argued:
Rosalind, Portia, Viola, and Beatrice among others are all permitted, within the comic universes of discourse in which they have being, not only to speak copiously and well, but also to be listened to and responded to, not only to be appreciated and given credit for their words, but also to do things with words, to change minds, transform situations, harm others and help them. It seems something to celebrate, given the constant dreary prescriptions in Elizabethan writings and culturally authoritative texts that women should be silent, chaste, and obedient[.] (169)
14In other words, Beatrice uses her language as a sign of her autonomy and directs her words away from social expectations of femininity and, therefore, away from reward. She specifically reiterates that her “verbal masculinity” (McEachern 27) runs counter to the aim she is supposed to pursue. She openly expresses her critical opinion of women’s subordination in marriage: “Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I’ll none. Adam’s sons are my brethren, and truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred” (MA, 2.1.53-57). At the same time, Beatrice is aware that this language stalls her dramatic destiny. Upon the engagement between Hero and Claudio, she realistically proclaims, “Good Lord, for alliance! Thus goes everyone to the world but I, and I am sunburnt. I may sit in a corner and cry ‘Hey-ho for a husband’” (MA, 2.1.292-294). The investment of her linguistic capital against the hegemony makes her fundamentally unmarriageable. Lynne Magnusson evokes Pierre Bourdieu’s linguistic analysis: “Bourdieu has argued that speakers learn over time within their habitual speech contexts to self-censor.… Shakespeare recognizes and draws to our attention… how the tacit regulation of women’s speech through the subtleties of its reception in everyday contexts can be just as restrictive” (172-173). In other words, Shakespeare’s Beatrice speaks without adherence to the calculation of profit:
[S]trategies originate from the language habitus, a permanent disposition towards language and interactions which is objectively adjusted to a given level of acceptability. The habitus integrates all the dispositions which constitute expanded competence, defining for a determinate agent the linguistic strategy that is adapted to his particular chances of profit, given his specific competence and his authority. (Bourdieu 655)
15Beatrice defies those strategies by refusing to self-censor. She is obviously aware of the fact that the only “profit” she can make and is expected to pursue is marriage and that her linguistic strategy runs counter to the “traffic both in words and in women” (McEachern 27) in the play.
16Beatrice stretches not only social but also dramatic conventions and can only be reined in by the comic fate that necessitates a happy ending. It is one of the most discussed ironies of the play that the happy ending between Beatrice and Benedick is conditioned by the language of paternal authority. When Leonato hands her over as Benedick’s future wife, he significantly says: “I will stop your mouth” (MA, 5.4.97). Her defiant language stops and she does in fact speak no more for the remaining minutes of the play. In modern performance, the line is often given to Benedick, who follows it with a kiss to fulfill more contemporary romantic notions. It remains true, however, that Beatrice has now exhausted her linguistic capital, which has no place in marriage. At the same time, there is a dramatic necessity to stop all the mouths, like any ending, any curtain, requires. The play has given her voice until there is no play left and Beatrice’s wit and vitality have made her “the most beloved of Shakespeare’s heroines” (McEachern 36). In her famous reading of the play, Barbara Everett has argued that this is the first of Shakespeare’s plays in which “the woman’s world dominates” (320). It seems no coincidence, therefore, that Austen chose Beatrice as a foil for Elizabeth Bennet.
17It is unclear whether Austen followed Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in her composition of Pride and Prejudice intentionally or not. While critics like Jocelyn Harris emphasize the structural and thematic parallels between the two texts, especially concerning the construction of the “sparring lovers” (Harris, Memory 109), the extent to which Austen meant to rewrite the play is debatable. Juliet McMaster has pointed out that the similarity between the two texts extends the main plot (171), but the parallels between Austen and Shakespeare are most frequently evoked by critics in reference to Beatrice and Lizzie Bennet. There seems little doubt that “Elizabeth Bennet is a descendant of Beatrice in Much Ado: both of them single out their men for pointed abuse before a happy reconciliation” (McMaster 130). What the two funny women share, most obviously, is their unwillingness to use their linguistic capital for profit on the marriage market: Lizzie does not self-censor either.
18Like Beatrice, Lizzie refuses to play to type and it is her insistence on her own integrity that seems to be the source for her timeless popularity. The woman’s world dominates in Pride and Prejudice, too, and like Beatrice, Lizzie Bennet is singled out from the social world she is a part of through her satiric distance to the conventions with which she is supposed to comply. She openly mocks Darcy and deviates from the expectation that she must make herself amenable to “secure” him:
19‘Oh! shocking!’ cried Miss Bingley. ‘I never heard anything so abominable. How shall we punish him for such a speech?’
‘Nothing so easy, if you have but the inclination,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We can all plague and punish one another. Tease him—laugh at him. Intimate as you are, you must know how it is to be done.’
‘But upon my honour I do not. I do assure you that my intimacy has not yet taught me that. Tease calmness of temper and presence of mind! No, no--I feel he may defy us there. And as to laughter, we will not expose ourselves, if you please, by attempting to laugh without a subject. Mr. Darcy may hug himself.’
‘Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!’ cried Elizabeth. ‘That is an uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintance. I dearly love a laugh.’ (Austen 55-56)
20Austen famously posits Miss Bingley and her heroine at opposite ends of the scale that constitutes female propriety. Miss Bingley’s refusal to laugh at Darcy translates as her wish to secure him; Lizzie’s propensity to mock him translates as the exact opposite. The two women thus exemplify the theme at the heart of the novel: “the opposition between a false form of femininity and a strongly felt rational autonomy” (Jones xxiv). In fact, Austen insists on her heroine’s integrity and refusal to participate in the marriage market to the point that she has her reject Darcy’s first proposal. The novel’s turning-point creates the high point of both characters’ vanities that need to be overcome by the end and epitomizes the humiliation that humbles them both into accepting their comic fate. Moreover, the moment also makes clear that Lizzie defies all social expectations. In fact, it is her status as a “licensed satirist” (McMaster 157) in her social world that accentuates her comic deviance.
21Pride and Prejudice stands out from Austen’s other works for its heightened dramatic nature. Critics such as Reuben Brower have emphasized “how intensely dramatic the dialogue is, dramatic in the sense of defining characters through the way they speak and are spoken about” (65). Lizzie’s language defines her character through her refusal to direct her words towards a reward she could expect within the confines of proper femininity. This is why Austen chooses the dramatic dialogic form with notable preference over narrative description. She hardly gives insight into Lizzie’s character that goes beyond the technical necessities of narration. Darcy’s early insult, the point of origin for their comic trouble, is contextualized and met with only the bare minimum of narratorial comment: “Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the story however with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous” (Austen 14). Lizzie’s sense of humor, which allows her to take his initial rejection in stride, is the only characteristic the narrator wants to emphasize. It is also, of course, the precondition for her comic education that enables the happy union in the end. However, for as long as the comic plot allows it, Elizabeth goes willfully against her own interests: “Elizabeth is responsible, and very clearly elects her own path. There is an emphasis not just on her mistakes, but on her willful choice of them. If she goes astray, she does so very consciously, even though she is unaware of the full extent of her wandering” (McMaster 85). This funny woman could not be positioned further from the expectation of female compliance. It is the novel’s iconic triumph that in the end, she is rewarded for her resistance.
22Elizabeth Bennet’s language is crucially built by Austen on the incongruity of a young woman, who is unwilling and/or unable to assimilate others’ discourse. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin posits that the discourse of others shapes “an individual ideological consciousness”:
The tendency to assimilate others’ discourses takes on an even deeper and more basic significance in an individual’s ideological becoming, in the most fundamental sense. Another’s discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rules, models and so forth – but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behaviour; it performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive discourse. (342; original emphasis)
23The authoritative discourse, the “word of the father” (Bakhtin 342), is an unambiguous expression of patriarchy. In Pride and Prejudice, this discourse is notably not transmitted through men, but through women—most overtly, Mrs Bennet, Lady Catherine De Bourgh and Charlotte Lucas. Charlotte, for instance, is a porte parole for the idea that a young woman should act so as to “secure” a husband and not “lose the opportunity of fixing him” by giving unreasonable attention to her own emotions (Austen 22). From the beginning of the novel, Lizzie consciously and willfully acts in defiance of her friend’s advice and pushes the boundaries of propriety. The fact that she is determined to act according to what she sees as her own integrity is brought to a final climax in the novel through her verbal confrontation with the “word of the father” through the authoritative figure of Lady Catherine De Bourgh. Even though Austen steers the course of her novel towards a happy union between man and woman, she creates this climax very shortly before the ending to ensure us that while Lizzie may have reformed her thinking, she has not and will not reform her resistance to conventions. Through the highly dramatic encounter between Lady Catherine and her heroine, Austen pits the “word of the father” against her heroine’s independent thinking:
‘I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.’
‘It is well. You refuse, then, to oblige me. You refuse to obey the claims of duty, honour, and gratitude.’ (Austen 338)
24Lizzie refuses to speak in compliance with Bakhtin’s authoritative discourse: “The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it” (342).
25Austen has created the most famous funny heroine of all time as entirely immune to that authoritative word. Lizzie pointedly does not acknowledge it and does not make it her own. Her verbal deviance from proper femininity as determined by the authoritative discourse make her the true descendant of Beatrice and the perfect predecessor for Bridget Jones. Consequently, Austen herself deviates significantly in her adaptation of Shakespeare. Darcy does not stop Lizzie’s mouth. In fact, Austen makes use of the possibilities of narrative over drama in order to include an outlook on the marriage. Since there is no curtain at the end of the performance, the novel can end on the vision of equality. Lizzie Bennet still laughs at Darcy defiantly: “Georgiana had the highest opinion in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with an astonishment bordering on alarm, at her lively, sportive, manner of talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open pleasantry” (366). Austen refuses to rein in her heroine even for the sake of a happy ending and the contrast to Much Ado seems deliberate: Austen needs to point out that her heroine’s deviance will not be controlled by marriage. The incongruity between the conventions that determine Lizzie’s gender and the language she speaks remains unresolved; society does not avenge itself, like Bergson thought. Lizzie may be in trouble for the comic progress of the novel, but it is Austen’s particular achievement that she will not reign her comic heroine in for a conventional happy ending.
26Helen Fielding translates the dramatic nature of Pride and Prejudice into diary form for her new comic heroine Bridget Jones. The novel’s genre has been debated for its alleged aspiration to “authenticity” (Case), but critics tend to overlook the fact that the diary form has two comic effects that are essential for the character of Bridget Jones. First, it imitates the immediacy of the female voice that both Much Ado and Pride and Prejudice display. And second, Bridget’s struggles are exposed not as struggles with herself per se, but as the struggle between the authoritative discourse prevalent in her society in 1990s Britain and her own “internally persuasive discourse” in Bakhtin’s sense (342). More often than not, Bakhtin posits, there is an almost irreconcilable gap between the authoritative discourse and the internally persuasive discourse: “[I]t happens more frequently that an individual’s becoming, an ideological process, is characterized precisely by a sharp gap between these two categories” (342). Bridget’s self is placed in this gap, and the diary form reveals her thwarted attempt to reconcile the authoritative with her inner discourse. Every single diary entry reiterates a crushing conflict between the norms that are imposed upon her mind and body as a woman and her never-ending struggle against them. It is in the diary form that her inner discourse can be given free rein without imposing the “word of the father” on the novel through an authorial narrative voice. Fielding thus chooses that sub-genre of the novel that allows her more than any other to truly satirize the conflict between what women are and what they are supposed to be, frequently enhancing the comic effect through hyperbolic excesses that underline Bridget’s supposed inadequacy in the world she lives in.
27Bridget’s diary gives voice to a subversive female discourse that is largely ignored in her society, which struggles with the double bind of a “new” feminism and traditional ideas such as marriage and procreation. The novel foregrounds that discourse, those “thoughts,” that usually either remain unnoticed or strategically silenced by the hegemony. The “internally persuasive word,” according to Bakhtin, is conventionally “denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), and not even in the legal code” (342). Bridget gives voice to this internally persuasive word in her diary, and she struggles to hinge her inner discourse about femininity to the authoritative frame of a “new” feminism that is located somewhere between Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and Susan Faludi’s Backlash. Her attempts to structure her own experience through the language of others mostly remain fruitless, however, for she can see the dilemma entrapping her, but she cannot resolve it. Her New Year’s Resolution reads: “I WILL NOT Sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend” (Fielding 2). She has a sense of self as an independent woman, who should not be preoccupied with finding a husband, and she likes to view herself and her friends as feminists. Yet, the authoritative discourse in her world still tells her that she needs to find a mate and procreate: “‘Bridget! What are we going to do with you!’ said Una. ‘You career girls! I don’t know! Can’t put it off for ever, you know. Tick-tock-tick-tock’” (Fielding 11). The comic cruelty of the repeatedly evoked ‘tick-tock-tick-tock’ thus drives Bridget into two contradictory directions at once. She has to pursue diametrically opposed ends in order to satisfy both the authoritative and her inner discourse, which is the premise for her trouble. Bridget’s attempts to be an ‘independent’ woman and ‘secure’ a boyfriend are Sisyphean struggles that are a perfect translation of her predecessors’ similar dilemmas.
28Both Beatrice and Lizzie have been singled out for their outspokenness and willingness to invest their linguistic capital in aims that do not lead to marriage, which makes them unconventional women in their times. While the restrictive frame of marriage as the only “career” for a woman has been made economically redundant in Bridget Jones’s world, the residues still cause incongruities inherent in the life she leads, as her friend Sharon points out in a drunken rant: “‘We women are only vulnerable because we are a pioneer generation daring to refuse to compromise in love and relying on our own economic power. In twenty years’ time men won’t even dare start with fuckwittage because we will just laugh in their faces,’ bellowed Sharon” (Fielding 21). It is a part of the novel’s irony that, in many ways, these female characters already lead the life Sharon envisions. Their struggle results from their attempts to reconcile their inner discourse with the norms of society. They suffer from the conflict between their own perception and that imposed upon them not only by the previous generation but also by their peers. Bridget is painfully aware of the things she ought to say and do because she is frequently humiliated for her perceived non-compliance. The authoritative voice that pains her is transferred from paternal figures or marriage markets to the “smug marrieds” of her own age, who single her out nevertheless:
Why do they do this? Why? Maybe the Smug Marrieds only mix with other Smug Marrieds and don’t know how to relate to individuals any more. Maybe they do really want to patronize us and make us feel like failed human beings.… ‘You really ought to hurry up and get sprogged up, you know, old girl,’ said Cosmo, pouring a quarter of a pint of ’82 Pauillac straight down his throat. ‘Time’s running out.’ By this time, I’d had a good half-pint of ’82 Pauillac myself. ‘Is it one in three marriages that end in divorce now or one in two?’ I slurred with a pointless attempt at sarcasm. (Fielding 41)
29Bridget’s humiliations show her struggling for a satiric detachment towards her experience; much as if she wished herself to be a different narrator with greater distance to the story. The conventional pressure she perceives herself to be under, which, in view of the fact that she is indeed financially independent, is centered on the supposed duty to procreate, gives her ‘marriage market’ an urgency that is not that far removed from Austen. The fact that Bridget is shown unequivocally to suffer emotionally from these humiliations (“Then I got into a taxi and burst into tears”; Fielding 41)—although she mostly tries to make light of them for the sake of the comedy—underlines the pressures she is under as a single woman in the nineties. Thus, her propensity and her determination, even, to laugh at her potential mate emphasizes her heartfelt wish not to bow to the ideology of women as predetermined mothers and marriage as a prerequisite condition for motherhood.
30Bridget is opposed to the idea of marriage as a necessity just as much as Beatrice and Lizzie are and she is placed in a power balance with Mark Darcy that mirrors exactly the so-called sparring lovers Beatrice/Benedick and Elizabeth/Darcy. Bridget and Mark get off on the wrong foot and Bridget’s mockery of him shows her disdain: “It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mark 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” (Fielding 13). Her immediate rejection of him is determined by the hypotext, but Bridget leads up to it with hyperbolic emphasis on the pressure she is under to accept him:
Every time my mother’s rung up for weeks it’s been, ‘Of course you remember the Darcys, darling.… Did I mention Malcolm and Elaine are bringing Mark with them to Una’s New Year’s Day Turkey Curry Buffet? He’s just back from America, apparently. Divorced. He’s looking for a house in Holland Park’…. I don’t know why she didn’t just come out with it and say, ‘Darling, do shag Mark Darcy over the turkey curry, won’t you? He’s very rich.’ (Fielding 12)
31The mother, porte parole of an authoritative discourse of marriage and procreation, represents a version of femininity Bridget rejects, but which nevertheless crucially determines her sense of self. Thus, she tries to overcome the dilemma between her own desires and those imposed upon her. The incongruity between the two creates the novel’s comedy, which thrives particularly through the diary form, because Bridget’s inner discourse is audible and thus points out her deviation from the norm.
32As a comic heroine, Bridget Jones is “literally” obliged to cry “hey-ho” for a husband, but throughout the novel the character refuses to invest her linguistic capital in the pursuit of one. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the women’s language and those ideas of what should and should not be said plays an important role in the novel. Her friend Sharon’s feminist diatribes are met with only ambiguous approval to emphasize the women’s double bind. Identifying far more with her peers’ feminisms than her mother’s conservatism, Bridget enjoys Sharon’s rants, yet cannot unequivocally make them her own: “Jude and I were going, ‘Shhh, shhh,’ out of the corners of our mouths and sinking down into our coats. After all, there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism” (Fielding 20). Bridget’s language is incongruent with the ideological norms of femininity that still reign residually in her world and are irreconcilable with her own notions of what it means to be a single woman. Her ongoing attempts to perfect herself as a woman in both body and mind seem contradictory to her wish to be a “woman of substance,” but what transpires in the end is her triumph without having attained any of the goals she proclaims to have. In other words, Bridget’s inner discourse wins and it is here that the feminism of the novel lies. Against Bergson’s theory that comic characters “improve inwardly” (188), Bridget shows no signs of such improvements. In fact, while it can be said of both Beatrice and Lizzie Bennet that they change their views of themselves through their comic education, Bridget remains obstinate in her defiance of the “wrong” kind of femininity until the end. In this sense, she may be a “new” comic heroine after all, for she triumphs despite her refusal to change.
33Bridget is essentially in the same trouble as her funny predecessors. The trouble results from an oppressive discourse of femininity that all three women are exposed to and the comedy lies in their incongruous language. Interestingly, while Bridget certainly seems obsessed with self-improvement, as her diary reveals in meticulous detail, no improvement transpires in the end. She records the aspects of her conduct, intelligence and physical condition in great detail, which certainly gives the appearance of her wish for self-improvement, but the meticulous record she keeps shows instead that she simply repeats her patterns. Moreover, when the year is over, which also constitutes the end of the novel, the diary is exchanged for a new one, thus rendering all her professed attempts at self-improvement void. Therefore, Bridget’s self remains more intact than that of her predecessors. In other words, while both Beatrice and Lizzie have to undergo a comic education, Bridget Jones is essentially unaltered in her selfhood even after the equivalent of five acts. Her triumph as a comic heroine thus deviates from the others’, but the source of comedy for all three is very similar in kind. If humor is not timeless, as the twenty-first century has come to believe, and if certain comedy does not “age well” (the controversy around the film adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary serving as a prime example), then one would assume that very different comic strategies are at work to make these women funny. And yet, all three of them are placed between the horns of a dilemma that relates to fundamental ideas of how societies determine the meanings of womanhood. The texts transmit a very clear idea of what women in these social worlds are supposed to say and all three texts give them voices that are entirely incongruous with such expectations. In the end, there is one funny woman in trouble in three different versions of the same character. Beatrice, Lizzie Bennet and Bridget Jones are determined to say what they are not supposed to say. And they are all rewarded for their deviance. It seems that their immortal popularity is a direct result of their subversion of stereotypical femininity. None of these women comply with the silence imposed upon them and all of them are rewarded for speaking out. They laugh in the face of the “word of the father.”
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