Bridget Jones’s Hollow Feminism

Self-hatred sells. As the fourth Bridget Jones film arrives, I remember Helen Fielding’s creation with the queasy quality of hangover. She passed as a feminist heroine in the Nineties because she had a voice – she really did – and this is what she did with it: self-abasement. “I WILL NOT drink more than 14 alcohol units a week,” is the first line of her manifesto concealed as a list of New Year’s resolutions at the beginning of the first book. She also vows to be kinder, not to read books “by unreadable literary authors”, not to express her own emotions “but instead be poised and cool ice-queen”, and to purge her flat “of all extraneous matter”, though she doesn’t want to. This is a woman crushed from the off: a void.