ABSTRACT
Helen Fielding's novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, provides a good example of such a strange remainder in the eponymous Bridget, who, though a product of the British university system and a working, self-sufficient woman, cannot seem to reconcile her sense of embodiment with her female subjectivity. The same skepticism launched toward Nigella Lawson as a public figure is caricatured in Fielding's novel. The life outlined for Bridget is likely not far off from the lives of many women of her relative generation: women rose during the 1970s upon equal parts second-wave feminism and glamor-laced media. Although Bridget is wise enough to analyze the rhetoric of popular culture and its effects upon her being, she is nonetheless unable to shake off the fetters of a world thrust upon women through mass media. Bridget is caught between the two avenues that women are supposed to choose between, and, indeterminate, she is presented as a median point on the spectrum of contemporary feminist thinking.
