Bridget Jones' Diary compared to Pride and Prejudice

Bridget Jones' Diary (1997), by Helen Fielding, also a succesful film, offers a strange and parodic comment on Pride and Prejudice. Its action roughly echoes the plot - but in the midst of a quite different moral world.

Bridget Jones's Diary is a highly imaginative interpretation of the novel Pride and Prejudice, so different to be hardly recognizable.

Directed by Sharon Maguire in 2001, one hundred and eighty-eight years after Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, with that, Bridget Jones's Diary would seem be quite diverse to Pride and Prejudice. But it is actually a highly imaginative interpretation of the novel. This modern interpretation is seen through the plot, characters, context, values, language and film techniques.

Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones's Diary can be quite deceivable to the extent in which they are similar. To begin with, the first line from Pride and Prejudice states "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." This line has been modified in Bridget Jones's Diary as a voice over and it states, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that the moment one area of your life goes okay,the other falls spectacularly to pieces." This direct appropriation reveals the similarities between the texts and allows reproduction of Pride and Prejudice through Bridget Jones's Diary to be noticeable.

Bridget Jones's Diary and Pride and Prejudice do endure a similar plot. The protagonist is female; she is looking for love and is under pressure to find love particularly by her mother. The protagonist meets a man but his pride and her prejudice keeps them apart. She has been led to believe that the man is dishonest and had been involved in some inexcusable past behavior. Yet he learns to love her "just the way she is" and she learns the truth about her past behavior and he lets go of his "pride" and she lets go of his "prejudice" and they ironically fall in love. In analyses of the plot outline we see the texts do resemble each other and Bridget Jones's Diary is a highly imaginative interpretation of Pride and Prejudice.

Bridget Jones is left with a mother who is crass and difficult and always difficult and never complimentary other daughter. She is completely self-absorbed, much the way Elizabeth Bennett’s mother has not a good thing to really say abut her daughters, her single daughters, and wishes to marry them off, just as Mrs. Bennett does, to the richest bidder there is: so it is that Jane and Elizabeth up for the offerings so to speak; Bridget to Mr. Darcy (Mark Darcy, Colin Firth, with whom the mother is always trying to pair Bridget) and Mrs. Bennett who likewise is always trying to pair Elizabeth with Mr. Darcy, also played by Colin Firth. More, Bridget must choose between some other and Mr. Darcy ~ Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy. As for Mr. Wickham, the Cleaver equal I believe, he has made his intentions clear to one of Elizabeth’s sisters who is now “lost for ever” and “our whole family must partake of her ruin and disgrace.”

Moreover, in both films, our Colin Firth plays the same role, even in name (Mr. Darcy), and we have our Daniel Clever stand in, not to mention a clever repetition of scene and script that mimic the original. Except here, in Pride & Prejudice it is not the blonde who is favored, but the beautiful brunette, Elizabeth Bennett, who is lovely and certainly a woman worth fighting over. Though she may be of a ‘lower social standing’ like Firth, when Mr. Darcy sees her he wants her nonetheless and makes no secret of it. Or at the end he doesn’t, and while his initial resistance is there, it was too in Bridget Jones, our “everywoman” so to speak, or every single woman, and in some ways the directors really did capture what it means to be in your thirties, working, urban and single. The lifestyle seems accurate. The friends, the apartment, the job - all of it is so believable.

“I must tell you how ardently I admire and love you,” Firth tells Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, which brings to mind the line from Bridget Jones and the infamous dinner toast on her birthday that he admires her “just as you are,” he says, which her friends repeat, "to Bridget: 'just as she is'" revealing her desire for Firth and her concern for his feelings about her. Oh, she may play coy, but the truth is she really is attracted to Firth.

Some interesting aspects are:

Helen Fielding (as Bridget Jones) wrote of her love of the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in her Bridget Jones's Diary column during the original British broadcast, mentioning her "simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth" and regarding the couple as her "chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or rather courtship". Fielding loosely reworked the plot of Pride And Prejudice in her 1996 novelisation of the column, naming Bridget's uptight love interest "Mark Darcy" and describing him exactly like Colin Firth. Following a first meeting with Firth during his filming of Fever Pitch in 1996, Fielding asked Firth to collaborate in what would become an eight-page interview between Bridget Jones and Firth in her 1999 sequel novel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Conducting the real interview with Firth in Rome, Fielding lapsed into Bridget Jones mode and obsessed over Darcy in his wet shirt. Firth participated in the following editing process of what critics would consider "one of the funniest sequences in the diary's sequel". Both novels make various other references to the BBC serial.

Pride and Prejudice writer Andrew Davies collaborated on the screenplays for the 2001 and 2004 Bridget Jones films, which would show Crispin Bonham-Carter (Mr Bingley in Pride and Prejudice) and Lucy Robinson (Mrs Hurst) in minor roles. The self-referential in-joke between the projects intrigued Colin Firth to accept the role of Mark Darcy, as it gave him an opportunity to ridicule and liberate himself from his Pride and Prejudice character. Film critic James Berardinelli would later state that Firth "plays this part [of Mark Darcy] exactly as he played the earlier role, making it evident that the two Darcys are essentially the same".^[The producers never found a solution to incorporate the Jones-Firth interview in the second film, but shot a spoof interview with Firth as himself and Renée Zellweger staying in-character as Bridget Jones after a day's wrap.

Source Bridgetandpride and blogcritics