“She Says She’s Thirty-Five but She’s Really Fifty-One”: Rebranding the Middle-Aged Postfeminist Protagonist in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad about The Boy

Abstract

This chapter analyses Helen Fielding’s third Bridget Jones novel Mad about The Boy (2013). The former novels, Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), have functioned as touchstones in critical conversations about postfeminism, where Bridget’s subjectivity as a thirty-something singleton was scrutinised for what it could reveal about young women’s lives in a postfeminist social milieu. Mad about The Boy offers new critical possibilities for analysing how postfeminism continues to interfere in women’s lives at midlife and beyond. Some of postfeminism’s harmful outcomes are revealed, both through an examination of Bridget’s world within the novel, and in a study of its reception, each of which exposes how ageist discourses are naturalised as part of this ideology.