Calvino, Stereotypes and Misogyny

The stepmother greets Hansel and Gretel. Illustration of Grimm's tale by Henry Ford (c1891)

I mentioned in earlier posts that Calvino’s Italian Folktales has considerable stereotyping. Looking back after reading the entire collection, I notice that although he is a conscientious and thoughtful editor, in his notes he praises any detail except the glaring attitudes to women. I’m trying to identify which, if any, of these tales I could tell my grand-daughter, and I’m struggling. 

I was able to find one scholarly article about the Italian Folktales, by Martin Beckwith (1987), which looked at a few tales in detail and identified how Calvino had changed them. The changes included making some of the tales slightly less gory and violent, not dissimilar to the Grimm brothers in their retelling. However, the Grimms were writing in the late 18th and early 19th-centuries. As a 20th-century editor and commentator, would you not feel it appropriate to address the misogyny? Do we believe that the inherent nature of folktales is that stepmothers are evil and most old women suspect? If Calvino had left his stories untouched, he would not have invited criticism of this kind. But he clearly felt entitled to edit them, so I believe he bears some responsibility for the stereotyping he is consciously transmitting. 

As for other stereotypes, I used a digital edition of Calvino’s Folktales to identify that nine of the stories feature stepmothers. All of these references are to evil stepmothers. For example:

[52] One day the stepmother slapped her for breaking a bowl, and Stellina left home, unable to endure any more.

[82] As soon as the king was gone, the stepmother queen went to all lengths to get into his room. She put opium into the wine of his servant …

[95] the stepmother beat the poor girl every day.

[121] The son remained with his stepmother, who paid him no mind whatever, since she was in love with a Moor and had eyes only for him.

Calvino is not alone in ignoring the stereotyping; many modern commentators seem to do the same. The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales (2014) has just one incidental reference to “misogyny” or “misogynist”. Is that not a key question to address in any modern-day evaluation of the fairy tale?

I am not advocating censorship of literature. We recognize aspects of Shakespeare that do not conform to modern values. But in the restricted world of the fairy tale, the message is hammered home in story after story. You could even say the primary message of many (most?) of the tales is for the hero (usually male) to find a rich or titled wife (who typically has little or no choice in the decision) and to overcome the obstructions of stepmothers and other miscellaneous curses. I'd love to explore how many violent deaths occur in the tales to women, and how many to men. 

Perhaps the only response possible today to the traditional folktale is to follow Angela Carter and to rewrite the stories completely to fit 21st-century values. Should we abandon traditional fairy tales and folktales? I am waiting to be persuaded otherwise.

Final judgement on Cnut the Great

Cnut and his wife Emma, from the New Minster Liber Vitae

Having now finished Timothy Bolton’s biography of Cnut the Great, I can’t resist appending to my earlier post with some additional points. 

The conclusion should be at the start

Bolton’s five-page conclusion makes the life of Cnut much clearer. General readers would find it easier to have this as an introduction or first chapter.

 Get beyond “Englishness”

For much of the book, Bolton admirably examines Cnut both from a Scandinavian and an English point of view. I haven’t read many books about early English history, but I expect the typical book by an English author will look at English sources, and not consider events and sources outside England. But sadly, at moments in this book and in the very last page of this biography, Bolton comes dangerously close to falling into the trap of nationalism. I simply don’t believe that a ruler like Cnut will have seen “English” and “Danish” in the way we regard these terms in the 21st century: 

England may have been of crucial importance to him, but he seems to have remained at heart a Scandinavian. [p129] 

That is not to say that Cnut did not strongly feel himself to be Scandinavian or that he did not really wish to embrace Englishness [p213] 

I don’t imagine William the Conqueror was too bothered about embracing “Englishness”, whatever that is, and I don’t imagine that Cnut was very interested in it either, apart from the political benefit of appearing as the right kind of ruler. In fact, being able to tell the English what they wanted to hear, and the Danes what they wanted to hear, even if it was diametrically opposed, is what strikes me as modern about Cnut. 

Use a contemporary image of Cnut

I mentioned in an earlier post that the book uses a cover image dating two hundred years after Cnut's death. Bolton presumably sanctioned the use of this anachronous depiction of Cnut as a knight in medieval armour, while he includes a fascinating contemporary image of Cnut as one of his plates. He states, on page 192, “This is one of the most widely discussed drawings of Anglo-Saxon history”. A section is shown at the top of this post. .

The British Library states the illustration is “near contemporary”. Talking of dates, this book is maddeningly vague about dates; it doesn’t give a date for the illustration.

The historian’s innocence

Sadly, the author reveals a charming innocence when it comes to evaluating Cnut. He is convinced that Cnut became sincerely religious later in his life. For evidence of this, Bolton mentions the gifts Cnut lavished on English religious institutions. What motivates philanthropy? 

M.K. Lawson suggested in 1993 that many of Cnut’s gifts to the Church may have been politically motivated, and I later followed that approach myself. To some degree we were both probably correct, but genuine piety sits at the heart of an array of sources close to him, and Church gift-giving must also have been a powerful force behind this benevolence. [footnote: A mix of the two motives is perhaps characteristic of almost all medieval donors.][p183] 

I find this astonishing. Bolton gives ample evidence of Cnut’s astuteness (he calls Cnut a “diplomacist”, not a term I have found in a dictionary) yet is convinced he was sincerely Christian. I’d want to see more evidence than giving gifts to churches. 

Cnut turning back the tide

Like it or not, this is what most people think they know about Cnut. Clearly, from Bolton’s description, it is based on a wrong reading of the texts. But to place this in an appendix and footnotes is rather childish. Bolton justifies his decision thus: 

I beg my reader’s forgiveness for my irascibility on this front, but when one spends the better part of one’s adult life researching Cnut, it is the first thing anybody asks you about, and it become as irritating as a stuck record. 

Find a copy-editor

The book would benefit greatly from an editor able to remove some of the unique word forms (“eschelons”) and dead phrases. The quote above mixes “one” and “you”. Another quote above describes “the heart of an array of sources”. Some more examples: 

It in the field of international politics … where we can see that Cnut … ploughed a novel and quite opportunistic furrow. [p158] 

It’s a shame, since the underlying research looks so good, that the book loses the reader in details, when it would be simple to provide a few signposts.

How great was Cnut the Great?

 

A 13th-century illustration of Cnut in combat with Edmund Ironside

We hear a lot about the growth of scholarly publishing but even so, it’s not every day that a new book is published about Cnut the Great. It seemed like a good opportunity to find out if Cnut was a candidate for greatness. After all, he successfully invaded England less than a hundred years before William the Conqueror, but somehow the date of his invasion (1013) is not known by everyone in the way that 1066 is. 

This book (by Tim Bolton, appearing in the long-lasting series “Yale English Monarchs”) got good reviews, but the experience of reading it, for this non-specialist reader, was decidedly mixed. It would have been so easy to make the book more accessible.

·       The author must assume we know the main facts already, but I’m afraid I did not. Why not add a chronology of major events? I kept having to check the Wikipedia entry for Cnut to establish where we were.

·       The cover illustration, although it may be referring to Cnut, dates from two hundred years after Cnut’s time. We are quite certain that Cnut did not wear clothes like that. Could an illustration not have been found that was contemporaneous with Cnut?

·       Speaking of illustrations, you would have a hard time trying to link the photos with the main text. There are eight pages of black and white photos, but it seems beyond Yale University Press to indicate in the text where the images might be. For example, a pencase lid was found in a 1961. “Reproductions of both its upper and lower faces are given here in this volume”, states a footnote on page 142. Why so coy? It is plate 4. Here we are in 2021, and book publishing hasn’t yet reached the point where the text can refer to the illustrations with any certainty.

Much, perhaps most of the book is conjecture. This is unavoidable when writing the life of someone for whom so few sources remain. But it leads to a lot of hypothetical assertion.  As an example of “history as it could have been”, how about:

Harald’s death must have had a profound effect on Cnut. In England in 1018 he cannot have expected that Harald would be dead within a few months, and indeed as his brother must have been in his twenties or very early thirties, it was unlikely. The emotional toll may have been great. The brothers seem to have been close. [p131]

As if that isn’t uncertain enough already, a footnote adds: “No source records Harald’s age, but he is unlikely to have been many years older than Cnut, who at this stage must have been in his twenties.”

 The book is an uneasy mix of an academic article, disputing with other scholars, and a general introduction. For a general work of history, I would not include the names of any of the recent scholars in the body of the text. If the author wants to cite the attribution, it can be done in the footnotes. Discussions with other scholars are for academics to argue in journals, not for a biography of this kind.

·       The index is of proper names only, and pretty selective at that: there is no reference to “English Channel”, or “North Sea”, or “Kattegat”. Yet there is an entry for London. The index appears to suffer from an unconscious English bias. There is no entry for Aarhus or Fyrkat, but there is an entry for Abingdon Abbey. Who makes these decisions?

·       In contrast, the footnotes frequently contain material that is highly relevant for the main argument. These should be promoted.

·       There are just two not very adequate maps, one of Denmark, one of routes from Northern Europe to Rome. No map of England, or maps of the places mentioned in the text.

·       There is a fascinating introduction, but this combines a real overview (very helpful) and a detailed description of sources (very intricate, valuable, but making little sense to the general reader until the relevant source is mentioned in the text)

Is the book worth reading? Absolutely! It makes effective use of whatever sources it can find, including archaeology, coins, and poetry. Most impressive, to my mind, is the way it makes a determined effort not to interpret the life of Cnut, a Dane, into the standard narrative of English history, making so many unstated assumptions about the national heritage. Because the English sources are so much more substantial than the Scandinavian records, Cnut tends to be seen through English eyes, but he seems to have been equally at home in England or in Denmark. His life is a fascinating example of monarchy in the days before the nation-state became implanted on everyone’s brains. Finally, mercifully, there is no mention (at least so far in my reading) of the one “fact” that everyone knows about Cnut: his trying to stem the tide.

Books of the Year 2020

 

Some of the books of the year - I tend to give away the books I enjoyed most, so this is an incomplete selection of all the chosen titles. The best ones always get away!

Not much to celebrate about 2020, which went downhill from March onwards with coronavirus and final stages of Brexit, but despite everything, there were some books I encountered during the year that were truly inspiring (and some of them I even finished). Here is a quick list of eight books (and one art exhibition) that impressed, entertained, or challenged, and all took my mind off other things. 

Norman Scarfe (ed), A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk, 1784

This book only arrived in December, but already it has proved fascinating. Norman Scarfe is no doubt a monarchist, a reactionary, and against everything the French Revolution stood for, but I forgive him everything for bringing to life the diaries of the La Rochefoucault brothers during the year they spent in East Anglia. Their accounts of the everyday life of the English upper classes – their drinking, their hunting, and their impoliteness – is a wonderful corrective to the accounts of insiders such as the dreadful Parson James Woodforde, writing at a similar time, but utterly complacent and self-serving. Scarfe’s edition is a model of good scholarship: everything explained at the foot of each page, with illustrations of people and places, and a scene-setting introduction. It’s lovely to see this book has been reprinted four times since its first publication in 1987. 

Grace Paley, Collected Stories

What a discovery! She wrote only three collections of short stories, in 1959, 1974, and 1985, no novels, and yet managed to write pioneering experimental fiction, as well as being a political activist and campaigner. Her stories draw on her lower-class Jewish background in the tenements of New York, with many of the characters reappearing in several stories. She is never afraid to experiment (which means that some of the stories go nowhere, or simply fall over) but you forgive her for the success of some of the other stories. These stories have an immediacy, a vividness, that grips the reader, in great contrast to the more leisured, cossetted atmosphere of Updike. You suspect that for every Updike there is a Grace Paley somewhere looking after the kids and writing on the kitchen table. Best of all, Paley has no axe to grind; she writes believable fiction, not to prove a thesis. And her dialogue rivals Damon Runyon’s!   

Calvino, Italian Folktales

This vast collection of hundreds of tales constantly defeats my expectations. I’ve written about it at length elsewhere; suffice it to say here that I find it is consistently entertaining, while ploughing through collections of Grimm or Afaneseyev’s Russian folktales becomes heavy going.  However (two weeks later), just a minor update, after having read 155 of the 200 tales: I wish Calvino had exercised a little more rigour in his selection. Several of the tales repeat elements found elsewhere, and are not great tales in their own right. I think the selection could have been further reduced by around 20%. It would still remain the definitive selection of Italian folk tales. 

Susan Woodford, Greek and Roman Art (2020)

A real achievement, this one, in a series by Thames and Hudson, entitled Art Essentials, along the lines of Gallimard Decouvertes. There are plenty of introductory guides on the subject, several of them by Susan Woodford herself, so this one should have been unmemorable. What made it stand out was that is in full colour, with an integrated layout, with the excellent choice of illustrations, captions that read as if she has actually looked at the work in question (“the elegant pose of the statue folds into unintelligibility”), a good glossary and further reading section. All in all, a highly successful use of the concise format to focus on the essential artworks and artists. Very easy to read, and very inspiring to make me want to go and see some of these things in museums. 

Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)

It may be thought cheeky to select a book that I’ve only read a few hundred pages of. Given the size of the novel, however, these few hundred pages are as long as some novels. And you can already see some themes emerging. You notice the omniscient narrator, who tells us what to think, for example, that we should be fond of Pierre, and that we should see the social life of the rich in Moscow and St Petersburg as shallow: “Here in Moscow we are more occupied with dinner-parties and scandal than with politics.” It’s a clever trick, to give the appearance of neutrality, but to lead the reader by a hundred signs into agreeing with Tolstoy’s often peculiar ideas. 

Tim Parks, Medici Money (2006)

Medici Money is my nomination for book of the year. Discovered in the Amnesty Bookshop, Cambridge (remember second-hand bookshops?), at a price of £3, Tim Parks’ Medici Money turned out to be a real page-turner – pretty impressive when you think it is a book about banking and economics! But the combination of Parks’ accessible but informed writing style, and the astonishing subject matter, made this book a winner. I will never again look at the word “Medici” without suspicion, and the book has changed the way I see the Renaissance in Florence. 

Machiavelli, Florentine Histories

Inspired by Tim Parks (above), we read the first two hundred pages or so of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. The pattern seems to be clear: the city of Florence places its hopes in an individual or group to free them from a tyrant, only to discover that the resulting political situation is worse than ever. Unfortunately, the edition was a rather stodgy and unhelpful one. You need some assistance to make a contemporary historian accessible.  

Van Eyck exhibition, Ghent

This was certainly the exhibition of the year, even if the show was rather distorted into comparison of Flemish versus Italian art, with the winner being, of course, Van Eyck, the local; I wrote about it here.

Defoe, Captain Singleton (1720)

Defoe is remarkable for writing fiction that seems amazingly realistic, despite his not having any experience of the situation describe. Here, Captain Singleton is a pirate who crosses Africa from east to west with his band of followers. 

A Much-maligned town: Opinions of Reading 1126-2008 (2008)

I chose this book as a tribute to the small publishers across the UK who produce books about a place, for a local readership. Reading, not a city that you would immediately associate with publishing, has one of the best local publishers, The Two Rivers Press. I don’t see any truly local publishers like this in Oxford or Cambridge, which is a shame. Plenty of publishing about the universities - but that's not the same thing.   

Should we worry about not liking Céline Dion?

Cover of the original 2007 Continuum edition

Carl Wilson (not the former Beach Boy, but a Canadian music journalist) is a deeply troubled man. Given the assignment of writing about Céline Dion (for the book Let's Talk About Love, a title in a series published by Continuum, each volume devoted to individual albums) he agonises for over 150 pages about whether it is OK not to like the album he presumably has been commissioned to write favourably about. He must be worried, because he quotes from works on aesthetics (David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg) as well as academic sociology (Pierre Bourdieu, Petersen (actually Peterson), and Kern) to try to come to terms with his unease. He deserves top marks for honesty, at least. 

Wilson asks an interesting question, if you persevere beyond his mixed metaphors (“Schmaltz circles the rim but seemingly never wholly dissolves in the melting pot, bubbling up again decade after decade.” [p62]) and the odd vocabulary (see my post on music journalists’ style). He is most interesting when moving furthest away from his own response, and weakest when describing Ms Dion, perhaps because he has nothing much to say about her music. As an experienced music journalist, you think he could say something more specific than “her voice is nouveau riche” [p72] and “her singing is aspirational” (and I don’t think he means she pronounces her “h”s). He describes his problem, but despairs of ever resolving it. At one point he states: “For all the sense I’ve been able to make of Céline, why am I still bored?” [p74]. 

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about not liking Dion’s music, but sadly for Wilson, he appears condemned to feeling guilty about some popular music he cannot respond to. Let’s look at the reasons he gives for justifying liking Dion’s music: 

She had a challenging upbringing. As one of 14 children, born to a poor Quebecois family, and not initially speaking any English, Dion progressed the hard way. Nonetheless, that’s not a justification for the music either. 

She is a nice person. I don’t doubt that Ms Dion is a very nice person, but that’s not going to make me like her music. In my teens, I went with my girlfriend to a Donovan concert. I’m sure Donovan was and is a lovely, sincere, person, but I found the music utterly uninteresting. 

It’s impossible to describe your response to some musicians [a bit desperate, this one, from a music journalist]. “It’s not uncommon for musicians to bypass taste categories when they hear technical achievement, and Céline seems to be such a case.” [p67] 

Dion’s music is not white, nor black, but schmaltz. Wilson hears Dion’s music as “black music”, but on reflection, decides her music is neither black nor white; “the only unhyphenated label I can find is “schmaltz”. If nothing else, this response characterizes Wilson's unique way of reasoning. 

My response is tribal, not intellectual: “our guts tell us certain kinds of music are for certain kinds of people” [p19]. “My aversion to Dion more closely resembles how put off I feel when someone says they’re prolife or a Republican: intellectually ‘I’m aware how personal and complicated such affiliations can be, but my gut reactions are more crudely tribal.” [p19].

In other words, he can’t do anything about this matter of taste; that’s just how he is. Later in the book he considers taste in a more formal way (that’s where Hume and Kant come in) and moves, I think, to a useful conclusion, but doesn’t in the end respond to his own findings. “The question is whether anyone’s tastes stand on certain ground, starting with mine.” 

I think the problem is more simple than that. Hume, Kant, and even Clement Greenberg talk about appealing to some kind of authority, who can provide a neutral judgement. But in pop music, there is no such authority. Pop music is just another commodity, to be bought and sold. The only authority is sales figures, which make Dion without doubt one of the greatest stars ever. As consumers, we humans have just one main task in life: to purchase. For most of us, the only individuality we can express is our preference for A or B, for Dion or Dylan. Through these preferences, we make friends or lose friends. We believe we are free because of that choice, but even when Wilson describes Bourdieu’s famous survey in the 1970s on “discrimination”, that “taste is a manifestation of a quest for social status … to perpetuate the class structure”, he is not convinced. It is no choice; most of popular music is created so that young people can identify with a group (as well as representing something that their parents do not like). Popular music journalists beyond their teens, like Wilson (born 1967, and writing Let’s Talk about Love at the age of 40), struggle to make any sense of it, yet they lived through it; does he not remember? For Wilson, the bands and singers he liked in his teens are the ones that are “real”; the others, like Dion, incomprehensible. Why else would Rolling Stones concerts be full of audiences in their sixties? 

Pop bands and singers come and go, regardless of their cultural significance, and, as Bourdieu points out, cultural significance may well be determined by a different group to the consumers of the music. Consumers of the music may not like this presence or absence of cultural significance, but it doesn't matter to them. At the time, the important thing for the consumer is to have a preference: X is my favourite; I hate Y. Likes and dislikes create bonds and establish identity. Wilson more or less recognises this, at times: “It’s most blatant in the identity war that is high school, but music never stops being a badge of recognition.”[p19] 

Dion is a badge; nothing to do with autonomous value in the eyes of critics. As Wilson memorably describes, she “tastes good” to her audience, even if she is not “in good taste”. As a music journalist, he worries about good taste; music consumers do not. It might have been a problem for his book commission, but he can rest assured that most Dion admirers will not even know that his book exists. His secret is safe, despite publication.

The Style of Music Journalism

 

I’m reading a book by Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk about Love. Wilson is a music journalist, and it’s a long time since I’ve read any music journalism. I vaguely remember seeing articles in New Musical Express, during the 1970s when I was a student, and perhaps I was more tolerant at that time, but today this writing strikes me as very peculiar. As for the argument of the book, that is for a later post, but here I will try to clarify the main features of the music journalism style. You could say that much of the NME journalism could be excused as the result of enthusiastic youthful ardour by the writers, but Wilson was 40 when he published Let's Talk about Love. 

Mixing things up

Wilson constructs sentences by combining formal and informal, academic and popular discourse. This technique is certainly arresting: I stop reading with every example. I can’t decide if the technique is thereby successful or simply confusing: 

“This epidemic of second thought made critical scorn generally seem a tad shady.” [p15]

 Perhaps it is simply that Wilson confuses us with his baroque melange of metaphors:

 “Once pop criticism had a track record lengthy enough to be full of wrong turns, neither popular nor critical consensus seemed like a reliable guide.” [p15]

Using a phrase “track record” in the context of pop music seems likely to confuse. And a long track record isn’t necessarily full of wrong turns – it might just be long. 

Mixed metaphors

“After the tumult of the early 1990s, when ‘underground’ music was seized on by the mainstream and just as quickly thrown overboard” [p15]

“For four years her legions have tithed their salaries to fly to Los Angeles for her nightly revue” [p18]

Mixed metaphors are not confined to Wilson's writing. There are plenty of other examples, such as a review of the Wilson book by another (former) music journalist, David Zahl, who writes: 

Having authoritative taste in cutting edge music is a particularly cruel mistress, especially in an age when technology has put so many extra players on the field. 

Sentences that defy expectations

One of the challenges that AI teams are working on is to parse an English sentence correctly – to understand its meaning. Most English sentences are quite straightforward, but I feel sorry for the AI experts to have to deal with such illogical constructions as these: 

“The epiphany was ethical, but it led to musical enjoyment”.

That word “but” worries me. Are ethical actions not enjoyable? Does enjoyment have anything to do with ethics? 

References for the favoured few

A further confusion is references to popular culture where it is assumed that the reader knows what Wilson is talking about. For example: “[I had] gotten married (to a woman with a severe Gummo fixation)”. Do we know what Gummo is? It’s a cult film about teenage boys. As Wilson himself points out, pop music criticism often “hinges on turning your readership into an incrowd [with] the power to exclude”. [p16]

Perhaps the real challenge when writing about popular music is that the subject matter can be so banal, that the journalists feel they have to embellish their text to provide more interest. Perhaps you might say I am being unfair to Wilson, as his book makes a serious point - but that is for the next post. 

The Bridget Jones phenomenon

Being Bridget Jones, a TV documentary about the Bridget Jones books and films prompted a re-evaluation of the character. What made the Bridget Jones character so memorable? Is there anything more to be said about her?

It was clear from the documentary that what is memorable is not the males, however much screen entertainment they provide (usually based on rivalry). Hugh Grant versus Colin Firth, or Colin Firth versus Patrick Dempsey was not what we remember about the films: three of them, from Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), based on the book of the same title (1996), up to the film Bridget Jones's Baby (2016). By the end the story declines into wish-fulfilment, but there is enough in the earlier films and books to reflect on. 

No, the abiding achievement of Helen Fielding is to record female insecurity. Women have gained so much in the last 150 years, and yet hesitancy and lack of confidence remain very common in women. As Germaine Greer stated in the TV programme, we all of us have Bridget Jones moments, waiting for the phone to ring. I realised when she said this that she was referring to women, but it could equally refer to men. Here is a limitation of these films: all the leading males are secure in their roles; they are strong-jawed ciphers. Real men might sit waiting for the phone to ring, but not these males. Even Colin Firth, although he may be slow to reveal his true feelings, is a world-class lawyer.

Of course the reality is more complex than that. Bridget is the woman who is on the edge of her class, as you sense her creator Helen Fielding is. Fielding grew up in a small industrial suburb of Leeds in Yorkshire, and then went to Oxford as an undergraduate in the 1970s, where she will have encountered a very different, more polished world. “She seemed not to have read any books”, said her contemporary Richard Curtis, revealing perhaps more than he realised. It would be typical of Jones to reveal that she hasn’t read books, which the more poised public-school educated male undergraduates haven’t read either, but can confidently talk about in conversation.

The Bridget Jones character sits uncomfortably with feminism. Already, 20 years after the first film, we all realise that the attitudes would no longer be tolerated – groping women’s bottoms is not a matter for laughter any longer. The Jones character is not what many women want to dwell on (however much her attitudes, fear of failure, obsession with trivia, chronic insecurity) might be shared by males. “Will I get married” is not high on the feminist agenda.

While we can all agree that the obsession with weight and body image is sad and misguided, although very much the result of a world presenting images of female models who are spectacularly thin as a norm to be emulated, we might be a little more uncomfortable about other aspects of Jones’ character.

Making a mess of things in public (particularly with lawyers, given that Mark Darcy is a barrister) makes us feel at one with Jones, but sometimes the character exploration goes further and raises some questions. Jones’ talent for making a fool of herself in public is, I think, more than simply representing her background and openness. Fielding/Jones argues for a particular female attitude, not just rejecting the driven professionalism of some of the women in the TV company where Bridget works, but in the second film, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), her journalistic efforts are lame and amateurish. By comparison, Hugh Grant reveals himself to be an accomplished and relaxed presenter. He would get a job over her any day. Am I reading too much into the stories, but is there perhaps some underlying plea by Fielding for human failure rather than business success? After all, at the end of three full-length films, Jones finally gets married. Who does she choose? The charismatic, sexy, supremely confident and talented millionaire, or the repressed English lawyer who is anything but streetwise, but looks honest. The fact that he’s probably also a millionaire doesn’t mean she is marrying only for love.