Suspended Seriality and the Recovery of Bridget Jones

Abstract

When Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2013) appeared fourteen years after Helen Fielding’s second Bridget Jones novel, even Fielding’s most loyal readers likely had mixed feelings: excitement to recover a beloved character and her engaging comic voice tempered by trepidation that the recovery would be incomplete, that this third novel would not meet expectations created by Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), as some already felt Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) had not. When readers learned, many through advance press coverage, that the Bridget of this third novel is a widow and that her great love, Mark Darcy, is dead, trepidation perhaps threatened to overcome excitement: a novel about a devastated Bridget Jones was hard to imagine. However, readers’ fears that Bridgetmay have been rendered unrecognizable by what she has gone through are quickly dispelled: Fielding reassures her audience that we are encountering a familiar protagonist in a still familiar fictional world, and she does this especially through her deployment of what I call suspended seriality. A suspended sequel is a novel in a series that appears after considerable real time and story time have elapsed. Such a sequel depends on many of our expectations for seriality even as it disrupts others, especially regarding time. With seriality studies focusing strongly on nineteenth-century periodicals and also on comics, television, and digital narratives, the timing of installments – often very fast in contemporary works – is increasingly under consideration. This essay turns to the novel series to analyze the effects of extended timebetween installments on thehandling of narrative time. In the case of Fielding’s third Bridget Jones novel and others like it, the suspended sequel creates a focus on the present, rather than directing the reader’s attention toward the possibilities for a future resolution. This focus on the present also counters the orientation toward the past characteristic of the kind of trauma narrative Fielding’s readers may have expected, proving the suspended serial especially hospitable not to a narrative of trauma but to a narrative of recovery. That Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a narrative of recovery is evident in manyways, including that readers are well into the novel before being able to piece together the story of the loss Bridget has suffered. Sometime after we lastmet her in The Edge of Reason, she and Mark were married and had a son and a daughter. Only months after the birth of their daughter, Mark was killed by an exploding landmine on amission to free twoBritish aidworkers being held hostage inDarfur.