CONTEMPORARY TOPICS

Mr. Darcy and Pemberley Press: The Visible and the Invisible in Bridget Jones’s Diary

The text focuses on a discussion of the ways in which the 2001 film production of Bridget Jones’s Diary (directed by Sharon Maguire) participates in the construction of British cultural identity, especially in terms of redefining some crucial tenets of British cultural history. This redefinition is effected not least by the film’s capitalization of Austenomania of the 1990s. The visual rhetoric of the film, that is, promotes a complex interaction of political as sexual correctness, and vice versa, ironically echoing the very social ironies of Jane Austen herself.

On the other hand, however, this correctness is made possible by the symbolic exploitation of the Other — be it the other of the verbal discourse of the novel (as opposed to film) or the other of the British cultural geography (the defenceless spaces of Bosnia, Chechnya, or Kurdistan as utilized in the script). The symbolic labour of Maguire’s film in this respect is particularly relevant for the theorizing of visual discourse, because it relies on the sophisticated social economy of the visibility itself, the gaze and the spectacle.

Tatjana Jukić