“It’s Only a Diary”: A Comparative Analysis of Fictionalized Accounts of Women’s Journals in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Gone Girl (2014)
“It’s Only a Diary”: A Comparative Analysis of Fictionalized Accounts of Women’s Journals in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Gone Girl (2014)

Summary/Abstract: The diary, understood as both a practice of communication and a writing format, has enjoyed a prominent position among the discursive strategies employed by the American feminist culture of the past two centuries. Adrienne Rich has aptly referred to it as “that profoundly female, and feminist, genre” (Rich, 217). In looking at the diary as a crucially feminist instrument of self-conceptualization and self-actualization, one might also assume that to some extent, changes in journaling practices reflect larger developments within the feminist project itself. In this essay, I offer a comparative textual analysis of two fictionalized accounts of women’s diaries. Both case studies – Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014) – originate from contemporary Hollywood cinema. Adopting the historical trajectory of the feminist diary as my starting point, I use the selected films’ treatment of the diary to discuss two contemporary variations – postfeminist and post-recessionary, respectively – on feminist understandings of female identity and agency

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