Shaping G/Local Identities in Intermedial Texts: The Case of Bridget Jones’s Diary

Helen Fielding’s novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary, is investigated in this essay as a perfect example of intermedial storytelling. Started in 1994 as a column on the Indipendent newspaper, this first person narration of the ordinary life of a single thirty-something woman living in London soon became a novel and a film and a model for blogs and forum. Bridget Jones has therefore travelled incessantly through the entire media circuit, winning a wider audience each time a media boundary was crossed, gaining more and more energy from the movement. As a self-narrating character, she has suffered as many mutations as are the numbers of media through which she (as a narrating I) has transmitted her story: different media have shaped different Bridgets for different users. Through the intermedial reshaping of Bridget and the setting she moves in, a “commonplace” English (local) identity come to be fashioned for the global market, one that is made to be laughed at, but that still is a form of national identity, or better a “g/local identity”.