The Bridges of Madison County is a film based on a best-selling novel, and its high sales have been attributed largely to its romantic mood rather than its literary merit. The film makes numerous changes from the book version, and in part it moves more toward a greater realism as well as toward a delineation of character more in keeping with the sensibilities of movie audiences than readers of romance novels. In doing this, the filmmakers reflect current concepts of gender socialization in the context of the original story about a news photographer taking a series of pictures of the bridges of Madison County who has an affair with an Italian woman living on a farm in that region whose husband and children are away for a time. The affair is presented in both versions as an interlude of great importance to the two people involved, something they remember all their lives even as they continue those lives apart.
Suzanna Danuta Walters refers to the relationship between postfeminism and popular culture and how in film there has been something of a backlash against feminism, as seen in more reactionary works such as Pretty Woman or Ghost. She sees the 1980s and 1990s as having certain "dominant ideologies" about women, and much of what she says about this shift applies to The Bridges of Madison County as well. Most of these films have a certain feminist veneer, with women who are shown as trying to be their own person and trying to gain control either over their own lives alone or over something larger and external, like a company for Working Girl. Yet, at the same time these women are shown to be happier when they can make themselves adjuncts to men, or they are shown as succeeding only as they are able not to achieve through ability but to succeed through the use of their feminine wiles. The woman of today is presented as troubled and as anxious because she has been forced into the mode of trying to "have it all":
This discou...