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Friday, Oct 10, 2008
This kind of criticism sounds a lot like the insults that have been hurled at chick lit. In 1999, Lola Young, judging the Orange Prize for women's fiction, excoriated what was then a mostly British fad, calling it a "cult of big advances going to photogenic young women to write about their own lives, and who they had to dinner, as if that is all there was to life." In 2001, Booker Prize nominee Beryl Bainbridge echoed Eliot in calling chick lit "a froth sort of thing." She was supported by Doris Lessing, who wondered why women felt compelled to write such "instantly forgettable" books.
But how are we to be sure about which books are "instantly forgettable"? The first American bestseller was Susannah Rowson's "Charlotte Temple" (published in England in 1791, the U.S. in 1794), a novel that 20th century critic Leslie Fiedler described as "subliterate myth." A contemporary critic of Rowson's suggested that the author was "evidently unaccustomed to the use of a pen" (a characterization that should give pause to all those Believer acolytes who think that snark is a recent innovation in literary criticism). But "Chartlotte Temple" was, as we say today, critic-proof.
The book was part of a vogue for seduced-and-abandoned narratives, in the tradition of Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" and William Hill Brown's "The Power of Sympathy," and readers could not get enough of the clichis on which it and its sisters relied: a dim but virtuous heroine, a (sometimes Gallic) rogue, stillborn babies. To read the late 18th century crop of seduced-and-abandoned novels might create the impression, as critic Carl Van Doren wrote in 1921, that "that age [was] one of the most illicit on record, if they did not understand [that Samuel] Richardson's Lovelace [the seducer from "Clarissa"] is merely being repeated in the different colors and proportions." The notion that readers might get the wrong idea about a period based on the oft-mimicked formula of one of its popular genres sounds like the Observer's concern that chick lit's clichis change "the way that even New Yorkers see New York."
Like Jennifer Weiner's blockbuster "In Her Shoes" and "Devil," "Charlotte" was adapted for theatrical production. A gravestone in New York's Trinity churchyard bore the name of the book's doomed heroine, and fans visited the site to pay their tearful respects, sort of like those "Sex and the City" bus tours to Manhattan's Magnolia Bakery. It remained one of the bestselling novels in America until "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1852, and according to Van Doren's 1921 introduction, "Charlotte" "was known in every household in the Connecticut Valley," a statement that would likely apply to both "Bridget Jones's Diary" and "The Devil Wears Prada" today.
"Charlotte Temple" has been through more than 200 editions and is read today in colleges and universities -- not simply for the basics about what women wore and what their social season was like, though those things are there. Embedded in its reductive formula is half of our social history, a record of the female religious, economic and political experience that we can't get from political treatises or war stories because women were shut out of public spheres that produced documentation. Charlotte is an immigrant to the States from England, as was Rowson, and the book itself; "Charlotte" provides us with a unique reading of the Revolutionary rupture between Britain and the nascent United States. That books of its kind were denigrated for their cheap sentimentality and frankly feminine shortcomings does not sap them of value; they are women's history, and their popularity only validates that.
Chick lit provides a comparable female historical record today. Women may not be shut out of the public sphere, but the genre is helping to chronicle their journey inside it. There's chick lit about male-dominated politics (Kristin Gore's "Sammy's Hill" and Ana Marie Cox's forthcoming "Dog Days") and Hollywood (Rachel Pine's "The Twins of Tribeca") as well as the more traditionally feminine world of baby-sitting ("The Nanny Diaries"). In fact, most of these books don't differentiate themselves from each other by their subtly distinct romantic plotlines but by their varied professional ones. Thanks to this genre we can read about women zoologists and doctors, Peace Corps volunteers and advertising executives, chemists and elementary school teachers.
At its best, the chick-lit template works like "The Aristocrats": It's the familiar skeleton on which any number of riffs on modern womanhood can hang, allowing a breadth of narrative possibility. There is teen chick lit and lesbian chick lit. Weiner's novels are about overweight heroines. Alisa Valdés-Rodríguez, author of the bestselling "The Dirty Girls Social Club," has said that she "couldn't find in pop culture anywhere people like me and my Latina friends who went to university." Thanks to chick lit, Valdés-Rodríguez could tell the stories she hadn't been able to unearth as a reader. Last year, Red Dress Ink, the division of Harlequin devoted to chick-lit paperbacks, published "Flyover States" by Grace Grant and P.J. MacAllister, about two grad students, one black, one white, at a Midwestern University. "Flyover" is mostly about romantic imbroglios, but it's also about race and alienation; it refers less to Lizzie Grubman than it does to Lacan and Zizek. That doesn't make it a great book; but it does make it an interesting one. Recently published is Tara McCarthy's "Love Will Tear Us Apart," a chick-lit novel about conjoined twins named Flora and Fauna. Seriously.
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