Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Most women of the 17th century could not have imagined that one day seduction narratives might sit on their nightstands in place of Bibles. Likewise, our mothers, for whom writing about sex or career was often a necessarily political statement, would not have imagined that books about pink drinks and Prada shoes would one day shoot out of printing plants by the truckload. While there may not be Revolutionary anxiety coded in fictive Jimmy Choo receipts, the material specifics do stand in for larger issues: For the first time in Western history, a population of (privileged, urban) adult women is single by choice; they live alone; they can have sex with whomever they want when they want; they have incomes with which to buy overpriced footwear and stupid cocktails. Sometimes a cosmo is just a cosmo; in chick lit it may be shorthand for an independence and selfishness that is a revolution of its own. Chick lit chronicles exactly what the sensationalist gothics and pious sentimentalists could not: the young female experience of professional, sexual and economic power.
Margaret Atwood has herself claimed to have written the first chick-lit novel, 1969's "The Edible Woman." When pressed by an interviewer about how hers is better than what's out there now, Atwood responded, "Well, some chick-lit books are better than others. I thought Bridget Jones was quite a howl. There's good, bad and mediocre in everything ... So ... if it's about young women we're not supposed to take it seriously?"
It is the fear of not being taken seriously that surely undergirds the urge to blast chick lit. Female critics -- the genre's most frequent, and thus its loudest -- are understandably afraid of having their entire sex tarred with the same "frothy" brush as their chick-lit writing counterparts. When Curtis Sittenfeld wrote this year that calling a book chick lit is akin to calling a woman a slut, she also asked, "Doesn't the term basically bring us all down?" It's the same anxiety that's expressed by Eliot in "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," when she imagines a man's reaction to these books: "When a woman gets some knowledge, see what use she makes of it! ... look at her writings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality; she struts on one page, rolls her eyes on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth."
This fear is valid, especially in a cultural atmosphere in which "women's magazine" is a derogatory term but Esquire routinely wins National Magazine Awards, in which Weisberger and Bushnell merit a combined review but a first novel by a man about a single guy in his 20s looking for love and professional fulfillment gets lauded in a full-cover review on the front of the New York Times Book Review.
But the urge to condemn chick lit is also born of a shame about our own femininity, a desire to distance ourselves not just from bad writing, but from retailed versions of womanhood that might affect the way we are perceived by men and by each other. If chick lit chronicles female desire for sex and companionship, there's nothing dishonest there. We may not all be husband hunting, but would many of us deny that a quest for love is a part of our lives? We may not all be cosmo slurpers, but most of us do enjoy socializing with our friends; many do have ideas about how we'd like to dress if we could afford it; many of us probably even compare our fortunes to those of our contemporaries -- whether or not it's by reading the wedding announcements in the Styles section. Of course we don't want to be reduced to these qualities. But the impulse to reject novels that lay them bare is a form of self-flagellation that suggests that even as we move further into traditionally male spheres, the pressure to pass -- to act like men -- still persists.
So perhaps rather than punishing ourselves for our embarrassing femininity, we should take Jane Austen's advice from "Northanger Abbey." Writing about the many slights against the novel by fellow novelists, she recommends, "Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers."
