The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit

Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation

Heike Missler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317235316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Chick lit is the marketing label attributed to a surge of books published in the wake of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997). Branded by their pink or pastel-coloured book covers, chick-lit novels have been a highly successful and ubiquitous product of women's popular culture since the late 1990s.

This study traces the evolution of chick lit not only as a genre of popular fiction, but as a cultural phenomenon. It complicates the genealogy of the texts by situating them firmly in the context of age-old debates about female literary creation, and by highlighting the dynamics of the popular-fiction market. Offering a convincing dissection of the formula which lies at the heart of chick lit, as well as in-depth analyses of a number of chick-lit titles ranging from classic to more recent and edgier texts, this book yields new insights into a relatively young field of academic study. Its close readings provide astute assessments of chick lit's notoriously skewed representational politics, especially with regard to sexuality and ethnicity, which feed into current discussions about postfeminism. Moreover, the study makes a unique contribution to the scholarly debate of chick lit by including an analysis of the (online) fan communities the genre has fostered.

The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit weaves a sound methodological network, drawing on reader-response criticism; feminist, gender, and queer theory; affect studies; and whiteness studies. This book is an accessible and engaging study for anyone interested in postfeminism and popular culture.

Part I
Contexts

1 That’s me! - Enter Everywoman

The reading of works of fiction is one of the most pernicious habits to which a young lady can become devoted. When the habit once thoroughly fixed, it becomes as inveterate as the use of liquor or opium. The novel-devotee is as much a slave as the opium-eater or the inebriate. The reading of fictitious literature destroys the taste for sober, wholesome reading and imparts an unhealthy stimulus to the mind the effect of which is in the highest degree damaging.

—(Ladies Guide, Kellog, J.H., W.D. Conduit Co., Des Moines, USA, 1882, qtd. in Fiske 93)

On 28^th May, 2013, it was revealed that Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, was working on a third Bridget novel to be released in October of the same year. The sequel had been long awaited by its fans, even if, at the end of The Edge of Reason, it had seemed as though Bridget’s adventures in life and love had found a happy ending, with her happily reunited with Mark Darcy. Reactions were mixed upon the release of the news; the debates in online forums and national newspapers showed that Bridget’s return, albeit anticipated, still sparked controversy more than fifteen years after her appearance in the first publication. Critics and fans alike wondered if Bridget was ready for the new millennium. Would she still be dieting? Would she have changed? Only one thing was ensured by the title the novel - she would still be “mad about the boy”. For many, the name Bridget Jones is firmly linked to the 1990s. ln 2007, Guardian readers voted Bridget Jones’s Diary “one of the 10 novels that best defined the twentieth century”, notably, the novel that best represented the nineties (cf. Groskop). Based on Fielding’s semi-autobiographical column about the life of a thirty-something single woman in London, Bridget soon became the world’s most famous singleton. Not only were both Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) huge publishing successes - according to the Guardian the books sold 15 million copies in 40 countries spawning equally popular film adaptations (cf. Groskop) - Bridget Jones became an icon of a certain kind of femininity, “a representative of a zeitgeist” (Gill 227) - in short, a cultural reference.

One very convincing explanation for Bridget’s reverberations in the English-speaking world as well as internationally is the “that’s me” - phenomenon. Many readers felt that their experiences were reflected by Bridget’s trials and tribulations and her way of dealing with them. Bridget Jones is neither a superwoman nor a role model; she is in fact a rather ordinary protagonist - an Everywoman. The novels are full of astute and critical observations about womanhood in the nineties, especially about female economic independence: “We women are only vulnerable because we are a pioneer generation, daring to refuse compromise in love and relying on our own economic power”, Bridget states (18). This is echoed by feminist scholar Angela McRobbie more than ten years later. In The Aftermath of Feminism (2009), McRobbie also stresses that there has been a clear shift in expectations and configurations of contemporary femininity: “From being assumed to be headed towards marriage, motherhood and limited economic participation, the girl is now endowed with economic capacity” (55). Bridget and her friends embody this shift and illustrate that it has added pressure, if anything, and not ousted it, as they are now expected to succeed both in love and in their professional lives. She and her friends are young urban professionals rather than hapless daughters fleeing from paternal authority into the arms of their next provider, as hackneyed romantic clichés would have it. Still, their economic independence is usually greater and easier to achieve than their emotional independence, in that a life without a man possibly entails ostracism, and certainly unhappiness. In this respect, Fielding’s characters do not stray far from the ones in the novel that had inspired her - Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice (1813). Nevertheless, Bridget Jones’s emotional dependence on men is an enlightened one. She is fully aware that her ideas about relationships, and how to successfully enter into one, are the result of years of consuming popular media which constructs women as mythical creatures, who can ‘have it all’, men as shy about any committment and needing to be coaxed into stable relationships, and female beauty as a constant process of disciplining oneself. Bridget Jones’s Diary is full of comments which expose these ideals such as the following on the female body:

Being a woman is worse than being a farmer - there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done; legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged and stomach muscles exercised. The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature […] (27)

In short, Bridget Jones’s Diary portrays womanhood and gender relations in many contradictory facets, and that is why Bridget Jones and her support team of Sharon, Jude, and Tom have clearly struck a chord with readers. Assisted by a marketing campaign, the text’s cultural outreach became a commercial one as well. Novels that imitated Fielding’s signature style of humour - the diary format or at least the first-person narration and the inevitable single woman character - were sold based on cover blurbs that promised the readers ‘Bridget Jones-style’ entertainment. The publishing industry thus encouraged and promoted the birth of a lucrative genre. Fielding had provided a pattern,¹ but publishing houses turned it into a bestselling formula which was soon marketed as a genre in its own right due to its commercial viability. The question remains if Bridget still reflects contemporary womanhood almost twenty years later, and if we ask this question about the Bridget Jones trilogy, we should also ask it about the entire genre of chick lit, of which it still is one of the figureheads.

Fielding announced in an interview that the novel would be about a whole new phase in Bridget’s life, that Bridget had grown up and entered the age of social networking, but she also reassured readers that Bridget would be “trying a bit harder, and [be] a bit more successful, but she’s never really going to change” (McDonagh n.pag.). Journalist Melanie McDonagh noted with relief that “[a] successful, self-confident Bridget would miss the entire point of her” (ibid). For McDonagh, the point about Bridget is that she embodies “feminine anxieties and defuse[s] them by making them funny” (ibid). Even Angela McRobbie, who interprets the film version of Bridget Jones’s Diary as postfeminism in a nutshell, i.e. as a representative of a “new gender regime”, which takes feminism into account only to dismiss it as outdated or no longer necessary (cf. Aftermath 11), acknowledges that the text “speaks […] to female desire, and in a wholly commercialised way, to the desire for some kind of gender justice, or fairness, in the world of sex and relationships” (ibid 22). This remark about Bridget Jones seeking “gender justice”, and the question asked by McDonagh’s article whether Bridget Jones “still speaks for women as we are” (n.pag.) also addresses the longevity and the cultural clout of the chick-lit genre. In fact, we could also ask: Have gender relations changed so tremendously in the past fifteen to twenty years that Bridget Jones’s quest is outdated in the second decade of the twenty-first century?

I contend that it is not so. Bridget Jones’s adventures, as already mentioned above, did not spark a publishing phenomenon and trigger a flood of publications in the same vein only for entertainment reasons. Many have argued that chick lit is not just one more genre of popular literature, but indeed a cultural phenomenon. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, who have put together the first two collections of scholarly essays dedicated solely to chick lit (2006) and chick flicks (2007), convincingly put forth the term “chick culture” to address the variety of cultural texts that give proof of “a new visibility of women in popular culture”, not just in the UK, the US and the rest of the English-speaking countries, but worldwide (Chick Flicks 2). Bridget Jones may not be wholly responsible for “the contemporary media’s heightened address to women” (Ashby qtd. in Chick Flicks 2) but she has certainly contributed substantially to a new representation of women in the media - for better or worse. To paraphrase Kristyn Gorton: Bridget Jones, Carrie Bradshaw, Ally McBeal, and other prominent feminists of the nineties “marked something of a cultural shift that has influenced our collective conscience” (23) and they and their successors in the twenty-first century continue to do so.

Certainly, Bridget returned after chick lit had been repeatedly pronounced dead, or at least, figuratively speaking, suffering from a “massive hangover”, with sinking sales numbers and chick-lit imprints shut down after only a few business years (Coburn n.pag.). “We’ve pretty much stopped publishing chick lit”, said an editor at the Kensington publishing corporation in a 2012 interview with chick-lit author Jennifer Coburn (n.pag.). Bridget Jones thus re-entered the scene at a critical moment for the very genre Fielding’s books had unwittingly helped to shape. It is questionable whether her return can resuscitate publishers’ interest in the genre, but it is unquestionable that her fans are eager to welcome her back, be it under the label of chick lit or under a new one. In fact, many readers and authors would appreciate it if Bridget, standing in for her many fictional sisters, could shed the label imposed on her by both the publishers and the press. It is important to understand that the term is highly contested, and that definitions of it abound. The initial pillars of the genre, i.e. that the texts are written by, for, and about women, have all been challenged in the course of the genre’s development from the mid-nineties to today. Though these very simple characteristics are still true for a large part of the texts that make up the genre, the term has become much more inclusive. Chick lit can indeed be written and enjoyed by men too, and some of the novels allow equal space for the perspective of the hero, as for that of the heroine.² Moreover, the term can be applied to non-fiction books as well, e.g. Under the Duvet (2001) and Saved by Cake (2012) by Marian Keyes, Around the World in 80 Dates (2005) by Jennifer Cox, or Confessions of a Fashionista by Angela Clarke (2013). To put these changes into perspective, it makes sense to compare chick lit to a related term - chick flicks. Oxford Dictionaries Online defines chick flick as an informal and often derogatory term for “a film which appeals to young women” (n.pag). Films that “appeal to women”, clearly, do not necessarily have to be directed by, produced for, or talk about women, nor do they have to be recent productions. In Samantha Cooks’ Rough Guide to Chick Flicks (2006), Gone with the Wind (1939) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) make the top ten list of essential chick flicks along with Thelma and Louise (1991) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). Similarly, a wide variety of texts from all ages, all authors, and covering all kinds of topics can be classified as chick lit today - Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is often quoted as an example, and so are the novels of Nicholas Sparks or David Nicholls. The two predominant tendencies today remove the term chick lit from its initial narrow framework and use it either as quasi-synonymous to the term women’s fiction, which in its essentialism is little better than chick lit, or give it a very personal definition, which depends entirely on the reader and what she/he considers chick lit. Still, the novels that are mostly associated with the term by the general public, as opposed to the novels which chick-lit fans would consider part of the chick-lit canon, are those which have been most heavily marketed towards women in the aftermath of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City, evidently restricting those authors’ audiences. Therefore, amongst other reasons, few authors have wholeheartedly embraced the term chick lit; most of them rather tolerate it as they understand that it helps publishers to market their books to their target audience. Chick-lit author Jennifer Weiner, for instance, is ambiguous about the label, as she states in the FAQ section on her website:

It’s a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the chick lit label is sexist, dismissive, and comes with the built-in implication that what you’ve written is a piece of beach-trash fluff with as much heft and heart as a mouthful of pink cotton candy that doesn’t deal with anything other than boys and shoes. On the other hand, I know that the term gives publishers and, more importantly, booksellers and readers, a quick and easy shorthand with which to refer to books that feature smart, funny, struggling, relatable female protagonists. If slapping a lot of pink, a disembodied female torso, naked legs and/or cheesecake on the cover guarantees that my book will get noticed and picked up, that’s about all I can ask for. My readers know what I’m going for, even if the critics sometimes miss the point, or, more likely, ignore the genre entirely, and I’d rather have loyal readers than respectful reviews in all the smart places. (“FAQs” n.pag.)

The term “chick lit”, even though it was first used in print rather jokingly as a title for a collection of postfeminist short stories edited by Chris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell, very quickly acquired a dismissive and belittling connotation, instead of an empowering one, due to the pernicious marketing of the books. As Mazza explained, their decision to use “chick-lit” as a title (in the hyphenated spelling) was highly ironic and meant to challenge common assumptions and double standards about contemporary women’s fiction (in Ferriss and Young, Chick Lit 3). From this ironic use of the term, the term was - ironically, as one cannot resist to point out - turned into a brand name by the publishing industry. In 2002, just two years after Mazza’s and DeShell’s publication, chick-lit bestsellers grossed more than $71million in the US. Initially based on one formula, the genre had quickly become “big business”, as Ferriss and Young drily state (Chick Lit 2).

One of the best-known attempts to restore the empowering connotation and to defend the genre is the notorious collection of short stories edited by Lauren Baratz-Logsted, entitled This Is Chick-Lit (2006). It was “born out of anger” (Baratz-Logsted 1), in response to the derision directed against writers of chick lit by, amongst others, Elizabeth Merrick and her collection of short stories This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers (published earlier in 2006). In Baratz-Logsted’s collection, each short story is fronted by a quote from the author describing how she feels about the term. To give just three samples of the attitudes that writers in this chick-lit edition display towards the categorisation of their writing as chick lit: Harley Jane Kozak states: “Chick-lit, for me, is a twenty-first century marketing term that describes a genre that has been around for eons” (17). Heather Swain comments: “Labels in literature exist so publishers can market books. Anyone who believes in her own label too stridently is a victim of that marketing” (143). Finally, Karin Gillespie points out: “I loved chick-lit before chick-lit was even a genre” (187). About half of the eighteen contributors stress that for them the label is nothing but a marketing device.³ The fact that chick-lit writers themselves point out that the labelling of their work was partly imposed upon them as a selling strategy and that they do not identify with it is itself a comment on the validity of this moniker. Additionally, Baratz-Logsted’s collection is a case in point for the heterogeneity of chick lit, as it includes paranormal stories alongside detective stories, light-hearted texts but also some that deal with the hardships of motherhood, with adultery, or with death. Consequently, if chick lit, according to these authors and others, has never been anything else but the invention of a few marketing brains to spur sales, then the proclamation of its death may signal a positive turn in the history of women’s writing. If chick lit’s death signifies that the publishing sector is going to drop a label that is widely perceived as derogatory and patronizing by men and women alike, this could be seen as a step towards a more enlightened genre labelling in the book market.

Instead of discussing the shape of things to come, however, this chapter seeks to trace how chick lit has developed under the influence of the publishing sector and its loyal readers from a rather reductive character formula and plot pattern to a genre in its own right, while at the same time discussing the validity of the parameters of chick lit as a genre. I will explain why chick lit can be seen as a genre that never was, and why it makes sense to think of it as a culturally significant moment in the development of women’s fiction, which would have been unthinkable without the growing impact of the internet and the communication, networking and publishing practices related to it, which are more fully discussed in chapter 2. But before I turn to the evolution of the genre after the phenomenal success of Helen Fielding, Sophie Kinsella, Jenny Colgan, Lauren Weisberger, Melissa Banks, Jennifer Weiner, and many others at the turn of the century, I will try to answer the question what chick lit is, where it came from, and how it was received by cultural critics and commentators.

Bridget’s Sisters, Mothers, and Grandmothers - A Genealogy

Bridget Jones’s genealogy is not straighforward and has been contested, but there is a general agreement amongst scholars that she has an American cousin. Just as Helen Fielding had done, American author Candace Bushnell turned her The New York Observer columns “Sex and the City” into a novel in 1997. Even if it does not rely on the classic first-person narrative, Sex and the City deals with the same issues and uses the very same narrative tone as the Bridget Jones books, that is a tone of irony and occasionally satire. The television series based on Bushnell’s text is certainly one of the best known and most commercially successful products of international chick culture. Other critics highlight that Marian Keyes’s first publication Watermelon (1995) also deserves special mention, and Cecilia Konchar-Farr declares the work of African-American author Terry McMillan’s chick-lit novels avant-la-lettre (cf. 203). She posits that even though Bridget Jones’s Di...