Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit

Caroline J. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415956628
• eBook ISBN: 9781135910570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit focuses on the literary phenomenon popularly known as chick lit, and the way in which this genre interfaces with magazines, self-help books, romantic comedies, and domestic-advice publications. This recent trend in women's popular fiction, which began in 1996 with the publication of British author Helen Fielding's novel Bridget Jones's Diary, uses first person narration to chronicle the romantic tribulations of its young, single, white, heterosexual, urban heroines. Critics of the genre have failed to fully appreciate chick lit's complicated representations of women as both readers and consumers. In this study, Smith argues that chick lit questions the "consume and achieve promise" offered by advice manuals marketed toward women, subverting the consumer industry to which it is so closely linked and challenging cultural expectations of women as consumers, readers, and writers, and of popular fiction itself.

Chapter One
Introduction

Who needs a book of etiquette? Everyone does.

—Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette:
A Guide to Gracious Living (1952)

In British author Helen Fielding’s 1996 popular novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, the author describes the primping and prepping that her heroine undergoes before her first date with her boss Daniel Cleaver. Bridget reflects:

Ugh. Completely exhausted. Surely it is not normal to be revising for a date as if it were a job interview? . . . Since leaving work I have nearly slipped a disc, wheezing through a step aerobics class, scratched my naked body for seven minutes with a stiff brush; cleaned the flat; filled the fridge; plucked my eyebrows, skimmed the papers and the Ultimate Sex Guide, put the washing in and waxed my own legs, since it was too late to book an appointment. Ended up kneeling on a towel trying to pull off a wax strip firmly stuck to the back of my calf while watching Newsnight in an effort to drum up some interesting opinions about things. My back hurts, my head aches, and my legs are bright red and covered in lumps of wax. (59)¹

Though in the paragraph that follows Bridget acknowledges “Daniel should like me just as I am,” she also notes, “I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture . . . traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices” (59). Bridget’s observation, along with her pre-date actions, reveals the pervasive hold that women’s magazines have upon her life. As a “child of Cosmopolitan culture,” Bridget subscribes to advice that encourages women to perfect their bodies through such beauty regimens as exercise, exfoliation, and waxing. Only after perfecting her body according to Cosmopolitan magazine standards will she be acceptable for her date.

Bridget’s remarks in this passage reveal just how heavily she relies on the advice of others. Not only does she consult Cosmopolitan, but she also reads The Ultimate Sex Guide as well as the papers and watches Newsnight, hoping to glean information that will perfect both her body and mind. Bridget cannot seem to believe that Daniel will like her just as she is because she consistently consults texts that tell her he cannot. Being “a child of Cosmopolitan culture,” then, becomes metaphoric for the hold that consumer culture mediums from magazines to self-help books have upon Bridget’s life. Bridget struggles to determine what advice she should follow and what advice she should disregard, and subsequently, a central theme of Bridget Jones’s Diary becomes Bridget’s (in)ability to navigate these controlling texts. In this passage and throughout her novel, Fielding creates a complicated and contested representation of the reader/text relationship and comments, ironically, on both women characters and readers as consumers.

Bridget Jones’s Diary is just one of many texts from the recent literary phenomenon popularly known as chick lit which dialogues with consumer culture mediums, particularly women’s advice manuals.² Loosely defined, chick lit, which arguably began with Fielding’s text, consists of heroine-centered narratives that focus on the trials and tribulations of their individual protagonists.³ At its onset, the genre was narrowly defined in that the protagonists depicted in these texts were young, single, white, heterosexual, British and American women in their late twenties and early thirties, living in metropolitan areas. Very often, these protagonists not only mirror the authors of these texts, but they also reflect the demographic of their reading audience, connecting the texts directly to their readers. Additionally, chick lit seeks to unite readers across genre lines, by both grounding themselves in nineteenth-century, heroine-centered literature and by dialoguing with various twenty-first century consumer culture mediums, particularly women’s advice manuals. For these reasons, among others, the genre, as Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young note in the introduction to their collection of essays, Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, has experienced “amazing commercial success. [It] has been called a ‘commercial tsunami’ ” (2).⁴ They continue, referencing Heather Cabot’s 2003 article for abcnews.com entitled “Chick Lit: Genre Aimed at Women Is Fueling Publishing Industry” which indicated that “In 2002, for instance, chick-lit books earned publishers more than $71 million” (2). Largely, because of this commercial viability, the demographic for chick lit has grown; it now chronicles the lives of women of varying ages, races, and nationalities.⁵ And, not only has the demographic expanded, but also chick lit texts have been adapted for television, the film industry, and the World Wide Web. For instance, Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City was adapted for television; running on HBO from 1998–2004, and in America, it is currently re-running on the CW network. Helen Fielding’s novel was released as a feature film of the same title in 2001. And, Sherrie Krantz’s The Autobiography of Vivian Livingston (2002) began as a website, Vivianlives.com.

Despite this immense popularity with readers, however, chick lit texts have been heavily criticized by reviewers of the individual novels and literary critics alike. In her review of Bridget Jones’s Diary for the New York Times entitled “Dear Diary: Get Real,” Alex Kuczynski declares, “Bridget is such a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness, that her foolishness cannot be excused” (6) while Scarlett Thomas wrote in the Independent, “Chick lit is not just bad for the reader—it is bad for the author too.” In the most highly publicized criticism of the genre, author Doris Lessing echoed Beryl Bainbridge’s sentiments and pronounced chick lit “ ’instantly forgettable’ ” on the BBC Radio 4’s Today program which aired on August 23, 2001 (“Bainbridge denounces chick-lit as froth”). Bainbridge, the six-time, Booker Prize shortlist recipient, declared that the genre represents “a froth sort of thing,” and she asked, “ ’What is the point in writing a whole novel about it? . . . As people spend so little time reading, it is a pity they perhaps can’t read something a bit deeper, a bit more profound, something with a bit of bite to it’ ” (“Bainbridge denounces chick-lit as ‘froth’ ”). Three-time, Booker Prize shortlist recipient Doris Lessing concurred, “It’s a pity that so many young women are writing like that. I wonder if they are just writing like this because they think they are going to get published . . . It would be better, perhaps, if they wrote books about their lives as they really saw them and not these helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their weight and so on’ ” (“Bainbridge denounces chick-lit as ‘froth’ ”).

Bainbridge and Lessing’s conversation spurred subsequent, sensational media headlines that explored the state of contemporary women’s popular fiction. The Times asked, “Be Honest With Me, Do My Literary Pretensions Look Big in This?” while the Guardian announced “Real Lives: We Know the Difference Between Foie Grass and Hula Hoops, Beryl, but Sometimes We Just Want Hula Hoops.”⁶ The Sunday Telegraph decried, “No Wonder Beryl’s Cross. Bainbridge, et al. Wanted Boadiceas. Instead They’ve Got Posh Spice.”⁷ Media critics and chick lit authors, in turn, rushed to the genre’s defense. Jenny Colgan, author of such chick lit novels as Amanda’s Wedding (1999) and West End Girls (2006), responded, criticizing Bainbridge for her comments which imply “that . . . young women are too: ditzy/fizzy/stupid/ drunken/man-crazed to a) write books and b) read them” (“Real Lives: We Know the Difference Between Foie Gras and Hula Hoops, Beryl, but Sometimes We Just Want Hula Hoops”). Author Matt Thorne agreed, “ ’People who are dismissive of chick lit are misogynistic and elitist . . . Chick lit is a perfectly acceptable genre, no different from ‘literary fiction.’ The best writers in the genre are producing some of the best writing around today’ ” (qt. in Thomas).

Though this critical discussion helped to bring chick lit to the forefront of public consciousness, the debate was reductive in so far as it preoccupied itself with what Jean Radford, editor of The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, deems “the [critics’] same obsessive concern with the problem of value” (7). In the past, critics have been reluctant to take popular fiction seriously, and, as Radford and other feminist critics have concurred, all too often literary critics are quick to label women’s fiction as low art, a term which, by default, often denies any thoughtful consideration of that art. Deemed “ ’feeble and tiresome’ ” by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1852 (Massie and Francassini), “silly” by George Eliot in 1856 (Eliot), “ ’froth’ ” by Beryl Bainbridge in 2001 (“Bainbridge denounces chick-lit as ‘froth’ ”), and “ ’garbage’ ” (Weinberg) by a random man that writer Anna Weinberg encounters on a train out of New York City in 2003, women’s novels have been disparaged throughout the centuries.⁸ Chick lit, then, becomes an easy target for the critics’ derision, relegated to both subordinated spaces—the popular and the female.

As a result, chick lit, like the sentimental novels of the nineteenth century and the paperback romance novels of the 1980s, has not been a genre that literary critics have immediately embraced. While the mainstream media has been quick to take up the subject of these young, single, working women, the academic community has been slower to respond.⁹ Of late, there has been increased scholarly interest, including articles such as Kelly A. Marsh’s “Contextualizing Bridget Jones” from College Literature and Jessica Lyn Van Slooten’s “A Truth Universally (Un)Acknowledged: Ally McBeal, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the Conflict Between Romantic Love and Feminism” from Elwood Watson’s collection of critical essays, Searching the Soul of Ally McBeal. Additionally, Imelda Whelehan who wrote Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide has also produced an article entitled, “Sex and the Single Girl: Helen Fielding, Erica Jong and Helen Gurley Brown” and has written The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City, which chronicles the history of women’s popular fiction, focusing specifically on, and making connections between, the fiction of the 1960s and 1970s and the chick lit boom of today. Chick lit has also been the topic of several graduate theses in England, America, and Hong Kong, and it is finding a place in the undergraduate classroom as well.¹⁰ In an article entitled “Chick Lit 101” for the Fall 2006 edition of NWSAction, Brenda Bethman notes that “both Harvard and Tania Modleski (at the University of Southern California) are offering courses that at least partially engage with chick lit, indication that the study of the genre is gaining more respectability” (12). Perhaps the most comprehensive study of the genre comes with the publication of Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young’s collection of essays, Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, which contains fourteen essays on chick lit texts such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series, and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (1996). The collection covers such common chick lit themes as eating, shopping, and female sexuality, and several of its essays engage with more recent chick lit sub-genres such as mommy lit and chick lit for teenagers.

Still, there has not been a single, comprehensive study of the genre to date, and, more specifically, one which examines the nuanced way that chick lit engages with consumer culture mediums, particularly women’s advice manuals, such as women’s magazines, self-help books, romantic comedies, and/or domestic-advice manuals, despite the fact that the genre references and responds to these manuals in varied ways.¹¹ In the passage above from Bridget Jones’s Diary, we see how Bridget continually compares herself to the ideal offered by women’s magazines while Melissa Bank’s Jane Rosenal (The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, 1999) reads a dating, self-help book in the hopes of finding a man. Carol Wolper’s narrator from The Cigarette Girl (1999), a screenwriter of action films, puzzles over the fact that her life does not follow the simple plotline of a romantic comedy. And, Helen Bradshaw, of Anna Maxted’s Getting Over It (2000), consults home decorating magazines and catalogues in an attempt to construct the ideal home for herself. These consumer culture mediums, however, are more than just present in the text. Rather, these mediums heavily influence the protagonists of these texts, dictating to them expected feminine behaviors and ideals that they should attempt to achieve. In many of these novels, chick lit writers establish the behavioral guideline or standard for their protagonists to follow by including references to the explicit advice offered by women’s magazines, self-help books, and domestic-advice manuals and the more implicit advice for women conveyed through romantic comedies. In doing so, chick lit authors present complex representations of young, single women as both readers and consumers.

Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit demonstrates how these texts question the “consume and achieve” promise offered by these women’s advice manuals and in doing so challenge the consumer industry to which they are closely linked. Through their narrative structure and their depictions of discerning female readers and consumers, chick lit authors create fictionalized instructional guides that problematize the ideologies offered by the advice manuals their characters read. Chick lit authors, then, respond in varied ways to the manuals they reference, and in doing so, complicate the readers’ expectations about female consumption, women readers, women’s writing, and popular fiction. More specifically, Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit examines chick lit texts from the genre’s early period, beginning with an analysis of Helen Fielding’s novel (1996) and concluding with an examination of Sherrie Krantz’s The Autobiography of Vivian Livingston (2002), pairing, in each chapter, these chick lit texts with the women’s advice literature to which they respond.

Chick lit, like other literary movements, is a historically situated genre. In their introduction, Ferriss and Young cite Heather Cabot’s 2003 article “Chick Lit: Genre Aimed at Young Women Is Fueling Publishing Industry” for abcnews.com. In the article, Cabot quotes Jennifer Weiner, author of chick lit texts such as Good in Bed (2001) and In Her Shoes (2002). Weiner comments that there is “ ‘an authenticity frequently missing from women’s fiction of the past . . . I think that for a long time, what women were getting were sort of the Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz books—sex and shopping, glitz and glamour, heroines that were fun to read about, but just felt nothing like where you were in your life’ ” (qt. in Ferriss and Young 4). Chick lit author Laura Zigman agrees that this need was historically situated as women writers and readers of the late 1990s were looking to write and read texts that validated women’s experiences:

“In my heartbroken, urban, single, postfeminist mood I felt like there was a lot going on with women that no one was really talking about . . . We had a lot of freedom and a lot of choices, but there was a price. People were lonely . . . But you would pick up these books and go, Okay, I am not mad, I am not the only loser in the world who feels lonely.” (Weinberg)

This feeling of disconnect prompted women writers like Weiner and Zig-man to begin writing chick lit narratives, which they felt more directly connected to their own experiences. The author bios at the back of chick lit texts serve as evidence of this fact; they emphasize the similarities between the authors, their characters, and their readers. Bank highlights her single status in her author biography, noting that she “lives in New York City with her Labrador retriever, Maybelline,” while Sherrie Krantz emphasizes her own career achievements, a major focus of her protagonist’s quest. Helen Fielding’s author photograph for the hardcover, 1998 British edition of Bridget Jones’s Diary even goes so far as to mimic the cover design.¹² Both Bridget Jones, on the cover of the novel, and Fielding, on the back of the inside flap, are photographed in profile, smoking cigarettes.

In turn, book publishers responded to this need; as Sarah Bernard explains in “Success and the Single Girl,” they began publishing texts with protagonists whose experiences mirrored those of their real-life readers. Bernard quotes Morgan Entrekin, a Gr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: One Simple Step to Becoming a V.G. Consumer: Read Women’s Magazines
• Chapter Three: The Girls’ Guide to Breaking the Rules
• Chapter Four: Down With Marriage: The Search for Romantic Alternatives
• Chapter Five: Living the Life of a Domestic Goddess: “It’s a Good Thing”
• Chapter Six: Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography