this is not chick lit
I'm thinking about chick lit today, because Jennifer Weiner, a true daughter of Philadelphia and best-selling author of In Her Shoes, Goodnight Nobody, and Good in Bed, is slated to attend a lunch held at my workplace, the Kelly Writers House. My former journalism teach, Dick Polman, will be there with bells on, hosting the event (which you should totally RSVP for, by the way.)One of the perks of my job at the House is the name-dropping I can commence with after my commencement. I've dined with Margaret Atwood, played hostess to Adrienne Rich, and as you read before, met MoPo and his wife, the Divine Miss Connie Chung. There's more, but I don't want to sound like a big brag; basically, the House is a modern salon for philosophes, and you are going to meet some Really Cool People there no matter what.
Whenever I shamelessly name-drop among the literary minded, the reactions I get involve widened eyes, a "That's so cool!" and "What are they really like in real life?" I thought it would be the same with Ms. Weiner.
I was wrong.
You see, Ms. Weiner has made a grave mistake in her literary career. Unlike her Iowa MFA degree-d contemporaries, whom write Great American Novels with Grand Historical Themes and Intriguing Post-Modern Characters Whom Have Profound Revelations About the Meaning of Life (tm), Weiner has chosen to write about... Domesticity. Motherhood. Men. Quelle horror!
I can't throw a stone off of Huntsman Hall without hitting a feminist who will gladly tell me how Weiner and her contemporaries (Helen Fielding, of Bridget Jones fame, Plum Sykes, Sophia Kinsella, etc) are ruining us all by publishing "chick lit", or, in layman's terms, "books about plucky yet self-deprecating heroines who find fulfillment in snagging the right man, career, and pair of Manolo Blahniks." Instead of the raised eyebrows and "That's so cool!" I've been getting a lot of "Oh, her" and "Are you kidding?" When I say, "But I think she's great!" I am informed that my IQ had dropped about twenty points.
Seriously, fuck that shit.
I'll say it loud and I'll say it proud: I'm a Jennifer Weiner fan.
This is not to say that I worship at the shrine of all things Weiner (or all things "chick lit", for that matter.) For instance, I found Good in Bed more than a little hackneyed, and there are parts of In Her Shoes that sorely needed an editor's critical pen. I would rather drink bleach than read anything by Sophia Kinsella -- not because it's "chick lit", but because her Shopaholic books "suck ass". I do not mean to decry or downplay real criticism of women's fiction; however, it is the criticism of authors like Weiner merely because they are tackling women's topics" that I find disturbing, to say nothing of the misogynistic tinge of hurling the word "chick lit" as if it were a Devil Wears Prada-scented grenade.
Check out this editorial by a former maven in the publishing industry. While she raises some good points (see: my rant about Kinsella above), she also reveals some striking internalized paradigms of misogyny:
"The genre succeeded exactly because it looked more literary than its embarrassing romance counterpart. You could take Bridget Jones’s Diary on the T and not look like a dateless loser. And while this meant huge sales, it also meant that forever after, serious women’s literature (emphasis, mine) was either overlooked for chick lit, or worse, made to look like chick lit."
HOLD UP. The author cites Weiner as one of the biggest offenders for the federal offense of not writing "serious" women's literature. Last time I checked, Weiner tackles the issues of women's body image, abusive parents, America's prejudice against heavy people, family estrangement, and anxieties about career, motherhood, and modern marriage. I didn't realize these weren't "serious" issues, Ms. Famous Book Publishing Lady. (Interestingly enough, the same feminists who "hate" authors like Weiner are the same ones who will wax endlessly about Our Bodies, Ourselves and sport "Big is Beautiful" bumper stickers on the back of their Honda hybrids). Or could it be that our generation is unconsciously perpetuating the notion that anything having to do with women, the home, body image, and family must not be deemed "serious" enough for advanced literary consumption?
As a student of English literature, it shocks me that works by authors on the stereotypically "male" topics (you know, all that important stuff -- religion and politics and war and The Human Condition) get immediately placed into the canon, with books tackling motherhood and domesticity getting dismissed with the "chick lit" label. This does not mean I think Weiner's writing is Nobel worthy (it isn't), but it is indicative of a greater trend in putting down anything literary that has, pardon my French, a vagina associated with it. Writing about stereotypically "masculine" topics deserves its place in the canon. But so does work about stereotypically "feminine" topics as well.
It's even more troubling to realize that this is nothing new. One of the only female authors I can think of who is a universally required reading staple is Jane Austen. And rightfully so! Yet if you ignore the first novel as we know it (that would be Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe around 1719) the other first novels were about... women. Women's issues. Marriage, courtship, chastity, maternity, propriety. Sound familiar? Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Fanny Burney's Evelina are both funny, sharp novels about women's issues, but you'll rarely see them outside of the college classroom (much less considered serious contenders in the literary canon). Ditto for the Bluestocking authors Anna Seward, Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Carter, and Hannah More. "Hannah who?" you're probably asking. Exactly.
As scholar Nancy Armstrong articulates far more clearly than I can, the rise of the novel, in fact, centers on the rise of female domesticity and a female "separate sphere". The first novels-as-we-know-them were so extensively female-centered, in fact, that novels were seen as something that men shouldn't read, as "lesser". How strange! Could it be that we now feel the need to classify the Big Important Male Topics as literary canon and the Lesser Female Topics "chick lit" because we want to deny the novel's uniquely female roots? It's probably not the whole story, but there's definitely a grain of truth there.
I suppose my point is this: dislike Weiner and her ilk all you want, but don't dislike them because you want to make some big statement about how "cultured" you are for eschewing books about matrimony and mommyhood. All authors, "chick lit" and otherwise, deserve better than that.
Comments
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Elle, Oct 15, 23:57:
Atwood? I envy you.
On the chick lit: I agree wholeheartedly. I watch Sex and the City because I can’t help but love it—but don’t you dare call me Carrie Bradshaw.