Chick Lit Through the Ages

“With their work routinely marketed with frothy cover illustrations and stamped “chick lit,” young, urban female authors struggle with a label that pushes sales as much as it undermines their efforts.” So reads the caption of Leah McLaren’s self-reflexive article about this new genre in June’s issue of Fashion magazine.



But is the genre of “chick lit” really new? Hasn’t “chick lit” existed since the inception of the novel, just in a slightly different form? (But, perhaps, marketed in a slightly different way?) And is this why I contained the novel moniker in non-committal quotation marks so many times in the previous 50 or so words?

A brief history of the novel: when humans began writing down their stories on parchment instead of cave walls, they often did so in the form of ballads, sermons, poetry and plays – forms to which illiterate access was easy. So with the move away from the authority of the Church and rise of the middle class around 1700, there came increasing literacy amongst this class and thus the rise of the novel. This is the argument of Ian Watt’s Triple Rise Thesis, which has been widely criticized for its assumptions, but will serve my simple purpose here.

Mary Shelley was one of the first female authors to write in the form of the novel; however, it was Jane Austen, who included several central female characters and their quotidian happenings in her novels of manners, who really started the “chick lit” genre. Austen’s novels include all the romance, negotiations of society and character growth that we see in many of the popular “chick lit” novels today.

Just as Catherine “greatly preferred cricket…to dolls” in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and the title character in Emma enjoys such unladylike pursuits as archery, our modern day heroines like Bridget Jones do not fit the romantic feminine stereotype. We enjoy reading about slightly flawed characters (flaws that we may see in ourselves) who eventually stumble through the imperfections of life to prevail in the end (usually by landing a Marc Darcy or a Mr. Knightley). The reading is emotionally light, lacking in any heavy issues.

Compare this to the rise of the romance genre, with flowing hair and chiseled pecs on the pink and white covers, and the elaborately described scenes of love and loss on the pages inside. These novels work on ideas of perfect and flawless love. Their sole audience is women and their sole purpose is that of escape, with little critical analysis or thought needed.

So perhaps this is where “chick lit” veers from the more serious literature written by women. Virginia Woolf’s novels deal with homosexuality and suicide, Sylvia Plath’s deal with mental illness: their novels do include the female experience of traditional romantic relationships, but it is never the central theme. Lives tend to be less than ideal, the subject matter focussing on struggles that may not be solved in the end.

The same can be said of many contemporary (Canadian) authors – Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Sylvia Fraser, Ann-Marie MacDonald – these authors write from the perspective of “other”: marginalized members of society trying to negotiate their place within it. These stories are denser, pithier dissections of our so-called lives. They make us take a look at our imperfect existence and draw connections to ourselves.

Bridget Jones may have marked the shift from romance to “chick lit”: Helen Fielding presented us with a flawed character in an essentially romantically structured novel. She included elements of “perfect love’ from the romance genre with the idea of imperfect characters from weightier tomes. It is, perhaps, not as dark a reality as authors such as Atwood and Plath might illustrate, but still moves away from the idea of ideal, true love that follows a fated, effortless path.

Like Bridget Jones, the new, successful spring of pink and teal novels, set out pleasingly on tables in bookstores, combine the endeavour for perfection with the reality of “chick” life. McLaren may feel that the label undermines her efforts as a serious novelist (she has recently written The Continuity Girl, which I haven't read), but is she really writing about serious subjects?

Good literature, regardless of the author's gender, is engaging, thought-provoking and enduring. And these adjectives can be applied to any book, regardless of the gravity of the subject matter. Sometimes, all you need is to read about how Catherine lands Mr. Knightley. I'm sure Jane Austen would agree.