Chick lit: A postfeminist fairy tale

10/18/13 Working Papers on the Web: Chick Lit, Isbister

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Chick Lit: A Postfeminist Fairy Tale.

Georgina C. Isbister

University of Sydney

Introduction

This article argues that the popular fiction genre of chick lit can be illuminated by adiscussion of the redeployment of fairy tale tropes in a ‘popular postfeminist’ context.Utilizing many conventions of romantic fairy tales, chick lit focuses on protagonists’relationships and their quest for the romantic ideal of ‘true love’. Yet it also departsfrom these narratives in its ‘postfeminist’ twist on the fairy tale, filtering the central fairytale narrative through a lens dramatically shaped by the influence of feminism on latetwentieth-century popular culture. The fairy tale metamorphosis in chick lit neverthelesscontinues to be the metamorphosis of the self on which so many fairytales magicallydepended. In the chick lit example, the fairy tale conventions of quest andtransformation are incorporated in terms that I want to associate with ‘popularpostfeminism’. In unpacking what I will term the ‘postfeminist fairy tale’, this essay willfocus on a particular idealisation of the ‘true self’—a woman capable of ‘having it all’(education, career, economic independence, love and family).

I will argue here that, as feminist writers revised the fairy tale genre, creating a sub-genre of feminist fairy tales, popular incorporation of some feminist ideas intomainstream culture has produced new versions of the fairytale, some of which we cansee in chick lit. Although the genre of chick lit often seems quite far from the feministreconfiguration of fairytales in writers like Angela Carter, it similarly reinforces linksbetween fairy tales and women’s experience. The postfeminist fairy tale is a sub-genreof fairy tales that I see manifesting particularly within the genre of chick lit and itssubsequent film and television adaptations, in texts such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, TheDevil Wears Prada, Sex and The City and Lipstick Jungle. This sub-genre incorporatesand reconfigures both traditional and feminist fairy tale discourses in popular culture.This postfeminist fairy tale manifests in some influential ways the impact of feminism inpopular culture, and moreover operates as a navigational tool for readers and writersexploring ‘popular postfeminist’ expressions of contemporary women’s experience.

In exploring these claims across a range of contemporary and historical feministscholarship, this article is divided into three main sections. The first section considerspostfeminism in the academy and then in mainstream media cultures. Drawing onrecent work by Rosalind Gill (2007) on postfeminism as a ‘sensibility’, I claim that thepostfeminist fairy tale constitutes a way of bringing popular postfeminism to theforeground in fiction. The postfeminist fairy tale is both a new intervention in the fairytale genre and continuous with fairytales as a genre that is constantly being reinvented,and the second section gives an overview of fairy tales’ historical transformations andthe associations with women’s experience which were additionally reinforced by laterfeminist re-framings of the genre. Indeed, fairy tales manifest and reflect historical andcultural change and, through their connection to women, can be important sites for theinvestigation of women’s experience. Finally, by analyzing chick lit, and focusing



particularly on a novel which for many is the archetypal chick lit text signalling theemergence of the genre, Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), I will explore how theconjunction of popular postfeminism and fairy tale narratives works in chick lit.Focusing on Bridget Jones’ attempts at postfeminist transformation, particularly in hercareer and relationships, I aim to exemplify how, in chick lit, the discourses we mightunderstand as ‘popular postfeminism’ have taken up and deployed fairy tale narrativesand thus taken up a place in popular cultural renegotiation of idealised womanhood.Centrally, I argue that the postfeminist fairy tale offers women readers, as well astheorists, a tool for navigating the field of contemporary debates concerning women’srelationship to heteronormative romance.

Postfeminist Reflections

The term postfeminism has generated much debate amongst feminist scholarsconcerning its implications for the current state and future of feminism (Brooks, 1997;Gill, 2007; McRobbie 2007; Tasker & Negra, 2007). Gill (2007) suggests there arethree dominant accounts of postfeminism within the academy: an epistemological orpolitical stance in light of feminist incorporations of ‘difference’, an historical shiftwithin feminism directed by a movement away from Second Wave feminist ideologies,and a backlash against feminism (Gill, 2007:148). Ann Brooks (1997:1) argues thatpostfeminism is ‘an expression of a stage in the constant evolutionary movement offeminism’ that explores the intersections of multiple postmodern, post-structuralist andpost-colonial feminist discourses which critique earlier ‘second wave’ feministmovements. Brooks and Angela McRobbie (2007) both argue for a complication ofpostfeminist discourses. They claim that postfeminism reflects the institutionalization offeminism in the academy and thus provides a space for a reflexive feminist discoursethat takes into account the current situation of feminism within this academic context.McRobbie (2007:27) argues that for feminism to be ‘taken into account’ it must beunderstood as already having passed. In this way, McRobbie and Brooks understandthe ‘posting’ of feminism as having the potential to re-engage feminist discussionsrather than shutting them down.

Other theorists and critics have framed postfeminism as a historical shift, signallinggenerational movements away from second wave feminist ideologies to newlyindividualist ideals of freedom and choice, in what has also been called the Third WaveFeminist Agenda (Heywood & Drake, 1997). Ideas of professional success andpersonal happiness, and ultimately an ideal of ‘having it all’ were hallmarks of thishistorical shift (Dow, 1996; Hollows, 2000; Moseley & Read, 2002). Finally, SusanFaludi (1992) is one of the influential critics who see postfeminism as a backlashagainst feminism and its fight for equal rights, represented as having apparently onlymade women miserable (Hollows, 2000:190). In Backlash: The Undeclared WarAgainst Women, Faludi claims that feminism was no longer seen or embraced bywomen as relevant to their lives (Siegel, 1997:75).

What postfeminism most clearly names is debate concerning feminism’s relevance andfuture role in women’s lives. Whilst these analytical framings continue to develop in thefeminist academy, in a variety of popular, media and consumer cultures postfeminismhas taken further manifestations. Gill sees postfeminism as a ‘sensibility’ thatcharacterizes multiple media products. She claims:

postfeminist media culture should be our critical object—rather than ananalytic perspective. This approach does not require a static notion of onesingle authentic feminism as a comparison point, but instead is informed bypostmodernist and constructionist perspectives and seeks to examine whatis distinctive about contemporary articulations of gender in the media (Gill,



2007:148).

This ‘postfeminist media culture’—or popular postfeminism, as I will call it—is distinctfrom academic feminism in countering what it positions as traditional (second wave)feminism with an apparently uncomplicated ideal that ‘women can have it all’:education, career, economic independence, love and family. Not all popular media textswe can call postfeminist represent this ideal as attainable but they all represent it as thecontemporary aspiration which makes second wave feminist claims redundant,inadequate or at least unrealistic.

As a discourse, popular postfeminism is informed by feminist interventions into popularcultures as well as subsequent postfeminist academic debates. Yet, even as popularpostfeminism offers feminist scholars investigative avenues for thinking through thesetheoretical ideas, its potential as a site for considering contemporary women’sexperience of these debates about what women do and should aspire to justifies‘popular postfeminism’ being treated as a separate field. Popular postfeminism providesa needed space for exploring expressions of women’s experience, especially includingthose women who do not identify as feminist. It represents women who are oftenstruggling with gendered issues without equating such a struggle with politicalidentification as a feminist. Moreover, popular postfeminism’s manifestation in popularculture foregrounds a variety of consumer, economic and neo-liberal forces that arecommonly contrary to feminist agendas but undoubtedly key contexts for the women towhom chick lit and feminism aim to speak. As a discourse shaped by multiple anddiverse influences, popular postfeminism, like its academic counterpart, recognises aperception that feminist struggles have now enabled gender equality and opportunityfor women in all aspects of economic, social, professional, domestic and political life.As Diane Negra (2009:2) argues, postfeminism in the context of popular culture:

offers the pleasure and comfort of (re) claiming an identity uncomplicatedby gender politics, postmodernism, or institutional critique. This widely-applied and highly contradictory term performs as if it is commonsensicaland presents itself as pleasingly moderate in contrast to a “shrill” feminism.

Indeed, one prevailing characteristic of popular postfeminism is that women can evenreclaim traditional ideals of femininity and re-embrace institutionalized heterosexualideals of marriage and family without contradicting feminist principles (Coppock,Haydon & Richter, 1995). Popular media images which caricature Second Wavefeminists ‘as unhappy, embittered, man-hating women’ (Coppock, Haydon & Richter,1995:4), have discouraged many young women from identifying with feminism at all,presuming it threatens traditional notions of femininity and heterosexual ideals ofmarriage and motherhood (Ouellette, 2002), but popular postfeminism does not souniformly resolve these questions.

Popular postfeminism thus incorporates a tension between representations of femininityand feminism (Ouelette, 2002) which is also present in some academic postfeminisms,in what McRobbie has called a ‘double entanglement’ of anti-feminist and feministthemes (McRobbie, 2007; Gill, 2007). Neoliberal projects of individualism are evidentin much popular postfeminism (McRobbie, 2007; Gill, 2007), where neoliberalism isunderstood to construct individuals as ‘entrepreneurial actors’ who are responsible fortheir personal biographies of success no matter what their situation is (Gill, 2007:163).This entrepreneurial ethos comfortably slots into the dominant popular postfeministideal in which ‘women can have it all’ (as long as they work hard and make the rightchoices). This move towards self-regulated subjects who are responsible for their ownmonitoring and transformations supposedly places women in control of their ownagency and destiny; as Gill writes, ‘women are required to work on and transform the



self, regulate every aspect of their conduct, and present their actions as freely chosen’

(Gill, 2007:164). As the postfeminist fairy tale in chick lit makes particularly clear, in

popular postfeminism this ‘double entanglement’ abjures women to conform to a

particular glamorized traditional femininity whilst also appearing empowered and self

directed in all aspects of their life.

A focus on consumerism as the ultimate technology of female empowerment

complements these changes, and this is where I will suggest chick lit’s function can be

most clearly evident. Tasker and Negra argue that postfeminist culture has largely

commodified feminism through an image of woman as empowered consumer, positing

both their public and private lives as centrally directed by ‘freedom of choice’ (Tasker

& Negra, 2007:2). With popular postfeminist discourse hailing women as super

heroines (Superwoman, Wonder Woman and Super Mum),1 consumer interests have

seized on women’s role as earners, providing an ever-evolving supply of new images to

sell. Iconic depictions of female empowerment such as Girl Power (Whelehan, 2000;

Gill, 2007) were deployed by advertising industries as marketing strategies aimed at

women, and feminine commodities such as women’s fashion, beauty products, fiction

and non-fiction literature embraced these ideals2. Self-help manuals further epitomized

these popular postfeminist discourses, depicting the transformation from female victim

(of both patriarchal hegemonies and Second Wave feminist ideologies) into an

empowered contemporary woman3. Thus popular postfeminism represents female

empowerment by combining particular feminist and neoliberal ideals in images of

consumer success. The postfeminist fairy tale aids this transformation into empowered

femininity. The ‘ideal’ postfeminist woman is characterised as feminine, intelligent and

career-directed, whilst also successful in love and domestic spheres. She is the

postfeminist fairy tale as it manifests in chick lit is a story of both quest and

transformation articulating the intersections between feminist, neoliberal and consumer

influences of popular postfeminism.

Romancing Female Subjectivity: A history of women and fairy tales

Before exploring the concept of the postfeminist fairy tale, it will be helpful to revisit

the connections between women and romantic fairy tales as well as the implications of

more recent feminist interventions into folklore scholarship. Discourses of love and

romance share a long association with women and the popular cultures they consume.4As far back as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French women writers had

identified fairy tales as having something to say about gender and sexuality, as they

themselves had experimented with gender constructions in their own tales (Haase,

2004). Women story-tellers and writers have used fairy tales as a means of exploring,

rewriting and subverting their socio-political situations for centuries (Harries, 2001;

Tatar, 1999; Bernheimer, 1998). The vast majority of printed versions of fairy tales,

however, have been published and re-written by men, constraining and re-editing a rich

history of women writers and tellers of fairy tales given that fairy tales are generally

considered to have developed out of a predominately female oral tradition (Harries,

2001). Subsequently, from the late seventeenth century onwards, the association

between women and fairy tales was manifest more as an effect of their shared links to

representations of romance and marriage rather than as oral traditions passed between

generations of female story-tellers.

Charles Perrault’s fairy tale editions, Tales of Mother Goose, published in 1695

(Perrault, 1956), signalled the emergence of the written fairy tale genre as a sub genre

of folktales. Perrault’s fairy tales predominantly featured young female protagonists,

including ‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, portraying the

ascribed developmental trajectories of young women of the period—specifically, a



girl’s path from daughter to wife. Perrault’s work promoted as well as popularized links

between women and fairy tales encouraging romantic ideals of love and marriage.

‘True love’ became the magical agent of female transformation encouraging women

readers to see marriage as a key to upward mobility. Indeed, the social upheaval caused

by the industrialization of Europe at this time led to dramatic changes in family

structures, and ideas of individualism took hold that generated a need for new social

arrangements that encouraged courtship between men and women. The emergence of

fairy tales as the genre we now recognise as the ‘traditional fairy tale’ is thus

contemporary with the gradual emergence of what we now recognise as feminism,

reflecting on the same social changes.

In this context, Wendy Langford (1999: 2) argues that ‘Passionate involvement with

one other person began to be constructed as a primary ground for identity formation,

rather than wider kinship networks or social position’. Romance ideologies became

instilled in courtship rituals in this period, encouraging the romanticisation of discourses

of love and its association with women and marriage. With these social changes came

an increase in fairy tale consumption by young women, encouraging discourses that

amplified the importance for women’s popular culture of romance as a genre and

romantic feelings as an ideal This was not only the case within the ruling and middle

classes but for the working classes (Otnes & Pleck, 2003). The development of new

and faster printing techniques and the significant increase in the numbers of literate and

educated women also broadened the field of and changed the cultural contexts for

romance genres.

In the early twentieth century, when mass produced romance fiction was steadily

making its mark on the publishing industry, and in the homes of women across the

western world (Radway, 1991), the film industry was also burgeoning. In the first half

of the twentieth century, Walt Disney began reproducing animated adaptations of

classic fairy tale romances, representing protagonists as passive, pretty, obedient and

good heroines waiting to be rescued by their prince (Lieberman, 1972; Stone, 1975).

Disney films became instrumental in strengthening women’s relationship to fairy tales,

not only by popularizing the genre through the exposure such films enabled, but

through the perpetuation of a coherent representation of femininity tied to idealised

narratives of romance (Stone, 1975). This reinforced an image of womanhood defined

through the love of a husband. These animated films idealised a specific portrayal of

what it was to be a woman—passive and good—and construed transformation by love

as woman’s salvation.5 As Simone de Beauvoir (1988:653) notoriously described the

1950s housewife: ‘Love becomes for her a religion’.

Feminist Interventions into ‘Happily Ever After’

In the late 1960s, feminist scholars and authors began critically investigating fairy tales

and their role in socializing women’s subject formation, cultural identities and

relationships to discourses of romance. A 1970 New York Review of Books article by

Alison Lurie inspired a particularly intense feminist debate over the genre. ‘Fairy Tale

Liberation’ argued that fairy tales were a liberating force for women and girls because

female protagonists in fairy tales were strong role models for both younger and future

generations of women. This claim inflamed much of the feminist community and

scholars such as Marcia Lieberman (1972), and Karen Rowe (1986) responded

vehemently.6 Each declared that the classic fairy tales reproduced in popular culture

propagated romantic ideals of love and that this was primarily a strategic manoeuvre to

keep women bonded to men. Their central claim was that patriarchal structures shaped

cultural ideas about sex/gender roles through the lens of romance. Fairy tales

encouraged women to idealize love and, as such, their role as subservient passive



housewives.

As feminist debates developed it soon became apparent that associations between

women and fairy tales were not solely a result of patriarchal hegemonies cultivating

ideals of romance as a means of subordinating women. Later writers challenged this

frequently generalized and simplistic analysis, arguing that female audiences identified

with both the heroines and heroes (Stone, 1996; Gilbert & Gubar, 1979). Readers

encountered fairy tales as a means of escape and pleasure and in the hope they offered

as a catalyst and framework for transforming their own lives.7 Stevi Jackson (1995:50)

further suggested that ‘It is possible to recognize that love is a site of women’s

complicity in patriarchal relations while still noting that it can also be a site of

resistance’.

Feminist scholarship on fairy tales and romance has therefore moved away from a

polarized debate, which claimed that romantic fairy tales either represented false notions

about sex roles or were revolutionary sites. Nonetheless, early feminist research on fairy

tales paved the way for the discovery of alternative fairy tale forms and narratives and

their relevance to contemporary popular cultures. As a genre that women both

participated in and utilized as a cultural framework to negotiate individual subjectivities

and relationships, feminists across multiple disciplines have engaged, debated and

assimilated romantic fairy tale discourses into their work (Haase, 2004). As feminism

has developed and spread across multiple spheres of ethnicity, race, class, generations

and sexualities, fairy tale narratives have visibly adjusted, reflecting cultural shifts and

critical turns. The explicitly feminist fairytales of writers Angela Carter and Marina

Warner, Alan Dundes’s (1988) scholarship on cross-cultural retellings of the Cinderella

tale, more popular retellings of Cinderella in films such as Ever After (1998), BridgetJones’s Diary and Sex and the City (2008) and multiple re-framings of fairy tale

narratives in romance fiction (discussed in the next section) all exemplify the fairy tale’s

many transformations8. These feminist rewritings and theoretical re-framings of fairy

tales in fact reinforced connections between women and fairy tale ideals of romance

and love. In this way, both types of feminist interventions drew attention to the central

role fairy tales had come to play in women’s lives.

Consuming Fairy Tales in Chick Lit

Fairy tale narratives, as many writers and folklore scholars have argued (Carter, 2005,

1979; Tarter, 1999; Warner, 1995), are not simple and straightforward narratives which

are concluded with ‘happily ever after’. Angela Carter (2005:xx) describes the goal of

fairy tales as a ‘Utopian one, indeed a form of heroic optimism—as if to say, one day,

we might be happy, even if it won’t last’. As Carter claims, the Utopian idealism of

fairy tales is a key ingredient generating hope in the minds of readers, not only as an

escapist pleasure but a mechanism that propels them through an engagement with the

complexities and struggles of the protagonist. However, delving deeper into their

narratives, it becomes apparent that there is a lot more to fairy tales than their optimistic

conclusions. Cinderella may end with a true love transformation but family struggle

fuels the central narrative. Fairy tales, both past and contemporary, tell of the conflicts,

contradictions and complications of everyday life, alongside ‘journeys of self discovery,

recognition and confrontation of internal anxieties and desires’ (Swann Jones 2002:16–

17). So whereas fairy tales may offer a promise or an ideal to strive for, they rarely offer

solutions—instead providing an exploratory space for the discussion of social issues.

Marina Warner (1995:XXI) explains:

The happy endings of fairy tales are only the beginnings of the larger

story, and any study which attempts to encompass it wholly must stumble

and fall before any kind of ending can be made: the story of storytelling is



a tale that will never be done. As one traditional closing formula implies,the story is made of both together: ‘This is my story, I’ve told it, and inyour hands I leave it’.

As this quotation suggests, fairy tales are shaped by readers’ participation in them asmuch as the authors who write them, in that readers see in the characters a cultural toolto explore the struggles they face. Fairy tales’ productive capacities enable theirconsumers to think through or even transform themselves out of their current situation.As cultural work on romance reading attests, women participate in romance as a way ofexamining their social situations (Modleski, 2008, Radway, 1991) using fairy talenarratives to ‘engage in complex and contradictory ways with real problems—offeringtemporary, magical, fantasy or symbolic solutions’ (Gill & Herdieckerhoff 2006:492).

The genre of chick lit has a large number of female readers who appear to identify withand participate in its protagonists’ trials and tribulations (Whelehan, 2005). Escapinginto chick lit can offer women readers both temporary respite and hope for resolving thevery real negotiations of their own situations. Yet chick lit protagonists differ from theheroines of earlier romance novels in the choices and opportunities available to them.Career and economic independence drives their narratives at least as much as romance,as Gill and Herdieckerhoff (2006:495) explain:

In traditional romantic novels, heroines are not normally seen asparticularly career driven despite their spirited nature and intelligence.Rather, they see advancement and power through romantic alliance with aman. In this respect, the female characters in chick lit novels seemmarkedly different, as they are invariably portrayed as employed andcommitted to the idea of career.

Chick lit unmistakably portrays postfeminist ideals of empowered femininity as centralto its protagonist’s experiences. Protagonists’ quests are concerned with navigating theebbs and flows of contemporary female experience, negotiating the challenges ofjuggling personal autonomy, career, family, friendship and love.

Chick lit particularly invokes the experiences of single, mid-twenty to thirty year oldwomen negotiating the complexities, contradictions and anxieties of feminist idealsduring their peak years of independence.9 Chick lit heroines are less reliant on beingrescued and transformed by their ‘true love’ than those of traditional fairy tales, ratherrelying on their own skills and their friendships to sustain them in times of adversity orwhen their ‘luck’ is down. Even as fairy tale romance remains a focus of their lives,‘true love’ and ‘happily ever after’ have been relegated to a secondary position inrelation to the transformations of the self. As Stephanie Harzewski (2006:37) argues:‘the quest for self-definition and the balancing of work with social interaction is givenequal or more attention than the relationship conflict.’ The idea of a prince charming,Mr. Right, or ‘true love’, is still a focal part of the protagonist’s quest in chick lit. Butsignificantly, the point and focus of the protagonist’s transformation has shifted fromthe ideal achievement of ‘true love’ to an ideal achievement of the ‘true self’. Only oncethis transformation has occurred can she possibly be successful in attaining ‘true love’.Alison Umminger sums this up well:

Chick lit might seem at first to be a category of novels primarily concernedwith finding a mate—the search for a decent man in a sea of indecent“perverts and Fuckwits,” to quote Ms. Jones. And although this is acontrolling feature of the genre, I maintain that in many of the books thispartner quest is entirely secondary to the ongoing battle chick lit’s heroinesare engaging with themselves (Umminger, 2006:240).



Even as the romantic quest for ‘true love’ has become secondary, chick lit’s negotiationbetween fairy tale ideals of love and the popular postfeminist traits of independence andresponsibility identified earlier sheds light on contemporary women’s self-formation.Chick lit weaves popular postfeminism through its narratives, producing new genderedideals centred on recognisably feminist ideals of female empowerment and self-realization intersected with traditional gendered ideals of ‘true love’ and other capitalistneoliberal images of promised satisfaction.

An array of chick lit novels embody these postfeminist ideals in their plots. In TheTrials of Tiffany Trott (Wolff, 1998) the protagonist challenges the assumption thathaving a full-time relationship or marriage is a necessary part of ‘having it all’. In MrMaybe (1999), the character of Libby Mason is a publicist who realizes that marryingthe wealthy Ed McMahon may not be worth the fabulous designer lifestyle that shethought would mark her as ‘having it all’. She decides that Nick—an unemployedwriter whom she loves spending time with and who knows how to make her laugh—may be just what she wants. In Sex and the City (Busnell, 1998), Carrie Bradshawconcludes, in the final episode of the television adaptation born out of the novel, that‘the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all, is the one you havewith yourself. And if you find someone to love the you you love… Well that’s justfabulous.’10 And, in a critical twist on the genre, Not Meeting Mr Right (Heiss, 2007)sees the character of Alice Aigner coming face to face with the whiteness of manypostfeminist ideals, as well as the complexity of still wanting many of these idealswhich are often opposed to her identification as a Koori woman. She further articulatesthe contradictions embedded in her consumption of fairy tales, questioning whether shereally wants the ‘after’ in ‘happily ever after’:

Of course I’d dreamt about meeting Prince Charming and having a fairytale wedding… Problem was I’d never given any thought to what wouldhappen after the wedding. All I really wanted was a man. A weddingwould be fun too. But married life? Not for me (Heiss, 2007:5–6).

But perhaps the most prominent example of the postfeminist fairy tale remains theexemplar of chick lit, Bridget Jones’s Diary, which the next section discusses in detail.11

The Postfeminist Fairy Tale: Frogs, frocks and ‘freedom’

Bridget Jones’ commitment to transforming herself is signalled in the novel’s keynarrative device, which is to structure her voice through the aid of a daily diary entry.The book begins with her New Year resolutions, and two lists: the ‘I will not’ list,including ‘Drink more than fourteen alcohol units in a week…smoke…spend morethan I earn… Get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen’ (Fielding,1996:2). The ‘I will’ list includes: ‘stop smoking… Reduce circumference of thighs…Improve career and find new job with potential… Form functional relationship withresponsible adult’ (Fielding, 1996:3). In these ways the novel frames the postfeministideal of wanting it all as the dominant narrative. As Bridget records her daily vices,weight measurements, number of cigarettes, alcohol units and self-help mantrasperformed (tasks drawn from her many self-help manuals) she documents her desiredrenovation into a thin, beautiful, intellectual and successful career woman. The diaryformat resembles a kind of Foucauldian technology of the self (Foucault, 1997:123),whereby documenting and self-monitoring according to postfeminist ideals somehowproductively assists in the project of self-transformation.

Bridget strives to take responsibility for and control of her life in order to become whatshe understands to be a successful contemporary woman. Thus, chick lit novels are



dominated by protagonists’ struggles with transforming themselves. In its conflation ofboth traditional ideals of true love and feminist ideals of self-autonomy, the postfeministfairy tale in chick lit redirects the transformative narrative away from the agent of ‘truelove’ and towards an affirmation of the protagonist’s agency. But as Warner’s earlierquote suggests, the ‘happily ever after’ transformation by ‘true love’, or ‘true self’ in thepostfeminist fairy tale, is not the primary mechanism of fairy tales. Even as chick litrepresents these ideals of the ‘true self’, its protagonist’s experiences reveal acontrasting reality. The character of Bridget is shown regularly botching work-relatedmatters, ‘over thinking’ relations with men, and generally distributing her focus in toomany directions as she attempts to appear triumphant and controlled in all aspects of herlife. Preparing for the book launch of Kafka’s Motorbike Bridget prioritizes her eventlist, taking advice from a New Yorker columnist on the art of parties and networking tofurther one’s career. This list clearly highlights the contradictions within postfeminism,highlighting her anxiety over wanting a relationship but believing her own self-transformation (as an empowered career woman) should be more important:

1) Not to get too pissed.2) To aim to meet people to network with.Hmmm. Anyway, will think of some more later.11 p.m. Right3) To put the social skills from the article into action4) To make Daniel think I have inner poise and want to get off with meagain.No. No.4) To meet and sleep with sex god.4) To make interesting contacts in the publishing world/ possibly evenother professions in order to find new career.Oh God. Do not want to go to scary party. Want to stay home with bottleof wine and watch Eastenders(Fielding, 1996:97–98).

As this example expresses, more often than not Bridget feels overwhelmed by theexpectations postfeminist ideals create. She is often left in scenes of apparent failure,with a ‘wine’ and ‘ciggie’ in hand, congregating with friends and prostrating herself fornot realizing her ‘true self’. In its incorporation of postfeminist ideals of self-transformation, chick lit’s portrayal of the postfeminist fairy tale not only sets itsprotagonists up to fail but maintains their responsibility for this failure. Protagonists’experiences are messy, often both embarrassing and humorous, inviting readers torecognize their own anxieties in those of the protagonists. As Imelda Whelehan(2005:6) writes, ‘you don’t have to read too many of these texts to observe a sharednote of anxiety about the fate of femininity after feminism and the culture ofachievement it has seemed to breed’; according to Whelehan, ‘Chick lit speaks to thoseafraid they won’t make the cut and thrust of high female achievement’. In portrayingthe protagonists’ struggles so openly, chick lit creates a level of realism that manymiddle-class western women readers may recognize as their own: trying and failing toachieve the dream of having a career, amazing friends, Mr. Right, familial and financialsuccess—and looking fabulous while doing so.

Postfeminist Romance: which frog?

To the extent that Bridget Jones’s Diary and other chick lit novels base their narrativesaround a love plot, they tend to do so by opposing two types of classic male suitors, thetraditional Byronic hero (in Bridget’s case, Daniel Cleaver) and the contemporarynascent feminist hero (Mark Darcy).12 Here the two heroes together symbolize the



protagonist’s negotiations of the traditional gendered romantic fantasy of love versusthe contemporary feminist love of equality. In this way, the fairy tale plot plays uponthe postfeminist antagonism between the feminine and the feminist mentioned earlier.As Bridget develops her relationships with both Darcy and Cleaver, she explores andquestions what she wants in a man, constantly referring back to her fairy tale ideals oflove and postfeminism (usually in one of her many self-help manuals).13 Bridget ratesthe advantages and failings of both men, trying to decide which is her more likelymatch. Negotiating between her irrational desires for Daniel, who is clearly not a goodrelationship prospect but evokes her romantic fantasy of Prince Charming, and Mark,who may not move her passions in the same manner but nonetheless provides anopportunity for a relationship of equality as well as the desired ‘functional relationshipwith responsible adult’ (Fielding, 1996:3). Indeed, Bridget’s negotiation betweenDaniel and Mark as opposing love interests metaphorically portrays the postfeministfairy tale dilemma. The postfeminist ideal of ‘having it all’ is played out in theseoppositions to ask whether women can ‘have it all’ in a relationship, traditionalgendered ideals of romance and contemporary feminist ideals of equality. The playbetween Daniel as the Byronic hero and Mark as feminist hero represents Bridget’sown negotiation and exploration of her female identity.

Here we notice another shift in romantic fairy tale genre and functions. While earlierromance novels portrayed a budding feminist heroine defying the hero, their task was tosoften and teach him the value of the classic feminine traits of caring and love foranother (Pearce & Stacey, 1995). In chick lit, protagonists reflect on the futility oftrying to change a man and the difficulty of actually finding one they like or that willmake a commitment to them. Chick lit represents contemporary postfeminist womengrappling with the instability of contemporary romance. The freedom and choiceenabled for women by feminist interventions into relationship forms, along with relatedshifts in gendered power dynamics are in this sense portrayed as something of anordeal. Protagonists are shown to be frustrated, often disheartened, by the ambiguitiesof contemporary romance and the apparent lack of relationship guidelines that result inpart from feminist questioning. As Whelehan argues:

[i]t is precisely in the arena of romantic love that sexual politics failed topenetrate in any meaningful or long-lasting way, and what Fieldingappears to be sending up here is the absence of a language of sexual desirethat went beyond identifying the ways in which heterosexual relationshipswere imbued by inequalities of power.(Whelehan, 2005:185).

On the surface, chick lit narratives appear to echo popular postfeminist proclamationsthat feminism is over. However, delving deeper into the characters and storylines this isnot necessarily the case. These narratives often do not directly acknowledge thefeminist dilemmas of protagonists, but consistently allude to a tension between feministdiscourses and putatively mainstream women who don’t identify as feminist(Whelehan, ibid.). Protagonists repeatedly reflect on the conflicts presented by pursuingand negotiating relationships of equality that they certainly desire even while they ofteninvoke a nostalgia for traditional marriage models. Bridget flits from desperately tryingto prove that she is going somewhere in her professional life to attempts at being a‘domestic goddess,’14 apparently readying herself for a life of marital bliss. Bridget isfixated on shaping her own contemporary womanhood, while quietly hoping her truelove will come to rescue her from the endless challenges the postfeminist ideal ofwomanhood poses. Her constant daydreaming about Daniel Cleaver and the possibilityof him marrying her acts as a nostalgic fantasy for the apparently simpler gender rolesof the past (McRobbie, 2007:37). This not to say that contemporary readers of chick lit



are wishing for the patriarchal chains of previous times, or that it dismisses any chanceof feminism offering them valuable perspectives. Rather, chick lit gives a voice to thecomplexity of romantic ideals for contemporary women by allowing them to considerthe limitations of the traditional ‘happily ever after’ ideal (Mabry, 2006) and thechanging landscape of relationships brought about by new gender ideals.

This reading is reinforced when we realize that even though Bridget clearly judges herlife in relation to the ideals of the heterosexual marriage institution, none of theexamples of marriage or coupledom in Bridget Jones’s Diary are actually very positive(Guerrero, 2006:99). Bridget’s parents are separated, Darcy is divorced, and her bestfriend Jude spends half her time at work in the bathroom, crying on the phone toBridget over ‘Vile Richard’ (Fielding, 1996:187), her non-committal boyfriend. It isimportant not to forget that the ‘smug’ married couples referred to in the book are rarelyactually happy (Guerrero 2006). In many ways the novel challenges ideals of true loveand idealization of traditional heteronormative relationship forms, urging a rethinking ofwomen’s subjectivity in and outside of the frameworks that such relationship discourseshave demanded.

Bridget’s journey is represented as one of transformation through the realization andaffirmation of her ‘true self’. When Darcy expresses his admiration for Bridget, ‘Just asshe is,’ it may be Darcy who speaks the words but it is Bridget’s own acceptance ofherself, separate from him, that sees her transformation complete. Bridget does managein the end to attain her ‘true love’ and equal, as romantic fairy tale convention dictates,and Bridget Jones’s Diary ends with a happily ever after. It matters then that the sequelBridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) revised that happy ending most of allbecause it is Bridget’s continued struggle to achieve the postfeminist fairy tale thatresonates with readers and, as Whelehan (2000) suggests, installs her as theembodiment of the postfeminist zeitgeist.

Conclusion

Like classic fairy tales, the ‘happily ever after’ narrative of chick lit is an allegory ofhope. The Utopian dimension of fairy tales generates heroic optimism for theachievement of women’s empowerment via a complication of popular postfeministideals. On the surface, the postfeminist fairy tale appears to embody contemporarywomen’s struggles with a representation of past relationship forms. Nevertheless, itdraws attention to the necessity of navigating these ideals and their problematicinteraction with heteronormative discourses, rather than convincingly suggestingprotagonists can ultimately ‘have it all’. Chick lit’s fairy tale elements insist on a hopethat both feminist and heteronormative love ideals can be compatible in women’s lives,and that the current instability of contemporary subjectivity will resolve itself in somenew ideal grounded in gender equality. The postfeminist fairy tale complicates ratherthan resolves debates around the significance of romance in contemporary women’sexperience, opening doors to re-thinking and re-configuring future female subjectivities.It speaks to women who may not be comfortable calling themselves feminists, yet areinterested in thinking about the real gender issues that affect them. It is thesecontradictions within femininity and feminism that makes chick lit so enjoyable andprovocative for its readers.

On one level, popular postfeminism recreates a quasi-universalized ideal of whitemiddle class interests (Coppock, Haydon & Richter, 1995; McRobbie, 2007)specifically, in its suggestion of feminism’s redundancy. In this it again resemblesacademic postfeminism’s tendency to discriminate and superficially wash over itsreinstatement of particular white middle class frames (somewhat ironically, consideringsecond wave feminism was culpable of the same discrimination), and its close



associations with neoliberal discourses of ‘choice’ that mark it as deeply problematic(Coppock, Haydon & Richter, 1995; McRobbie, 2007; Gill, 2007; Negra, 2009). In thewake of the dismantling of an earlier universalized second wave feminist movement,and the continued proliferation of neoliberal projects of individualism, a void incollective mainstream feminist voices has opened up. Arguably, popular postfeminismhas situated itself in this void, coming to signify a mainstream site for the discussion ofdiverse feminist propositions and accompanying debates. At least, popular postfeminsmhas emerged as a space that facilitates dialogues between various articulations of femaleidentity and the contradictory forces that shape it. This is precisely because, within itsfluctuating contours, it encompasses inherent inconsistencies and contradictions inrepresentation. Most critically, popular postfeminism is the site occupied by mainstreamwomen, many of whom are not engaged in feminist politics. Taking up Gill’sproposition that postfeminism is a sensibility, popular postfeminism may well be acrucial critical object into which feminists must inquire and with which it must engage.If there are to be further productive changes in the way feminism is perceived andenacted in public arenas, it is crucial for feminist scholars to continue to researchpopular postfeminism. Importantly, exploring representations of popular postfeminism,opens up avenues for finding out what women outside of the realms of academicfeminism, those for whom it seems popular postfeminism is an active pleasure, areexperiencing, thinking about and hoping for in their lives.

Notes

1 See Coppock, V. Haydon, D. & Richter, I. (1995) The Illusions of ‘Postfeminism’:

New Women, Old Myths, Haussegger (2005) Wonder Woman: The myth of ‘having it

all’ or Maushart (2005) What Women Want Next.

2 I use the term ‘Girl Power’ loosely to encompass girls and young women. In the1990’s Madonna and the girl band the Spice Girls married consumerism with ‘GirlPower’ engendering it as representative of the postfeminist woman in popular culture.Note: a large body of literature complicates the term ‘Girl’ and its relationship to‘woman’, see Taft (2004) ‘Girl Power Politics: Pop-Culture Barriers andOrganizational Resistance’ or Driscoll (2002) Feminine Adolescence in Popular

Culture and Cultural Theory.

3 Women’s advice manuals, books and magazines have embraced postfeminist ideals ofthe transformation of the self, becoming the dominant narrative of the female self-helpgenre, moving away from their role as dominantly guides for women’s lovetransformation. See Caroline J Smith (2005) ‘Living the Life of a Domestic Goddess:Chick Lit’s Response to Domestic-Advice Manuals’ or David Shumway (2003)Modern Love.

4 Examples of fairy tales used in women’s popular culture can be seen in; earlyromance novels such as those by Jane Austen and the Brönte Sisters, magazineperiodicals, mass produced formula romances of Mills & Boon and HarlequinEnterprises as well as in more recent formats of film and television. See Jack Zipes(1986) Don’t Bet On The Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North

America and England, Marina Warner (1995) From The Beast to The Blonde: On

Fairy Tales and Their Tellers or Maria Tartar (1999) The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts,

Criticism.

5 Portrayals of strong women were predominantly confined to evil female characters,such as the evil Step Mother’s or old crones, thus perpetuating patriarchal gender



dichotomies of passive heroines as good and active female characters as evil.

6 In her 1972 article ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through

the Fairy Tale’, Lieberman retaliated apparently nullifying Lurie’s argument by

vehemently claiming that the fairy tales Lurie was speaking of were not mainstream

enough for general readers to be reading, and thus irrelevant to feminist politics of the

moment.

7 For further examples, see Gilbert and Gubar (1979) Madwoman in the Attic, Stone’s

(1996) ‘and she lived happily ever after’, or the introduction to Pearce and Stacey’s

(1995) Romance Revisited.

8 Also see Shrek (2001) and Bride and Prejudice (2004).

9 See Chris Mazza (2006) ‘Who’s Laughing Now? A Short History of Chick Lit and

the perversion of a Genre’, in Feriss, S. & Young, M. (Ed) Chick lit: the new woman’sfiction.

10 I use a reference from the TV adaptation rather than the book, firstly, as it shows the

wide appeal of chick lit (in that it was made into a Television series and more recently a

film) and secondly because the final line, of the final episode, sums up the central

narrative of the Sex and the City expressing the postfeminist fairy tale.

11 I use Bridget Jones Diary as the primary example, as its narratives focus specifically

on the career/relationship dilemma that marked the emergence of the genre. Yet, I

acknowledge the genre has expanded significantly in recent years to include subgenres

of Mummy Lit, Christian lit, Ethnic Lit, Teen Lit and Hen Lit.

12 Also see Sex and The City (Bushnell, 1997), Senate (2001) Jane Date or The

Cinderella Moment (Fox, 2006).

13 Bridget draws on self help books such as ‘The Goddess within’ (Fielding,

1996:195). The genre of self-help plays an active role in chick lit, operating as an

important guide to the postfeminist transformation. In many ways trends in popular

psychology, particularly the self-help genre, are heavily based on fairy tale ideals and

forms. See Caroline J Smith (2005) ‘Living the Life of a Domestic Goddess: Chick

Lit’s Response to Domestic-Advice Manuals’.

14 This is a reference to Nigella Lawson’s cookbook How to be a Domestic Goddess:

Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking (2001) that was an international best seller and

appeared at a similar historical juncture as the chick lit phenomenon.

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Zipes (1986) Don’t Bet On The Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North

America and England. Aldershot, Hants New York, Gower: Methuen.

Films

Bride and Prejudice (Motion Picture) 2004 Miramax Films, directed by GurindaChadha.

Bridget Jones’s Diary (Motion Picture) 2001 Universal Pictures, directed by SharonMaguire.

Ever After (Motion Picture) 1998 Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, directedby Andy Tenant.

Sex and the City (Motion Picture) 2008 New Line Cinema Warner Brothers, Directedby Michael Patrick King.

Shrek (Motion Picture) 2001 Dream Works Animation, directed by Andrew Adamson& Vicky Jensen.

The Devil Wears Prada (Motion Picture) 2006 20th Century Fox, directed by DavidFrankel.

Television

Sex and the City. Created by Darren Star. HBO. 1998–2004.

Lipstick Jungle. Created by DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler. NBC UniversalTelevisions Studios. 2007–2009.

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