Marian Keyes

Elena Pérez-Serrano
University of Lleida | |

|Chick lit is a literary genre that originated in the mid-nineties, with its cornerstone novel, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s|
|Diary, published in 1996. In subsequent years, chick lit narratives have been further popularised by other media like |
|television, with series such as Ally McBeal (1997) or Sex and the City (1998), whichestablished the genre as a phenomenon in |
|only a decade. Regardless of its phenomenal success in terms of sales [1], chick lit has been surrounded by ambiguities about |
|its ideological commitment from its emergence. The fact that hundreds of novels with very different political slants are |
|published yearly under the umbrella of the genre’s name adds up to the difficulty of pinningit down ideologically. Under these|
|circumstances, this paper seeks to answer one of the questions put forward in connection with the genre, which arises from the |
|doubts exposed in the following passage (Ferriss and Young, 2006: 9): |
|Reactions to chick lit are divided between those who expect literature by and about women to advancethe political activism of |
|feminism, to represent women’s struggles in patriarchal culture and offer inspiring images of strong, powerful women, and those|
|who argue instead that it should portray the reality of young women grappling with modern life. The generations of women coming|
|of age after the women’s movement of the 1960s find themselves in an ambiguous position: they haveindubitably benefited from |
|feminism’s push for education and access to the professions, but they still experience pressures from without and desires from |
|within for romance and family. In short, they are caught between competing demands to be strong and independent while retaining|
|their femininity. Is chick lit advancing the cause of feminism by appealing to female audiences and featuringempowered, |
|professional women? Or does it rehearse the same patriarchal narrative of romance and performance of femininity that feminists |
|once rejected? |
|Thus, the question I want to examine is: is chick lit representative of the discourses of feminism; or does it ultimately|
|conform to patriarchal ideologies and have an exclusively commercial purpose? |
|With the purpose of finding possible explanations, in order to analyse the genre I have made use of critical discourse |
|analysis, which van Dijk (2001: 352) defines as “a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social ||power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political |
|context”. Alongside critical discourse analysis, I have drawn on cultural studies as the critical framework. According to this |
|discipline, all cultural manifestations take place in specific contexts and are consequences of the background in which they |
|werecreated; for this reason literature cannot be isolated from its social environment. As Fuery and Mansfield (2000: 23) |
|define the term, cultural studies are “concerned with the investigation of how we read cultures, how cultures generate and |
|sustain meanings and interpretations, how cultural perspectives are generated, and how cultural differences…operate”. ||Consequently, culture and society nourish one another in a bi-directional process, showing the “vital signs of how we construct|
|our culture and how that culture constructs us” (Brooker 1998: 2). Thus, the cultural representations found in chick lit are a |
|reflection of the society in which the genre emerged and, at the same time, the genre operates transformatively on its |
|audiences,...