"It’s both. It’s everything. Beauty. Originality. Artistry. It’s all ridiculously unclear" : the complexity of chick lit

Abstract

Chick lit is a form of women’s fiction characterised by a single female protagonist who often deals with the challenges of romantic relationships and a demanding career. It has been highly dismissed by highbrow critics and writers for being mainly entertaining and simple, rather than thought-provoking and complex. However, chick lit has also been largely embraced by readers and this gave it immense commercial success. These paradoxical receptions of chick lit indicate that the genre has the capacity to yield multiple responses and as a result, requires further attention and reflection. Chick lit’s relationship with feminism and gender politics has the capacity for multiple interpretations especially when considering whether it contributes to feminist ideology or whether these novels simply use feminist symbols to act as a trojan horse for establishment and patriarchal values. More paradoxes emerge in relation to chick lit’s use of earlier women’s writings, such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as source texts. This may be seen as low-brow borrowing of Austen’s brand name to increase sales, while it could also serve as a means of addressing the manner in which canonical female writers contributed to patriarchal discourse. This dissertation explores how these complex elements present themselves in chick lit to challenge the way popular fiction is denounced by highbrow critics. This will be done by discussing Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last as these two novels both allow for an analysis of the genre at the time of its conception as well as its development in recent times.