Hey everyone, so like the other girls, this week I read essays from Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young’s compilation, Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. I chose to read, “Chick Lit Jr.: More Than Glitz and Glamour for Teens and Tweens” by Joanna Webb Johnson.
I am one of the bloggers in the group who came in having read a lot of adult chick lit prior to this class. Therefore the idea of Jr. Chick Lit was interesting to me as to where I made the transgression from Jr. Chick Lit to adult. Arguably I have not, because while I haven’t enjoyed a recent installment of a Gossip Girl book for over a year now, it’s still on my reading list—while I would no longer browse the book store for a young adult best seller, there is something to be said about Cecily von Ziegesar gaining my readership in my teenage years and maintaining such a strong hold over me that I am not embarrassed to be still reading the Gossip Girl installments at 21 years old. After all the time I spent with the character… I have to know how it ends, right? I was interested to read pivotal books of my youth, such as Judie Blume books or Little Women, being characterized as Chick Lit Jr. Little Women is one of those “great American novels” and chick lit is often looked down upon as such a vapid form that it would seem as insult to characterize these reknwoned coming of age novels as Chick Lit Jr. However, they do follow the feminine literary tradition.
Chick Lit Jr. often in the genre of young adult coming of age novels entertains as well as guides through example and anti-examples. Instead of women attempting to run the world, chick lit jr. focuses on “negotiating” their present day world. There is such a lack of children engaging with books nowadays that my mom, a teacher, doesn’t mind if her kids opt for these “trashy novels” instead because at least their reading. I agree with this, I love classic literature, The Odyssey is one of my favorites, yet a remember lining up in my school’s library when the new Goosebumps book came out. However, with readership of these novels starting at such a young age, should we be wary of the values being imparted to young women—the values that adult chick lit is often accused of promoting?
Take, Cecily Von Ziegasar’s Gossip Girl series, one of the riskier of the chick lit jr. novels that I have read. It highlights children of privilege in NYC who at a young age, drink, smoke, engage in sexual activity and lead lives more glamourous than some of their adult chick lit counterparts. Arguably, Carrie Bradshaw would be lucky if she had Serena van der Woodsen’s life. Many years ago, these books would have definitely been on a young adults censored list; now they are being turned into TV shows. However extreme, I do feel like Gossip Girl the novel addresses key issues of young adulthood, but with the anti-example being so glamourous, there is a dangerous trap in relying on a young adult to clearly see the distinction between the behaviour they should emulate and that which they should not. Are novels like these instilling the wrong kind of values at a critical age? They are heavily engaging an audience which is extremely hard to engage. So what is it about them? Did young girls values so drastically change in the last 100 years that we have gone from Little Women to Gossip Girl?
I think it is actually young girls that have changed as well as the opportunities available to them. For good and bad, young girls now can behave just as badly as the boys can and jr. chick lit is a reflection of this. Chick Lit Jr. seems a preclude, telling young women what to expect of adulthood. Both the heroines of adult chick lit and chick lit jr. deal with sexuality, love, job/school, family—more so in chick lit jr. in adult chick lit, your family is often your close knit group of friends–, and all other problems and insecurities plaguing women, however in chick lit jr. there is the awkwardness of coming of age thrown into the mix.
What I wonder is to my peers that are new comers to chick lit and a little resistant to it: am I more willing to accept Nan and her flaws or some of the seemingly vapid-ness that attaches itself to the genre as a whole because I have been prepped to accept this? From Little Women to Louis Beckett’s Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging series to Gossip Girl, I not only read but happily devoured almost every book Johnson mentioned in her essay. While I can’t say all have helped me come of age they did provide fits of laughter as well as tears.
