The last decade has seen the emergence of the what is popularly called the "chick-lit heroine." It began with bestselling books such as Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones Diary. Since their success was assured, young women authors were given obnoxiously large advances for chick literature and these include Devil Wears Prada, Something Borrowed, Nanny Diaries and the like. The "chick lit heroine" soon become an easily identifiable and staple character of urban culture. In fact, these women were everywhere: 30-something, single, exciting career, great friends, interest in fashion (read shoes), excessive white-wine drinking ability, a loveable clumsiness, looking for mr. right, dating many mr. wrongs.
Sadly, a lot of fairly cool chick-lit books were turned into movies that focused on the romantic trajectory often ending with finding love as opposed to offering a real insight into what these books were really doing - dismantling the space of cliched romance novels of the Harlequin variety. Instead of unrealistic escape narratives where women are being discovered and swept off their feet by counts, dukes, industrialists and other unreasonably successful, somewhat rough yet tender-hearted hunks, we had a career-minded woman who did not want to settle for the wrong guy and for whom her friends had become the new urban family. While the romance novel remained undisturbed in popularity and sales, the new comedy of manners called chick-lit had been born and it offered a counter-discourse within women's writing.
As the chick lit sales and production stabilized, as more and more of the books turned into movies and became a common feature at airports, beaches and young women's homes, the chick lit heroine began to go through some new avatars. The first shift was the emergence of similar narratives from African-American (not to be confused with urban lit dealing with the complexities of street culture deriving from hiphop lyrics and ideologies), Indian, Asian and Hispanic communities. These were still middle-class tales of city life whether yuppie black women in Atlanta in Scenes from a Sistah or an Indian woman coming of age in New York's fashion industry in For Matrimonial Purposes or the tough dating situation for Chinese-American singleton The Dim Sum of All Things who lives with her family or then Tamara Contreras who chooses singledom in LA over family and a traditional, Mexican fiance in Hot Tamara. Primarily the story of a white urban girl, the narratives slowly began to mirror female dilemmas in various other communities. At the same time, a post-singlehood narrative also began to emerge. There came mommy-lit that dealt with the travails of what happens after you have everything you've ever wanted. These were stories of juggling love, career and now, a baby. The frazzled but adoring mommy narrative has certainly seeped into our collective consciousness as well and it can all be traced to these books. Chick lit in whichever form is about the many choices offered to the modern woman as opposed to fixed traditional roles, and the ways in which she successfully navigates these many spaces
But lately I feel that something has ruptured the hard shield of optimism that seems to have kept this "chick" persona afloat in fiction and in real life. The recent article by Kate Bolick on marriage as a declining option for women caused a stir on the internet and led to many spin-off opinions and debates. Bolick dissects the second-wave feminist idea which elevated "independence over coupling." The article claims that women now, "keep putting marriage off." Bolick rattles off some impressive statistics: "In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the US was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. We're also marrying less – with a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29% of my Generation X cohort was married; among today's Millennials (those born in the late-70s to 90s) that figure has dropped to 22%. Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those aged 18 to 29 had already tied the knot."
Competitive career trajectories, economic independence, the ability to raise children without a husband, lack of religious pressures and an inequal sex ratio between men and women have led to this decline. The quest for love does continue, of course, and unconventional family structures have certainly are starting to emerge all around us whether its same-sex marriages or families, single parent homes, fathers as primary care-givers or just single living.
Trends like these change the basic trajectory of the "chick" who is, after all, a somewhat traditional girl. She may not want to settle for the wrong guy but she certainly wants to marry and settle down. The main shift for me is the move away from the narrative of trying to please everybody (the boss, the date, the boyfriend, the best friend, the parents) to pleasing herself. Bolick claims, "...my problem, as I saw it, lay in wanting two incompatible states of being – autonomy and intimacy – and this struck me as selfish and juvenile; part of growing up, I knew, was making trade-offs."
Some movies have reflected this particular focus on the individual though sometimes with less of the glowing excitement of Bolick's piece. The Back-Up Plan where the heroine decides to have a baby without waiting for a man and then with Switch starring Jennifer Aniston offer a refreshingly different kind of woman - older, fiercely independent and untraditional. The smash hit Bridesmaids offers a fairly negative portrayal of weddings and by extension, approaches the act of coupling with lot a mockery. Not to mention, the "chick" in this film has a bankrupt business, no relationship and ends up betraying her best friend in many ways. While all this resolves itself neatly for the heroine of Bridesmaids, the most recent film Young Adult starring the ridiculously talented Charlize Theron (her role in YA is my vote for the Oscar this year) has taken a very deliberate turn toward the bitter and the negative. Though characterized as a film about a woman who never got over being popular prom-queen in high school and is holding on to her young-adult stage, it is really a culmination of the direction in which the "chick" had been going in the past few years.
If Bridesmaids and Young Adult are any indication, it seems like the "chick" is now going through a depressed phase. In YA, Theron plays a self-centered woman who plots an impressive but impossible scheme to win back her high school boyfriend. Not only has her character ended her first marriage, she is mortified at the thought of her ex being happily married in a suburban home. She attempts to rescue him from this tragic fate and tries to lure him into her urban life. All of this is played out through a really depressed Theron character who wakes up puffy-eyed each morning, has a hard time getting out of bed and drinks incessantly. She does not get the guy in the end, just some hard knocks and warning bells about her life.
While this particular narrative is an exaggerated representation of the new "chick" avatar, it does herald a shift in the generally rosy and adorably frazzled story of single 30-something women. My guess is that we are looking at a kind of transition blues phase within the "chick's" narrative and in fact, the story itself is going to enter a brand new phase where these women probably will reject marriage and the ending will look very different but still be happy, sort of like Bolick's article. Until then, the "chick" is in the doldrums, but fingers crossed, not for long!
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