“All Chick and No Lit”?
Literary Legitimacy, Feminism, and the Role of Fashion in Chick Lit
Liseth Wielema 1615521
Dr. Kees de Vries 31 August 2014
14,389 words
Master’s Dissertation English Language and Culture Department of English Language and Culture,
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Introduction
Commenting on the reception of women’s writing in the late 1920s in the essay A Room of
One’s Own, Virginia Woolf remarked that“[s]peaking crudely, football and sports are
‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room” (96). Despite being made some eighty-five years ago, this observation – bar the now largely obsolete drawing-room – still holds in the discussion pertaining one particular genre of contemporary women’s writing: chick lit. Now a category of popular women’s fiction, the term ‘chick lit’ is believed to have first been used among Princeton students in the late 1980s to refer to a college course on female literary tradition taught by Elaine Showalter1 (Harzewski, Chick Lit 44). In 1995, Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell used the term ironically in the title of their edited anthology of post-feminist fiction
Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, “not to embrace an old frivolous or coquettish image of
women but to take responsibility for our part in the damaging, lingering stereotype” (Mazza 18). Almost twenty years later, the intended irony has long worn off but the term ‘chick lit’ as well as the eponymous genre have been the subject of debate ever since.
It has proved difficult to pinpoint when or why exactly ‘chick lit’ went from being a term to denominate an observed development in postfeminist fiction that “challenged the status quo” (Mazza 21) to a derogatory label for a genre whose authors and advocates are having to defend its literary value. In ‘Who’s Laughing Now? A History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre,’ Mazza, one of the editors of Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, outlined the developments following the anthology’s publication. According to her, the initial reactions to the first Chick Lit were predominantly positive, ranging “from astonishment to
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gratitude” (19). Literary and feminist scholars seemed to understand and validate the general direction in which Mazza and DeShell were trying to push women’s fiction or, rather, the interpretation thereof: to move beyond conventional feminism and the status of women as victims. Yet the anthology’s 1996 sequel, Chick Lit 2 (No Chick Vics), did not elicit the same responses as its predecessor; on the contrary, one particular review supposedly led to the volume being pronounced “an offence to the senses” by a subcommittee of the United States Congress (Mazza 21). The term ‘chick lit,’ however, did enter the literary mainstream after the publication of James Wolcott’s editorial in the New Yorker titled “Hear Me Purr: Maureen Dowd and the Rise of Postfeminist Chick Lit” in May 1996 – but not quite in the way Mazza and DeShell had envisioned. Defining ‘chick’ as “a postfeminist in a party dress, a bachelorette too smart to be a bimbo, too refined to be a babe, too boojy to be a bohemian” (54), Wolcott accused the writing by “chick writers” of having “softened and juvenilized” into “a popularity-contest coquetry” imbued with “sheer girlishness” – a development he believes to be an odd aftereffect of feminism (57). Though Wolcott mentions Mazza and DeShell’s anthology, wrongfully categorizing it as a “pop fiction anthology” in which “the concerns of female characters seem fairly divided between getting laid and not getting laid” (57), Mazza is sceptical whether Wolcott actually read Chick Lit, but credits him for describing the genre
avant la lettre.
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earning publishers more than $71 million in 2002 in the US alone – chick lit became a “target for the critics’ derision, relegated to both subordinated spaces: the popular and the female” (Smith 4). One of the most pervasive charges made against the genre is that the novels are ‘light’ and ‘frivolous’ – criticism reminiscent of that expressed in the 1850s by George Eliot in “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) and by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who famously referred to female authors as “a damned mob of scribbling women,” in several letters to his editor. Correspondingly, it was the criticism expressed by established authors that heightened the current debate about chick lit. During a discussion between women writers on a BBC radio show in 2001, Dame Beryl Bainbridge and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Doris Lessing publicly condemned the genre: after Bainbridge denounced chick lit as “a froth sort of thing”, Lessing added that “[i]t would be better, perhaps, if [female novelists] wrote books about their lives as they really saw them, and not these helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their weight” (“Bainbridge Denounces Chick Lit As Froth”).
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bring down all of us? And yet, with [Bank’s new novel], it’s hard to resist” (qtd. in Harzewski, Chick Lit 6).
Criticism of the genre is not just limited to its novels’ plots; even the chick lit’s cover art has received its fair share of condemnation. Typically characterized by day-glo or pastel-coloured covers, catchy titles in cursive fonts, and cartoon-style illustrations of stiletto’s and shopping bags, chick lit’s bright jacket designs are instantly recognizable and distinguishable from other genres (Gill & Herdieckerhoff 488). Indeed, chick lit’s highly feminized visual presence in the marketplace is – much to the vexation of its detractors – ubiquitous. In “Heels over Hemingway,” Maureen Dowd recounts how she found herself “swimming in pink” (par. 2) while browsing for a copy of Conrad’s Nostromo during a bookstore visit, which led her to contend that “[t]he blood-red high heel ending in a devil’s pitchfork on the cover of the Lauren Weisberger best seller might as well be driving a stake through the heart of the classics” (par. 4). Conversely, feminist scholars have pointed out that chick lit novels were strategically targeted and marketed by means of their distinct visual identity to revive the romance novel formula and increase sales among the 20- to 30-year old demographic in the 1990s.2 There was, nevertheless, certainly a novelty factor to chick lit, which was heralded a new kind of women’s popular fiction, though the same cannot be said about the criticism it has received, which follows much in the same vein as Hawthorne’s contempt for the sentimental novels of the nineteenth century: “[w]hat is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’3
and other books neither better nor worse? – worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000” (Hart 93).
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Harzewski, “Tradition” 35; Gill & Herdieckerhoff 488.
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Feminist literary critics in particular have concerned themselves with the overwhelming success and popularity of the genre’s forerunner, the formula romance, over the decades and have recently broadened their field of interest to include chick lit. As part of a tradition of literary criticism by women that can be traced back to the medieval period, the study of women’s writing is by no means new, yet it was not until the 1960s that it became a distinct literary discipline (Benstock, Ferriss & Woods 153). In order to gain a better understanding of this interest in and relationship with women’s writing, it is essential to take into account the movement from which this school of criticism arose: feminism. Emanating from the critical examination of a history of oppression and inequality between the sexes, women’s movements first emerged in the late eighteenth century and were known as ‘women’s suffrage,’ ‘the woman movement,’ and ‘woman’s rights’ (Boles & Hoeveler 2). Though scholars have disputed when and by whom it was first used, the originally French term ‘feminism’ disseminated rapidly from the 1880s onwards and was widely used – albeit in its anglicized form – throughout Europe and North and South America by 1910 (Boles & Hoeveler 2).
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feminist literary theory. Defined in its broadest sense as the movement associated with the “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex” (OED), feminism is more commonly defined in terms of waves: the first wave of feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which centered on the demand for women’s suffrage and equality with regard to education, employment and matrimony;4 the second wave of feminism arose from within international movements concerned with social, racial and economic discrimination in the 1960s, and centered on women’s shared experiences through unity and sisterhood;5
a third wave is considered to have emerged, predominantly in the US, in the 1980s and 1990s, “as a reaction against the perceived lack of focus on class and race issues in earlier movements” (OED).6
From a literary point of view, feminism has contributed to or even prompted new narrative traditions and genres in women’s writing that are more or less concurrent with the movement’s waves. Changes in ideas about marital relations and the rise of the companionate marriage – in lieu of the arranged marriage – brought about by the early women’s movements in the eighteenth century gave rise to the courtship novel (Harzewski, Chick Lit 72). The romance of the 1970s and 80s, also known as the Harlequin romance after its chief publisher thrived concurrently with second-wave feminism, from which feminist literary criticism and theory emerged.7 Chick lit, the latest addition to this narrative tradition, has been linked to postfeminism, a term that has generated a similar debate amongst feminist scholars. As a result of the disagreement concerning the definition of feminism, its current state, and its future, multiple and conflicting strands of postfeminism have developed over the years, of which three can be considered to be dominant within the academy: “an epistemological or
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Benstock, Ferriss & Woods 153-4; Boles & Hoeveler 134; OED.
5 Boles & Hoeveler 293; OED.
6 Due to an overlap with postfeminism and the lack of scholarly consensus on its ideologies, the third wave of
feminism is omitted in this dissertation.
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political stance in the wake of feminism’s encounter with ‘difference’”, “an historical shift within feminism”, “or as a backlash against feminism” (Gill, “Postfeminist” 148). These postfeminist strands have each been thoroughly underpinned by equally valid theories, but – as will be discussed in chapter 2 – they need not necessarily preclude one another.
The two novels under consideration in this dissertation, Helen Fielding’s Bridget
Jones’s Diary (1996) and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003), were
published several years and an ocean apart, but nevertheless share certain features in terms of their success. Firstly, both chick lit novels were international best-sellers: to illustrate, Bridget
Jones’s Diary – the Americanized edition – remained on the New York Times Best Seller list
for fiction for seventeen consecutive weeks in 1998; The Devil Wears Prada surpassed that by seven weeks, holding its place on the same list for a total of twenty-four weeks in 2003.8 Secondly, Bridget Jones’s Diary as well as The Devil Wears Prada were made into top-grossing movies – the popularity of the latter’s screen adaptation even somewhat obscured that of the novel – which were released in 2001 and 2006, respectively. The commensurate success of the novels did not, however, warrant the same academic consideration, as attested by the varying extents to which they have been considered in literary criticism and, more specifically, feminist discourse. Bridget Jones’s Diary, which is widely believed to have inaugurated the chick lit genre, “is the most canonical of chick lit titles as well as the most acknowledged by professors who feature the text on contemporary British novel and Austen-related syllabi” (Harzewski, Chick Lit 59); however, the same cannot be said for The Devil
Wears Prada. In fact, Weisberger’s novel has not only received little academic attention,9 it was also shunned by the publishing company that produces Vogue among many other
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The New York Best Seller List archive via hawes.com.
9 The movie’s 2006 screen adaptation, however, has been sufficiently discussed by film and media, gender, and
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upmarket glossy magazines, Condé Nast, and the magazines it issues. Weisberger herself has argued that, as the book’s title character is based on American Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, “not a single Condé Nast publication mentioned a word – not [her] name, the title, anything” despite the fact that “the book was getting so much hype and so much publicity” (Das par. 30).
A likely explanation for The Devil Wears Prada to be excluded from feminist literary studies could be the resistance of fashion in feminist scholarship – a resistance that had been common among other disciplines until recent years. Although theoretic writing on fashion can be traced back to 1575 (Johnson, Torntore & Eicher 2), it did not gain prominence until recent years due to a number of reasons, which include a “broader awareness of fashion as a social process, more recognition of the personal, social and ecological implications of fashion, and the greater attention paid to fashion in academia as a result of fashion’s role in globalization” (Lillethun 77). There is no universally accepted fashion theory as of yet, allowing fashion theories to be proposed from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. In The Fashioned Body (2000) – the primary source of reference in the last chapter of this study – Joanne Entwistle provides a comprehensive overview of theories on fashion and dress that have been put forward from fields of study across the board. Touching on the most distinctive theories on fashion and dress to have come out of the last two centuries, such as Veblen’s The Theory of
the Leisure Class (1899), Simmel’s “Fashion (1904), and Flügel’s The Psychology of Clothes
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understood “as an inquiry into fundamental questions about fashion with the objectives of understanding, explaining and predicting fashion change” (Lillethun 77) that takes as “its starting point a definition of ‘fashion’ as the cultural construction of the embodied identity” (Steele 1). At present, the word ‘fashion’ functions as an umbrella term for an assortment of related words that are used more or less synonymously in sartorial discourse, such as ‘dress,’ ‘style,’ and ‘clothing’.10
Allowing for feminist theories as well as theories proposed from other disciplines, present-day fashion theories are particularly pertinent in analyzing the academic merit of a literary genre such as chick lit that is considered ‘fluffy’ due to its sartorially rich content.
Though oft-scorned and largely eschewed in academia, chick lit has made a positive contribution to the canon of women’s fiction by chronicling the modern-day female experience through its relationship with earlier women’s writing, feminism, and fashion. As the analysis of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada will show, fashion constitutes a new – and possibly unexpected – area of research that yet is to be explored in full, especially in feminist scholarship. Since the birth of the genre in the mid-1990s, chick lit has been dismissed as ‘lightweight’ and ‘feminine rubbish’ on account of the genre’s lack of literary merit. These accusations against a genre whose authors and readers are almost exclusively women reverberate views entrenched in the history of women’s writing, and consequently invite further exploration. Chapter 1 will explore the novels’ parallels to specific works of earlier women’s writing in order to establish the legitimacy of the genre. Following in chapter 2, then, is a further yet more general discussion of the divergence between chick lit and its precursors, and the manner in which this reflects the relationship between feminism and postfeminism. Lastly, chapter 3, will analyze the role of fashion in chick lit by drawing on examples from Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Devil Wears Prada.
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Chapter 1
In recent years, scholars have examined and debated the similarities between chick lit and novels from the nineteenth and twentieth century, and have established historical parallels between chick lit and earlier works of prose fiction in terms of plot, structure and criticism. When the romance was displaced by the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, critics questioned “the woman writer’s moral and financial status as well as the genre’s educational and entertainment benefits, especially in regard to women readers” (Harzewski, “Tradition” 31). Yet, studies have shown that the novel was, in fact, an adaptation of the romance’s structure, catering to a “demand for greater conformity to ordinary experience” (Harzewski,
Chick Lit 25) of the expanding readership which middle-class women had started to become
part of. Though similar links can and have been made between the relation of chick lit to the popular romance of the 1970s and 80s, “chick lit’s ties are stronger to the original prose romance” (Harzewski, “Tradition” 31).
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classification, the ‘single and unattached’ heroine, such as Bridget Jones, is not only the most frequently occurring type of protagonist in chick lit, but also has the most evident connection to its precursors from earlier women’s writing; Weisberger’s Andrea Sachs, exemplifies the less ubiquitous but nevertheless notable ‘attached but unmarried’ protagonist. The third type of protagonist, examples of which include Maggie Walsh in Marian Keyes’ Angels (2002) and Rose Lloyd of Elizabeth Buchan’s Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (2001), is gaining more and more grounds in the field of chick lit, but will not be further discussed in this thesis.
Since its publication in 1996, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones has come to epitomize the first type of protagonist, while Bridget Jones’s Diary has become a “source text for chick lit tropes” (Harzewski, Chick Lit 59). Charting one year in the life of its eponymous heroine,
Bridget Jones’s Diary is a column-turned-novel centering on Bridget’s romantic endeavors,
such as a fling with her boss and ‘emotional fuckwit,’ Daniel Cleaver, and a burgeoning relationship with the seemingly aloof “top human-rights lawyer” (101) Mark Darcy, but also includes more desperately-single moments in which she, for instance, contemplates rekindling the flame with a former boyfriend, with whom she seldom speaks, solely for the reason that she is ‘unhappy and lonely’ after being cheated on. The novel generated “huge numbers of ‘copycat’ novels centered on the life a thirty something female who was unhappily single, appealingly neurotic, and preoccupied with the shape, size and look of her body, and with finding a man” (Gill & Herdieckerhoff 489). To be sure, Bridget Jones’s Diary not only set the trend for chick lit – it was the benchmark to gauge the earlier chick lit novels by before chick lit became an established genre – it also has its own sources and influences. In Helen
Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide (2002), one of the few scholarly books
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confessional tone to that of, for instance, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973).11
Yet, as Whelehan so justly points out, Fielding’s main sources of inspiration are evidently the works of Jane Austen.
In reading Bridget Jones’s Diary, the correlation to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with regard to the general story and, to an extent, its characters, quickly becomes apparent. But Fielding’s was not an attempt to covertly copy what is held to be the perfect romance narrative; on the contrary, she has publicly acknowledged that she “shamelessly stole the plot” of Austen’s Pride & Prejudice – her favourite book – as she thought it “very well market researched over a number of centuries.”12
By naming her male lead, Mark Darcy, after Austen’s Mr. Darcy, Fielding cleverly created an intertextual link to Austen’s original hero – the irony of which the author expresses vicariously through Bridget: “[i]t struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting 'Cathy' and banging your head against a tree” (13). The analogies between Mark and Mr. Darcy are further substantiated – and complicated – by Fielding’s incorporation of the BBC’s screen adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, which aired in 1995, in the novel. As part of the 1990s Jane Austen revival that saw copious reworkings of the author’s most popular works for film and television, the six-part television series starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennett drew approximately 11 million viewers per episode in the UK (Sokol 78). Like millions of other people, Bridget is caught up in the nationwide infatuation with the BBC drama, also known as ‘Darcy fever,’13
noting: “[j]ust nipped out for fags prior to getting changed ready for BBC Pride and Prejudice. Hard to believe there are so
11 For a more elaborate discussion of Bridget Jones’s Diary’s sources and influences, see Helen Fielding’s
Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide (2002) and The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl To Sex and The City (2005) by Imelda Whelehan.
12 Harzewski, Chick Lit 60; Smith 7; Whelehan 30. 13
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many cars out on the roads. Shouldn't they be at home getting ready? Love the nation being so addicted” (246).
As becomes apparent from this diary entry, Bridget takes watching Pride & Prejudice very seriously. Judging by the fact that she prepares and dresses for the occasion, it is not just a show to her; it is an event. After the show, Bridget all but salivates over Mr. Darcy with her friend Jude, who shares her obsession with the BBC series, in a “long discussion about the comparative merits of Mr. Darcy and Mark Darcy, both agreeing that Mr. Darcy was more attractive because he was ruder but that being imaginary was a disadvantage that could not be overlooked” (247). Despite being aware that the juxtaposition of the fictional and the real Darcy is somewhat quixotic, Bridget nevertheless feels disenchanted the following week when faced with the reality that her focus of affection is fictional:
I stumbled upon a photograph in the Standard of Darcy and Elizabeth, hideous, dressed as modern-day luvvies, draped all over each other in a meadow… Apparently they are already sleeping together. That is absolutely disgusting. Feel disorientated and worried, for surely Mr. Darcy would never do anything so vain and frivolous as to be an actor and yet Mr. Darcy is an actor. Hmmm. All v. Confusing. (247-8)
The sense of “tension between the pleasurable fantasies of faux-Austenian romance and the somewhat harsher realities of modern existence” (Murphy 31) implies that for Bridget watching Pride and Prejudice is a process similar to escape reading, offering a temporary break from her everyday life.
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[Darcy and Elizabeth] are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship. I do not, however, wish to see any actual goals. I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed, smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong and I would quickly lose interest. (246-7)
This attitude towards sexuality is more in keeping with eighteenth or nineteenth-century codes of romance in which “a ‘virtuous’ woman … would have neither confessed to being in love with a man until she had received a proposal of marriage from him nor admitted to having been in love with more than one man” (Wells 51). Even the heroines of the 1970s Harlequin romance were – perhaps surprisingly in light of its concurrence with second-wave feminism – still “characterized by sexual innocence and passivity” (Gill & Herdieckerhoff 493). Moreover, her response corresponds to those of the romance readers in Janice Radway’s study in the early 1980s, who “explained that they do not like explicit description [of physical contact] because they prefer to imagine the scene in detail by themselves” (Radway 66). For Bridget, who is neither sexually innocent nor limited to one partner, to idealize the old-fashioned courtship is a reflection of a postfeminist ambivalence towards second-wave feminism’s anti-marriage politics so typical of her generation.
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or marginalized by her married friends, who play matchmaker by “seating [her] opposite an increasingly horrifying selection of single men” (212) at their dinner parties. In an attempt to renounce the stigma of their single status, Bridget and her friends dub their wedded friends and acquaintances ‘Smug Marrieds’ and coin the term ‘singleton’ as an alternative to its predecessor ‘spinster’ for the “whole generation of single girls like [them] with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and don't need to wash anyone else’s socks” (42). In order to celebrate her status as a ‘singleton’, Bridget relies on the reaffirmation of her friends, her mother, and sometimes books and magazines, and without it she is inclined to revert back to her more conventional desire for marriage and to lamenting being ‘boyfriendless’ (78).
Though Bridget’s amorous vacillation and ‘shagging’ adventures set her apart from her counterparts in earlier women’s fiction, it has also been one of the chief reasons Bridget
Jones’s Diary was instantly embraced by such a wide audience. According to Imelda
Whelehan (2002), Bridget Jones’s Diary gives an “astute picture of dating in the 1990s reflecting a wish-fulfilment fantasy that love can sweep away all other obstacles” (28), which seems to have struck a chord with its readers. Moreover, “Bridget’s life, aspiration, and consumer tastes to a large extent reflect the tastes, trends, and popular cultural milieux of glossy women’s magazines and popular television in the mid-1990s,”14
rendering her a relatable and recognizable character for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. A case in point is Elizabeth Gleick’s review of Bridget Jones’s Diary for the New York Times in which she wrote: “show me the woman to whom this sort of stream-of-consciousness, self-assessing mental clutter is unfamiliar and I'll show you the person who will not think Bridget Jones's
Diary is both completely hilarious and spot on” (par. 2). As a result of the widespread
identification with her character as the everywoman of the 1990s, Bridget attained the status
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of an icon and became “a recognizable emblem of a particular kind of femininity” (Gill& Herdieckerhoff 489).
The year 2003 saw the publication of Lauren Weisberger’s debut novel, The Devil
Wears Prada. Loosely based on Weisberger’s own life and one-year stint at Vogue magazine,
this roman-à-clef narrates the story of Andrea Sachs, a 23-year-old recent Brown graduate, who moves to New York in the hopes of finding a job in magazine publishing and pursuing her dream of working at the New Yorker within the next five years. Though not quite the publication or position she was looking for, she lands her first job out of college as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of Runway, a prestigious – and fictitious – fashion magazine. Unfamiliar with the fashion world, Andy finds herself in an office populated by beautiful women and men clad in incredibly stylish designer outfits. While her position as Miranda’s assistant is believed to be ‘a job a million girls would die for’, Andy soon discovers her boss, whose extraordinary yet tough leadership has instilled fear in all her co-workers, to be so ruthless and demanding it borders on abusive. Nevertheless, Andy is determined to complete her “year of servitude” (251) as one year of tenure “in Miranda’s office was considered to be the ultimate way to skip three to five years of indignity as an assistant and move directly into meaningful jobs in prestigious places” (74).
With its protagonist in a long-term relationship, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears
Prada deviates decidedly from Bridget Jones’s Diary with regard to its romantic plot.
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prominence of Andrea’s demanding job, which ultimately leads to their break up. Moreover, the central quest for love characteristically found in chick lit and earlier romance novels is notably absent in the story. Even when she enjoys a brief flirtation with “literary boy genius extraordinaire” (236) Christian Collinsworth or when she finds herself single at the end of the novel, Andy does not actively pursue a relationship and seems content being single. In fact, instead of seeking a new love interest, Andy returns her focus on her career. Accordingly, Wells’ observation that “the world of work in chick lit is thus essentially window dressing: a backdrop to the real business of finding love” (55) holds true for Bridget Jones’s Diary, it does not for The Devil Wears Prada, at least, not for Andrea; however, for her co-workers, whom Andy refers to as the ‘Clackers’ after “the sound of their stilettos clacking on the floor” (13), finding a potential romantic partner takes on a higher priority. Offering a rare glimpse into her colleagues’ lives outside of work, Andy relates how the Elias-Clarke office building, which also houses ‘one of the most prestigious banks in the city,’ is a scene for their search for a spouse, noting “[w]e didn’t share anything with them, not even an elevator bank, but it didn’t stop their rich bankers and our fashion beauties from checking each other out in the lobby” (125).
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the industry in which she works. In fact, the lone novel which lends itself to be easily likened to The Devil Wears Prada with regard to the fashion aspect of the job is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, which was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963. Also regarded as a roman-à-clef, Plath’s first and only novel contains a host of autobiographical elements that are not only similar to her own experiences but also approximate those of Weisberger and, accordingly, Andy’s in The Devil Wears Prada.15
For instance, Plath also worked at a New York-based magazine, in her case Mademoiselle, and set the story of The
Bell Jar ten years prior to its publication, in 1953, the year of Plath’s own month-long tenure
at a fashion magazine.
Similar to Andy’s character, Plath’s protagonist, 19-year-old Esther Greenwood, moves to New York for a month-long summer internship she has won at Ladies’ Day magazine, during which period she attends functions, banquets, and parties, and acquires a wardrobe of expensive clothing. In New York, she lives in the Amazon hotel, an all-female residence, where she shares a floor with the magazine’s eleven other interns, a rather curious phenomenon at the time as a convincing majority of women in the US were either already married or engaged before the age of twenty (Harzewski, Chick Lit 131). Young as she is, Esther comes to the realization that she has no clue as to what to do with her life after the apprenticeship, as opposed to Andy, a career-minded woman of the noughties, who takes on the job as a means to advance her career. Regardless, both Andy and Esther are aware of the fact that they hold a much-coveted position, though neither of them seem able to enjoy it. As Esther remarks:
I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes I'd bought in Bloomingdale's one lunch
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hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocketbook to match. … I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. (2)
Yet, the discontent with their jobs arises from different circumstances: Andy is sorely tested on a daily basis by her ‘devil’ boss, whereas Esther, who admits to liking her boss a lot, suffers from severe depression which prevents her from taking pleasure in the opportunity she has been given.
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The correlations between Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada’s respective literary precursors validate the claim that chick lit finds its roots in the romance tradition. That is not to say that the differences between chick lit as the contemporary romance and its predecessors ascertained here are of no importance. On the contrary, they can be argued to be evidence of a perceivable shift within the romance tradition rather than a departure from it. Fielding’s novel can certainly be seen as a continuation of the romance tradition as it has retained the romance’s central love plot but has given it a modern twist with more ‘shagging’. Though seemingly an anomaly within the chick lit genre, Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada is akin to the novels from which the professional protagonist emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Having established specific links between Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice on the one hand, and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada and
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Chapter 2
If there is one term that is therefore prominently present in critical debates of chick lit and is, therefore, inextricably entangled with the genre, it is postfeminism. The matter-of-course fashion in which the postfeminist label is designated to the genre suggests the existence of specific features by means of which texts can be identified as postfeminist, but so far only tentative suggestions have been made as to what they could be. In fact, there is yet to be agreement in feminist theory on what postfeminism is for the reason that a range of conflicting meanings have been attributed to it. As briefly discussed above, Gill (2007) distinguished three main ways in which postfeminism is broadly understood in feminist criticism. Firstly, the notion has been considered to be “an epistemological break within feminism – a move to a kind of theorizing influenced by post-structuralism, postmodernism and postcolonial theory.”16 Secondly, postfeminism “may be used to index a historical shift, a move into a new period after feminism and thus characterized by different problems and concerns.”17 And, thirdly, it can be interpreted to be a backlash against feminism – an hypothesis famously evinced by Susan’s Faludi’s Backlash18
– in which an antithetical position against feminism is assumed.19 While a detailed discussion of these accounts is beyond the scope of this thesis, they are useful in gaining an understanding in the complex and seemingly contradictory relationship between chick lit and feminism, which is the focus of this chapter.
There is a consensus – at least, to a certain degree – in the feminist scholarship dealing with chick lit that the generations of women born or “coming of age after the women’s movements of the 1960s find themselves in an ambiguous position: they have indubitably
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Gill, Gender 250.
17 Gill, Gender 250.
18 Faludi’s treatise was published as Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women as well as Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women.
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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” (Ferriss & Young 9). The 1990s were a pivotal period in the development of feminist theory, as various aspects of second-wave feminism were interrogated simultaneously both within and outside of academia. With the wider circulation of feminist values through popular mass media reached a vaster audience than it had done in the past, ‘popular feminism’ came to permeate the daily lives of young women. The struggles for women’s advancement of the first and second-wave feminism had paved the way for the increasing independence and individuality among women that had come to replace the reliance on old social structures, giving rise to the creation of new, individual structures. As a result of great changes in social mores over the years, the gradual loosening of gender roles made it possible for the chick lit generation, that is, the authors, readers, and protagonists of the genre, “to re-locate to the city to earn an independent living without shame or danger” (McRobbie 20) as the generations preceding them had not been able to do. Rather than acknowledging this development as part of the legacy of second-wave feminism, “in chick lit the women’s movement is taken for granted as an unquestioned birthright, if not directly treated with hostility.”20 Accordingly, “[the genre’s] embrace of women’s rights but eschewal of the feminist label mirrors the most common response of young women toward feminism today.”21
Even though the mere mention of the word feminism is generally avoided in chick lit – as it is in Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada – the opposite holds true for Bridget Jones’s
Diary. On various occasions, Bridget indulges in ‘feminist ranting’ with her friends Jude and
Sharon, which are often followed by contradictory actions. On one such an evening, for instance, after Jude has split up with her with her on-again-off-again, commitment-phobic boyfriend known as Vile Richard, the women denounce men for their “SHITTY, SMUG,
20
Harzewski, Chick Lit 168.
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SELF-INDULGENT BEHAVIOUR” (127). Yet, when Bridget’s new boyfriend Daniel comes by, “freakishly pretending to be the perfect man” (128), the women have a change of heart and turn into ‘fluttering’, ‘stupidly grinning’ girls. More significantly, Bridget’s own ambivalence toward feminism mirrors the contradictory nature of postfeminism. In what can be seen as an attempt to impress Mark Darcy, Bridget pretends to have read Susan Faludi’s
Backlash when he inquires if she has read any good books lately, even though she is actually
“halfway through Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” (14). In the journal entry, she remarks:
I haven't exactly read it as such, but feel I have as Sharon has been ranting about it so much. Anyway, completely safe option as no way diamond-pattern-jumpered goody-goody would have read five-hundred-page feminist treatise. (14)
Her choice to name a feminist bestseller in a bid to impress Mark is particularly surprising, but also characteristic of the novel’s humour, as only shortly thereafter she expresses an awareness of the fact that “there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism” (20).
Even without any explicit reference to the women’s movement, The Devil Wears
Prada exhibits a tension between feminism and postfeminism through the complex
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seventeen and working her way up from a position as an assistant to the very top of her profession as the editor-in-chief of a magazine that is on a par with Vogue. Alienated from her family by her ambition and success, Miranda ultimately transforms herself “from Jewish peasant to secular socialite”(39) by assuming a new name and a ‘cultivated’, ‘educated’ accent to match. Miranda’s “self-belief, professional success, [and] exquisite taste in consumerables” (Whelehan, Feminist Bestseller 146) relate her to the protagonists of the sex and shopping genre of the 1980s, also known as ‘bonkbusters’. Described as the anti-dote to the 1970s self-help books which set impossible standards of perfectionism, these novels launched the ‘superwoman’, “a glamorous, ambitious heroine who fights her way to the top of a corporate empire while engaging in conspicuous consumption of men and designer labels” (Felski qtd. in Whelehan, Feminist Bestseller 144). These novels, however, were by no means a glorification of the career-woman and contained “a moral core which offers an implicit critique of the superwoman by emphasizing her unnaturalness, and her uniqueness” (Whelehan, Feminist Bestseller 146). This idea is conveyed in The Devil Wears Prada through the characters of Andy and Emily, as they suspect Miranda of not sleeping, based on the fact that “Miranda would leave eight to ten ambiguous messages for [them] between the hours of one and six in the morning” (132) and of having a ‘superhuman metabolism’ as she is capable of “devouring the fattiest, most sickeningly unhealthy foods” (135) while maintaining her size-zero physique.
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powerful woman in fashion and publishing, and you just can’t get to the top of two major industries in New York City handing out candy all day long. Um, it’s understandable that she’s a little tough to work for. I would be too” (127). This statement is challenged in another definitive moment in their relationship when, during an unexpected conversation between the two characters, Miranda tells Andy she should be proud of herself for deciding to stay in Paris to assist her even after learning that her best friend is in a coma, which Miranda interprets as a sign of commitment and considers the right thing to do.
Just when I thought I’d faint from the length and depth and content of the soliloquy – whether from joy or from pain, I wasn’t sure – she took it one step further. In a move that was so fundamentally out of character for this woman on every level, she placed her hand on top of the one I had resting on the seat between us and said, “You remind me of myself when I was your age.” And before I could conjure up a single appropriate syllable to utter, the driver screeched to a halt in front of the Carrousel du Louvre and leapt out to open the doors. (338)
Though she is unsure at the time whether what had just transpired “was the proudest or the most humiliating moment of [her] life” (338), Andy’s ensuing realization that “morphing into Miranda Priestly’s mirror image was probably not such a good thing” (349) and telling her boss to “fuck off” (347) after yet another – very public – condescending ordeal, is effectively a rejection of the old feminist premise of ‘having it all’ by means of self-sacrifice. However, that is not to say Andy chooses family life or love over her career after quitting her job at
Runway: as becomes apparent at the end of the novel, she continues to seek employment in
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The relationship between Bridget and her mother is another example of such a generational relationship. In one of the novel’s subplots, Bridget’s parents separate after Pam has struck up a rather unusual friendship with a man named Julio, whom she met while on holiday in Portugal, and continues to see him back in the UK. Realizing that she has “spent thirty-five years without a break” (53) as a stay-at-home mother and wife, Pam decides it is time for a change. Asking her husband to move out, she starts casually dating other men, and in between frequent shopping trips and lunches, embarks on a career in television, presenting BBC 1’s new show Suddenly Single. Describing her mother as having “been infected with ‘Having It All’ syndrome” (71), Bridget grapples with the ramifications of her mother’s transformation from a full-time wife and mother to a sexually liberated career-woman much like the ‘selfish feminist’ of the 1980s, a sharp contrast to herself, worrying only haphazardly about her career and being too preoccupied with finding love to really concern herself with her “professional stagnation” (78). On the one hand, she admires how her mother has been able to reinvent herself – even though it forces her to acknowledge her own shortcomings with regard to relationships and work: she envies her mother’s new-found power over men – a quality she definitely lacks, writing “I haven't even got power over my own hair” (67), while also reaping the benefits from her mother’s desire for a career and determination, which land her or, rather, force her into a TV ‘career’ of her own. On the other hand, her parents’ imminent divorce would mean the end of family life as she knows it, a change she is not ready to accept just yet.
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getting their knickers in a twist about Bridget Jones being a disgrace to feminism and so on. … But it is good to be able to represent women as they actually are in the age in which you are living.” (“Bainbridge Denounces Chick Lit as ‘Froth”). The novel’s engagement with feminism has thus often been misconstrued as being serious and even angry, rather than ironic. As a deflation of the independent heroines and the superwoman figures produced by the women’s movement, Bridget reflects a generation that deals with feminism’s gains and deficiencies with humour and self-deprecation.22 Yet, these layers of meaning might elude some readers, taking Bridget and her friends’ stances on feminism literally, interpreting Bridget as anti-feminist, while others – often younger readers who were “educated in irony” – appreciate the added irony and, more significantly, get the joke (McRobbie 17).
Working in tandem with chick lit’s postmodern irony is a sense of realism, “an authenticity frequently missing from women’s fiction in the past” (Weiner qtd. in Ferriss & Young 4). Just as earlier bildungsroman, such as Austen’s Northanger Abbey, are a parody of the Gothic novel, so can chick lit be seen as “a partial parody of Harlequin romance.”23
Chick lit’s forerunners, the Harlequin novel of the 1970s and the ‘bonkbuster’ of the 1980s, established protagonists that were either too sexually innocent or too sexually voracious for its readers to relate to, causing a need for women in the 1990s “to write and read texts that validated women’s experiences” (Smith 6). Greater realism was achieved by employing the first-person instead of the third-person narrative used in both the Harlequin and ‘sex and shopping’ novels. Moreover, chick lit’s modification of the romance plot from the one-man one-woman formula to a ‘serial dating’ protagonist rendered the traditional Happily Ever After (HEA) ending in which the male and female protagonist would seal their love in matrimony no longer requisite (Harzewski, Chick Lit 26-8). For The Devil Wears Prada, whose protagonist is single at the close of the novel, it is the more realistic focus on the
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mundanity of working a full-time job – and, possibly, a demanding boss – coupled with the absurdity of Andy’s tasks and Runway’s office culture, that resonates with its audience.
In academia, the development of the diverging accounts of postfeminism called for a more comprehensive understanding of postfeminism to not only include but also “emphasize the contradictory nature of postfeminist discourses and the entanglement of both feminist and anti-feminist themes within them” (Gill, “Postfeminist” 149). Though, as it stands, there is no agreement as to what postfeminism is or what it means, though theories have been proposed, tentative as they might be, in order to use the term for analytical purposes. Both Gill (2007) and McRobbie (2009), have postulated self-surveillance or self-monitoring and self-discipline to be among these postfeminist features that are prevailing themes in chick lit. Evidently, Bridget is the quintessential self-monitoring subject: she keeps a diary, she is an avid reader of self-help books and magazines, and confides in her friends, who, like her, are predisposed to read self-help books. By doing so, Bridget and her circle of friends create their own structure, thereby forming a mixed-sex ‘urban family’, a phenomenon that can be seen to replace “the same-sex consciousness-raising group of second-wave feminism” (Harzewski,
Chick Lit 125; McRobbie 20). The body is also subject to self-monitoring and disciplining
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Chapter 3
With its manifold references to clothing, accessories and fashion brands, chick lit is imbued with fashion and, as discussed earlier, is condemned by its critics because of it. In order to discuss the role of fashion in chick lit, it is imperative to first clarify what fashion means. The notion of fashion has developed substantially since the word, derived from the Latin factio, a nominalized form of the infinitive facere, meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to make’, made its way into the English language via Old French (OED). In its noun form, factio can mean “action or manner of making or doing”, “a class (of persons) either professional or social” or “a political party, chiefly in bad sense, an oligarchical clique” (OED). While the word ‘fashion’ is still used as both a verb and a noun, the sense of the former corresponds to that of its etymological root, whereas the latter – the definition of which is under consideration here – has very little relation to its Latin counterpart. In fact, dress or fashion has taken on a host of meanings over the past centuries, thereby becoming entrenched in but also produced by culture. As this chapter takes a closer look at the development of the phenomenon that fashion is today and its role in the societal changes that also contributed to the advancement of women in society, it is perhaps noteworthy to point out that fashion’s relation to feminism has been largely overlooked – or deliberately avoided – in feminist criticism. Nevertheless, despite the prejudiced misrepresentations of feminist stereotypes and ‘feminist dress’, there is a long line of feminists who did concern themselves with fashion, albeit on a personal level rather than in their critical thinking, that can be traced from Virginia Woolf and what she called ‘frock consciousness’, to Simone de Beauvoir, who was known for her trademark turban and colour-coordination, and Elaine Showalter, who is trying to “sneak the femme back into feminist” (80) and who has “seen the best feminist minds of [her] generation ogling shoes” (86).
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in Atlantic City in 1968. While the ‘myth’ has been debunked since, as no bras – or any other undergarments or items of clothing – were burned during the rally, the bra-burning feminist stereotype persisted and remains unshakeable to this day. That is not to say that this image is entirely unfounded; contrary to popular belief, the link between women’s movements and the burning of women’s undergarments is not the legacy of second-wave feminism but stems from the late nineteenth century. The brassiere’s precursor, the corset, was among the items of dress that were criticized by the dress reform movements of the nineteenth century, as it was not only considered physically restrictive but also a health risk for women – it was said to weaken the muscles (if worn consistently since childhood) and to deform and damage internal organs (Entwistle 163). In one of the earliest demonstrations of the trope, American author and early feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a strong advocate of clothing reform, urged women to burn their corsets in What to Wear? (1873):
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by short hair and a practical uniform consisting of a ‘tailor made’ and a shirtwaister24
– a look that “referred to masculinity in its plainness and tailored cut, yet retained the lines of conventionally female dress” (Fawcett 145). Later, during the period following the war up to the mid-1920s, the term became synonymous with the modern woman, that is, “the independent, cigarette-smoking, fashionable flapper … [and] was tied to the consumption of luxury items and stylishness in ways that the early category was not” (Fawcett 145).
The late 1970s saw the rise of power dressing, “a gendered discourse on dress operating in the professional workplace” (Entwistle 16), which was further popularized through ‘dressing for success’ manuals and articles in the 1980s. Associated with this mode of dressing was the 1980s career woman, who was “depicted in tailored skirt suits with exaggerated shoulder pads” (Whelehan, Feminist Bestseller 142) often matched with a briefcase and big hair. These attributes – save the typical ‘80s hairstyle – then, have become “visual signifiers of female success,” typically deployed in advertising, and “are connected to signifiers of traditional femininity such as long hair, makeup, [and] conventional attractiveness” (Gill, Gender 95-6). Though this image implies that the long-standing tension between being powerful and successful, and the expression of femininity through clothing has been eradicated, feminism and femininity can still be seen to be in binary opposition with one another in the former’s treatment of fashion in chick lit.
In order to discuss feminism’s relation to fashion in contemporary women’s fiction, it is imperative to first answer the question, what is fashion? As previous studies on the subject matter have confirmed, the term is not easily defined and attempts to do so have failed to encompass the magnitude and complexity of the social phenomenon fashion has become. Fashion as we know it today has evolved from a fashion system that arose in the
24 The ‘tailor made’ is a wool or serge skirt suit; the shirtwaister is a blouse inspired by tailored shirts for men
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nineteenth century. Up until the 1850s, high fashion was created through a process of purchasing fabrics from mercers and modistes which were then taken to a tailor or dressmaker to be made into the desired items of clothing. “Dresses were composed of several separate garments and enormous quantities of fabric” (Crane 100), had elaborate and complicated trimmings, and physically restricted women in their movement. Urbanization, technological developments, and the economic climate following the Industrial Revolution brought about the establishment of couture houses and department stores in larger cities in Europe and North America. With the arrival of public transport, that is horse-drawn buses and later horse-drawn streetcars, centrally located retail stores were able to draw in a larger clientele and subsequently expand, both in sales volume and retail surface. Now utilizing several floors, retail enterprises gradually broadened the scope of merchandise sold at the stores, adding clothing and footwear (Fawcett 146; Pasdermadjian 1- 4). The first couture house in Paris had merged the services of mercers and tailors, offering sample designs for customers to select from which would then be manufactured in a colour and fabric of their choosing, as well as one of a kind designs. In keeping with this emerging trend, department stores initially provided their clients with copies of Parisian gowns, catering predominantly to the middle and upper-middle classes (Edwards 31; Fawcett 146).
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– the use of which had been facilitated by the technological innovations of the era. While even the earliest magazines had carried advertisements, they were restricted in their size and style and their placement was limited to the front and back covers. As the women’s periodical press expanded and an increasing number of publishing firms faced financial concerns due to higher production costs, advertising revenue grew more and more important. As a result, advertisements began to take up a substantial portion of the magazine and were spread throughout the content (White 64-7); retail advertisers – such as department stores – were keen to capitalize on this editorial development.
By the turn of the century, both fashion and publishing had grown into strong, flourishing industries, between which a reciprocal relationship had formed. Moreover, magazines saw an increase in circulation, which had until then “remained confined to the Capital and its environs” (White 25), due to the higher literacy rate as a result of the Education Act of 1870 (Ferguson 16; White 24-6). In post-war England, fashion magazines that had championed expensive custom-made couture in the previous century began to feature ready-to-wear garments, which were more affordable and readily available. Not only did the increasing popularity of ready-to-wear clothing precipitate the demise of custom dressmaking, challenging the set social conventions and codes of dress, it also meant a new position for magazines as trend setters in lieu of fashion followers (White 113). By the 1930s, magazines included shopping features, such as fashion routes and shopping advice columns, that doubled as advertisements for products, brands, and stores, stressing their versatility as arenas for shopping and socializing.
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women were to carry out distinct roles and duties in their respective realms, that is, the private and public sphere. Accordingly, the woman’s place was in the home and there were only a few places “where it was socially and morally acceptable for a woman to be seen in public on her own” (Tamilia 3). A space outside the domestic sphere where women could shop, department stores also provided new career opportunities by making jobs available for women (Tamilia 3).
Fashion and the consumption of clothes thus played a significant role in the advancement of women in society and consequently became associated with the feminine in the nineteenth century, when the expression of gender distinctions through clothing – which had been minimal until then – superseded the role of dress as a signifier of social class. While the significance attached to appearance remained, its focus shifted from clothing as part of a social role that was to be performed in the public realm to dress as the manifestation of a person’s ‘true’ identity. The dichotomy that this change yielded, that of dress as a means to both conceal to reveal identity, is so entrenched in contemporary culture that it is now understood as a given. Furthermore, it has been argued that “dress is an intimate aspect of the experience and presentation of the self and is so closely linked to the identity that these three – dress, the body and the self – are not perceived separately but simultaneously, as a totality” (Entwistle 10). Accordingly, the notion of the self-monitoring subject can be combined with the notion of the body and the self as ‘works’ that can be revised and remodelled by means of constant discipline and surveillance, to form an “overall ‘reflexive project’” (Entwistle 19). Spreading and enforcing this perception are magazines, self-help manuals, literature on ‘how to dress for success’, image consultancy services, and makeover TV shows that encourage “the view that one can be ‘transformed’ through dress” (Entwistle 19).
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more attention to her appearance, visiting a health spas, seizing every opportunity to go shopping, and wearing bolder, smarter outfits. The desire for transformation extends beyond herself to Bridget, whom she calls to give – often unwanted – fashion advice, constantly criticizing her clothing and insisting she is taking her to “get her colours done” (130). After setting Bridget up with a job interview at a TV station, she barges into Bridget’s flat unannounced with outfit options for the upcoming interview that include “something pleated and synthetic in bright yellow with a terracotta leaf design”, “a bright blue suit”, and a “slithery green blouse” (190), styles and colours that Bridget would not typically wear. And, to make matters worse for Bridget, her mother also lets her friend Una weigh in on the state of Bridget’s wardrobe choices – a message Pam is all too happy to convey, telling Bridget that “if [she]'d had something a bit more bright and cheerful on at the turkey curry buffet Mark Darcy might have shown a bit more interest. Nobody wants a girlfriend who wanders round looking like someone from Auschwitz”(130-1). Bridget, nevertheless, remains reluctant to partake in her mother’s wardrobe overhaul mission.
The notion of dress as transformative is more clearly manifest through Andy in The
Devil Wears Prada, though, like Bridget, she is initially hesitant to submit to it. Coming into Runway, Andy is blithely unaware of the workings of high fashion and dress, admitting to
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Before she can let Runway assume control over her appearance, as it has over most of her daily life, she ponders the decision of giving in to the magazine’s pressure to conform sartorially:
Why fight it? I asked myself. Simply wearing their clothes wouldn’t necessarily
mean I was a total sellout, would it? And besides, the comments on my current wardrobe were becoming more frequent and vicious, and I had begun to wonder if my job was at risk.… I was working at Runway magazine for chrissake—simply putting on anything that wasn’t torn, frayed, stained, or outgrown really wasn’t going to cut it anymore. (123)
Telling in this passage is the belief that wearing designer clothing would make her feel like a ‘sellout’ – as if she were, in fact, betraying herself or her own identity by doing so. When she does finally make use of the designer clothes so readily available to her, Andy soon relinquishes these concerns to enjoy the effect that wearing Prada – supposedly Miranda’s designer label of choice – has on her:
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Dress is particularly crucial in formal situations “such as job interviews, business meetings and formal evening events” in which “conventional codes of gender [are] more rigidly enforced than in informal settings” (Entwistle 15). In Bridget Jones’s Diary and The
Devil Wears Prada, one such a formal situation arises for both protagonists in the form of a
job interview. When Bridget goes in for her interview at the TV station that her mother arranged for her, she feels inappropriately dressed when going for a job interview: “[Richard Finch’s] singsong personal assistant – Patchouli… sported Lycra cycle shorts and a nose stud and blanched at [her] Jigsaw suit, as if, in a hideously misjudged attempt to be formal, [she] had turned up in a floor-length shot-silk Laura Ashley ball gown.” (197). While Bridget is made to feel overdressed for the occasion, Andy feels underdressed for hers. A telling moment as she recalls picking out her ‘pseudosuit’:
I… managed to assemble a jacket and pants that did not match and in no way created a suit, but at least they stayed put on my emaciated frame. A blue button-down, a not-too-perky ponytail, and a pair of slightly scuffed flats completed my look. It wasn’t great – in fact, it bordered on supremely ugly – but it would have to suffice. They’re not going to hire me or reject me on the outfit alone, I remember thinking. Clearly, I was barely lucid. (13)
Though she has chosen to wear a black suit, which is believed to be “a sign of independence of mind and sexual autonomy,”25 along with “something resembling a briefcase” (Weisberger 19) – an outfit similar to that of the power-dressing woman – her apparel does not have an empowering effect. Instead, she feels utterly embarrassed and “awkward … among the most toned and stylish women in New York City” (19).
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The almost instant awareness of just how ‘horrendously inappropriate’ her outfit was for the extremely stylish Runway office is later further exacerbated as she gets more acquainted with fashion and the magazine’s office culture, remarking “I didn’t know until later, until I hovered on the periphery of being one of them, just how much they had laughed at me between the rounds of the interview” (19). Approaching dress from a social point of view, it can be argued that “[b]odies which do not conform, bodies which flout the conventions of their culture and go without the appropriate clothes are subversive of the most basic social codes and risk exclusion, scorn and ridicule” (Entwistle 7), an observation that is a recurring theme in women’s fiction throughout the century, such as Virginia Woolf’s short story “The New Dress” (1927). In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy is scrutinized by everyone from her boss Miranda and her co-workers to the cashier in the cafeteria, even after she has started wearing more Runway-proof clothing. “As if it wasn’t enough for the Runway girls to mock, terrorize, and ostracize any and every person who wasn’t one of them, they had to create internal class lines as well” (130), Andy comments on the office’s social stratification that is mimetic of that of the eighteenth century, but instead of social class it is based on the labels of their clothing and the presence it exudes. Miranda’s scrutinizing outfit inspections, in particular, are so intense it borders on absurd:
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see the very fine lines around her mouth and eyes that were invisible from a more comfortable distance. But I couldn’t look too long at her face, because she was intently examining mine. There wasn’t the slightest indication that she recognized that a) we had, in fact, met before; b) I was her new employee; or c) I was not Emily. (105)
In her study of readers of romance novels in the early 1980s, Janice Radway noted that the descriptions of clothing never contributed significantly to the story’s developing action. Acknowledging that such descriptions are “seemingly superfluous details for the reader,” she asserts that they are “part of an essential shorthand that establishes that, like ordinary readers, fictional heroines are ‘naturally’ preoccupied with fashion. Romantic authors draw unconsciously on cultural conventions and stereotypes that stipulate that women can always be characterized by their universal interest in clothes” (193). In chick lit, descriptions have been given a more significant function. When the clothes of the protagonist herself are described, it is a direct reflection of her state of mind. Bridget, for example, chooses to wear a “cardigan with egg on it” at a time when she feels insecure and discomfited by the realization that she cannot attain the beauty ideal imposed on her by women’s magazines. More frequent, however, are descriptions of people not closely associated with the protagonist, such as Bridget’s co-worker Perpetua and the majority of Andy’s Runway colleagues. What this seems to imply, then, is that a one’s character can de deduced solely on the basis of his or her clothing. Moreover, it presupposes a prior knowledge of complexity of fashion and its meanings, which is demonstrated by Bridget as well as Andy, who are both able to identify items of clothing from certain brands without being particularly fashion savvy. As Andy illustrates:
