The Problematic (Im)Persistence of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Popular Culture and YA Fiction

Introduction

The year is January 2007. The verb ‘to Google’ made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary a mere six months ago, social media platform MySpace is at the height of its popularity while Facebook and Twitter are in their infancy,¹ and video rental stores such as Blockbuster and Xtra-Vision are still going strong. As the dust settles from Western Christmas and New Year celebrations, film critic Nathan Rabin publishes a review of Cameron Crowe’s film Elizabethtown (2005) in which he coins the term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ (MPDG), citing Kirsten Dunst’s role as quirky flight attendant Clare Colburn in Crowe’s film and Natalie Portman’s as Sam in Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004) as “prime examples” of the trope (“Bataan March”). Though the term gained traction after the publication of Rabin’s review, between 2012 and 2013 pop culture writers such as Kat Stoeffel and Aisha Harris were claiming the Pixie was dead.²

Fast-forward to 2021. Facebook and Twitter now have millions of users and have been joined by TikTok, Instagram, BeReal and more. MySpace is now all but defunct and streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime made brick-and-mortar video rentals obsolete long ago, their place in everyday life cemented by various Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. On the 19^th October, TikTok user @allcakenocheese posted a seven-second video. In it, her make-up consists of stylized winged eyeliner to create a doe-like effect; heavy doll-like blusher that is also lightly blended across the bridge of her nose to create an illusion of slight sunburn; and a small, glittery golden star drawn on her left cheek. Dressed in a sage green jumper accessorized with layered amethyst crystal necklaces, she talks directly to the camera: “Listen, I can’t disclose too much information at this time, however, I fear I may have … ” she pauses, angling her phone upwards to emphasize her bright purple hair and wispy bangs, “Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girled a bit too close to the sun.” By mid-December, over 900 users had used the sound³ to re-create their own version of @allcakenocheese’s video. At the time of writing, videos within the hashtags ‘#manicpixiedreamgirl’ and ‘#mpdg,’ including @allcakenocheese’s video and subsequent micro-trend, have amassed over 100 million views on the platform. A cursory Google search produces over 2.2 million results, with the Pixie featuring across multiple forms of media including music, games, television and film, and literature – particularly Young Adult (YA) fiction. Notably, not all of these texts simply reproduce the trope, with novels like Gretchen McNeil’s I’m Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl (2016) and Lenore Appelhans’ The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project (2019) attempting to intervene in, play with, or parody Pixie discourse. Nearly a decade after Stoeffel and Harris pronounced her dead, then, it is evident that the Pixie did not die – she evolved.⁴

A tension exists, however, between the Pixie’s cultural and textual lives. Though the MPDG is a stubbornly persistent, ever-evolving trope in popular culture, within the texts in which she appears, the Pixie is a temporary, transient figure. As I have discussed elsewhere, MPDG narratives are formulaic, comprised of five key plot markers (Gouck 5). Over the course of the novel, the Pixie disappears twice: the first time temporarily, after an argument with the protagonist; the second time, permanently. In this way, the MPDG is a manifestation of what I term “disposable girlhood” (Gouck 5). She is an ephemeral being, designed for discarding once the male protagonist – a symbol of the patriarchy – has used her for her singular purpose: to enrich his unremarkable life and prepare him for a bright, fulfilled future.⁵ The simultaneous existence of these contradictory manifestations – that is, of the trope’s cultural persistence and textual impersistence – can thus be characterized as what I call ‘problematic (im)persistence,’ resisting and complicating the overwhelmingly positive narratives of female persistence that pervade the contemporary moment.

In this article, I explore the tension between these two existences in detail. I begin by situating the persistent Pixie of popular culture within the overlapping discourses of nostalgia, retro, cuteness, and the twee. I argue that the MPDG, along with the discourses that surround her, is both an embodiment and symptom of the nostalgic as theorized by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia; as a cultural trope, the Pixie’s sartorial style often invokes fashion more suited to a 1950s housewife than a twenty-first-century young woman, while her appearances across the cultural zeitgeist can be traced through moments of significant nostalgia. It is all the more notable, then, that the discourse surrounding the trope is experiencing a significant spike in cultural prominence that began in 2019 – emphasized, I argue, by the Covid-19 crisis. Importantly, though, this resurgence has been subject to a critical turn, with online spaces such as TikTok providing a platform for women to both embrace and deconstruct the Pixie’s return. As such, I refute Stoeffel’s and Harris’ claims that the Pixie has died, arguing instead that the tapering off of ‘typical’ Pixie characters in the early-to-mid 2010s is not the result of the Pixie’s demise, but her evolution. The second half of my argument shifts from the persistent Pixie of popular culture to the decidedly more transient Pixie of YA fiction and the subgenre MPDGYA. Here I examine the role the Pixie’s two disappearances play in MPDGYA, arguing that these function as a means of silencing. I suggest that the Pixie’s narrative impermanence, and thus curtailed future, means that MPDGYA narratives are at odds not only with the contemporary cultural emphasis on the empowered, persistent girl, but with conceptualizations of adolescence – the very embodiment of ‘problematic (im)persistence.’

The persistent pixie: The trope in/and popular culture

As Laurie Penny pithily notes, “like scabies and syphilis, Manic Pixie Dream Girls were with us long before they were accurately named”; indeed, in another ongoing project I argue that the Pixie is a descendant of the Classical Muse and also has roots in the Pygmalion myth. In more recent centuries, however, film critics have suggested that the Pixie can be found in a myriad of films released well before Garden State (2004), Elizabethtown (2005), and Rabin’s review, including: Bringing Up Baby (1938); Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961); Annie Hall (1977); Betty Blue (1992); Almost Famous (2000); and Sweet November (2001) (Murray et al.). In the world of YA, Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, published in 2000, features a girl who is “as magical as the desert sky” and “as mysterious as her own name” (cover copy)⁶ and in 2005, John Green’s debut novel, Looking for Alaska, was published. As Mary Jo Tewes Cramb observes, although this novel “preceded the term manic pixie dream girl [it] helped define the territory” through the rendering of the titular Alaska as a “textbook MPDG.” As the Pixie figure rose in cultural prominence post-2007, actress and musician Zooey Deschanel – who had starred opposite Will Ferrell as the petite, blonde department store elf Jovie in the 2003 Christmas film Elf – became “the official face of the MPD[G]” in the late 2000s and 2010s (Romero). It is this moniker that makes Deschanel a valuable point of contact when exploring both how and why the Pixie persists in popular culture throughout this article.

Of course, one obvious fallacy exists in discussing Deschanel-as-Pixie: she is a real-life woman. As I discuss in greater depth elsewhere, “[i]n each of her manifestations the Pixie exists solely to enrich the life of the White, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class male protagonist” (Gouck 5).⁷ Because she “is built on that which is visible and visual and, because of this focus on surface rather than depth,” the MPDG can thus never be more than a two-dimensional object of patriarchal fantasy (5). To put this another way, the very nature of the Pixie trope means it is impossible for her to exist in real life; “flesh and blood women … are inevitably more complex and substantial than the superficial waifs of our collective pop culture fantasies” (Knisley). As Richard Dyer notes in Stars, however, celebrities are, “like characters in stories, representations of people. […]. [T]hey are just as much produced images, constructed personalities as ‘characters’ are” (20; my emphasis). Indeed, while “the fact that [stars] are also real people is an important aspect of how they signify … we never know them directly as real people, only as they are to be found in media texts” (Dyer 2). The two-dimensional, constructed image of the celebrity thus lends itself well to the traits of the Pixie. Here, then, it is Deschanel-as-star I am discussing as a Pixie figure, not Deschanel-as-woman.

In pop culture, the MPDG’s trope-defining quirkiness is reinforced by the retro aesthetic she embodies and enacts.⁸ Her thrift-store clothing is alternative in style and tends to harken to an era long passed, typically the 1950s or ‘60s; her hobbies often include knitting or crocheting, pastimes usually associated with an older generation as well as with domesticity; and her music tastes are firmly rooted beyond today’s mainstream, with 1980s band The Smiths being an oft-cited Pixie favorite. It is through this retro aesthetic that the Manic Pixie can be considered as a site of both nostalgia and cuteness – the latter of which Sianne Ngai defines as “an aesthetic that celebrates the diminutive and the vulnerable,” subsequently resulting in an “eroticization of powerlessness” (3–4).⁹ Building on Dylan E. Wittkower’s assertion that cuteness “is one of the dominant aesthetics of the twenty-first-century” (qtd. in McIntyre 423), I suggest that cuteness, along with nostalgia, are also dominant affects of the contemporary world. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym writes that “nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (xiv). Since the turn of the century, the world has been bombarded by precarity and uncertainty, from the 9/11 attacks in September 2001, to the 2008 financial crash, to the COVID-19 pandemic and a myriad of events in-between. Given the fertile ground of these unstable socio-cultural contexts, it is little wonder the Pixie, entrenched so deeply in the nostalgic, has flourished, evolved, and persisted.

The rise of Zooey Deschanel as-Pixie exemplifies the trope’s ties to nostalgia. The financial crash I mentioned above was the biggest since the Great Depression, triggering a significant recession from which the world took nearly a decade to recover. This period of societal upheaval and uncertainty created the ideal conditions for the Pixie – and, concurrently, Deschanel – to rise as both an embodiment and symptom of nostalgia. In 2008, Deschanel and M. Ward released their first album as indie duo She & Him, their vintage-inflected style resulting in music which, according to one reviewer, “could have been written and recorded at any point since 1965” (Murphy qtd. in McIntyre 428). A year later, Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer was released, with Deschanel playing the eponymous, Pixie-esque Summer opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt.¹⁰ In 2011, the first episode of Fox’s TV series New Girl (2011–2018)¹¹ aired. In it, Deschanel plays elementary school teacher Jessica Day, known for her 50s-style polka-dot-dresses, ballet pumps, and a penchant for ribbons and glitter – all of which invoke the twee aesthetic and function as either nostalgic throwbacks or invocations of childish innocence. Through marketing descriptions of Jess as “simply adorkable!” and a pilot episode that “leaned into the entire precious pixie schtick at every chance it [got]” (Romero), the show established Deschanel’s “brand of quirky femininity,” along with her status as Queen of the Pixies (McIntyre 423).

The association of the adorkable and the quirky with Deschanel-as-Pixie is important. As Anthony P. McIntyre observes, “[t]he fact that ‘dork’ is itself a word mostly used by children further adds to the child/adult liminality that is central to the concept” (425). Moreover, it is also pertinent that, as Arianna Romero explains, it is unlikely that “someone we respect or find powerful” would be called ‘adorkable.’ This, she suggests, is why there is no equivalent word for men. The adorkable Pixie is thus fashioned as a non-threatening figure and consistently infantilized, perpetually viewed as inferior to maleness – a position bolstered by her connection to the quirky. In his discussion of quirkiness in cinema, James MacDowell argues that “‘quirky’ suggests a film to be unique, and therefore desirable, product” (1). Similarly, Michael Hirschorn suggests that “quirk is an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream.” Crucially, though, “Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt” (emphasis in original). As a quirky figure, then, the Pixie’s persistence during the 2000s and 2010s can be traced to her ability to skirt (but never cross) the boundaries of substantial difference.

Deschanel’s personal brand mirrors the masquerade of normativity-as-difference associated with the Pixie. Key components of her ‘look’ are physical attributes which exemplify Western beauty ideals: large, blue eyes; porcelain skin; and long, brunette hair with thick, full bangs. As McIntyre observes, the “size and doll-like quality of Deschanel’s eyes are routinely mentioned in press features and are crucial to the cuteness she evokes” (430). As large eyes are a key characteristic of cuteness and are associated with the child-like (Merish 187), once again we see Deschanel-as-Pixie presented as infantilized and diminutive. This is reinforced by the “cute paraphernalia” associated with the actress, such as the ukulele she plays in the opening monologue to the Saturday Night Live (SNL) show she hosted in 2012, and the cupcakes Jess is often seen baking in New Girl (McIntyre 435). Importantly, both the Pixie and the aesthetics of cuteness are “saturated with racial, as well as class, meanings” (Merish 180). Tamara Winfrey-Harris notes that the persona so often accompanying the Pixie is “bound by class and race” and that the “wide-eyed, girlish, take-care-of-me characters that Deschanel inhabits on film are not open to many women of color, particularly black women.” It is no coincidence that Deschanel and the ‘quirky girls’ she appears alongside in the SNL skit “Bein’ Quirky With Zooey Deschanel” are thin, White, and conventionally attractive.¹² Non-White women “have less access to those varieties of cute aesthetics predicated on white, Western standards of beauty” (Leyda qtd. in Dale et al. 167). Conversely, the White, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class MPDG meets these Western standards of beauty because she is constructed from them. The Pixie’s exclusion of non-White women thus offers a “promise of the continued dominance of whiteness” (Projansky 54), the trope’s quirks demonstrative of performed (rather than actual) difference.

Although the 2000s and 2010s were an ideal time for the Pixie, it is worth noting that the trope’s rise was paralleled by a cultural backlash that began to emerge as early as 2008. Notably, these attempted interventions in Pixie discourse were executed with varying levels of success. John Green published his second novel, Paper Towns, in October that year. Although he framed it as a deconstruction of the Pixie trope, arguing that the book was “devoted IN ITS ENTIRETY to destroying the lie of the manic pixie dream girl” (“Hey John … ”), neither readers nor critics viewed the novel in the same way, instead reading the text as a re-inscription of the Pixie trope (Cramb; Leszkiewicz; Vincent). By contrast, Zoe Kazan’s film Ruby Sparks (2012), which follows the story of a lonely writer whose novel draft about a dream girl comes to life, was rather more unambiguous in its decimation of the Pixie trope. In 2014, Rabin penned an article for Salon in which he apologized for coining the term, claiming that he “could never have imagined how that phrase would explode” (“I’m sorry”). Rabin’s apology for his coinage marked an important moment for the Pixie; she was not dead, as columnists Harris and Stoeffel had proclaimed in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Rather, there was a marked shift in how the Pixie was received and perceived that cemented, rather than erased, her status as a cultural object.

The Pixie – and MPDG discourse – undoubtedly persisted. However, that persistence relied on evolution, arguably another kind of persistence. Pixie stories continued to exist and be reimagined across multiple media and through the figure itself, as I explore in greater detail in the next section in relation to MPDGYA, continued to be transient within these media, the approaches to and incarnations of the Pixie began to develop. For example, a male version of the Pixie, The Manic Pixie Dream Boy (MPDB), began to emerge. Charming and often somewhat eccentric, the MPDB’s interests in art, music, philosophy, or literature gesture to the ‘alternative’ (yet heterosexual) masculinity he embodies; where the Dream Girl is ‘not like other girls,’ seemingly the MPDB is ‘not like other boys.’ Much like the MPDG, the male Pixie has roots in film and television; Molly Lambert first discussed the MPDB in a 2012 article in which she identifies Criss Chros, Liz Lemon’s love interest in 30 Rock (played by James Marden) and Ben Wyatt, Lesley Knope’s partner in Parks and Recreation (played by Adam Scott) as examples of the MPDB. In a review of the film adaptation of Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Augustus Waters was also hailed as an example of the MPDB (Patches), while celebrities such as Harry Styles and Timothée Chalamet are to the MPDB what Deschanel is to the MPDG (Sakshi). Another notable evolution of the Pixie can be found in the Earnest Elfin Dream Gay (EEDG), the queer version of the trope coined by Derritt Mason in 2018. An “alluringly peculiar and selfless character” who is “simultaneously idealized and sidelined in the queer adolescent love story,” the EEDG exists “primarily to support and nurture the conflicted hero” (Mason). Examples of the EEDG include Linus in Patrick Ness’ Release (2017), Robby Brees from Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle (2014), Charlie from the Netflix adaptation of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper (2022), and Simon from the Swedish Netflix series, Young Royals (2021-present) (Mason ”The Earnest Elfin Dream Gay” and personal communications). Finally, a breed of MPDGYA novel I call ‘interventionist novels’ came to the fore in the mid-to-late-2010s. These texts, such as Gretchen McNeil’s I’m Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl (2016) and Lenore Appelhans’ The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project (2018) seek to challenge or intervene in the discourse surrounding the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.¹³ On the one hand, such evolving approaches and manifestations – particularly unsuccessful interventionist texts – undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping the MPDG alive. On the other, they are also indicative of the new kinds of spaces the Pixie occupies in the current cultural imaginary. The continued persistence of the Pixie thus indicates a fascination with her that extends beyond her cinematic and pop-cultural roots. The emergence of alternative Pixies such as the MPDB and EEDG, as well as the turn in YA toward novels which challenge or reimagine the trope, points to an audience ready to critically examine the trope.¹⁴

It is this appetite for critical appraisal that underscores the current configuration of the Pixie, which I will turn to discuss in a moment, as well as the resurgence of several aesthetics and discourses connected to it. The most notable of these, perhaps, is nostalgia, facilitated in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw “up to half the global population … under some form of lockdown to slow the spread of Covid-19 by early April 2020” (Kennedy “TikTok” 1069). As a result, traditionally domestic hobbies such as baking (particularly banana bread), knitting, crochet, and other arts and crafts rose sharply in popularity, functioning as an echo of the hobbies typically associated with the Pixie. In late 2021, @allcakenocheese’s TikTok video, discussed in my introduction, was uploaded. The crisis of the pandemic thus created – and at the time of writing still creates – ideal conditions for a return to nostalgia. Long periods of confinement “forced us to look for comfort in the familiar” (Lanigan), functioning as the kind of defense mechanism Boym describes in The Future of Nostalgia.

However, the pandemic only served to strengthen nostalgia’s presence in popular culture, rather than act as the sole reason for its return. As Kayla McCarthy notes, since the mid-2010s there has been “a significant increase in American media that takes people back to the recent past through nostalgia” (663). In particular, McCarthy gestures to a nostalgia for “geek culture of the 1980s” (663), citing the recent Star Wars reboots, Ready Player One (the novel and its film adaptation), and Netflix’s long-form series, Stranger Things as examples. McCarthy also points to entrepreneurs “riding the wave of 1980s geek nostalgia” as evidenced through the rise of arcade bars in “cities and college towns across the country, from the Big Apple to Bloomington, Indiana” (663–664). Notably, this kind of nostalgia is coded as masculine; the geek in media “is often a white, straight male [who] exhibits primarily three qualities: (i) propensity for science and technology; (ii) social awkwardness; and (iii) near-obsessive interest in science fiction and fantasy genres” (664). Along with 1980s culture, there has also been a resurgence of 1990s fashion trends ranging from bucket hats, scrunchies, and fluffy earrings to plaid print knitwear and cycle shorts. Beauty brand Skinny Dip has also released ‘90s-inspired designs using Disney characters and characters from the Nickelodeon cartoon, Rugrats (1991–2004). Crucially, this ‘90s nostalgia is more clearly rooted in girlhood trends and femininity, while ‘80s nostalgia is coded as masculine.¹⁵ In a broad sense, then, the masculinization and feminization of nostalgia facilitates a return to the kind of binary gender norms so key to the Pixie trope: the hyperfeminine Pixie and the somewhat nerdy, male protagonist who functions as a symbol of the patriarchy. Moreover, the return of decidedly more feminine ‘90s trends has paved the way for a resurgence of the twee aesthetic associated with the Pixie (and particularly Deschanel, both as star and in her role as Jess in New Girl).

Derived from the sound of a small child attempting to say the word ‘sweet’ (Spitz 10), the twee aesthetic peaked in the mid-2010s on the online microblogging site, Tumblr.¹⁶ Heavily inspired by “anything Zooey Deschanel, really” staples of twee’s nostalgia-infused style included “ballet flats, Peter Pan collars, tights, giant bows, cardigans, berets, longer hemlines, and satchel bags” (Zhou). This overlap between Deschanel and the so-called “Tumblr-girlies” (Lanigan) resulted in a reiteration of the problematic undertones that are equally present in discourses of cuteness. As Lanigan writes:

The twee trend at its inception was dominated by thin, white, cis female bodies. The childlike, gamine aesthetic, popularized by celebrities with those same body types, is not exactly a bastion of the same inclusivity the fashion industry and social media celebrates (or at least likes to claim it celebrates) today.

TikTok, which as Kennedy notes, “is predominantly a site of youth culture” (“TikTok” 1070) has functioned as a digital space in which women and girls are both embracing the return of twee and deeply aware of its shortcomings. Though often considered a platform for Gen-Z (born between the late-1990s and the early 2010s), Millennials (born between the early 1980s and the mid-to-late 1990s) are also active on TikTok. As a result, the discussion of twee on the app is punctuated by a push-pull between those on TikTok who are discovering and taking part in twee culture for the first time and those who experienced it when they themselves were teenagers. While Gen-Z users appear to romanticize and embrace the twee, Millennials are approaching its return with what I term ‘critical nostalgia,’ simultaneously indulging in memories of their first encounter with the aesthetic while also creating videos in which they unpack and dissect that which was, and continues to be, problematic about the twee (and, by proxy, the Pixie). For example, user @wannabehayleywilliams makes deliberate, ironic use of a song by She & Him by pairing it with on-screen captions critically reflecting on the aesthetic: “It wasn’t all Zooey Deschanel & Mustaches [sic] … It was racism, fat phobia, SH [self-harm] posts and ED [eating disorder] forums. I could go on forever.” Other users have used the resurgence of the aesthetic to suggest that the Pixie is a romanticized coding of both mental illness and neurodivergence, presenting such conditions as endearing and charming while erasing the difficulties people with these conditions face on a daily basis (@juniebjonespitonme; @thewilderflowers). Newer permutations of the Pixie and her related aesthetics, then, are underpinned by a decidedly critical turn that is led by popular, rather than published, voices.

Thus far, my discussion on the persistent Pixie has focused largely on adult examples; indeed, Rabin’s original definition centers on a “fantasy woman who sweeps in like a glittery breeze to save you from yourself, then disappears once her work is done” (“I’m sorry”; emphasis mine). Rabin’s definition, though, is somewhat disingenuous; after all, the term coined by the critic was ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl.’ In its original form, the term was applied to female characters in their mid-twenties to make them “seem less like autonomous independent entities than appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualize” (Rabin, “I’m sorry”), their coding as ‘girls’ rather than ‘women’ acting as a means of infantilization. However, when the trope appears in YA fiction, the characters, for all intents and purposes, are girls (or, at least, adolescents), albeit on the cusp of adulthood. In this way, MPDGYA novels complicate the trope; how can a character already considered a ‘girl’ be infantilized? Claudia A. Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh observe in their Introduction to Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia that when we “begin thinking about what a girl is we initially have to think about issues of age,” resulting in a number of questions being posed, not least “How old is a girl?” (xxiv). In the contemporary moment, “teen culture and girl culture is extending … at its upper end – up to age 25 or 30” meaning that “youth culture potentially encompasses much of childhood, all of adolescence, and all of young adulthood” and that, theoretically, “a female can be a girl by participating in girl culture for almost a third of her life!” (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh xxvi). Of course, the Pixie’s crossover between YA and so-called ‘adult’ media is not unusual and, since 2010, YA itself has seen “a steady ‘ageing up’ with … novels occupying a hazy ground between YA and adult fiction” (Phillips 44). Thus, what is important for my purposes here is that, whether we consider Rabin’s original definition as applied to kooky twenty-somethings of the 2007 cinematic landscape or to the whimsical teenagers of YA fiction, the lines between adolescence and adulthood are blurred – and they have been for quite some time. If we are to consider the persistence of the Pixie (and the evolutions of the trope therein) in its totality in meaningful, productive ways, it is thus crucial to consider the more adult cultural Pixie alongside the teenaged Pixie of MPDGYA.

The impersistent pixie in MPDGYA

As I gestured to above, the Pixie of MPDGYA fiction is a transient, temporary figure who disappears twice over the course of the narrative: after an argument with the protagonist and at the novel’s end. However, the Pixie’s transience is not limited to her instability within the plot. Rather, the framing of a typical Pixie story means that she is not only transient, but silenced. In her seminal work Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Literature, Roberta Seelinger Trites notes, drawing on the work of Barbara Johnson, a woman loses the ability to speak (or, as Johnson terms it, is subject to aphasia) when that woman “is reduced to playing only one role” (Trites 48). Indeed, though she is reduced to a singular role (that is, to enrich the life of the male protagonist), the Pixie’s relationship with her voice (or lack thereof) is a complicated one. Trites argues that “an ability to use her voice is essential to a girl’s subjectivity” (62). For the Pixie, however, the ability to speak is situated in relation to male voices. Often the Pixie is considered bubbly and effervescent with a penchant for waxing lyrical about the beauty of nature and of the everyday. In Spinelli’s novel, for example, Stargirl brings protagonist Leo on a whimsical adventure to the nearby Arizonian desert. When they arrive at what she calls “an enchanted place” (Spinelli 123), she tells him, “‘[t]he earth is speaking to us, but we can’t hear it because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase out senses. Then – maybe – the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.’” (130). In a similar display of poeticism, Cassidy of Robyn Schneider’s The Beginning of Everything (2016) gives protagonist Ezra a pep talk when he appears unsure of his future, quoting from the work of Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, Horace, Mark Twain, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Dylan Thomas:

You can sound your barbaric yawp over the rooftops … or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune … or seize the day … or sail away from the safe harbor … or seek a newer world … or rage against the dying of the light, although that one doesn’t start with s so it sort of ruins the poetry of it all, don’t you think? (Schneider 114).

As is the case with most Pixie novels, lots of textual space is dedicated to Cassidy’s monologue of profundity. However, this is a red herring. Cassidy’s monologue is prefaced by a quotation from Mary Oliver (“‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?’” [114]) and, significantly, this female voice – though not Cassidy’s own – is quickly subsumed by the voices of numerous dead, White men. Moreover, her words perform a key role in the protagonist’s self-development, pushing him one step further on his journey of personal growth. Thus, the Pixie’s ability to use her voice is not essential to her own subjectivity, but the protagonist’s. Although she is indeed allowed to speak, she is only permitted to do so unencumbered when that speech is beneficial to the male protagonist and, through the foregrounding and amplification of male voices and the silencing of female ones, existing cultural structures of patriarchy, symbolized through the literary canon.

The Pixie’s silencing can also be traced, in part, to the visible and the visual – key tenets of the Pixie trope. Crucially, she is “never a point-of-view character and she isn’t understood from the inside” (Penny). The Pixie’s inherent superficiality is compounded by the narrative’s framing: any thoughts or feelings that she may express over the course of the novel are mediated through the straight, White, cisgender, middle-class, male protagonist. This mediation fosters an environment in which the Pixie is viewed as a two-dimensional object, rather than a fleshed-out girl. For example, when Pudge, protagonist of Green’s Looking for Alaska, first meets Alaska, he describes her as “the hottest girl in all of human history” before shifting his focus to the “cut-off jeans and … peach tank top” she is wearing (22). It is only then that he begins to take in “the voice emanating from the petite (but, God, curvy) girl standing before him” (22). A mere five pages later, Pudge asks Alaska a question as they smoke by the school lake. A nineteen-line description of Alaska’s fetishized body, in which he focuses on her “breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth … flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue toes,” separates the reader from her answer (27). Here Pudge tells the reader that it is in the gap between his question and her answer that he “realize[s] the importance of curves, of the thousands of times where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another” (27) emphasis in original. While not a total silencing of Alaska, these scenes render her distinctly muffled. On both occasions, it is Alaska’s body – that which Pudge sees rather than hears – that is foregrounded and, consequently, prioritized.

The Pixie’s ultimate silencing – and ultimate symbol of her textual impersistence – comes at the novel’s end. In the final chapters of the novel, the Pixie and the protagonist are reunited. Her work done, the Pixie must now disappear from the novel permanently, never to be heard from again. This exit can manifest in a number of ways. Most commonly, the Pixie will move schools or towns; Cassidy goes back to her old boarding school (Schneider 333), Stargirl climbs into the sidecar of a flowered bicycle and is pedaled away into the night¹⁷ (Spinelli 245), while the ending of Green’s Paper Towns implies Margo, who has already run over a thousand miles away from home, will run further to New York City (268). In some cases, like Krystal Sutherland’s Our Chemical Hearts (2016), the Pixie remains at the same school, but no longer talks to the protagonist. Instead, they become “unstuck from each other’s lives” by “deleting each other off Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat” (313). Regardless of how the Pixie leaves, MPDGYA novels typically end with a final monologue. Here, an entire chapter is dedicated to the protagonist’s reflections on his time with the Pixie. He will discuss the impact she made on his life, how she changed him, and what his future plans are. The Pixie’s future, however, is unknown. There is no indication whether she will go to college, of any potential careers into which she might enter, or what becomes of her once her work is done. The novel’s enduring voice is a male one.

In some MPDGYA texts, this silencing is taken further still. As the Pixie and the protagonist have a heart-to-heart in the pages before her disappearance, the protagonist tells her how much she changed his life. For example, Ezra tells Cassidy: “‘I wouldn’t be applying to East Coast colleges, or on the debate team, or any of those things, because I wouldn’t have met you.’” (Schneider 329). Immediately, though, she downplays her role: “‘But I didn’t do any of that […]. You keep wanting to give me credit because you finally decided you weren’t content with squeezing yourself into the narrow corridor of everyone’s expectations, but you made that decision before we’d even met.’” (329). In this moment, the Pixie commits an act of self-silencing, a total loss of subjectivity, by giving up the credit assigned to her by the male protagonist. In this way, she becomes (even more of) a passive figure. Yet it is this passivity which allows her – indeed, has allowed her throughout the novel – to play an active role in the protagonist’s development. In MPDGYA novels, then, the Pixie’s very existence, let alone persistence, depends on the wants and needs of a teenage boy.

The transience of the Pixie’s ending is at odds with contemporary ideas of female empowerment, persistence, and discourses of postfeminism. It is also at odds with conceptualizations of adolescence. Though Angela McRobbie has recently claimed that postfeminism refers explicitly to the period 1997–2007 (43), as Rosalind Gill argues, “so many elements of a postfeminist sensibility – the individualism, the entrepreneurial subjectivity, the emphasis on personal transformation – seem to be present in these newer formulations” (qtd. in Banet-Wesier et al 10). Indeed, in the current climate, “postfeminism, neoliberal feminism and popular feminism are all sensibilities that exist simultaneously” while also being “engaged in a cultural conversation with each other that builds and expands” (Banet-Weiser qtd. in Banet-Weiser et al. 10). It is for this reason I argue that the persistence narratives surrounding teenage girls today continue, or at the very least echo, Anita Harris’ theorization of “can-do girls” from earlier in the twenty-first-century (9). Having developed from the grrrlpower movement that emerged in the early 1990s, the Girl Power associated with can-do girls “constructs the current generation of young women as a unique category of girls who are self-assured, living lives lightly inflected but by no means driven by feminism, influenced by the philosophy of DIY, and assuming they can have (or at least buy) it all” (Harris 17). Today, teenage girls “are supposed to be more confident and resilient than ever before; they have the ‘world at their feet’” (Harris 13). These can-do girls are “identifiable by their commitment to exceptional careers and career planning, their belief in their capacity to invent themselves and succeed and their display of a consumer lifestyle” (Harris 13). This is not dissimilar to McRobbie’s recent theorization of (neoliberal) feminism, “the p-i-r” (perfect-imperfect-resilience): “The ‘perfect,’ which appertains to lifestyles and the terrain of the feminine ‘good life’; the ‘imperfect,’ which offers some scope (but within carefully demarcated boundaries) for criticism of and divergence from these ideals; and finally ‘resilience,’ which becomes the favored tool and therapeutic instrument for recovery and repair” (42).¹⁸ Crucially, the notion of ‘having it all’ at the heart of postfeminism, the p-i-r, and ‘can-do girls’ “is an expression of upper-middle-class white identity; to express such a desire is to be potentially within reach of fulfilling such an ambition” (McRobbie 50; cf. Banet-Weiser 13). In other words, this kind of empowerment is only open to, and thus only makes visible, a specific kind of girl: White, middle-class, cisgender, and heterosexual. While the Pixie fulfills these criteria, she is denied access to this level of subjectivity, resulting in a striking complication and highlighting the complexity of her (im)persistence.

The narrative of the empowered, persistent, can-do girl is predicated on there being a future – and having control over that future. Likewise, adolescence is “approached as a moment of budding promise” (Matos 10) and is often perceived, as Alison Waller observes, “as liminal, in transition, and in constant growth towards the ultimate goal of maturity” (1). Narratives of adolescence in fiction, then, “mostly [concern] narratives of coming of age, with adolescence representing a stage of evolution, development, and growth” (Corbett 67). While the cultural trope has been afforded this level of persistence, it is not an option the textual Pixie is given. This is crystallized in Looking for Alaska, in which Alaska is quite literally afforded no future due to her death (a suspected suicide) around halfway through the novel. In this way, the curtailed life of the Pixie is emblematic of disposable girlhood: designed for singular use, existing only for as long as the male protagonist deems her useful. The enduring message, then, is that teenage boys deserve spiritual fulfillment, growth, and the future promised to them; teenage girls only exist to facilitate their access to it.

The Pixie’s lack of future means she is also trapped in a state of perpetual girlhood, unable to progress. Interestingly, Hannah Doermann’s forthcoming article frames perpetual girlhood as something positive, a vehicle for “the reclaiming of the ‘silly teen girl’” (Doermann). She defines perpetual girlhood as “an understanding of girlhood as an agential, self-determined state of being, rather than a state of becoming on the linear path towards adulthood,” arguing that the idea “refutes Western models of adolescence as a naturally occurring stage of development organized around progressing into adulthood.” Importantly, Doermann’s argument centers on Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, for which an argument could be made that Bella’s transformation into a powerful, immortal vampire while still a teenager does indeed afford her the agency and “self-determined state of being” Doermann describes. In MPDGYA, it is precisely the Pixie’s lack of agency that contributes to her perpetual girlhood, serving to disempower her. She is stuck in a state of adolescence where there is no future, a state of temporary liminality rendered permanent. While Doermann argues for perpetual girlhood as a radical rejection of the status quo, in the context of MPDGYA narratives, the Pixie’s stasis is in fact a crucial part of reinforcing the norm. Moreover, this state of perpetual girlhood also invokes new ways of reading Melanie Kennedy’s notion of ‘becoming.’ In Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture, Kennedy writes that the tween (and, I would also argue, the teen) “is in part defined by her in-between status – her liminality, indeed her becoming” (9; emphasis in original). This process, Kennedy argues, is a gendered one, with becoming being “a specifically female and feminine process: the journey of transformation from young girl to young woman and the development of a gendered and sexual identity that goes with this” (9). However, because the Pixie is permanently trapped in a state of perpetual girlhood, forever a teenaged fantasy, she cannot enact this process of becoming (a notably postfeminism process) into adulthood. As such, while the Pixie is “always in the process of constructing a self,” the self which she constructs is not her own, but rather that of the male protagonist with whom she is paired (Kennedy, Tweenhood 7). Perpetual girlhood in MPDGYA, then, is thus stripped of any of the positivity Doermann attributes to it, serving instead to curtail (rather than empower) the Pixie while simultaneously reinforcing her status as a silenced object.

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined the messy, complex lives of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In popular culture, the trope is an enduring, though evolving, presence in the pop-cultural consciousness. Part of this endurance, I have argued, can be attributed to the societal conditions under which the Pixie has flourished, as two decades of socio-economic turmoil have created the ideal conditions for a Boymian nostalgic turn. The Pixie and her overlapping aesthetics are both an embodiment and symptom of that nostalgia. On the other hand, the Pixie’s persistence can also be attributed to the normative values she perpetuates; the MPDG and the related aesthetics I outlined above are only available to White, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class girls. While Millennials, who experienced the Pixie as teenagers, are acknowledging the flaws in the Pixie’s patriarchy-perfect manifestation of femininity, recognizing that girls can be and are three-dimensional, non-White, non-binary, and any other combination of non-normative attributes, the failures of traditional media (including films, television, and what I term ‘interventionist novels’) to articulate similar critiques successfully means that the trope – and the normative cultural scripts surrounding her – continues to persist. This is in stark contrast to the Pixie of MPDGYA, a transient figure who is both silenced by and at the service of the male protagonist. The continued existence of the (im)persistent Pixie is not, then, as with other modes of girlhood persistence, indicative of the perseverance of teenage girls. Rather, it is demonstrative of the dominance of patriarchal values against which real-life girls must persist.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks go to the editors of this issue, my anonymous reviewers, Emily Corbett, Sarah Cullen, Kate Fama, and Clare Hayes-Brady for their insights and comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research conducted in this publication was funded by the Irish Research Council under award number GOIPG/2018/2048.

Notes

¹ Facebook was founded in February 2004, followed by Twitter in March 2006.

² For example, see Kat Stoeffel “The ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ Has Died” and Aisha Harris “Is The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Dead?”. See also Margaret Eby “The Death of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”

³ A TikTok, ‘sound’ is the audio accompanying the video. Users, called Creators, may use sounds from TikTok’s Sound Library or create their own (known as Original Audio), often for humorous or ironic effect. Sounds are often used over and over again by multiple Creators, either leading to a micro-trend or to the sound going viral (that is, becoming incredibly popular and used in lots of TikToks in a short space of time).

⁴ Emily Tannenbaum makes a similar observation in her article for Glamor.

⁵ For more on this, see Gouck, “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl in US YA Fiction: Introducing a Narrative Model.”

⁶ Although Stargirl was considered to be a YA text at the time of its publication, it is now marketed as a middle-grade book.

⁷ In capitalizing ‘White’ throughout this article, I intend not only to draw attention to the racialization of the MPDG trope and the male protagonist, but also to emphasize how they both enact and embody an explicit and particular form of privileged, cultural Whiteness. For more on this, see Gouck, “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl in US YA Fiction.”

⁸ While I focus on the ‘quirky’ Pixie of popular culture here, it is worth noting that, although her narrative purpose remains the same, the kind of femininity represented by the MPDG across her multiple forms is not homogenous or fixed. For example, MPDGYA often features Pixies who are not ‘quirky’ or ‘light and fluffy’ and instead possess a dark secret and/or are dealing with trauma. While a full discussion of these nuances is beyond the scope of this article, I gesture to this in “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl in US YA Fiction” and discuss it at length in another, ongoing project.

⁹ For more on the cuteness aesthetic, see Ngai Our Aesthetic Categories and Dale et al. The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness.

¹⁰ While (500) Days has been viewed by many as a Pixie movie, those involved with the film’s production maintain that Summer and Tom’s story is, in fact, the opposite, intending to highlight the biases that arise when men do not listen to women. However, given its broader cultural reception, for my purposes here I consider it a Pixie film. For more on the film as anti-Pixie, see Gordon-Levitt’s 2019 interview with Larry King (“It’s Tom’ Fault”) and the video essay “Why 500 Days of Summer is So Misunderstood” by online cultural commentators, The Take.

¹¹ While Deschanel’s role as Jess is often considered emblematic of the Pixie, this assessment is complicated by the fact that Jess is the show’s main character. Moreover, that the show ran as a weekly sitcom for multiple seasons means that it is almost impossible for Jess’ character to remain undeveloped. Nonetheless, that Deschanel-as-Jess is so entwined with the Pixie in popular discourse means that New Girl is worth mentioning as a cultural Pixie artifact.

¹² Part one of this skit aired the same night Deschanel hosted the show and in which she played Mary-Kate Olsen. “Zooey Deschanel” (played by Abby Elliott) and “Björk” (played by Kristen Wiig) also feature in this parody of ‘quirky girl’ culture.

¹³ For more on interventionist novels, see “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl in US YA Fiction.”

¹⁴ I discuss the MPDB, the EEDG, the Transgender Pixie, and the (im)possibility of a Pixie of Color in another, ongoing project.

¹⁵ I am indebted to one of my anonymous reviewers for this point.

¹⁶ The earliest known use of the word ‘twee’ is in 1905 in Punch magazine, a satirical British weekly publication. However, here I am concerned with ‘twee’ as it manifests in the twenty-first century.

¹⁷ The ending of Stargirl implies that Stargirl will never be heard from again. However, a sequel entitled Love, Stargirl was published in 2007 and picks up a year after the ending of Stargirl.

¹⁸ An in-depth discussion of McRobbie’s p-i-r- is beyond the scope of this article, but for more see McRobbie Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (2020); “Disavowing Dependency: On Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and the Politics of Resilience (Rottenberg, 2022); and “Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Spectacular girls and the place of psychoanalytic approaches in feminist media and cultural studies during the Coronavirus crisis” (Kennedy, 2022).