Aspects of Chick-Lit: A Comparison between Western Chick-Lit and the Israeli Chick-Lit The Song of the Siren

ABSTRACT

In the 1990s, a new literary genre appeared – the chick lit – dealing with the stories of women in their 20s and 30s in the big city, including accessible and humoristic poetics. This article maps the characteristics of the genre as well as its origins: diary, journalistic writing, romance, glamor novel and Bildungsroman. Comparison between the Anglo-Saxon chick lit and the Israeli chick lit novel The Song of the Siren reveals that the genre is less successful in conservative societies than in liberal Western ones. However, its subversiveness is deeper and it promotes anti-stereotype themes regarding women’s singlehood (which becomes legitimate), in choosing a partner who enables the female character to be dominant and find her place and career in the public sphere.

摘要

20世纪90年代, 出现了一种新的文学体裁——鸡仔文学——讲述大城市二三十岁女性的故事, 包括通俗易懂的幽默诗学。这篇文章描述了这一类型的特征及其起源:日记, 新闻写作, 浪漫, 魅力小说和成长小说。比较盎格鲁-撒克逊鸡仔文学和以色列鸡仔文学小说《塞壬之歌》, 可以发现, 这种文学类型在保守社会不如在自由西方社会成功。然而, 它的颠覆性更为深刻, 在选择一个能够让女性角色占据主导地位并在公共领域找到自己的位置和职业的伴侣时, 它促进了关于女性单身 (这是合法的) 的反刻板印象主题。

KEYWORDS:

• Chick Lit
• Women’s literature
• Diary
• Romance
• Bildungsroman
• Feminist Thinking

关键词:

• 鸡仔文学; 女性文学
• 日记; 浪漫
• 成长小说
• 女性主义思想

1. Introduction

Who are the heroines who have left a true mark on world literature? Within this list we will find Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Elizabeth Bennett and of course, Bridget Jones. The latter does not belong to belle lettres but rather to the “chick lit” genre. On February 28 1995 in London, The Independent first posted 1996 column of Bridget Jones. The novel Bridget Jones’s Diary was published in 1996 in London, translated into thirty languages and sold over two million copies. The year of the novel’s publication is considered as the birth of the chick lit genre (2011).

Was Bridget Jones indeed the first chick lit heroine, as mentioned in certain studies? It would seem not, according to meticulous study. In 1966 in the USA, an extraordinary novel was published, causing a sensation and selling 31 million copies, a rare achievement these days as well and recognized by the Guinness Book of Records. The Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susan, gleaned negative criticism while loved by the readers, and achieved various adaptations for cinema and television. The novel characterizes three young single women – Anne Welles, Neely O’Hara and Jennifer North – who live in New York. Anne, the protagonist, falls in love with Lyon Burke, employed at the agency where she works as a secretary. Her love story with Lyon is at the center of the novel, and its realistic ending – the acknowledgment that the desired man in question is not satisfied just by her and will continue to have affairs – hits the reader and breaks the structure of the romantic novel. The book’s title has a double meaning – the “dolls” are not just the heroines (who live in a chauvinist society that thinks that they are “dolls”), but also the sleeping pills that they take and which are called “dolls” in order to diminish the notion of addiction to them. In contrast to the literature preceding The Valley of the Dolls, the writer wished to present the lives of modern women in the big city.

This work may be considered as the first chick lit, and in many respects it familiarizes us with the recurrent structure of chick lit (Chick Literature) – a genre intended for women, and young women in particular. However, as opposed to the romance affiliated with the pre-feminist era, chick lit belongs to the post-feminist one. The genre label alludes to a degree of belittling of the works included, as opposed to women’s literature, which includes canonic masterpieces as well. The term is derived from the style of the text in chick lit – readable, clear, accessible and humorous.

The label “chick lit” has been in use since the 1990s. It was coined by American writer Cris Mazza and her colleague Jeffrey DeShell in 1995, in the book they edited Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction. The label was applied in order to ridicule the new genre that dealt with young women and emphasized their period of living a single’s life. Several years later, it became the official name of the genre (2006).

The OED 2007 defines “chick lit” as literature written by women, for women, and dealing with them, while focusing on their social life and relationships, and appealing to readers of similar experience. Another definition describes chick lit as novels dealing with the life of the modern, cosmopolitan and single woman in her 20s or 30s, who focuses on dating, career and shopping (Baykan). In terms of style, these are readable novels centering on the function of humor, and the plot is delivered as a diary or confession of the protagonist in first-person.

As opposed to the romance, where the protagonist is a young helpless woman who is salvaged emotionally and economically by a mature, sturdy and wealthy man, chick lit aspires to show the lives of modern women (2006). Hence, the protagonists are not necessarily young, but rather spanning various ages, and the plotlines vary. It may center on the heroine’s employment life, as in the case of The Devil Wears Prada by 2003 and The Nanny Diaries by 2002; or it may focus on her search for love, as in Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996). Chick lit often covers problems encountered by the protagonist living in a capitalist society, as in 2000 novel Confessions of a Shopaholic (2000), which recounts the heroine’s rehabilitation from obsessive shopping.

The chick lit genre may be viewed as one enabling spatial emancipation for women, since there is no recurring pattern of finding love or a lover and settling into a family lifestyle. Rather, there is a pattern in which the heroine goes out to the external world – often from a village to the big city, and from a quiet, safe life to a turbulent and challenging one – where she is confronted with powers greater than herself in terms of finances, socio-economic status and others.

In this article, I would like to delineate the stylistic and thematic characteristics of the chick lit genre, examining its sources, contribution and correspondence with the feminist discourse. Furthermore, I shall portray the Israeli angle, confronting the genre’s traits in its Anglo-Saxon representation with its representations in Israeli women’s literature, focusing on the first Israeli chick lit, The Song of the Siren, by 1991.

2. Stylistic and thematic characteristics of “chick lit”

The narrow definition of chick lit describes it as a genre that deals with the experiences, attempts, maturing process and difficulties of one woman – single, white, heterosexual, British or American, at the end of her 20s or early 30s, who lives in the metropolis. The key word defining the description in chick lit is “empowerment.” Throughout the story, the heroine gradually takes the reins and directs her life, both the personal and the professional aspects. A characteristic component of the genre is the first-person narrator, who creates a narrative often including self-humor. The confessional narrative, through which the heroine is exposed, enables the reader to identify with the described (2017).

The women who constitute heroines of chick lit are shaped as loyal readers of women’s magazines, meticulously following their instructions and guidelines. Here, one may mention Madame Bovary by 1991 [1856], whose failures stemmed, among other reasons, from her desire to achieve the life described in the magazines she read. If we examine the claims made by 1990 in The Beauty Myth, then women’s magazines have always spoken in double voices – a feminist voice alongside a chauvinistic view of everything concerning women’s appearance and behavior. This tension is often found in chick lit, which sounds feminist stances about the abilities of women and their existence in the public sphere, while also rendering an objectifying view, requiring that they give in to men’s scrutinizing gazes. Moreover, chick lit often demonstrates the price of giving in to the examples provided by women’s magazines, and – in the case of Confessions of a Shopaholic – the price is an uncontrollable shopping urge ending in bankruptcy.

In terms of couple relationships, chick lit shapes a worldview according to which a talented woman who does not necessarily live by the rules usually gets a rich and handsome man. At this point, the hierarchy originating in the romance novels is maintained: the man is richer than the woman, although she is not inferior in status or education.

Chick lit clarifies to women what is required of them in the 21st century: going to the gym, healthy eating habits and consuming healthy food, a thin body, being smart, having a career and a relationship with a man. However, the heroine often undermines these commands. Bridget Jones is not thin, she smokes, she gets drunk, and she is relentless in speech, hence the ambivalent stance of the genre vis-à-vis the feminist discourse. Chick lit presents a heroine who tries to maneuver between her own feminist demands and her awareness that the world around her operates according to norms that include chauvinistic stances. The heroine has to decide between which commands to adhere – those of self-fulfillment, or those yielding to social codes.

Contrary to the romance, where the women are outside the employment market, chick lit usually delineates two types of women: the first presents women who are committed to the idea of their career while being dissatisfied with it; the second relates to successful women – although they are not feminine (Gill and Herdieckerhoff) – such as the terror-striking chief editor in The Devil Wears Prada. Chick lit, respectively, is divided into two central types: the first focuses on the heroine’s career and the second on her love life. In terms of frequency, chick lit dealing with the heroine’s love life is more prevalent than that dealing specifically with her work life and with the job market in general (16).

Chick lit allocates a special place for fashion brands (2006). Although we shall discuss this aspect further on as a component drawing criticism against the genre, there are those who consider that brand names take a central place in the texts, claiming that the purchasing of brand names is a vital step in the heroine’s path toward independence and establishing herself as an independent subject. The shopping aspect is an important part of the heroine’s identity, and – socially speaking – gains significance by signaling to the male society about women’s abilities to buy brands for themselves (designer clothes, shoes, drinks and vibrators), and about their affiliation with global capitalism, since they make money and spend it and are not dependent on men to buy them the various items (2011).

The sexual aspect is highly present in chick lit, or as mentioned by Juliet Wells, one can scarcely find chick lit lacking in sexual scenes. This confirms the perception that sex is an integral part of relationships. The chick lit heroine, as in the novel 1996 has sex, talks about sex and also tends to joke about sexual matters. These novels also end differently than the romance novels: chick lit novels seldom end with a wedding. Most of the genre’s books end with a declaration of mutual love (2006).

Another research claim touches upon the shaping of the heroine according to the popular culture of television and cinema (especially romantic comedies). It has been claimed that two television series have produced feminine prototypes in chick lit – Sex and the City (1998–2004) and Desperate Housewives (2004–2012), affecting chick lit authors since the middle of the 1990s. The commercial success accompanying chick lit is not by chance. It is the result of aggressive marketing directed toward women in their twenties. Many publishers choose to advertise chick lit in various public transport locations, thus creating the norm of reading chick lit while commuting. Others choose to sell chick lit at supermarkets, thereby classifying it as a consumer product (Gill and Herdieckerhoff).

The attempt to represent the life experience of a modern woman also yields a pioneering characterization of the young woman’s relationship with other women. Many chick lit novels describe the friendship between the woman and her friends, or with her sisters, as in the novel In Her Shoes (2002) by 2003. These relationships break the stereotype that women are competitive, and they show the important aspect of sisterhood in consolidating the independence of the female character. From the feminist point of view, this is a vote of non-confidence in the patriarchal system, since the idea of female friendship conveys the message that the heroine is empowered thanks to her female friends rather than the man/men in her life.

3. The sociological aspect of chick lit

According Harzewski, chick lit’s main importance is in understanding contemporary Anglo-Saxon women. This is a new type of women created during the mid-1990s and represented in chick lit. Through the various plots, we may understand crucial social issues, such as the rise in age of marriage, the frequency of relationships not tied by matrimony, and the high rate of second marriages. These issues have created the distinct group of singles in the USA and the United Kingdom although it is not a defining aspect, since single women have always existed. Rather, it is the distinct lifestyle of the Anglo-Saxon woman described at the center of the novel. Chick lit is directed and marketed to those single women, the readers, who are also the subjects described in the books, just as the 19th century novel was directed to the bourgeoisie, while also depicting it. The preoccupation with money, and the lack of it, stems from the same class represented there, otherwise known as “class without money” (2011).

4. The influence of feminist thinking on the shaping of chick lit

By examining the central themes that appear in chick-lit, we may learn about the effect of the French feminist thinking upon the focus points of these novels. First, we find the insight sounded by Simone de Beauvoir in her book The Second Sex (1949), according to which women have various identities in addition to their being wives and mothers. This entailed her breaking the concept of the religion of motherhood. De Beauvoir rebelled against society’s treatment of women as a vessel for propagating the human species (378–379). As a result of this criticism, chick-lit has expanded the issues of finding identity and employment, as non-connected to motherhood. Secondly, in terms of poetics, chick-lit’s accessibility shapes a unique feminine language, which may be seen as “lower,” while actually demonstrating mistrust of the male language as it appears in the canonic novels. This language contains various registers, often slang, and the writers clearly attempt to fulfill the vision of feminine writing by creating a subversive language which is faithful to female experience (Cixous and Clement). This corresponds to the claim that language is a tool that helps perpetuate the hegemony of male genealogy. Hence, in its present format, it intends to perpetuate inequality and the viewing of women as “non men,” in other words – an abstract non-existing situation. Therefore, changes in the language will enable women to participate in the discourse as present-equal rather than as trivial objects (Irigaray).

Beyond the impact of these philosophers, there is the influence of Anglo-Saxon writers regarding the female characters in chick lit. Female sexuality, suppressed by men for many years (Rich), is central to the novels, which often depict the heroine as the initiator of sexual advances and breaking myths of feminine virginity. Moreover, the hegemonic text is characterized by a dichotomic description of female characters, constructing two polarized female models: “the angel” and “the monster” (1997). This traditional branding of the female character has been labeled “Textual Harassment” (Jacobus) – hence, the call issued to render panoramic, non-binary, female characters. This call has been translated in chick lit to the shaping of complex heroines surrounded by supporting characters who are not evil but rather complex as well. The pattern of the good heroine surrounded by the bad woman who wishes to harm her, or the “evil” heroine doomed to death (Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary) has largely been replaced by a humane heroine, filled with inner complexity, and a panorama of women surrounding her, who can neither be defined as “good” nor as “bad.”

Here we might mention that the themes appearing in chick lit characterize liberal feminism, since chick lit engages in issues of spatial equality, employment equality and sexual equality, which are at the core of liberal feminism notions (Kristeva). Radical feminist aspects, such as violence against women, abortions, pornography and connections between cases of oppression (1996) are not part of chick lit. While radical feminism educates to a better world, liberal feminism and chick lit believe that the existing world can be rectified and made ideal.

Examination of the genre, which is a feminine genre par excellence (women writing for women readers), enables us to realize the concept of gynocritics, which refers to the study of women writers in the following aspects: the history of women writers; styles; themes; genres; poetic structures characterizing writers; and the psycho-dynamics of female creation. Gynocritics enables us to shift from endocentric feminist critique focusing on the study of the creators, to gynocentric feminist critique (1997). We shall immediately relate to the influence of the origins of the chick lit genre, and examine the gynocritics in practice, since the genres preceding chick lit are mainly identified as female writing. Hence, chick lit constitutes an intersection of various female modes of writing.

5. Origins of the genre

Chick lit is perceived as simple and devoid of linguistic complexity. However, it is an intersection-genre, a meticulous reassembling of historical genres, some popular and others canonic.

6. From the “glamor novel” and up to chick lit

The 1980s saw a successful literary type of women’s literature, called “the glamor novel.” Authors such as 1986 (Lace, 1982) 1981 (the Lucky Santangelo series, 1981 on), 1986 (I’ll Take Manhattan, 1986), 1982 (Sins, 1982) and 1988 (To Be the Best, 1988) wrote serial books adapted to television, which dealt mainly with wealthy and glamorous women, full of self-confidence and operating to expand their wealth and status in the business world. The genre’s critics called it by a name similar to that later given to chick lit, “the sex and shopping novel.” Chick lit writers claim that the genre was not perceived as authentic at the time and did not represent experiences of the middle class employed woman. However, they did take the love of shopping and brands from the glamor genre, as well as the heroine’s sexual freedom. Instead of a woman roaming the world alone on her way to success, chick lit added a social environment – often a girlfriend or best friend, or a girl from her family. The chick lit authors aimed at using the structure of glamor novels, while turning the heroine into a representative, and evoking identification (2011).

7. Newspapers

The books Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City started off in the newspapers. They tied together columns that had been written by authors Helen Fielding and Candice Bushnell in the papers where they were employed. This fact is crucial for understanding that the chick lit genre was born in the papers, hence the short chapters, the accessible language, the humor, loyalty to the main character, the impressionist setting and the lack of sophisticated literary stylistic means. Many chick lit writers started their careers as reporters or columnists in newspapers and magazines.

8. Bildungsroman

Some claim that chick lit is part of the female bildungsroman tradition which also described the integration of a young woman into society and the community, and her journey until finding her place (Amiel Hauser). As opposed to the female bildungsroman where the woman moves from the auspices of her parents to that of her husband, chick lit adds another space of existence – the heroine’s life on her own after leaving her parents’ home. The perception behind this step is that women need to substantiate their identity while they are single, before getting married and becoming a mother. This is the perception which breaks the pattern that the transition from being a girl to being a woman takes merely one moment at the wedding ceremony.

9. Romance

As mentioned, romance novels belong to a genre that greatly influenced chick lit. Various chick lit writers mention Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen as a crucial novel which they allude to in their writing. This phenomenon is called “Darcymania.” Chick lit does indeed allude to this genre, yet it implements considerable changes, as shown in the study conducted by Gill and Herdieckerhoff:

1. The heroine’s characterization: while the romance novels often presented smart and assertive women such as Jane Eyre, chick lit may present naïve and passive women who are often recurrently surprised by events, experience suppression by men in their career, or fall prey to mean and manipulative women. Most of the chick lit heroines hold academic degrees, a fact that was never the lot of romance novel heroines. The chick lit heroine works and is committed to the idea of a career, as opposed to the romance heroine who had access to power and resources only through the man whom she had married. The chick lit woman has financial independence, even if it is relative or limited. However, most of them work for low pay, a large part are employed as service providers, and their frustration and struggles at work are often described. The aspect of humor must be added to these components. In contrast to the romance heroines, the chick lit ones see their lives and character through a prism of humor.

2. Appearance: the heroine of the romance is effortlessly beautiful. Chick lit offers two approaches concerning appearance. The first shows the heroine as beautiful in the present although she was an ugly duckling in her past. The aspect of losing weight is often mentioned. The heroine had to cope with being over-weight, got thin and became attractive. The theme of change is part of the popular culture, and the message to the readers is loud and clear: in order to achieve love, you have to be beautiful. The process of becoming beautiful includes regimenting of the body and ongoing effortful work. The second approach of part of the novels presents a heroine who is not attractive and does not maintain the beauty “norms” of our times. However, this heroine changes her free mind from the external commands regarding her appearance the minute she sets eyes on the man with whom she falls in love.

3. Sex: the heroine of the romance was characterized as sexually naïve. She hid her passions and the subjects of her sexual interest, and her sole stance was being tempted. Conversely, the chick lit heroine has sexual experience and even instigates sexual contact. Descriptions of casual sex are not foreign to the genre. However, despite the permissive approach, the heroine often undergoes a re-virginalization regarding the subject of her love, since in the company of the desired man, the heroine senses an emotionally virginal state. Her previous sexual experiences diminish in view of those existing with the desired man, and he is the one to instruct her in true sexual enjoyment. In this manner, the “right” man is the one to turn the heroine into the “right” woman.

10. The diary

Another genre that reverberates in chick lit is that of the diary – rendering it a realistic quality and the ability to evoke identification. Writing diaries in its familiar structure is a ritual that began in the 17th century, although several diaries remain from the 16th century, such as the diary of King Edward VI, which he wrote in his childhood. In the 18th century, the diary was a genre relegated to women, as witnessed by the large corpus of diaries that have remained. The diaries of Queen Victoria (1862, 1883) and of author George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1885) are two famous ones written in the 19th century (2011).

2009, in his attempt to explain why diaries are inferior to literary genres, quotes intellectuals of the 18th to 20th centuries for whom diaries are trivial, as they contend that diaries are written by people who cannot write complex literary forms and therefore resort to diaries. Lejeune also mentions that diary writing was historically perceived as loafing from work, hence the negative feelings it stirred. Furthermore, it was considered a female genre, thereby lending it greater inferiority. Respectively, 2012 notes that the diary is perceived as a spontaneous, unprocessed text, written daily with no structured principle, describing both significant and trivial events. The addresser writes about his or her life, acts and thoughts, and the diary is chronological throughout its days, months and years of writing. Moreover, as opposed to literary works, which distinguish between the central character and the writer, the person writing the diary is him or herself the central character depicted in the work. Hence, the judgments existing in the diary are the result of the diary writer’s culture, world, values and ethical perception.

In chick lit, we encounter works that employ not only classic diaries but also e-mails, letters, first-person narration, confessions – all of which strengthen the authentic atmosphere surrounding the genre.

Hence, the chick lit genre is built upon a stylistic and thematic aspect affiliated to literary and historical genres: the historical novel, the glamor novel, the female bildungsroman and the diary, together with its close bond to journalistic writing and popular television and cinema culture.

11. The heroine’s character in chick lit

In an interview with Sophie Kinsella (Aitkenhead), one of the most prominent chick lit writers, she relates to the way that she describes her characters:

A woman can be highly intellectual while also ditzy and klutzy. She can be bad at cooking, love lipstick. And I think it’s more realistic to describe women from all these aspects than to say, okay, this is an intelligent woman, therefore she has to be described as successful in all areas. I don’t think this ideal is fair. A woman who is never wrong, whose private life is never chaotic, who’s never troubled by the balance between work and life? I think that isn’t realistic. What I write is indeed realistic. (Aitkenhead)

Further on, she relates to her readers regarding the heroine’s character:

These are my readers. This is how they think. They aren’t silly or imbecilic, nor have they given up on their feminist ideals. They are true, genuine human beings with both superficial aspects and deep ones, and I’m just showing the whole picture. (Aitkenhead)

As mentioned, chick lit focuses on the life of the single woman in her twenties or early thirties. This is a period of consolidating one’s personal identity – emotional, psychological, social and employment, as well as finding a life partner and defining one’s place within the relationship. One of the heroine’s dominant characterizations, differentiating her from heroines of other genres, is the mixture occurring in her behavior and character – between that of a teenager and that of a woman, rendering the feeling of a new combination of girl-woman. This may be attributed to the fact that in the second millennium, adolescence is longer, and enables the heroine, and women in general, a longer period of time to consolidate their choices in life. This may be the crux of the difference between women’s literature from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century and the chick lit genre books. While the canonic women’s literature posit models of strong women even during times of crises, or multi-faceted characters (such as Toni Morrison’s women-characters), chick lit emphasizes women’s vulnerability, such as may be studied in the post-feminine era. Conversely, some claim that the chick lit heroines are not as naïve as were those of the romances, largely due to their involvement in the employment market and the fact that they lead a social life in addition to their couple relationships (Baykan).

The recurring pattern in the context of building the heroine’s character usually includes movement from a lack of confidence, naiveté, and even the sense that she is trampled upon, toward a more decisive, strong being with a distinct character in society. At the end of the story, the heroine understands not only herself but also those around her, and the happy ending does not necessarily include a romantic union but rather knowledge and understanding translated into a sense of superiority. We may see this in the Israeli chick lit Remind Me Who You Are by 2017. Although the heroine parts ways with the young man with whom she was having an affair, this is not about her downfall, but rather about the sense of confidence and decisive experience that replace the melancholy and frozen condition she was in at the beginning of the novel.

In various chick lit, the heroine highlights social phenomena, be it an uncontrollable urge to go shopping, backstabbing at work, or feeling exhausted or burned out by a job she is doing. In any case, the heroine is at the center of the phenomenon or is the one suffering from it, and she has to decide whether she joins forces with the owners of the magazine (as in 2003) or protests (as in 2003. Interestingly, despite the knowledge gained by the heroine and her moral decisions at the end of the novel, she is perceived as a human character similar to her readers, and essentially positive.

The building of the heroine’s character takes place from two viewpoints: on the background of her acts and thoughts, and in view of the analogies developing between herself and the secondary characters. Welles notes that readers like the heroine more than the other characters, and therefore the negative analogies to the secondary characters function to shed light on the positive traits of the heroine. Crucial characters may be those of close friends, a sister and/or employer. Throughout the plot, the heroine ponders the various constructions of femininity, as for example several of them wishing to learn how to cook, yet none excel at it, or take steps beyond buying a cookbook. Hence, although chick lit represents the heroine’s search for love, it also represents the idea of the new woman, who is not a housewife and to whom the home chores are foreign.

Externally, we may locate a wide span of heroines of various physical dimensions, perceived as attractive by the secondary figures or described as average. The combination of imperfect outward appearance and belonging to the middle class, alongside their presentation as earthy and humoristic, is what constructs the everywoman – the representative heroine who evokes identity in the hearts of the female readers.

The sense of identity with the heroine is enhanced by her desire to improve, whether in her outward appearance or a character trait that bothers her (being lazy, wasteful, naïve, weak).

The geographical aspect of chick lit does not include a return home but rather the opposite. The heroine remains in the metropolis and does not return to live near her parents – a choice testifying to her maturity and ability to lead her own life.

Most significant is that the heroine conveys her story through the prism of humor. This gives the sense of a heroine who is down-to-earth and possessing self-awareness; contrary to the bildungsroman, she is not a character who develops in an extreme fashion, but rather she is accepting of herself. As described in Bridget Jones’s Diary, at the end of the year Bridget reports that she has lost 72 pounds and gained 74. The humorous aspect appears in a series of chapters in which the heroine is humiliated, usually by the man she desires. Humiliation is part of the initiation process, and advances her toward awareness of the desired man’s suitability, as he contains her despite it all.

12. The mommy lit and the chick lit jr

The successful chick lit books that placed the single woman in the center yielded books adopting the chick lit style but with older heroines, with special emphasis on motherhood. A novel of this sort that received special attention was I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002) by 2002. Mommy lit no longer deals with singlehood and the search for love, but rather focuses on the heroine’s place in her couple relationship, her relationship with her children, and her more mature employment life. The physical aspects have changed as well, and instead of debating weight loss, the women are engaged in getting old and in menopause and its physical and mental repercussions. Along with the publication of these novels, which appeal to older women, junior lit has appeared, following the young girls and their identity crises, aspects of self-confidence and the weaving of relationships (Ferriss and Young).

13. The male character in chick lit

The male character in chick lit divides into several central types, depending on the plot. If the plot ends with the unification of the lovers – the heroine and the man she fell in love with – then the man is usually described as smart, educated, a man of values and often of the elite class. He has a high post and the heroine often feels lucky that a man so impressive, sharp-minded and sensitive toward her has indeed chosen her. This man corresponds to the hero of the romance; however, he is more accessible, devoid of mystery, and instead of being rough, he shows sensitivity and contains those very character traits that bother the heroine in herself.

However, in chick lit that describes an affair between the heroine and a man, whereby they ultimately break up, the man is described as unreliable and clearly unable to give the heroine a sense of security (2003). The breakup may be due to a gap in values or a different worldview. The heroine’s success in understanding the man’s unsuitability to her symbolizes her growing up and being prepared for a life in which she is the one who navigates her destiny.

14. Criticism of the genre

Interesting criticism has been brought to bear by canonic female writers, who try to differentiate their writing from the chick lit writers, describing chick lit as commercial material with no chance of leaving a mark in the cultural memory. The famous line in The New York Times relating to this genre was written by columnist Maureen Dowd, who presented it as non-literature: “All chick and no lit.” Various journalists and researchers are mainly concerned that chick lit will be perceived as the essence of the term “female writing,” thereby preventing entry of female writers otherwise deserving of recognition. They believe that chick lit renders the female experience superficial while literature expands and deepens it (2006).

This criticism may be a reason for chick lit writers to use aliases and to lead double lives, as a “serious” writer and as a chick lit writer. A well-known example is that of Sophie Kinsella, pen name of Madeleine Sophie Wickham. Kinsella’s chick lit books have sold six million copies.

15. Feminist, queer and post-colonial criticism

In Europe and the USA, this genre is distinct from all other books since its book-covers are soft pastel-colored/shiny/especially noticeable, and the images are taken from the world of girls – handbags, shoes, and illustrated images of women. Many of these books have caricatures of women on their covers, like those in children’s comics. Hues of pink, light blue, purple and others, with a flash of shininess characterize many chick lit novels, hence the label “candy-colored covers.”

The external attire of the genre and its thematic scheme raise the question: Is chick lit feminist? This seems to be the central question preoccupying researchers of the genre. The world described in chick lit is post-feminist, where feminist values are perceived as taken for granted (2011). Liberal feminism may be found in these novels, part of which promotes an equitable approach between men and women. However, more complex feminist ideas are pushed aside and even presented as threatening.

Moreover, the heroine is a heterosexual person who confirms the hegemonic structures. These novels are claimed to be a-political, totally ignoring the political world where they live, and with no criticism of the capitalization and over-consumption described there. Additional issues of racism or globalization do not appear in the texts (except for the subgenre where the heroine is Afro-American). The novels are criticized for their encouragement of extreme individualism, the notion being that the extreme preoccupation with the “self” may promote total blindness to the public sphere. These aspects promote the creation of a neo-liberal, middle-class, female subject.

By taking for granted the political achievements of the feminist movement from the 1970s and 80s, the genre drew criticism, often asking why it deals solely with two central themes of consumerism and sexual passions, to the exclusion of crucial issues such as equality of pay between men and women, abortions, the fees for children’s frameworks and more (2011).

16. An eastern gaze: The Song of the Siren by Irit Linur (1991)

Israeli women’s literature experienced two “births”: with the appearance of writer Devorah Baron, the first woman writer to enter the canon at the beginning of the 20th century; and later on, with the appearance of author Amalia Kahana-Carmon, in the 1950s (1994). However, Israeli literature research is mainly devoted to the writings of male authors, and respectively, the canonization of men writers is completely different from that of women authors. Israeli women writers are considered marginal, as seen in the method of distributing literary awards (1999). Naveh even calls women’s literature an “inferior league” in view of the attitude toward it. Moreover, Israeli women writers often have aggressive criticism directed toward them by men critics, a ritual which deepens the view of women’s writing as inferior to that of men (2012). The Israeli publishing houses prefer to publish popular translated literature of women rather than original women’s literature. For instance, there is no Israeli parallel to “glamor lit” – despite the fact that these novels were translated into Hebrew – since in the 1980s, Israeli women authors were struggling to enter the sphere of belle lettres. Only a decade later did another wave of women writers offer a poetic-popular alternative.

Hence the double importance of the attitude toward Israeli popular women’s literature and to the genre of Israeli chick lit, which has a reduced corpus and has not yet been researched.

In order to discuss the eastern appearance of the genre, I shall focus on Irit Linur’s pioneering literary work The Song of the Siren (1991), which preceded Bridget Jones’s Diary by five years.

Seemingly, Irit Linur’s literary work The Song of the Siren does not belong to the chick lit genre, for one main reason: the plot takes place during the Gulf War, which lent the book its title. As mentioned, chick lit steers away from politics, however, despite the placing of the protagonists in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War, this is not a political novel about Israel’s relations with its neighbors, but rather chick lit. The novel follows 32-year-old Talila, a single Tel Aviv woman, who fights on two fronts during the novel – professional and romantic – till the happy end.

Furthermore, there is an aspect of humor in the novel, although it takes place during the Gulf War. While the people around Talila are panicking, she is preoccupied with her inner world, her desire to be promoted at work, and the romantic tie developing between her and Noah. Hence, the war does not achieve a political aspect but rather is ridiculed at times or even ignored.

The Song of the Siren is distinguished from Anglo-Saxon chick lit in respect to the shaping of the heroine. Talila is not a naïve woman lacking confidence, but rather quite the opposite. She is a financial manager for a big advertising company, has a high salary, and at the beginning of the novel she gets a major project that puts her in charge of an advertising team. Hence, in terms of her identity formation, Talila is not a girl-woman. She is a mature, solidly formed adult right from the beginning of the novel. Regarding her character – most chick lit heroines have good will and are therefore well liked. Talila is sarcastic, blatant, sharp-tongued and direct, and often confronts her surroundings. Regarding her appearance, she is not the kind of heroine who wants to change her looks. She’s thin and good-looking and knows that men consider her attractive. Nevertheless, during the novel, Talila undergoes an identity crisis. She gets tired of chasing after fashion, and prefers candid emotion to a superficial suitability to a popular ideal.

The novel includes many components which constitute it as chick lit:

16.1. Language

The novel is written in an accessible language. It is humorous, told in first-person, and the chapters are short. Each chapter opens with a line which sums up its plot – a characteristic taken from children’s novels. There are many sexual descriptions in the novel and the heroine breaks the puritan discourse of women in Israeli literature. It is important to mention that Israeli literature does not deal very much with sex and sexuality, sexual descriptions are not prevalent, and that is part of the puritan “tzabar” streak of the books written in the first decades of the State:

As an ideal - modern nationalism was devoid of sex, yet full of Eros, an erotic passion which sublimated into masculine friendship with a common ideal. It was ethical-oriented and ascetic, preaching a healthy body maintained by physical exercising. It belittled love of women and preferred true male friendship. (2006 67–68)

Ben-Ari calls this phenomenon “national de-eroticization,” yielding double results: an “erotic” discussion of working the land, together with a national discussion on love and sex. Erotica appeared then in tiny novels from the 1930s, but these were not part of the canonic literature. In terms of their place – they were sold in kiosks and small shops in order to show their triviality and the forbidden aspect of reading them. Hence, Linur’s novel was considered pioneering at its publication, especially since it was written by a woman and not a man. In this context, we should mention the novel Pleasures of Man by 1974, which was considered a sensational novel in the annals of Israeli literature, although the harsh criticism it received ended the writer’s career. Conversely, The Song of the Siren heralded the opening of Linur’s impressive literary and public career. In her case, however, she was not accepted to the canon, but rather her books became bestsellers shortly after publication.

16.2. Brands

The Israeli prosperity culture of the 1990s is present in the novel, from the descriptions of Talila’s clothing and up to her impressions of the people around her. She says of her Tel-Avivian apartment: “It cost me a fortune, although it isn’t really big. Father gave me most of the money, and I put a considerable sum into renovating. It had one big living room, enormous windows and a bedroom with a balcony – also with big glass windows. I tried to figure out how to shut this whole complex – who says that big spaces are so great – and for the umpteenth time in my life I was sorry that I let fads affect me” (24). Talila’s world includes buying expensive clothes, dining in highly recommended restaurants, and she comments on the clothes, hair and houses of people around her, as part of the intensified importance which she grants to external and class details. At the end of the novel, it seems that Talila is tired of the brand culture and no longer wants to model her life according to those looking out at her from magazines. The symbolic act indicating this is her purchasing of a comfortable flowery couch, replacing the expensive, uncomfortable sofa in her living room.

While part of the Anglo-Saxon chick lit novels promote capitalistic approaches, Linur promotes a social discourse with the purpose of showing that the anti-capitalistic approach (prevailing in Israel until the 1990s) is preferable for the heroine’s peace of mind.

16.3. Love among opposites

The love story between Talila and Noah is the attraction of opposites, a prominent motif in chick lit where in many books the messy heroine is attracted to a neat man, the wasteful woman connects with a frugal guy and the rather flaky woman falls in love with a stable man. Talila is eccentric in her behavior and tongue while Noah is timid, restrained and conservative. In terms of brand names, Noah is comfortable with his subversion against the ruling fashion, with his odd clothes, and his home that is reminiscent of an old person’s abode. Hence the message in the novel – as in many chick lit – is that happiness is not connected to wealth or fashion, since Noah gives Talila a love that depends on nothing else, in contrast to her previous partner Ofer – a sophisticated and brand-loving man with synthetic emotions ensuing.

16.4. The search for love

Fogiel-Bijaoui claims that familism is one of the central characteristics of Israeli society, and – among the capitalistic democracies – Israel is the most familial (high marriage rates, high childbirth rates). Several assumptions derive from this claim: marriage is inbuilt as the legitimate framework for childbearing; women are geared first and foremost to be wives and mothers; and this familism rests upon inequality between the genders and on the women’s inferior economic condition. It appears that the novels undermine these assumptions.

At the beginning of the novel, Talila, having separated from her previous partner, has an affair with Ronen, the son of her office’s CEO. Gradually, a romance develops between her and Noah, a food engineer of a vegan company whose advertising budget is under Talila’s management. Ofer Strasburg, her previous partner, with whom she lived for two years, returns to her life concurrently with her relationship with Noah, and would like to resume their romantic tie. It seems that despite Talila’s emotional and financial independence, she strives to find a partner and not to remain alone. At the end of the novel, Talila turns down Ofer’s marriage proposal, thus clarifying the change in her emotional set-up. She rejects the superficial, rich and handsome man in favor of the “guy next door” with whom she feels comfortable and does not need to use “cultural” masks and hide her true self. Relinquishing the promised wedding for the sake of the beginning of a relationship is a declaration regarding the perception of the female subject as independent, contrary to the choice of marriage at any price.

16.5. Love at first sight

In many chick lit, as well as in The Song of the Siren, the novels describe love at first sight. Talila is interested in Noah from the moment they were introduced. Immediately after arriving at his home for the first time, she seems to view Noah as her future husband. The two have sex the first time they meet outside of work, and move in together quite soon after meeting – catalyzed by the Gulf War and the fear of rockets over Tel Aviv, which induced Talila to move into his home in Mazkeret Batya, at quite a distance from Tel Aviv.

16.6. The male character

A crucial point related to the Israeli family is connected to the division of roles within it. The intra-family division of roles has not changed despite the processes of individualization and democratization of the family institution. Most of the married women, with no connection to their education and part in the employment market, continue with the household chores. The essential change that has occurred in the Israeli family concerns the shaping of the role of the “new father.” Men are taking a more active role in childcare and education (1999).

However, 2017, in his book The Drama of the New Masculinity, notes that the stereotypical patterns underlining the identity of the Israeli man are deep and stringent. In his opinion, several factors have caused Israeli men to adhere for years to the strict codes of masculinity. The first is the heavy environmental pressure due to the ongoing security threat. The second is lack of resources and limited physical space. Under these conditions, society demands of its members to unswervingly adopt the image of the mythological hero and the span of behaviors connected to it. In order to be considered a “real man” under these conditions, men have to show traits of durability and physical strength, and to withstand quasi-military tests and be emotionally tough (31).

In The Song of the Siren, two male types are shown. Noah, the man with whom Talila decided to have a couple relationship, is a food engineer, occasionally described by her as boring, unsophisticated and the complete opposite of her. Noah is woven by contrasts. On the one hand, he’s clumsy, lacks in taste, has trouble maintaining conversations, and he’s over-sensitive (Talila found love letters he had written to a former girlfriend and ridiculed his writing). On the other hand, he is an engineer, educated, smart, and sexually attractive. The novel is full of sexual descriptions and Talila clearly prefers physical communication with Noah rather than verbal. Hence, the masculine type that is portrayed as successful in the novel differs from the modern transformation of Cinderella’s prince. Talila emphasizes her superiority over Noah, her ability to lie to him and manipulate him, his heaviness at expressing himself as opposed to her ridicule, while she also yearns for his love and for tightening the bond with him, and she fears that his former girlfriend will return to his life. Ofer Strasburg contrasts with Noah as the Tel-Aviv yuppie, sophisticated, smart and fashionable, handsome and arrogant, alongside which Talila feels inferior, as he tried to educate, tame and change her while the two were in a relationship. Noah is actually the one who does not try to change her, and that is the novel’s message, that a woman has to choose a man who accepts her as she is.

Linur presents two opposing male models, and chooses the man with the complex and androgenic gender performance for her heroine, rather than the macho one. She thereby undermines the eastern patriarchal culture and presents a relationship in which the woman is assertive and the man may be sensitive, indecisive and “feminine.” Thus, she changes the rules of the Anglo-Saxon chick lit (as well as the romance norms) and even undermines the structuring of masculinity and couple relationship in Israel.

16.7. Analogous pattern

In contrast to her older sister Alona, who married young and became a mother, Talila chose the track of professional identity rather than becoming a wife and mother. At the end of the novel, it becomes clear that her relationship with Noah will continue and that he is “the one for her,” but there is no wedding, nor does she become a mother at its end. Thus, the analogy is posited between the woman who married her first boyfriend too early and became a mom without fulfilling herself, and the more sophisticated woman who decided to settle down at a later age and meanwhile accumulate life experience. The analogous pattern works to the benefit of the single woman and her choices. The period of singlehood affords her excitement, and despite the difficulties inherent, it is clear that this life is preferable to life in a stifling and alienated relationship.

16.8. The happy ending

After Talila and Noah break up, Ofer returns to her life and proposes. Talila turns him down. Noah then waits by her home and the two reunite. As befitting the genre’s ending pattern, there is a union, not a wedding. Moreover, the heroine has two men struggling over her heart and she chooses the one best suited for her – a recurrent motif in chick lit. In addition, she achieves the desired post as marketing manager in a food factory, where she will make more money than her present salary as financial manager. Hence, the heroine wins on both fronts, and the fact that two men are interested in her strengthens her self-image and confidence regarding her way.

16.9. Post-feminism

The novel promotes the approach that women are sexual beings, while also having their own presence in the employment market. As mentioned, Talila shifts between three men throughout the plot – Ronen, Ofer and Noah. Similarly to many chick lit heroines, she reveals rich sexual experience, describing sex and characterizing herself as an instigator of sex, the temptress rather than the tempted one. When Talila first reaches Noah’s home, she kisses him on her own accord, aggressively: “I didn’t kiss him. I pasted him to the door. I kissed the hell out of him” (42). Both the act and its description appropriate the male vernacular and male courtship, while feminizing it – it is a woman who initiates contact and tells about it with slang and humor. Further on, while they are separated, Talila is the one to initiate encounters with Noah, during which she demonstrates a temptress behavior.

16.10. Female friendship

Seemingly, there is no sense of female solidarity in the novel, as shown by Talila’s impressions of the office secretary: “I think she was about 22, an age I particularly hate, and she looked like someone who works for the fun of it, not for the money. That’s also not something I’m crazy about, and if we add the fact that in terms of her wardrobe and appearance she was Liron’s parallel, then we get a strong desire on my part to destroy her” (38). Thus too with her reaction to her brother-in-law’s infidelity. She feels satisfaction that her sister has a crisis in her married life. However, their bond is tight, and there is true love between the sisters so that their sisterhood arises above friction, and further on we see how the various women in the novel help each other.

17. About singlehood

Regarding Talila’s singlehood, she notes: ‘I don’t think it’s easy to be single. Of course, I think it’s more difficult to be married, but to each her deviance” (39). Talila, from her 20s on, has to repel her mother’s badgering about getting married. Thus, she clarifies her affiliation with the sector of singles, and her revulsion of old-fashioned norms about rushing to get married. Moreover, her views on marriage are critical and devoid of myths.

17.1. Career

The Israeli employment market experienced feminization in the 1980s, yet only in 1996 did the Israeli Parliament pass a bill of equal pay for women and men (1999). However, there are still blatant gaps of pay together with a lack of women in high posts.

As of 2021, in the OECD countries the average of children per woman is 1.7, in the European Union countries it stands at less than 1.6, in the USA the average is 1.9 children per woman, whereas in Israel the average is over 3 children (Wikipedia). This fact impinges on the careers of Israeli women (1999). Hence, Linur’s attitude toward single women without children, as part of the Anglo-saxon chick lit tradition, challenges the Israeli tradition and the “route” taken by most Israeli women, both Jews and Arabs, who get married at a young age, have many children and thereby postpone or cease their careers.

The novel deals broadly with Talila’s career life – both before and during the present time of the plot. Her professional decisions show determination, the desire to make a lot of money and to achieve greater authority and recognition of her abilities in her office. When her salary is cut due to the Gulf War economic crisis, she immediately resigns and gets better offers, and a higher post than the one with which the story began. It is interesting to note that the novel maintains norms that are not accepted in the current #metoo work place. Talila had an affair with Ofer Strasburg while employed in his advertising firm, and from there she moved on to another office and had an affair with Ronen, the owners’ son. The advertising offices are portrayed as courting grounds and the work there is secondary to the romantic ties developing among the employees. This aspect of affairs at the work place is not foreign to chick lit, from The Valley of the Dolls and up to Bridget Jones’s Diary. The figure of the desired boss replaces the figure of the landowner, the nobleman, who employed the young girl, the heroine of the romance.

18. Conclusion

In this article, five basic components of the chick lit genre were formulated:

1. The heroine is in her 20s or 30s, single, white, heterosexual, middle-class, living in a metropolis. She experiences a crisis and most of the plot describes how she resolves it.

2. The heroine is intensely preoccupied with her looks as well as with various brands.

3. The employment world of the heroine is described, including her salary, which is usually low. In some of the books, the boss appears as a mean character.

4. The novel describes the heroine’s relationship with a man who may become her husband, although in some of the books, the ending includes their parting ways. At the same time, her social life is described with a close girl-friend or gay male bestie.

5. Poetics: delivery in first-person, language close to the vernacular, nuances of diaries or confessions, use of humor, many sexual descriptions, a fast-moving plot, short and without detours.

Despite the criticism, this genre has rendered contribution on several levels. First, it has granted representation to single women over 30. This is not mere representation, but a feminist legitimization for life outside the heterosexual couple unit. Some of the heroines in chick lit do not manage to find a lover throughout the novel. Second, chick lit promotes liberal feminist values of independence, individuality and self-fulfillment as opposed to being acquiescent and suiting oneself to social codes. Third, the chick lit genre frequently deals with the place of female friendship and camaraderie in a woman’s life. The female friendship is a source of strength, a means of emotional release, and spurs the heroine on, to act without fear. It breaks an ancient stereotype attributed to friendship among women, according to which women do not sympathize with one another and therefore their friendship is limited to childhood and adolescence. Fourth, as a post-feminist genre, chick lit assumes that women are part of the employment market. And fifth, the principle of romantic choice is present in chick lit, showing the female readers that they are the ones to choose their subjects of love according to their own definitions. Hence, the male characters in chick lit are varied, as opposed to the duplicated characters of the romance, where the male character is masculine, wealthy, powerful and experienced, and imbued with a certain tinge of darkness.

The main contribution of chick lit is in facilitating a new timetable for the educated woman after graduating. Chick lit presents singlehood as a long period, postponing marriage in the lives of young women. Together with the impact of education on the postponing of marriage, it was chick lit which legitimized pre-marital sex, and choosing the destined groom after numerous encounters and various relationships with men.

To conclude, Anglo-Saxon chick lit, compared to chick lit written by Israeli women writers, focuses on two main aspects – finding a partner and professional fulfillment, while Israeli chick lit focuses on the love life of the heroine, who isn’t necessarily single, as well as her career and her attitude toward her body. Moreover, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon chick lit, the Israeli genre tends to emphasize social aspects, the heroine’s family and the Israeli space with its security, economic and cultural issues.

The question arising from the discussion is: Why has the chick lit genre been only partially successful in Israel, as opposed to the rest of the Western world? The Song of the Siren is a novel that is both pioneering and unprecedentedly successful although Israeli chick lit novels do not currently achieve commercial success and, respectively, are few. As mentioned, the genre challenges the values of traditional societies such as the Israeli one. The State of Israel is located in the Middle East, and family values and modesty still have a central place there. Chick lit speaks about sexual freedom of women and aspects of women finding their personal identity and careers, contrary to the approach of values and morality withheld by most Israeli women. Hence, Israeli chick lit renders presence to the family and finding one’s mate, while perceiving of women’s career as secondary, according to the values prevalent in Israeli society. It is actually a “Trojan Horse,” which confirms part of the traditional values in order to offer a more highly developed view of women as subjects.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Shai Rudin

Shai Rudin (Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature, Gordon College of Education, Haifa, Israel) investigates Women’s Writing, Popular Literature, and Children’s Literature. He writes about gender in Israeli Literature and the influences of radical feminist discourse on women’s writing (in adult literature as well as in children’s literature); the acceptance of women writers in North America, Europe and Israel, the representations of women and children in Holocaust Literature and the appearance of violence as a super-theme in women’s writing. His book Violences (2012) deals with violence against women, girls, and minorities and its poetic representations in literature (spatial violence, textual violence, and sexual violence). His book To Herself: Reading in Galila Ron-Feder-Amit’s Work was published in 2018 and deals with the Israeli writer, Galila Ron-Feder-Amit.