Worst Professor Ever

Or, What Elizabeth Gilbert Could Learn from Aristophanes’ Chicks

Or, Why I Think Brideshead Revisited Is Chick Lit

So today a friend and I are trying to decide if  we should go see Eat, Pray, Love. I’ve already been to Italy, and I’m not into real-life stories that act like rom-coms, but I gather I’m supposed to be into seeing the movie solely on the basis of having ovaries.

I’m really confused about chick lit right now. For a long time, I thought of chick lit as  anything written from a female point of view; the Wikipedia definition agrees — sort of. I guess most technically chick lit means a “light romance” type of deal, and that definition has spawned some impassioned pro- and anti-chick-lit arguments recently.

Um, what?

Tricky business, defining things without historical context, because people tend to take their current beliefs about gender and apply them to the past. I’m not even going to get started on why romance – whether rom-com or novel or whatever -  has been a male-authored fantasy for most of the last two thousand years. But about this idea that that light humor is now “feminine.”  Nancy Mitford, okay, but what about the escapist frivolity of  P.G. Wodehouse and pre-Brideshead Evelyn Waugh? Both frothy,  funny, and very concerned with clothes.

And what about Brideshead Revisited (a book I hate hate hate to love)? First person narrative, pining about lost love, picnics with Sebastian — in short, a story so focused on “having feelings” that it may as well be chick lit. Except that there’s like, war and stuff involved, and Evelyn Waugh, despite being named Evelyn, was a man. (At least Waugh’s  masculine whining is made tolerable by its literary artistry, unlike certain other authors with unbearably heavy male egos.)

Here’s an indisputable fact that sucks: in every era women’s writing tends to be isolated — and trivialized — as its own category even if it’s exactly the same as what men are doing. Same with “chick” lit. This category is based on people’s desire to find “feminine” qualities in a particular kind of writing, and I’m not buying it. I think it’s true that women can bring a uniquely female viewpoint to things  (they have, after all, not achieved equality yet and have not been the “norm” for most of history) but I think we need to be careful with our declarations about this stuff.

Eat, Pray, Love confuses me even more. It was written by a woman, sure, but if we’re going to get all technical, I’d classify the book as travelogue or even spiritual memoir. Both genres have been around for a loooooong time, being written by men. But there’s Andrew Gottlieb’s parody Drink, Play, F**k, and Denis Leary’s rant in Why We Suck, both calling the book’s entire concept “feminine.”  I guess that’s why the “softer, gentler” movie is positively destined to lose out to the The Expendables, dollar-wise. (Oh, and speaking of generic definitions, can anyone tell me how action flicks are less trite and predictable than rom-coms? Because that assumption seems to underlie a lot of box office mojo.)

Speaking of women and comedy, though, my collaborator and I are doing some Aristophanes revisions this week. Now Aristophanes was a man, of course, and a sexist pig because he lived two thousand years ago. And yet his “female” characters (constructs, played unconvincingly by men) are still doing more interesting things than the chick characters of chick lit today.

Instead of going abroad to find enlightenment, they take over the government of their home state. Instead of whining about dating, they leave their husbands at home to drink and have sex — and because they had sex toys they don’t even have to wait around for guys to do it. Is this chick lit? It sure sounds like it, and as female translators, we’ve got some claim on a “feminine” point of view.   But I’m still not sure it counts.

I think I’m going to go back to calling anything authored by a woman “chick lit”.  Or maybe just “literature written by women.” Or maybe “Wakalixes”^*, because it doesn’t really matter what you call it. I reserve the right to like something or not, regardless of the author’s gender, and I’m especially going to reserve the right to call any author of any gender on his/her/their assumptions about gender, and I still think we could benefit from highlighting the assumptions embedded in dude-lit, like say the tendency to think that whatever the male narrator is doing is more important than anything else and that women are irrational and mysterious creatures and that, darn it, how are men supposed to deal when nobody understands how hard their lives are.

I also reserve the right to think that most “light” literature today is not nearly as well-written as the works invoked to defend chick lit, but also to say that, since anything designated as “feminine’ automatically becomes less important anyway,  women may as well make lots and lots of money by being successful authors — by hook or by crook, you go, gals, and start throwing that money around politically!

Anyway, I have to return to the Eat, Pray, Love debate. I suspect that instead of seeing the movie, my friend and I might end up just drinking beer and brainstorming about effective leadership strategies – hey, if we wrote about that, would it count as chick lit? Or dude lit? Or what?

*A term coined by Richard Feynman in protest of giving random names to stuff.

Tags: chick lit, eat pray love, elizabeth gilbert, evelyn waugh, genre, julia roberts, literature, movies, nancy mitford, p g wodehouse