From Chick Lit to Bitch Lit: A Reclamation of the Genre Through Maneater by Gigi Levangie Grazer
Maneater by Gigi Levangie Grazer could be described at the surface level as “chick lit.” The story follows the 28-year-old (31-year-old, but you’ll never know) Clarissa Alpert as she tears through Los Angeles looking for a wealthy husband. When we meet her, she’s slept with every music producer, talent agent, corporate attorney, successful surgeon, and film director in the city, but is now on the hunt for her greatest challenge yet: a husband. She lives in an apartment in Beverly Hills, funded by her father, of course. Her daily schedule consists of waking up a little before noon, eating lunch with her closest friends, watching television, grooming at a variety of hair and nail salons and spas, and partying. Her day-to-day becomes much more ambitious as she plans a wedding for herself and a wealthy heir who has yet to propose to her yet, Aaron Mason.
This all sounds like the perfect mixture for your basic “chick lit” novel: Los Angeles, girly girl with no job, wedding planning, parties, a committee of close female friends, and frivolous drama fueled by the protagonist’s desire to have an unlimited shopping fund provided by a rich husband.
But “chick lit” is a term which unfortunately has pejorative connotations, ones specifically of frivolity, humor, and vapidity. The seeming nothingness of the genre stems from sexism which stipulates that any story featuring an all-female cast, concerned with women’s issues and experiences, must be denigrated by a term which devalues a work before it can even be read.
It is for this reason that I refer to Maneater, a book whose depth I will extrapolate on, as bitch lit. Bitch lit, to me, is the reclamation of the form, as it offers deep character development
This is not to say that there is “chick lit” which is stupid and vapid, and that there is “bitch lit” which is more sophisticated. I am saying that chick lit has always had depth, and has always been sophisticated, but that it needs a new name that embodies the reclamation of its books and films. I call it bitch lit for two reasons. First, “bitch” is a word which has similarly been reclaimed, as more and more women use it as a term of entitlement, empowerment, or endearment with one another, instead of an insidious insult specifically for women, to which there is no equivalent for the male gender.
Second, the change in the name of the genre to me has to do with another purpose of diction. Meaning, “chick” is in some ways a more derogatory term than “bitch” when it comes to colloquial use. “Chick” is casual and objectifying. Straight guys use the word “chick” to describe some girl they fucked, some girl they thought was hot at a grocery store, it’s always just “some chick” -- a flippant term representative of the glibness and superficiality imposed on chick lit. “Bitch” on the other hand, is a term used out of either anger, adoration, immense disrespect or respect. It is a term only used when strong feelings or thoughts are evoked. That is why it is a much more apt term to describe important literature for and by women. This literature can and should provoke intense thoughts, not a passive array of emotions, and it should be treated as such.
In this light, Maneater is certainly bitch lit. The novel offers a complex plotline and character development which negates previous stereotypes about “chick lit.” Everything from the sharply amusing tone to the book’s major plot twist to the way it speaks to negative stereotypes via the development of its protagonist make it much more than a book to skim through for fun on vacation.
The book’s plot begins with Clarissa’s pursuit of a marriage proposal from Aaron Mason, an extremely “old rich” young man from Georgia, who has decided to make it in L.A.’s film scene. In many ways, Clarissa is representative of the nouveau riche, and Mason representative of the rich establishment. Clarissa’s father is self-made, although sometimes his making of himself lands him in prison for fraud or tax evasion. He always keeps an emergency stash of ten thousand dollars taped in an envelope beneath his desk. Mason’s wealth, by contrast, comes from being the latest in generations of Southern royalty. Still, this does not mean that he has the know-how for navigating L.A.’s film and socialite scene. At one point, Clarissa tells one of Mason’s friends to remind him that the dress code for a party of hers they are attending is “Rodeo” not “rodeo.”
On a deeper character level, Clarissa represents the new wealthy class because she is much more conscious of her own economic status and that of others, and she openly gold-digs to find new sources of money. She subscribes to superficial displays of wealth and is in constant pursuit of both wealth itself and the trappings of it. Mason on the other hand is much more authentic. It is not readily apparent that he is wealthy. He grew up “organically rich.” As a character, he is seemingly less superficial and more down to earth, despite having grown up with enormous wealth.
But in the novel’s satisfying plot twist, it turns out that the man she thinks of as Aaron Mason is actually “pseudo Aaron Mason.” Clarissa’s authentic, grounded Southern paramour was merely a stand-in for the actual Aaron Mason, who was elsewhere, flying around the world doing drugs and sleeping with random women. In order to not be disowned, he lied to his parents, telling them that he had moved to Los Angeles and was starting a production company. To make this story believable, he paid another man to pretend to be him. The Aaron Mason in Los Angeles was actually a son of one of the Mason family’s many servants. In order to move up in the world of Hollywood, the pseudo Aaron Mason marries Clarissa because he recognizes her as a guide for dress, norms, and connections.
This completely flips the script of the female protagonist being the greedy, fake, two-faced pariah she always is portrayed as in these books. In Maneater, it is the supposedly humble, sweet, authentic guy who is the biggest liar of them all. The pseudo Aaron Mason plotline subverts the stereotype of the spoiled gold digger who lies to get what she wants. While Clarissa might not let Aaron in on her plans to marry him early on, nor does she tell him that she inseminated herself with his sperm from used condoms on their wedding night (thus rendering the pregnancy which would “trap” him not an accident), she is always eventually transparent with her goals.
“Aaron” on the other hand was a fame-hungry random with no actual old rich lineage, the paid ghost of the real Aaron Mason. He lied to Clarissa about who he was, where he came from, and where he got his money from. He lied doubly when he told her that he had been disowned, after they got married, to test whether or not she actually loved him or his money. In a twist on stereotypes of women, “chick lit,” and gender norms, the real fake all along was the man in the story.
The book’s development of Clarissa’s character and what it reveals about her also negates the supposed shallowness of chick lit and its protagonists. At first, Clarissa is your typical Regina George, a beautiful human Barbie clad in Dolce & Gabbana, and years of father-funded unemployment. But the novel asks itself how such a stereotype could arise: what causes this “chick” to become the subject of so much film and literature?
The answer lies perhaps in one of Clarissa’s more serious monologues, triggered by an existential crisis she experiences when she meets a gynecologist named Elsbeth who causes her to wonder “what path had led Dr. Elsbeth to her position, why such a pretty girl would sit alone in a room and study for years to become a doctor when it was so much easier just to marry rich and settle down. And then it came to her. Maybe it wasn’t so much easier.” Clarissa realized that in the time she has spent looking for financial stability in a rich man, she could have become a highly paid doctor.
But instead of delving into self-loathing, the protagonist critically analyzes why this happened. She lists, among many reasons, “C. Her first diet at age five...D. In junior high, discouraged by her mother to take the ‘hard math,’ even though she had a knack for numbers. E. At thirteen, told by her father that she would never be a Playboy Bunny if she continued to play soccer...G. At eighteen, father tells Clarissa she’ll never be able to take care of herself, and she should find a rich man.”
Personal narrations such as these interrogate the concept of the vapid queen bee usually featured in chick lit. Chick lit is mocked for representing these types of girls, girls who are supposedly empty and aimless and concerned only with their looks and marriage prospects. People have contempt for such women, both in the fictional and the real world. But Levangie Grazer pierces through the schematic characteristics of the queen bee, by questioning what forces created her in the first place. The author points out, through the narrator, that it is childhood sexism, adolescent pressures, and so on, which produces the Regina Georges of the lit world.
This narration critiques the fact that throughout their lives, young women are pressured into cartoonish displays of femininity, into disregarding their intelligence, their athleticism, their own desires for red meat and junk food -- but then when they turn 25 and have no career, no marketable skills, just no-carb, no-fat diets and a thirst for a rich husband, they are mercilessly persecuted for being useless. In short, we cannot make fun of someone for being the result of social conditioning that she has been subjected to since birth. It is unfair to impose femininity, grooming, norms, and rules onto women, and then criticize them when they make a life, or a creative genre, dedicated to these crafts and social views. As if suddenly it is ridiculous to take what they have and make it into something more -- to reclaim it.