The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 8, pp. 752-753. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710818180

Two views (at least) exist about feminist fiction – one that it represents the gender and role and identity issues that have preoccupied political feminists for decades, and another that it strays off into bonk‐buster romance and chick‐lit and leaves the serious issues of feminism behind. When we factor in other things, like the changes feminism itself and feminist fiction have undergone since the 1960s, it comes as no surprise to read that the issues in the period 1960‐1980 were consciousness‐raising and sexual politics, and these morphed through the period 1980 up to today through post‐feminism. This transformation probably took place because fiction got embedded in familiar culture, readers wanted something new, and feminist writing began to treat itself, and its readers, with irony.

As a result, Whelehan argues in The Feminist Bestseller, we find a persistent ambivalence about feminist fiction, and about bestsellers in particular. Indeed, works like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and Lisa Alther's Kinflicks are controversial (for their time and since) by any reckoning, above all for a post‐baby‐boomer generation of women readers who want something more than tracts and chick‐lit. This book is a critical study of the genre, framing its discussion around a “second wave of feminism” (fed by works like Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl from 1962 and moving through women's liberation to French, Jong and Piercy), and a “third wave of feminism” (or post‐feminism, taking us through Superwoman and Bridget Jones to chick‐lit and urban sex and beyond, with a sidelong look at Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins). We see power and choice aplenty in the television series Sex and the City (1996), something so important culturally that it simply cannot be ignored.

Whelehan may be known to readers for earlier work like Modern Feminist Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 1995) and Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (The Women's Press, 2000). Palgrave Macmillan have other works too that merit comparison, such as Merja Makinen's Feminist Popular Fiction. Her discussion of the feminist bestseller is framed clearly by chronology, describing the American origins of much feminist fiction by writers like Susanne and Metalious and others, and shifting the focus later to the UK and Europe (though formal European writing is given little explicit attention).

Whelehan is rightly keen to provide a snapshot of the critical trends throughout the period, since these provide valuable insights into how the fiction was received (some thought it cheap and irrelevant, others culturally relevant), and this critical strand in the book helps her explain why feminist bestsellers are seen in such mixed ways by their readers, and establish her own critical position (“in two minds about [things like] chick‐lit”). So we have two commentaries (from contemporary feminists and from Whelehan herself) throughout – what writers like Rosalind Coward said in Female Desire in 1984, the reception of Fear of Flying at the time and what it adds up to now, why issues like lesbianism and men‐as‐objects mattered in the late 1980s into the 1990s, and how feminism became increasingly implicit later: “post feminist narrative of heterosex and romance for those too savvy to be duped by conventional romance”.

Culturally unmissable, changing form as creative fashions and reader needs altered, both a mouthpiece for and a distortion of feminist ideology, the feminist bestseller coexists with romance and lesbian fiction, runs parallel with what is on television, and offers realism as well as fantasy. Whelehan believes that post‐chick‐lit is about having it all and telling it like it is, and at the same time being bored and ironic about being bored: perhaps, then, moving towards dealing with “real” issues, beyond desire and consumption towards human fulfilment. A big claim for fiction but one often made, even about bestsellers. Good on how and why the genre has changed, helpful on the critical viewpoints, the book offers a good bibliography and sound critical material for the college and university library where gender and women's studies and popular fiction are studied. There is a paperback too.