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When I say the words "teens" and "mean girls" I know that many of you shudder a little. We all know some. Some of us have been their target. Some of us have been mean girls ourselves. Some of have been on both sides. We see them reflected in movies, tv show and fiction. But are they really as bad and as prevalent as we make them out to be? Have they become an easy and empty archtype?
Mean girls have been around in fiction for, well, I imagine as long as there has been women's fiction. Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst in Pride and Prejudice. Austen's title character Emma is a queen bee and who her mean girl moments (though she does repent and try to rise above them). Josie Pye in Anne of Green Gables. There's a reason why Judy Blume's Blubber resonated so well with so many of us. We all knew a mean girl.
Maybe Winona Ryder Got This One Right. Colleen asked the following questions:
Does teen literature exaggerate the mean girl phenomena too much? If aliens landed on earth and read teen lit (oh my) would they expect to find mini Cordelias wreaking havoc on every high school across America? Are they so prevalent because it just easier to write about mean girls then nice ones? Is teen lit reflecting what is real in this instance or propagating an unfair female stereotype?
The responses that she got were thoughtful and insightful. I'm going to sit on my hands while you go and read them all because I cannot reasonably quote all the wonderful thoughts they had.
It has you thinking and rethinking about mean girls doesn't it? When it comes to fiction are mean girls just an archetype? Yes...and also no. They can be two-dimensional cutouts, just like the dumb jock and the nerdy brainiac. As Zetta Elliott points out in Colleen's post, we rarely see a true mean girl. More often than not there's simply not enough time for a mean girl to truly develop in a story. Sometimes we get to see it in a series but it's hard in a stand alone book, unless they are the main character.
Imagine reading a book set in a high school where everyone was wonderful and got along and no one hated the main character or her friends. Everyone gets along. Does that sound realistic to you? Heck, even Pollyanna has a few tough nuts that she has to crack. Of course she does and by the end everyone loves her, which let's be honest makes us hate her a little (or a lot).
Mean girls in real life give us a chance to grow and learn things about ourselves. Mean girls in fiction can make us feel less like we're the only ones dealing with it. I'm frequently reminded by posts like this one by Uppercase Woman, whose three-year-old daughter came home chanting "I'm not your friend" because others had said it to her at school, why we need to see these relationships in books. Or this post on the teen girl ranking system by Elizabeth Donovan:
A tween recently confided that the ‘popular girls’ in her Middle School ‘rank’ the girls in their grade according to beauty, skinniness, and how many boys like them. Until a few weeks ago they’d been using social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to rank seventh and eight grade girls, but decided to pull the files for fear of discovery by a school official. This group of ‘mean girls’ now posts the rankings in the schools bathroom along with a year book photo of each girl and a ‘numerical’ rank beside her picture. The ranking lists are periodically taken down to avoid detection by school personnel, but reappear in the girl’s bathrooms often.
Our hearts ache a little for those girls because we've been there or our friends or our daughters have been there and we desperately want them to know that they are not alone.
Colleen's questions inspired Courtney Summers to write about why her book is about mean girls.
I think mean girl lit is booming not because it’s easier to write about mean girls (it’s so not easier to write about
