From Small Spiral Notebook last week there is a big discussion, yet again, about this whole chick lit vs not chick lit deal. I was thinking about it (and reading it) this weekend because I am reading The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the The Curse of Frankensten which has gotten the whole sci fi vs not sci fi argument in my head. One group claims quite vehmently that Frankenstein could not be science fiction - it predates Verne who is considered the father of the genre and a similar argument is made for Jane Austen at the SSN discussion. But really it is comments like this from Not Chick Lit author Samantha Hunt that put a bit of a nasty spin on the deal:

"The divide [between chick lit and not chick lit] is between art and marketing. In my opinion, the formulaic plots of most chick lit, while they might make a lot of money, do not make good art. There are a number of “how-to write a chick lit book� manuals. I want to read the kind of literature that couldn’t be written by following a how-to manual.

As for Jane Austen, she was not a chick lit writer. She was a writer dealing with the politics of her time: women as wampum and marriage, a business deal. She was activist on the part of romance."

There are so many things here that seem wrong or unfair. For example, there are how-to books on every type of writing, from genre to nongenre, as well as the whole craft of writing type titles like those by Margaret Atwood, Anne Lamont and Ray Bradbury (the odds are good that Hunt is not so unimpressed by those books). But what really blows me away is that Austen "was an activist on the part of romance."

Ah - so that's how we can still read her while not treading into chick lit territory. She was an activist. Well, thank heavens because otherwise I just would have been enjoying Sense and Sensibility for the happily every after aspect. And really - it has to be about something more than that, doesn't it? Or everyone that loves Austen's work (and has made her books classics) are just a bunch of romance/chick lit lovers. Just like the fans of Frankenstein might be horror or sci fi fans. (What's really weird is when a sci fi fan says Frankenstein isn't sci fi or a chick lit fan says Austen isn't. I'm not sure if this is self loathing at work or clinging to outsider status or just some weird brain washing. Who knows.)

Editor Elizabeth Merrick solves the Austen/chick lit issue by looking at the timeline: "Chick lit as a genre arose out of a marketing scheme invented circa 1996--therefore it is ridiculous to categorize Austen as chick lit. Absurd. Maybe Jane Austen is tempted to shiv with a knitting needle from the great beyond the next person to suggest such preposterousness." Since she's so intense about it, I'm not going to argue with her or anything. I do agree that chick lit is largely a marketing term but concentrating solely on the label vs the content is like saying mint chocolate chip cookies didn't exist until someone lableled them as such - any time prior to that they were chocolate chip cookies with added mint or something like that. In other words, if the predominant romance element is the same, then aren't the books the same? Does it matter if the label is there or not? (And again with Frankenstein - a mix of futuristic science and story makes science fiction, right? So electricity creates life means we have sci fi - doesn't it? How is this less sci fi then time travel, space travel or journeys to the center of the earth?)

Here's Hunt again on whether or not the term chick lit is degrading:

"Is the term chick lit degrading? It is if you’re calling my books that. When I was a girl I couldn’t wait to become an adult. I wanted to wear caftans and sip martinis. (Think Elizabeth Taylor in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Gloria Steinem, Susan Sontag, beautiful, smart, sexy women.) I wanted wisdom and control. I wanted to be an adult. How disappointing then to find that, now that I’ve reached adulthood, the qualities currently most prized in women are those belonging to the average sixteen year old. I don’t want to be a chick."

Why say that? Why say something so mean and hurtful? It's like with one big whip you are just beating a whole group of writers who are fine with the chick lit term, fine writing happily ever after. And I'm sorry, but a lot of women at the age of 25, 35, 45 and on are worried about finding a soul mate and being happily ever after. So pretty much Hunt is calling all of them children, belittling their worries and concerns. She suggests she's better because she wanted to be like Elizabeth Taylor - which is hugely ironic because really, after 8 husbands isn't she the biggest chick of all?

I mean if she was so confident and sure of herself why the hell did she keep getting married and divorced? (Or is the comparison better to Virginia Woolf, one of the more famous literary suicides in history? I'm not sure who Hunt likes more between the two - or why she thinks Taylor in that move makes her a better role model than a woman in a Jennifer Weiner novel.)

This is so frustrating to read about and think about - especially because Hunt describes her books as some I would just love to read: "I have always been inspired by the mysterious. Janet Cardiff, Rupert Sheldrake, the Arctic regions, Kelly Link, Shelley Jackson, the ocean, Haruki Murakami, Sophie Calle, W.G. Sebald, William Faulkner, Maria Mitchell, Luddites and Primitivists, Mother Nature. I’m inspired by artists, writers and scientists who reveal a mystery and then, rather than solving it, simply stand back and let us see the wonder. Mystery that is unsolvable. Both of my novels, The Seas and a forthcoming book called The Invention of Everything Else, try to explore such mysteries: identity to a young girl from a small town, living underwater, death, dictionaries, Nikola Tesla, electricity, love, how pigeons always know their ways home."

But I also like Katie Fforde and Jennifer Weiner. So I am clearly not a reader that Samantha Hunt has a lot of respect for. What I have to decide, is whether or not I still want to spend my money on her stories, inspite of that.

And as for Mary Shelley - well more on her as I continue reading the very excellent Monsters.