On Jezebel's Fine Lines Series and Spunky Female Protagonists

My favourite feature at the blog-for-women behemoth Jezebel is their Friday series called Fine Lines, in which contributor Lizzie Sturnick re-reads and reviews a YA book and the commenters go crazy over it. I’m sometimes there, also going crazy over such YA books as A Wrinkle in Time and The Westing Game, two of my absolute favourites from my youth. Both feature strong female protagonists (and are written by women, in fact) and have been discussed in Fine Lines.

I also love to read Jezebel’s comment section and hear stories from other women about how they were book nerds in grade school who read everything in their school library and skipped ahead during read-aloud time in class. I, too, was one of those book nerds. Books were my best friends for a long time when I didn’t quite fit in at my Catholic, upper-middle-class elementary school, and whenever I was feeling lonely in high school, even though I had plenty of friends and fun in both cases. Books, in some measure, will hopefully always be there for me and for everyone who remembers reading with joy at a younger age.

I can’t remember where I read this, but on a blog recently someone hypothesized that the reason Jezebel is so popular is because smart women are underutilized in their jobs. The editors at Jezebel post during the workweek and usually during traditional work hours, but commenters still manage to generate thousands of hits per post, and hundreds of comments on controversial items of news, such as the Elliot Spitzer saga, for example. Every Friday instalment of Fine Lines also gets a lot of responses. It’s interesting, because Fine Lines isn’t a series about “chick lit” or modern fiction – it’s about nostalgia. Many of the commenters, myself included, think they would have been different people if they hadn’t idolized Jo March, Anne Shirley or Vicky Austin in childhood.

Every time I read Fine Lines I wonder what it is about YA fiction that gets women so excited. I don’t read blogs geared specifically towards men, but I would be surprised if such a blog had a similar feature where men talked about Phineas and Gene’s complicated relationship in A Separate Peace, or shared stories about how Huckleberry Finn changed their lives. And then, there was a post on Jezebel about the series Anne of Green Gables, which, being Canadian, a girl, and an aspiring writer, I read dozens of times when I was in grade school. I identified so strongly with Anne that I started to talk like her and write overblown descriptions of natural scenes. (And I've decided to re-read the complete series this summer, because I don't have enough "reading projects" to hold my attention!)

And it wasn’t just Anne, either – like Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, I thought I was ugly and awkward, and I could never control my emotions. Like Vicky, my family was a complex and sometimes annoying entity. And like Katy in What Katy Did, sometimes I was too wild, or said harsh things that I didn’t mean.

I am still a voracious reader now, but I don’t identify with the female characters I encounter in nearly the same way. YA lit is rife with strong girls, dreamy girls, shy girls, awkward girls – girls who encompass all aspects of traditional femininity AND masculinity, girls who learn how to be themselves painfully and truthfully.

While part of my enduring love for YA fiction is because I read most of it while I was growing up – a vulnerable time, where things stick with you – it’s also a question of supply and demand. I want to read about complicated female characters, and YA is still the best place to find those characters. The Sarah Dessens and Joan Bauers of today's YA world are doing their best to follow in the footsteps of L.M. Montgomery and Madeleine L'Engle. There are more materialistic, less well-written books on the periphery of the YA world - the Gossip Girl series, which is like a more expensive East Coast version of Sweet Valley High - but they remain just there: on the periphery. Unlike chick lit marketed towards grown up women, which sometimes seems to be all we women are supposed to be reading, girls can still proudly choose meaningful literature. Lucky them.

YA fiction, especially older books like the Anne series, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the Little House books, feature strong, vibrant female narrators (or protagonists) who practically leap off the page with the force of their personalities. Jo in Little Women, Cassandra in I Capture the Castle – YA books marketed towards girls encourage those girls to be everything that they can, like those protagonists. Jo and Cassandra aren’t perfect; they make mistakes, they lose their tempers and want to be left alone sometimes, just like real people.

So when asking why so many smart women spend their days commenting on Jezebel instead of doing work at their boring nine-to-fives, maybe we should also consider the enduring popularity of young adult fiction and the Fine Lines series. It’s difficult to be a woman these days. Undervalued at work, courted by publishing execs who still think that all women want to read books with pink covers and brand-name titles – is it any wonder that women are turning to fiction where girls, at least, are still allowed to believe that they can grow up to be whoever they want?