This article argues that the popular fiction genre of chick lit can be
illuminated by a discussion of the redeployment of fairy tale tropes in a
‘popular postfeminist’ context. Utilizing many conventions of romantic
fairy tales, chick lit focuses on protagonists’ relationships and their
quest for the romantic ideal of ‘true love’. Yet it also departs from
these narratives in its ‘postfeminist’ twist on the fairy tale,
filtering the central fairy tale narrative through a lens dramatically
shaped by the influence of feminism on late twentieth-century popular
culture. The fairy tale metamorphosis in chick lit nevertheless
continues to be the metamorphosis of the self on which so many
fairytales magically depended. In the chick lit example, the fairy tale
conventions of quest and transformation are incorporated in terms that I
want to associate with ‘popular postfeminism’. In unpacking what I will
term the ‘postfeminist fairy tale’, this essay will focus on a
particular idealisation of the ‘true self’—a woman capable of ‘having it
all’ (education, career, economic independence, love and family).
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