Mean Girls, Mean Women.

Navigation: Main page

Author: Segal, Carolyn Foster1

OBSERVER

Question: Did you find it hard to be a female spook in the masculine realm of espionage?

Answer: No. The same skills you learned as a little girl can be modified and used when you are working overseas as a spy.

I'm almost positive that this isn't what we meant by "sisterhood is powerful," but 30 some years after that chant, it's clear that mean girls have never really cleaned up their act.

My 17-year-old daughter and her friends love the movie Mean Girls. They saw it in the theater when it first came out last year, and they have watched it over and over again on DVD. "So, do you think it's true?" I asked Libby after yet another showing one afternoon. "Ye-e-esss, Mom. I do," she answered, rolling her eyes. "Don't you?"

Well, yes. I've known my share of mean girls. In grade school, there were Judy K. and Rory F. In high school, there was Carol M. Then I not only went on to an all-women's college but I ended up teaching at one, so I've had an extended, not-so-sentimental education in the ways and means of mean girls. My first college roommate wrote the book on freeing your inner "gutsy" (read mean) self, Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead … but Gutsy Girls Do. As a faculty member, I've been cursed at, spit on, and battered with a blunt object (the paperback version of Rebecca, fortunately, and not the hardcover edition of War and Peace).

Along the way, I've taught â€" and read, for bittersweet pleasure â€" a number of books and films featuring mean girls. From Eris, who launched the golden apple that launched the thousand ships of the Trojan War, to the Grimm Brothers' harridans to the villains in All About Eve and The Devil Wears Prada, it seems that girls just want to have discord.

Even Louisa May Alcott's little women aren't exempt. Amy may announce in the closing scenes of the 1994 film version that "A sister is more important than marriage," but let's not forget that Amy got the trip to Europe and the boy, and that, back in Part I, Amy burned one of Jo's manuscripts and Jo retaliated by (before coming to her sisterly senses) letting Amy skate off alone to an icy near-death experience.

For portraits of contemporary literary queens of mean, it's hard to top Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye or The Robber Bride. After recommending Cat's Eye to an artist friend of mine, I asked her what she thought of the sections on Elaine's paintings. "Paintings?" she said blankly. "I was totally focused on the girls."

Good idea. My students love Cat's Eye; they also respond positively to the works of Edith Wharton: the short story "Roman Fever" and the novels The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth. One of the first comments students invariably make is that Wharton seems so contemporary. Pressed further, they pronounce that Wharton got it right â€" "it" being the portrayal of women's lives "on the side where," to quote from The House of Mirth, "the threads [are] knotted and the loose ends [hang]." In my "Survey of American Literature," the discussion of "Roman Fever" goes on far longer than that for any other selection on the syllabus. Students are both delighted and disturbed by what appears to be "a cat fight on the Riviera," as one of my advisees describes it. In another course, the planned two-week excursion into Lily Bart's social world in Wharton's 1905 The House of Mirth spirals into three.

Eventually, we work our way to the metaphorical, historical, and literary-historical, but first my students want to stop and linger at the literal story. It is their identification with and attachment to Lily that will eventually allow me to help them shift to the symbolic level.

Lily's world is remarkably similar to that of my students. Cliques and gossip; concerns about money, work, and clothes; the longing to be understood â€" these are the day-to-day dramatic elements of my women's college. Emotional blackmail, moral choices, the possession of secrets, romantic yearning, and the phantasmagoric relief of drugs â€" these too are part of the lives that we ask students to suspend while they sit in our classrooms and think great thoughts about great literature.

And so, in retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised by what happened at the conference held by the Edith Wharton Society in June. Billed as a celebration of the centenary of The House of Mirth, the conference featured a day and a half's worth of papers devoted to the novel. Frankly, no conference should be devoted to just one novel; some might accurately consider listening to paper after paper on a single book to be a form of author-aversion therapy. But I had no such worries as I set off for my summer idyll on the bank of the Hudson River. I was looking forward to the conference, partly because I have always loved Wharton's novels and partly because I would be meeting up with an old friend from graduate school. It was she who had first told me about the conference, adding, "And I think you'll really like the society. It's so civilized." (As opposed to what? What exactly goes on at other literary-society meetings?)

The conference was â€" how shall I put it? â€" positively Whartonian. The festivities began with a late-afternoon tea on a meltingly hot terrace; the tea was followed by a dinner and a keynote speech in which the speaker covered every topic on the list of panels. Then we retired to redraft our papers. The next morning, presentations began at 8:45, and all went well, if a bit redundantly (by the second morning, one panelist would invite audience members to chant along as she quoted from Lily's increasingly dreary saga), through the early afternoon. We had just reviewed, once again, Lily's mortally sad but triumphant moral victory over mean-girl Bertha Dorset when it was time for the final concurrent formal panels of the day.

I was scheduled to present, and during the presession chatter, I noted that, while the size of the audience in my room wasn't shamefully small, members of what I had observed to be the society's inner circle were absent. They had understandably, I thought, chosen to attend the other session, which featured one of the eminent dowagers of the society.

That other session also featured a plot twist worthy of Mrs. Dorset or Ethan Frome's Zenobia: the diva's savaging of a young scholar who was in the room. Was this development a surprise to everyone? Some individuals probably knew and/or anticipated a scene; there had been furtive whispering during the lunch break. The object of the senior presenter's scorn was a paper on Wharton delivered by the younger woman at another conference a month or so earlier. The moderator of that earlier panel was also in attendance, and she too was a recipient of the dowager's wrath. But it was the young woman who was devastated.

One attendee, who was still trying to understand the back story several days later, called the experience "horrible." When my friend and I asked another woman whom we've known for years what happened, she said it was "unfortunate." She then went on to explain that longtime members of the society "were embarrassed for and by" the older scholar, but that they had stayed with her afterward, creating a "circle of healing." (As for the young woman, she returned to her hotel room, then went alone to the restaurant where my friend and I were having a late dinner.)

On the third and final day of the conference, the older scholar was loudly in attendance. The young scholar did not appear; she had been, like Madame Olenska in The Age of Innocence and like Lily, effectively "eliminated from the tribe" (Wharton's description of Madame Olenska's social ostracism in The Age of Innocence and Lily's fate as well). The circle had closed. My friend and I departed before the afternoon's activities of tours and boat rides began; we left at the end of the final plenary session, at which board members read their favorite passages from a novel that we all, by then, seemed to know only too well.

That evening my daughter recommended some "video therapy." Would I like to join her, she wondered, for an episode or two of Alias, with good-girl CIA agent Sydney Bristow?

CARTOON

~~~~~~~~

By Carolyn Foster Segal, An associate professor of English at Cedar Crest College.