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2016
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This dissertation describes beauty and romance narratives that recur in contemporary Young Adult fiction for girls and examines the ways these narratives construct girlhood. The romance narrative dictates that girls must find heterosexual romance in order to be happy, while the beauty narrative asserts that girls will only find romance if they meet ideal feminine beauty standards. I first create a genealogy of romance and beauty in American¿ girls¿ fiction in order to demonstrate the origins of these narratives. I then examine how contemporary texts incorporate and resist the beauty and romance narratives. In the first chapter, I compare Stephenie Meyer¿s Twilight (2005) to Meg Cabot¿s The Princess Diaries (2000) to demonstrate how postfeminism and third-wave feminism, respectively, have interpreted the beauty and romance narratives. I argue that the postfeminism of Twilight reinforces conservative ideals and traditional gender norms while the girlie third-wave feminism of The Princess Diaries subtly resists the more restrictive aspects of the romance and beauty narratives. In Chapter Two I use Judith Butler¿s theory of the performative nature of gender to argue that romance and beauty are part of our gender performance, as seen in Rainbow Rowell¿s Eleanor & Park (2013). The title characters are physically, socially, and economically unable to perform beauty and romance as expected, and therefore both prove the constructed nature of that gender performance and offer alternative models of girlhood and boyhood. In Chapter 3 I assert that Suzanne Collins¿ phenomenally popular Hunger Games series criticizes the romance and beauty narratives, in part through its dystopian features, without entirely rejecting romance and beauty. I argue that the protagonist, Katniss, learns to use beauty and romance rhetorically for her political and personal gain. This project ends with a Coda, in which I look to how we may continue to examine the significance of the beauty and romance narratives, such as by analyzing them intersectionally with race, class, and sexuality and by conducting ethnographies to determine the impact these narratives have on real girls.
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English