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The Source and Structure of Girl World: Tina Fey's Mean Girls and Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes

2019; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 45; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.2019.0021

1913-4835

D.M.R. Bentley,

American and British Literature Analysis

The Source and Structure of Girl World:Tina Fey's Mean Girls and Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes D.M.R. Bentley (bio) For My Daughter Diana The story of the loss and regaining of identity" may not be "the framework of all literature," as Northrop Frye asserts in The Educated Imagination (21), but it is undeniably the frame within which Tina Fey weaves the fabric of Mean Girls. At the heart of the autobiographical tale that Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) tells in the movie's retrospective voice-overs lies a comedic narrative of Bildung in which Cady loses her identity and moral compass and eventually regains them at a mature level of consciousness of the sort that scholars of William Blake usefully call "higher innocence." From the outset, she is positioned as an innocent in the alien and hostile environment of North Shore High—Blake's realm of "experience"—and by the end she is the wise overseer of a peaceable kingdom that she has been partly responsible for bringing into being. Most prominent of the various threads that Fey weaves into the intervening world of experience, "Girl World," that Cady enters at North Shore is the book from which that phrase is taken and upon which Mean Girls is based: Queen Bees and Wannabes, a lively and commonsensical guide to "Helping Your Daughter Survive the Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of [End Page 143] Adolescence" by Rosalind Wiseman that became popular enough after its publication in 2002 to be reprinted several times and, in 2010, reissued in an updated and revised form that takes into account such things as Facebook, Twitter, and, nominally, Fey's movie.1 The relationship between Mean Girls and Queen Bees and Wannabes is a close and complex one that, when examined with an eye on the 2004 screenplay2 from which the movie emerged, promises to shed light not only the ways in which the movie draws upon and differs from its sources but also on its substance, its structure, and its ideology—indeed, on how Mean Girls means and what social and cultural work it performs. I Because girls' social hierarchies are complicated and overwhelming, I'm going to take you through a general breakdown of the different positions in … [a] clique. Queen Bees and Wannabes The closeness and complexity of the relationship between Mean Girls and Queen Bees and Wannabes becomes immediately and strikingly apparent when Wiseman's vignettes of "The Queen Bee and Her Court" in her opening chapter on "Cliques and Popularity" are compared with Fey's characterization of Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), and Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), the three "Plastics" whose impact on the principal character, Cady Heron, drives the narrative of her steadily deteriorating values and their eventual reconstitution. All three are largely based on types identified and delineated by Wiseman, as are Regina's mother (Amy Poehler) and Cady herself as she becomes a Plastic and, in due course, the clique's Queen Bee. Other characters such as Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), the "Arts Freaks," who initially "mentor" Cady (S 10) and then hatch a plot to dethrone [End Page 144] Regina by depriving her of her senior boyfriend, her "'Hot' Body, and her "Army of Skanks," spring less obviously from the pages of Queen Bees and Wannabes, but they nevertheless reflect aspects of Wiseman's book, which also provided the basis or the inspiration for several scenes and parts of scenes in the movie. The "fabulous but … evil" Regina (Damian's description) is of course (and as her name declares)3 the Queen Bee who, in Wiseman's terms, personifies a "mean" and "evil popularity" "based on fear and control"—a popularity that she uses to dominate the other Plastics and, because they are the "dominant, or alpha, clique" at North Shore, the school as a whole, including the teachers and the African-American principal, Mr Duvall (Tim Meadows) (24, 25, 81). "[T]hink of a combination of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and Barbie," writes Wiseman in a reference to the infamous Matel doll that inspired the term Plastics: "Through...