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daily life and relationships, she always feels “the truth in [her] bones, the Gospel
according to [her] father: I was fat and I was ugly and nobody would ever love
me” (Weiner 84). When Cannie finally meets her father after not having seen
him for years, he barely acknowledges her and does not provide any kind of
apology. She ultimately loses her excess weight in an extreme depression when
she almost loses the daughter she had conceived when she had sex with Bruce
during a short reconciliation. However, unlike Jemima and Bridget, a thin “hot”
body is not the solution for finding happiness because Cannie’s thinness comes
from what she calls her “Placenta Abruptio Emergency Hysterectomy Premature
and Possibly Brain-Damaged Baby Diet” (Weiner 341). Cannie does not
subscribe to the shallow concept of fatness being equivalent to shame. Cannie
retums to her original weight after the baby recovers, and she finds love and
happiness at a size sixteen.
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“It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love,
wealth or power but the pursuit of attainable goals: and what is a diet if not
that?” (Fielding 16)
In Consuming Innocence, Karen Brooks writes that Barbie was created
to “give girls the chance to imagine what it would be like, through play with a[n]
[adult] doll, to have a womanly body, accoutrements and fashions,” thus laying
the foundation for generations of women to suffer anxiety because they could
not match up to the impossible dimensions which Barbie’s ostensibly
“womanly” body seemed to set as the Standard for femininity (Brooks 94).
Women suffer from Body Dysmorphic Disorder every day and undergo
stringent diets just in order to be young, thin, and beautiful forever. All to please
men, the prize for being prettier than other women—this is a new spin on the
idea of the survival of the fittest. Moreover, the word “fat” has become one of
the biggest insults which can be applied to a woman, and sizes like 0 and 00 are
being invented so that women can never really be thin enough. Women who feit
like they had achieved the Mecca of perfection at a size 0 are made to feel
insecure and dissatisfied as size 00 is the next big (or tiny) goal that they need to
achieve. This debilitating process engineered by the patriarchal establishment
“elects” who will belong to the clique of the beautiful, where the definition of
beauty always excludes the fat people.
The postfeminist sensibility has a decidedly bodily quality, where
femininity involves a regimen of self-discipline and incessant monitoring in
order for women to achieve a sense of empowerment and individualism. The
socio-cultural significance of this Obsession with one’s physical desirability that
is present in almost every chick lit novel is that being thin not only has romantic
but also financial rewards. The pursuit of (attainable?) happiness through diets is
Bridget