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

Abstract

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