Grrrl Revlonution: Cosmetics, Ugly Beauty, and Grrrling Women in Emma Forrest’s Cherries in the Snow and Thin Skin

Abstract

Thin Skin (2002) and Cherries in the Snow (2005) are coming-of-age novels set in reverse. This is to be expected when considered in conjunction with the “needy and attention seeking” narratives so typical of Emma Forrest’s oeuvre (Forrest, Thin Skin 123). Alighting on a deliberate confusion of girlhood and womanhood, both novels anticipate a contemporary (and postfeminist) rhetoric that, as Stephanie Harzewski identifies, is “uncomfortable with female adulthood itself, casting all women as girls to some extent” (9). As Forrest’s protagonists all carry an unease about being grown-up, despite the fact that they are grown-up, her work makes a timely intervention that both celebrates (and problematizes) the postfeminist trend and cultural phenomenon of girling women in the twenty-first century. Thin Skin, even down to its title, alludes to the simultaneous and often volatile encounters of girlish and grown-up, ugly and beautiful feminine identities through its twenty-something failed actress and self-proclaimed fucked-up girl, Ruby. In Cherries in the Snow, grown women are resold their former grrrlishness through the ugly makeup central to the fictional cosmetic company, Grrrl Cosmetics. In both novels, the girl/grrrl is instrumentalized by Forrest to tinker with established structures of feminine identity. I examine the extent to which the grrrling of women is politically, socially, or culturally progressive: does it really change anything or suggest a pathway to change? Or is it evidence not of resistance or rebellion but of a predictable tinkering with interpretations of femininity that have gained traction in contemporary consumer culture.