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Airheads.

Article Excerpt
Airheads is the word I use to refer to the protagonists in the recent spate of popular teen girl diaries. American Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries and its sequels; the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson books by the U.K.'s Louise Rennison (the first of which is Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging); and Canada's Alice, I Think and its sequel Miss Smithers by Susan Juby have all enjoyed remarkable sales, and all find their energy in the naivete and self-absorption of their subjects. Something about these girls--Manhattanite Mia Thermopolis (a.k.a. Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo, Princess of Genovia), Midlands working-class Georgia Nicolson, and small-town British Columbian Alice MacLeod--strikes the funny bones and taps the desires of teen girl readers by the score.

Like Bridget Jones and Clueless Cher before them, these girls are characterized by ignorance and misperception. They share a limited knowledge of the world and exaggerated self-interest; they all act on strong romantic twinges and sexual curiosity. But while the interests of Mia, Georgia, and Alice may be comfortingly similar in some ways, Cabot, Rennison, and Juby reflect and expose, in the girls' voices, the divergent desires and anxieties of their three cultures.

In its very conceit, The Princess Diaries appeals to a longstanding, well-documented American desire--the longing for royalty. In her epigraphs, all of which are taken from Frances Hodgson Burnett's enduringly popular A Little Princess (1905), Cabot consciously evokes a literary past that fed on this fascination. (Burnett's 1886 Little Lord Fauntleroy, a fantasy about a poor American boy who finds he's a British earl, rescued Burnett from poverty and made her fortune.) In a country committed to seeing itself as a democracy at all costs, the longing for blue blood will out. And Mia's royal blood isn't just a feature of a Cinderella story, a poor girl who elevates herself by her sweetness: it's about finding oneself born to privilege instead of having to work for it; it's about being plucked from the ranks of the ordinary to be elevated to the ranks of the "special" through no act of one's own. Of course, in deference to the American image of democracy, Mia's problems show the downside of an aristocracy--responsibility without choice--but they're designed to appeal. Most of Cabot's readers probably find the idea of trying on designer gowns, learning how to greet heads of state, or even use the correct utensils at official dinners, attractive rather than off-putting.

Is it because the U.S. does have an aristocracy of sorts that this conceit is appealing to young readers? It seems entirely possible that part of the popularity of the Princess Diaries novels springs from an admission that in reality the great republic is not very different from a monarchy (on NPR's Morning Edition one interviewee from the 2004 Republican Convention, asked about the grooming of the next Bush for office, had to protest, "This is not a monarchy!"--suggesting that it might seem so, to some observers). In Princess Mia, blue blood and family wealth (Mia's father's personal worth is estimated at "over three hundred million dollars") connect her both to the romantic fairy tale of European aristocracy and to the more pragmatically evolved American hierarchy of wealth and family connections. Young readers can thrill to both.

At the same time that Mia's royal lineage is irresistibly attractive, however, it could cast the lie to the ideals of a "democratic" society. Hence Mia's, and especially her clever friends Lilly and Michael Moscovitz's, concern with equity and inclusiveness. The Cultural Diversity Dance at which a group of Goths try to embark "upon a demonstration over the unfair exclusion of a table dedicated to Satan worshipers"; Lilly's campaign against the racist pricing at the Korean deli (the owners charge Asian students five cents less than they charge others for gingko biloba puffs); Lilly's statement that "sovereignty rests with the people"--these are only...