Miss Havisham ... it's all about the confidence!

Where did Miss Havisham go wrong? Not enough clinched in waist-belts? Wrap-dresses or control underwear? Was she the subdued pre-curser to Carrie Bradshaw? Should a modern Miss Havisham just ‘change her facebook status to single’ and get over it?

Miss Havisham has become the pin up for pop culture’s anxiety of the unmarried jilted woman, still panging for lost love. Three waves of feminism later and are the current men-less woman any better off? Perhaps we should be more attune to the empty misery of four single women trotting around New York in heels they can’t walk in, desperately trying to secure a man, all in the name of good post-feminist fun!

There is a refreshing honesty, even dignity about the Miss Havisham character, admittedly she has her ups and downs, at one point urging her daughter to secure a man, only to leave him heartbroken – all in the name of revenge. However her dogged adherence to internal misery and utter rejection of any surface values of happiness (sipping saccharine cocktails at a ‘fabulous’ party) is something modern post-break-up women have lost. Katie Price celebrated her newly single status by throwing a divorce bash, and instead of stopping the clocks and living in her wedding dress, Carrie Bradshaw gets in a limo with her girlfriends to Mexico for what would have been her honeymoon. Three jilted women appeared on ‘Good Morning America’ in 2008, all listing the positive effects this had on their lives.

Perhaps this shift in attitudes could be down to the vicarious way we now live through the fictional characters we see before us, on screen they serve a different purpose – to remind us that from an outsiders perspective we probably do look ‘fabulous’, even though we don’t feel it. Contentment has become so interlinked with surface values and body image it feels women are perpetually told they are one waist belt purchase away from a zen-like acceptance of the self. Miss Havisham sees the bigger picture. She spends the rest of her life in her rotting wedding dress, amidst the remains of her cake. While even GCSE students could spot the symbolism, we are instantly seduced by the ‘fabulousness’ of the post-feminist single woman’s life and fail to see that just because the glamorous outfits are changed every scene in Sex and the City, doesn’t mean they serve any different purpose to Miss Havisham’s wedding dress.

If awkwardness was made out of strawberries....

....we'd all be drinking a lot of smoothies right now.

‘I just love awkwardness... it fascinates me’ - Peaches Geldolf

‘My life is a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents’ - Russell Brand

Urban dictionary defines the ‘awkward turtle’ as the mascot of the awkward moment.

But how has awkwardness become adorable, trendy and hilarious? When I feel awkward, I am not endearing, I am not hilarious and most of all, I am not trendy. Awkwardness is that moment when you fail as a human, you malfunction to such an extent that your insides contract and you want to curl in the fetal position and rock back and forth. Does Peaches Geldolf love that feeling? Could she possibly be so sadistic that she enjoys invoking that feeling in others? Perhaps Peaches could be... but surely not all those skinny-jeaned, pointy-shoed indie types who revel in the idea of the cringe-ment (cringe moment).

Here's a googletrend graph of awkwardness. Apparently at the start of 2009... we started loving it.

‘I love awkward moments,’ ‘You know what, I just don’t feel awkwardness,’ ‘ha... look at that awkward girl over there... awkward turtle! *awkward turtle hand motion*.’ These quintessential awkward-related sentences sum up what has become the ‘po-mo-awk,’ the post modern concept of awkwardness.

Perhaps we’ve become detached masochists, removing ourselves from our emotions and finding pleasure in the pain of the cringe. After having a thirty minute conversation with friends about the awkwardness of greeting people (hand shake? go in for the hug? a double kiss? double kiss with a hug on each side? too weird?) I realized the importance of talking about your awkwardness, dispelling the pain by turning it into a moment of po-mo-awk. Sometimes, when I’m in bed and almost asleep, a painful split second memory of an awkward moment will take over my thoughts. I then lie awake, wide eyed and pursed lipped mentally cursing my inability to just be normal. I’ve asked friends what moments sneak into their brains and keep them awake at night. One physically cringes when she remembers her three-year-old self getting into another families car after a picnic, one grits his teeth when he remembers ending his presentation with a ‘ta-daaaaaa’. We talk about these moments and laugh, in fact, these conversations are so hilarious, that i love them. I love awkwardness... Or at least sharing a cringe with other cringers.

This is the turning point; the horrible into the hilarious, the haunting memory into the shared joke, the awk into the po-mo-awk. It’s the feeling of community, knowing that malfunctioning as a human is, in fact, functioning in a totally normal way. You might talk to a blonde stranger next to you in topshop assuming that they’re the similarly blonde friend you came in with, you might sleep with a man and the next time you see him you might have a which-type-of-greeting-panic like none other, or maybe you’ll spend a day with a piece of tissue attached to your nose ring. But none of that matters, because you’ll tell your friends and as they laugh at you, you’ll notice they’ve all got toilet roll stuck to the bottom of their shoes.