The major thesis of Reviving Ophelia is that contemporary industrialized Western culture, chiefly by way of the mass media but also by way of family and peers, sends behavioral and attitude cues that young girls find difficult to ignore and that foster what amounts to the death of the self. In particular girls become dissatisfied with their changing body image and become anxious to please. The model is Ophelia, who is torn between pleasing her father Polonius and pleasing her would-be lover Hamlet. Unrewarded for doing either, she commits suicide. Today's adolescent girls are torn between family and culture, with culture's "junk values" implicated in "development of individual pathology" (26). How this works is Pipher's subject.
The first chapter describes cultural pressures on young girls. Feminism may have given some women great jobs, but most working women have jobs at the margin, and the culture is hostile to feminism. Lip service to equality has been balanced by actual increases in pornography and violence toward women and discrimination against them. Women are devalued in general, and the culture has become more dangerous, less protected, for young girls. Meanwhile: "The gap between girls' true selves and cultural prescriptions for what is properly female creates enormous problems (22).
Beginning with a case history of a girl whose charmed childhood gave way to a troubled adolescence and herpes, Chapter 2 develops the view that girls take on the attributes of a false self but can descend into anger and depression on that account, not least because they understand at some level that their true and false self are in conflict on one hand, and under pressure from peers and the culture on the other. They are being pressured to conform to feminine personality stereotype, and their sense of self is crushed as a result. Consciousness of self is lagging behind other changes in their lives. Thus: "Girls need and can benefit from cons...