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March 23, 2006
Nancy Drew's Father Part I
Following is from an article written by Meghan O'Rourke in "The New Yorker" in 2004. We enjoyed it so much we wanted to share it - even if in installments!
The summer I was seven, a sudden adventure shanghaied my parents, and they hastily deposited me at my grandmother's home, in suburban New Jersey, for the weekend. I was sitting mournfully by the back-yard pool, without the prospect of a playmate, when my grandmother came down the flagstone path, a box in her hands, and announced with an air of genial relief, "I've found your mother's old Nancy Drews." Warped and moldy, "The Bungalow Mystery," on top of the box, appeared unpromising - and, at two hundred pages, long. But desperation will drive a child to great lengths. I began to read and, it now seems, didn't look up for several years.
What I was reading were dozens of variations on a single story, which went something like this: Nancy Drew, a sixteen-year-old girl in the suburb of River Heights, visits a friend and learns of a mystery, typically involving a lost treasure or a missing heir. An anonymous note slipped under her door warns her, "Keep off the case, or else"; high jinks and a car chase ensue. While sleuthing, Nancy gets knocked out by a crook, and comes to in an elegant old mansion ("Nancy saw lovely damask draperies, satin-covered sofas and chairs"), where she partakes of a refreshing tea service and cinnamon toast; renewed, she discovers a secret passageway, thanks to a cunning knob of some kind, rapidly solves the mystery and restores social order.
As Bobbie Ann Mason points out in her excellent 1975 history, "The Girl Sleuth", Nancy Drew is a paradox - which may be why feminists can laud her as a formative "girl power" icon and conservatives can love her well-scrubbed middle-class values. She climbs fences like a tomboy but cries "How dainty!" upon spying a gold bracelet. Her friends have marvellous weddings, but Nancy never frets about her future; more than a kiss from Ned Nickerson, her worshipful beau, would only interrupt her sleuthing. Like many juvenile heroines of her time, she is missing a mother. (Hers died when she was three.) But there are no shadows behind her "sparkling" bright-blue eyes. The shadows are in the world and they are easily detected and vanquished, for they have squinty eyes, poor grammar, badly mended clothes, and a habit of wearing too much rouge.
Next year, Nancy turns seventy-five, and having sold more than two hundred million books, she has been rewarded with a twenty-first-century makeover. "Nancy Drew Girl Detective" is a new series launched last spring by Aladdin Paperbacks, a division of Simon Schuster. The contemporary Nancy is more attuned to emotional issues than the old Nancy, as one can only expect in our therapeutic age. But her gaze remains unshadowed.
I don't remember wonering much about Carolyn Keene, the book's putative author, although I must have eventually asked how she could write so many books; I recall my father gently suggesting that Keene had been replaced by a ghostwriter. This concerned me for one reason: what if the books changed? I needn't have worried. The truth is that Nancy Drew, like her comrades-in-sleuthing the Hardy Boys, was never a creation of a sincle mind. From the start, she was the product of a corporation - a literary syndicate. The man who created the syndicate was not a feminist or a brilliant writer. But in his own unassuming way he was, like Nancy Drew, a phenomenon.
To Be Continued
Posted by mysterygamers at March 23, 2006 09:50 PM