The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Scrambling to meet deadlines, suffering anxiety attacks when a hard drive fails, and feted at book parties, Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, gives us the portrait of a young woman as writer. But with each passing season, we are drawn into what looks more and more like a roller-coaster ride of fairy tale–themed romance, until it becomes something of a relief when Carrie finally hits the jackpot and gets her happily-ever-after with a certain prince named Mr. Big. It is he who rescues Carrie from a failed relocation to Paris with a faux version of Mr. Right, and brings her back to New York City, where she is doomed to marry and languish in two predictably soulless movie sequels. Being a thirty-something single writer in New York City may have its upside, but the consolations of a sex-and-relationships column cannot provide the satisfactions of marriage to a wealthy, attractive, and elusive bachelor who wanders, Odysseus-like, from one port to the next until he finally docks at the right one.

  All the more astonishing, then, to discover that the young Carrie Bradshaw, in The Carrie Diaries, the fictional prequel or origin story to the HBO series, moves in a different direction, discovering in writing pleasures and satisfactions that compensate for the disappointments of romance. Like many who came before her, Candace Bushnell, author of the bestselling anthology on which the television series was based, saw the craft of writing as an expressive form, a type of autofiction that enabled her to process the ebb and flow of daily life. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Joan Didion had written back in 1976.7 Both the series and the book on which it is based give us a dose of real life, direct and unembellished, with little literary artifice. In autofiction, attention is focused on the narrator’s status as writer, and the writing of a book becomes the goal etched on the book itself.8

  Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the CityCourtesy of Photofest

  Candace Bushnell herself began writing as a child, and the two backstories she wrote for Sex and the City—targeted at teen readers—were partly autobiographical. The Carrie Diaries, published in 2010, and Summer and the City, published a year later, are reminders that Carrie started young as a writer. “I’ve been writing since I was six. I have a pretty big imagination,” she tells us, emphasizing the powerful link in fiction for girls between imagination—the power to visualize things, real and counterfactual—and writing.9 As a child, her role models were the “lady writers” pictured in the author photos of her grandmother’s romance novels. But soon she learns to suppress the “secret excitement” she feels about writing that kind of fiction, and turns to the “real” in order to establish her credentials.

  What she discovers in the course of her efforts to enroll in a writing program is, once again—just like Jo, Anne, and Francie—the need to tame the imagination, to take up topics drawn from her own social domain. Writing for The Nutmeg, her school newspaper, she discovers the power of using her voice to change the culture of her school—to address, what else but the toxicity of high school cliques. Tellingly, for her second assignment, an article entitled “The Queen Bee,” she uses a gender-neutral pseudonym, “veiling her identity to ensure that her work will be taken seriously.”10 Her mission is not to become prom queen but to critique the entire concept of the prom queen.

  What is permitted the young Carrie Bradshaw is not permitted to her older and wiser self. The teenager can struggle and flourish with her writing (as she does in The Carrie Diaries), but the thirty-something woman of Sex and the City must train her sights on finding a suitable romantic partner. “I have always been a firm believer that men, marriage and children are not the ‘answer’ for all women,” Candace Bushnell declared in an interview printed as an appendix to The Carrie Diaries, sounding all the while like Betty Friedan addressing the younger crowd, at a time when she was channeling Helen Gurley Brown for the adult-themed Sex and the City.

  The young Carrie’s efforts to define herself are carried out against a backdrop of revealing archetypes. When a personal crisis unfolds, “odd thoughts” come to her mind, among them: “In life, there are only four kinds of girls: The girl who played with fire. The girl who opened Pandora’s Box. The girl who gave Adam the apple. And the girl whose best friend stole her boyfriend.”11 (The girl who played with fire, a female analogue to Prometheus, is more than likely a reference to Stieg Larsson’s 2006 novel of that title, the second novel in his Millennium trilogy.) That series of “archetypes,” with a new one that, once again, vilifies women, is a reminder of how we focus on the dark side of women’s actions. The origin story for Sex and the City, more than the adult-focused TV show and movies, is a powerful reminder that our cultural stories about women from times past continue to resonate with us today in negative ways, and that the only way to loosen their tight grip on us is to craft new stories—transforming “the girl whose best friend stole her boyfriend” into “the girl who became a writer.”

  The series Girls features Hannah Horvath, played by Lena Dunham, as a twenty-something making her way from post-college narcissistic aimlessness to a form of self-awareness and social responsibility as she struggles to find her voice and become a published writer. She and her circle of three girlfriends mirror, magnify, and distort the quartet from Sex and the City. We are in the funhouse, looking at Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte through the curved mirror of millennial sensibilities.

  In some ways, we are all writers, or at least potentially so, and Hannah is supremely aware of that fact when asked about her “real job” in New York, which involves casual labor in a coffee shop. “I’m a writer,” she nonetheless insists. “And that’s how you make money?” her interlocutor presses on. “No, I don’t have any money,” Hannah responds, having just been cut off financially by her parents. “Do you have an agent?” is the next question. “No, I don’t have an agent,” the defeated Hannah responds.

  Hannah’s first success at monetizing her craft comes in the form of an e-book anthology of her essays, with an editor who is elated that she suffers from “mental illness”—“That’s something we can work with!” When that project collapses after the suicide of the editor, Hannah enrolls in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, only to find that she is not suited for ventures that require social interactions and collaboration. Her leap to self-actualization comes when she is interviewing an acclaimed author named Chuck Palmer and declares, while asking about the sexual assault charges brought against him by several women, “I’m a writer, you know, and I mean I may not be a rich writer or a famous writer . . . but I am a writer, and as such I think I’m obligated to use my voice to talk about things that are meaningful to me.”

  Hannah’s odyssey takes her from extreme navel-gazing to a sense of purpose for her writing. The girl of Girls becomes the It Girl, turning into a woman writer of the #MeToo era, letting go of the excitement of imaginative fiction and turning to essayistic social critique. Hannah’s New York Times op-ed in the Modern Love section and a storytelling performance at Housing Works reveal how she has found her mission in writing that disavows fiction and turns to the essay as a form of social engagement. Still, in a brilliant twist, the final season gives us an episode that shows Hannah watching her ex-boyfriend’s film about their relationship, turning the entire series into an infinite loop about picturing yourself being pictured. And we end with a snappy reminder that narcissism is a key feature of every writer’s personal profile. Never mind that in real life Lena Dunham found her calling in the medium of film.

  Hannah’s turn from fiction to journalism has its own logic in a culture that was processing the rage and resentment brought on by news about decades of sexual exploitation and social suppression. Conducting her own investigative inquiry with the serial predator Chuck Palmer, she models the more subtle forms taken by that exploitation and begins to show, paradoxically, that imaginative works of fiction and film can be as compelling as the real-life stories that inspired them. We have documentaries (Predator), movies inspired by real-life events (The Morning Show),
books (Catch and Kill), and podcasts (Chasing Cosby) about power imbalances and gender inequality. Lena Dunham joins the ever-growing ranks of writers and filmmakers who use their imaginations to take up the ethical issues of the #MeToo movement and explore the emotional consequences of power imbalances between genders.12 Girls reminds us that detective work is always part of the cultural calculus in the work carried out by writers of fiction.

  Detectives, Private Eyes, and Female Dicks

  The cult of the writer, as we have seen, led almost directly from Little Women through fiction for girls to screen fantasies about topical writing as professional work. But epistemophilia, the love of knowledge that has its origins in our innate curiosity, has a second dimension that merits exploring. Are there women less bent on the search for self-actualization and enlightenment than on advocacy and the kind of social work associated with inquiring minds? Reading may enlarge the world, as it does for the many young writer-heroines in our fictions, but writing has a deeply private and personal dimension that shrinks the universe down to a solitary mind wrestling with emotion, interiority, and existential crisis. It is hard not to associate the loneliness of the long-suffering writer with a poet like Emily Dickinson, seated at her tiny desk in Amherst, Massachusetts, writing verse on sheets later hand-sewn into fascicles. But words on the page, printed or written by hand, like the stories that circulated in the form of gossip, mattered even more back then, precisely because they were a way of getting out the word at a time when speaking in public was rarely an option for most women.

  Unlike the writer who traffics in words on the page, often in private spaces, detectives have a job that requires investigative action in the public arena—the inspection of the crime scene, the search for clues, the interrogation of suspects. But detectives are, for good reason, called private eyes, for as much as they scan crime scenes and search for suspects, they also try hard to fly under the radar, keeping a low profile to maximize their ability to collect information. The first female detective in British literature was a Mrs. Gladden (“the name I assume most frequently in my business”), whose serial adventures were published in 1864 by James Redding Ware, who used the pseudonym Andrew Forrester.13 Mrs. Gladden credits her sleuthing skills to her unobtrusiveness—she can easily pick up local gossip, masquerade as a servant, and trade on the assumption that, as a woman, she could not possibly be capable of solving a crime.

  The female detective is something of a breakthrough figure. Driven by curiosity and determined to find justice, she is often both insider and oddball, a woman who operates in the public sphere even as she is often desperately trying to cover her tracks or elude detection herself. In some ways she fits right in with the foundational figures of the detective novel, those brooding geniuses known as “armchair detectives” for their reclusive nature and sharp intelligence. Edgar Allan Poe’s Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes made their literary debuts nearly fifty years apart, the one in 1841, the other in 1887. Both sleuths work by ratiocination, more introspective and reflective than adventurous and gregarious. They reason out their solutions in the company of admiring interlocutors, sycophantic sidekicks who are more like codependents than associates. “I am lost without my Boswell,” Holmes proclaims in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Both Dr. Watson and Dupin’s unnamed companion are deeply deferential and always impressed by the investigative virtuosity of their confidants.

  Women sleuths, by contrast to Dupin and Holmes, tend to be loners, navigating the process of solving a crime on their own. There is no supportive subordinate to extol their feats of logic and fact-finding finesse. To be sure, the friends of Nancy Drew in Carolyn Keene’s series are in awe of her sleuthing skills, but mainly at a safe remove—Nancy carries out most of her work as a solo private eye. Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple is also characterized by a high degree of autonomy. She lives alone, she thinks on her own, and her success is not dependent on having an interlocutor who is a sounding board and sympathetic listener. Adept at problem-solving and deriving pleasure from investigative work (with almost a “lust” for it), Miss Marple is unfettered by the bonds of kinship. She is a lone wolf and therefore also absolved of choosing between marriage and career or between romance and crime-solving, as so often happens with a younger generation of investigators.14

  In many ways, detective work seems like the perfect profession for women in the first part of the twentieth century, for they could operate clandestinely, be intellectually adventurous, and break rules at a time when most options were closed to them. Many of their male precursors were already eccentric figures: Poe’s Auguste Dupin goes out only at night and admits no visitors to his lodgings, while the violin-playing Sherlock Holmes is addicted to cocaine. And the often remarked kinship between lawbreakers and law enforcers (“Criminals and detectives could be as closely befriended as Sherlock Holmes and Watson,” Walter Benjamin tells us in a philosophical meditation on crime fiction) becomes all the stronger when rebels with a cause, women who are willing to cross social boundaries, take up sleuthing. Even when the conflict dividing the two sets of figures is clearly demarcated, with one a champion of law and order, fighting for the common good, and the other representing wrongdoing, evil, and disorder, there is still a sense that they are mutually enabling accomplices rather than pure adversaries.

  Where are the woman detectives? They should be ubiquitous, for, after all, women are nosy, gossipy snoops, always eavesdropping, prying, and rarely minding their own business. The term “female dick” may be oxymoronically jarring, but women, with their eagerness to meddle, are all in a sense private eyes. The term “private eye,” is said, by the way, to have been based on a Pinkerton agency logo that featured the words “We Never Sleep” printed under a painted eye. The earliest use of the term, as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary, was in Raymond Chandler’s “Bay City Blues,” published in 1937 in a magazine called Dime Detective: “But we don’t use any private eyes in here. So sorry.”15 Yet eight years earlier it had appeared in the 1930 Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn, when Nancy Drew is gruffly told, “Try to figure this one out, Miss Private Eye!” right before she is given a shove and dragged down to a river.16 It is deeply symptomatic that Nancy Drew, still a heroine today for many young readers, was overlooked when it came to defining the term that defined her.

  The Mysteries of Nancy Drew, “Best of All Girl Detectives”

  Nancy Drew, the sixteen-year-old girl detective (later turned into an eighteen-year-old), and Miss Marple, the septuagenarian sleuth, both made their first public appearances in 1930, the younger in The Secret of the Old Clock and the elder in The Murder at the Vicarage. A look at the origins of the younger detective will shed light on the adventures not only of her British elder but of the many female investigators who follow in her footsteps as crime solvers.

  Edward Stratemeyer, one of the most prolific writers in the world and the creator of The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, and other book series for children, also invented the character of Nancy Drew. He felt confident that the amateur girl detective would become as commercially successful as his Hardy Boys. After he pitched the new series to the publishing house of Grosset & Dunlap, the firm decided to take a conservative approach and negotiated with an unknown journalist named Mildred Wirt to write the first volumes for flat fees ranging from $125 to $250 (reduced to $75 during the Great Depression). The Secret of the Old Clock, the first book in the series, was published under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene.

  Over the years, the books about Nancy and her detective skills have been translated into forty-five languages, with sales so astronomically high that it is no longer possible to track them. “Nancy is the greatest phenomenon among all the fifty-centers. She is a best seller. How she crashed a Valhalla that had been rigidly restricted to the male of her species is a mystery,” one expert on the series wondered.17 Intelligent, fearless, stylish, and strong, Nancy Drew is flanked by two sidekicks, the tomboy George and the girly girl Bess, wh
ose roles seem limited to making the adventurous and glamorous Nancy look even better than she already is on the page.

  Is it an accident that so many of our female Supreme Court justices cite the Nancy Drew series as a source of encouragement and inspiration? Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor have all professed their love for the teen investigator, finding themselves, as did O’Connor, “totally absorbed” by the series.18 The girl gumshoe was evidently also a role model for Hillary Clinton.19 It seems more than likely that part of the appeal for these accomplished women was not just that Nancy solves mysteries but that she is committed to serving justice—that is what Nancy does supremely well.20

  In the Nancy Drew series, we discover the dark side to the pastoral world of River Heights, a town that is sometimes described as rural, sometimes as urban, sometimes as suburban, depending on which book in the series you are reading. That’s where Nancy resides with her widower father, Carson Drew, and a housekeeper named Hannah Gruen. The cozy villages of British murder mysteries may have high body counts, but the world of Nancy Drew, by contrast, is plagued by unusually high robbery rates. There are close calls but few corpses. What motivates Nancy goes beyond the return of stolen property. While she is committed to seeking justice, she also embodies the ethics of care described by Carol Gilligan in her landmark study of women’s developmental paths and how those paths differ from those of their male counterparts.21 “You are always putting yourself out to do a kindness for somebody or other who simply doesn’t count in your life at all,” Nancy’s pal George declares in The Sign of the Twisted Candles.22