The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Gilligan’s In a Different Voice argued that women, who see themselves embedded in a social network, approach ethical problems differently than their male counterparts. While women are oriented to an ethics of care, focused on connection, relationship, and conflicting responsibilities, men tend to think in terms of an ethics of justice, with codified structures of competing rights. For Gilligan, the terms “web” and “hierarchy,” while not perfect analytical categories, capture two disparate visions about care and justice. Gilligan later argued that these divisions were less gender based than thematic, and that the contrasting feminine and masculine voices are connected to two modes of thought as much as to two genders.

  Nancy Drew’s insistence on affirming the principles of the legal systems in place (her father is, after all, a lawyer) turns out not to conflict at all with securing and strengthening a communal web of relationships. She disrupts Gilligan’s binaries, suggesting that it is possible to secure law and order, but never at the expense of others. Whether rescuing a friend from turbulent waters, restoring stolen goods to an impoverished child, saving the inhabitants of a burning house, or freeing a boy from cruel exploitation, Nancy manages to model heroic behavior, risking her neck in a series of perilous adventures that reveal her commitment to serving justice and restoring goods and reputations, even while speaking “sweetly” and “kindly.”23

  Why, then, was Nancy Drew banned from libraries? I recall vividly that the volumes were absent from the shelves of the otherwise well-stocked local library in the Chicago suburb where I grew up. When I decided to include the Nancy Drew books in my research for this volume, I found myself furtively reading the series in the Farnsworth Room at Harvard’s Lamont Library, with its “extracurricular reading,” a collection that, as the placard in the room announced, did not pretend to offer “the best reading.” It was just a place to browse, “where an hour may be passed with pleasure.” The New York Public Library system did not carry the Nancy Drew books until the mid-1970s. They were considered “worthless, sordid, sensational, trashy, and harmful,” a menace to “good reading,” as one Canadian librarian put it. Under the right supervision, “this trash will find its way to the furnace, where it belongs.”24 Like the Hardy Boys books, which were denounced as working on a boy’s brain “in as deadly a fashion as liquor will attack a man’s brain,” they were “not written but manufactured.”25 “I wish I could label each one of these books: ‘Explosives! Guaranteed to Blow Your Boy’s Brains Out,’” grumbled the chief librarian of the Boy Scouts.26 Metaphors of toxicity abound in describing book series for girls and boys: “Much of the looseness of morals and of the contempt for social conventions for which the rising generation is blamed is due to the reading of this poisonous sort of fiction.”27

  The charge of bad writing, along with adult anxieties about flat prose, failed to diminish the appeal of Nancy Drew herself to adolescent readers. She thrilled them with her adventurous spirit and inspired them with her courage and kindness. One of the more explicit critiques worried that series books glorify characters who have broken with “the traditions and conventions which society has found essential to its highest goals.”28 Guilty as charged, many young readers would respond, for, once Nancy becomes a detective, she also acquires agency in ways that allow her to make a break with dependency on the adults around her. In a volume like The Mystery at Lilac Inn, for example, Carson Drew is astonishingly cavalier when it comes to Nancy’s many brushes with death. Unlike real-life parents or caregivers, the adults never act on concerns about her safety, nor do they limit her movements in any way.

  Many critics have pondered the mystery of Nancy Drew’s charm and charisma, both for the residents in her hometown of River Heights and for her readers. The blue roadster explains much, as does Nancy’s physical endurance and attractive appearance. Nancy can change tires in a thunderstorm, fix motorboats in the dark—she carries heavy loads with confidence. “Three capable, muscular, brainy girls such as we are shouldn’t need any help,” she tells her pals in The Clue in the Diary.29 “Unusually pretty,” with “fair” skin, “friendly blue eyes,” and “golden curly hair,” Nancy has a winning way with all those who enter her orbit.30 But these attributes pale by comparison with Nancy’s powers of what Edgar Allan Poe, author of, arguably, the first detective story in the United States, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” called ratiocination. In the very first book in the series, Nancy gazes at the “disorder” around her and searches her mind for an “explanation.” “What could it mean?” she asks herself.31 Even under the most extreme circumstances, as when she is locked in the closet of an abandoned house and left to suffocate and starve, Nancy is levelheaded and unflappable. “I’m only wasting my strength this way. I must try to think logically,” she tells herself in The Secret of the Old Clock.32

  Decoding mysteries, sorting out the truth, finding meaning—those are all things we do when we read. Nancy’s sleuthing activities mirror, externalize, and enact exactly what young readers do when they pick up The Secret of the Old Clock or The Hidden Staircase, working right alongside Nancy to unscramble enigmas and solve riddles. Beyond that, the Nancy Drew books offer compact allegories of loss and restoration, returning objects of value to the deserving and punishing the undeserving. As morality plays, the plots often turn on a single “lost” object, stolen goods that are restored to their legitimate owners. The universe is set right again.

  Issues of ownership and legitimacy are not surprising in a series that was ghostwritten by members of a literary syndicate.33 Ironically, the Nancy Drew books were fronted by a male entrepreneur who farmed out the writing of individual volumes to women authors. Edward Stratemeyer, the undisputed wizard of series books, grew up in New Jersey, the son of German immigrants. He worked in his father’s tobacco shop, using its basement to operate his own printing press and distributing stories such as “The Newsboy’s Adventure.” Before long, he embarked on a career that led to the writing and production of over thirteen hundred dime novels, serials, and Westerns. The breakthrough for him came when Horatio Alger Jr., suffering from failing health (“in a state of nervous breakdown,” as he put it), wrote to Stratemeyer, asking him to complete two stories. After Alger’s death in 1899, Stratemeyer “completed” eleven of his books even as he was writing the Rover Boys, a series that met with tremendous commercial success.

  By 1900, Stratemeyer, though by no means suffering writer’s block, decided to spend less time writing and more time recruiting authors for what became known as the Stratemeyer Syndicate. He would work with publishers and authors, developing a series with the publishing house and then creating characters and plot outlines for the hired ghostwriters. Between 1905 and 1985, the Syndicate produced over a thousand volumes that included a number of literary franchises.

  If the Nancy Drew series gives us individual heroics, with a self-reliant girl possessing an astounding skill set, it is shadowed by the tension between the authentic and the fraudulent, with a host of doubles, impersonators, and identity thieves.34 Dual authorship had a built-in rivalry between a public face (Carolyn Keene, a.k.a. Edward Stratemeyer) and a secret ghostwriter (Mildred Wirt Benson), and the books themselves reproduce that rivalry by putting their heroine on the trail of counterfeiters and thieves, those who appropriate property that rightfully belongs to others. In The Secret of the Old Clock, there is a bogus will and the genuine article, which Nancy discovers and uses to ensure that the rightful beneficiaries get their inheritance. In The Bungalow Mystery, an identity thief is jailed and the true heir wins back the estate to which he is entitled.

  Is it possible that Mildred Wirt Benson somehow wrote her own struggle with authorial identity into the series (consciously or not), turning Nancy into a sleuth who uncovers, among other things, true identities, the genuine article, the real thing? Benson herself was the first woman to receive a graduate degree in journalism from the University of Iowa. She was a champion swimmer who played golf and flew planes (taking up flying at the age of s
ixty), in addition to writing a newspaper column and books with her as named author.35 And her intense interest in pre-Columbian archaeology is a reminder that writing mysteries and digging up artifacts from the past are oddly compatible pursuits.

  Benson had no real reverence for authorship, considering herself as doing piecework more than anything else: “I didn’t analyze it,” she writes about the plots assigned to her. “It was just a job to do. Some things I liked and some things I did not like. It was a day’s work. . . . One year I wrote 13 full-length books and held down a job besides.”36 Since Stratemeyer drafted the plots, perhaps he too is implicated, with an unconscious sense of guilt or shame that revealed itself in stories that turn on fraud. The Nancy Drew books offer up two cases to be solved: the manifest crime, offense, or robbery that serves as a challenge to the girl sleuth and her readers, and also the mystery of authorship and the question: Who invented the Nancy Drew books and the wonders of that world? By plotting mysteries, Mildred Wirt Benson inscribed the loss of her identity as author into a series that bears the name of Carolyn Keene and was masterminded by Edward Stratemeyer, head of a syndicate, a man who masqueraded as a woman.

  In the proposal for the series, which was to feature a girl detective, Stratemeyer wrote, “I have called the line the ‘Stella Strong Stories,’ but they might also be called the ‘Diana Dare Stories,’ ‘Nan Nelson Stories’ or ‘Helen Hale Stories.’”37 A later proposal adds specifics: “Stella Strong, a girl of sixteen, is the daughter of a District Attorney of many years standing. He is a widower and often talks over his affairs with Stella and the girl was present during many interviews her father had with noted detectives and at the solving of many intricate mysteries. Then, quite unexpectedly, Stella plunged into some mysteries of her own. . . . An up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy.”38 Mildred Wirt was commissioned to write the first volume, along with the next two in the founding first three books of the series (with thirty books in all). Her recollection of Stratemeyer’s reaction (though contested by some scholars) reveals a decision to take ownership of the sleuth, for she did not stand down when given advice: “Mr. Stratemeyer expressed bitter disappointment when he received the first manuscript, The Secret of the Old Clock, saying the heroine was much too flip and would never be well received.”39

  Readers did not seem to mind a “flip” girl detective, and Nancy Drew lives on today, not just in books and reboots of the books, but also in video games, films, and merchandise. Her appeal is summed up by one critic as residing in “the image, however abstract, of a young woman who is able to forget the ‘distinction of sex’—at least so far as that distinction is rewritten as limitation.”40 Laura Lippman, bestselling author of the crime fiction series featuring “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan, revealed why she was partial to the Nancy Drew books. The books validated curiosity, seeing it as a virtue rather than a vice.41 Capable and caring, Nancy not only manages to make stalled trucks start up again but can also nurse ailing elders back to health.

  Figures like Elsa in Disney’s Frozen franchise and Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games trilogy, but especially Hermione in the Harry Potter series, are all reminders of the powerful afterlife of Nancy Drew in cultural productions for children. Hermione (and is it any coincidence that her name is linked with Hermes, god of speech and cunning?) uses spells and incantations to navigate the mysteries of Hogwarts, with its trap doors, secret rooms, enigmatic maps, and magical wardrobes. From “oculus reparo” (a charm for mending glasses) and “alohomora” (for unlocking doors) to “wingardium leviosa” (the levitation charm) to “petrificus totalus” (the full body-bind curse), Hermione, model student yet also rulebreaker, is ready to break and enter, eavesdrop, and steal in order to discover solutions to the challenges facing the adventurous trio she forms with Harry and Ron. Beyond that, she exceeds Nancy’s passion for justice by becoming a social activist who founds the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (SPEW), an organization designed to advocate for the rights of an oppressed group. It is no coincidence that, like the spinsters of detective fiction and the old wives before them, she is also labeled a nosy “know-it-all.”

  Spinsters Seeking Justice

  Spinsters and old maids are on the decline. Type those terms into Google Ngram and you will find that the term “spinster” was on the rise until the 1930s, spiking in 1934, with a falling off after that. “Old maid” peaked in 1898, and since then has been steadily vanishing, with a small spike in 2004, perhaps only to broadcast how out-of-date the term had become. Yoking youth with senescence, the term “old maid” suggests someone who is never the right age and can never assume full-fledged autonomy. Today, “singles” and “bachelorettes” have supplanted spinsters and old maids.

  For a time, “spinster” was the term given to women (or, occasionally but rarely, men, as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us) who engage in spinning as an occupation. From the seventeenth century onward, the word was used as a legal designation for unmarried women, until it finally became a casually used descriptor for women once fertile but now beyond the age of bearing children. The OED records a use of the term in 1882 that suggests a spectacularly condescending attitude toward these women: “Providence is wonderfully kind to plain little spinsters with a knack of making themselves useful.” In other words, staying unmarried meant that you could be useful to others (usually as a caretaker of aging parents and the children of siblings), though that did not mean that you could actually make something of yourself.

  The term “spinster” resonates powerfully with notions of spinning and solitude, and also with the spookiness of self-imposed seclusion and sinister designs. Like many who were educated in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, my personal understanding of spinsters was shaped by their literary representation. Novels taught me the horrors of spinsterhood, especially of women left at the altar. Here is Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, in all her alarming morbidity:

  I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could.42

  Miss Havisham belongs to the living dead, inhabiting a house infested with spiders and mice. Here is what Pip, the youthful hero of the novel, sees when he enters the dining room of her house:

  The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. [A] center-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite indistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

  Spinsters seem doomed to consort with spiders. Both operate in solitude, busily spinning their webs, threads, and yarns, creating death traps for their prey. The young boy Pip turns into something of a stray fly, lured into Miss Havisham’s infested mansion. Pip’s great expectations and Miss Havisham’s lost illusions work together to produce two compelling accounts of romance gone wrong. The novel writes large the spine-tingling horrors of the spinster and of her intrigues.

  Harry Furniss, “Miss Havisham” for Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, 1910

  Paradoxically, spinsters are highly visi
ble beings yet also imperceptible presences. Visible as objects of scorn, pity, revulsion, and derision, they are also invisible in having little social purchase. Seen as superfluous, and designated as UFs (Unnecessary Females) in the era after World War I, when there were 1,098 women to every 1,000 men, the spinster came under constant fire for her lack of productive labor and reproductive capability.43

  It was in England that spinsters made a comeback, now as sleuths who rivaled hard-boiled private eyes in their shrewd deployment of detective skills. How that happened is a mystery in itself worth unraveling. In 1930, a group of British writers, among them Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Hugh Walpole, and G. K. Chesterton, set up the Detection Club, whose members held regular dinner meetings in London. Those who joined had to swear the following oath: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?”44 Note that the majority of the writers in the Detection Club published their work in the so-called golden age of detective fiction, inventing “whodunits,” mysteries designed to “arouse curiosity,” as Ronald Knox put it. Knox, who was a priest as well as a writer of detective fiction, formulated the “Ten Commandments” of detective stories, and these normative features are tarnished by ethnic slurs and condescending remarks about intuition and deviations from an established form.

  1.The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.