The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  35.Benjamin Lefebvre, The L. M. Montgomery Reader, vol. 2, A Critical Heritage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 380.

  36.Claudia Durst Johnson, “Discord in Concord,” Humanities Commons, https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:18288/datastreams/CONTENT/content.

  37.Mollie Gillin, The Wheel of Things: A Biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery (Halifax: Goodread Biography, 1983), 72.

  38.Willa Paskin, “The Other Side of Anne of Green Gables,” New York Times, April 27, 2017.

  39.L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (New York: Penguin, 2017), 35. Quotations that follow are from pages 220, 174, 323, 236, 223, 267.

  40.Perry Nodelman, “Progressive Utopia: Or, How to Grow Up without Growing Up,” in Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, ed., Mavis Reimer (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 32.

  41.Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4.

  42.H. W. Mabie, ed., Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905), xiv, xv.

  43.Miracle on 34th Street, dir. George Seaton, 1947.

  44.Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 84. Additional quotations are from pages 234, 6, 390, 166, 492, 493, 489.

  45.Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, ed. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, trans. Susan Massotty (New York: Bantam, 1997), 18, 21.

  46.Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, 247. Additional quotations from pages 68, 53.

  47.Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Vintage, 1979).

  48.Katerina Papathanasiou, “Hidden Heroine: Exploring the Story of Anne Frank,” Vale Magazine, December 27, 2019.

  49.Ian Buruma, “The Afterlife of Anne Frank,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1998.

  50.Francine Prose, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 277.

  51.Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 34. Additional quotations are from pages 3, 250, 268, 278.

  52.“Moran: ‘It’s a Dirty Business,’” CNN Access, January 12, 2005.

  53.Anita Silvey, 100 Best Books for Children: A Parent’s Guide to Making the Right Choices for Your Young Reader, Toddler to Preteen (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

  54.Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 141.

  55.Rorty borrows that word from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita to signify a lack of caring and empathy.

  56.Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1961; New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 33, 320.

  57.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), 52–53.

  58.Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2017). Quotations are from pages 252, 412, 302, 444.

  59.Lucy Feldman, “How TLC’s Left Eye Helped Save The Hate U Give Author Angie Thomas’ Life,” Time, February 5, 2019.

  CHAPTER 5: DETECTIVE WORK

  1.Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor, 1991), 126, 104.

  2.Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 50th anniversary ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

  3.Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geis, 1962).

  4.“Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave ‘Single Girl’ a Life in Full, Dies at 90,” New York Times, August 13, 2012.

  5.Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, 7.

  6.For strong arguments about how the series marked a sea change in our cultural understanding of women’s sexual identities, see Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

  7.Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” New York Times, December 5, 1976.

  8.Christian Lorentzen, “Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How ‘Auto’ Is Autofiction?,” Vulture, May 11, 2018.

  9.Candace Bushnell, The Carrie Diaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 25.

  10.Victoria Kennedy, “Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women’s Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries,” Women: A Cultural Review 30, no. 2 (2019): 202.

  11.Bushnell, The Carrie Diaries, 297.

  12.Tara K. Menon, “What Women Want,” Public Books, June 24, 2020.

  13.Andrew Forrester, The Female Detective (Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2012). As Alexander McCall Smith notes in the foreword to that work: “The female detective uses the apparent marginality of her position to good effect” (vi).

  14.As Philippa Gates puts it, “The only female detectives who seem to have avoided [choosing between being a “woman” and working as a detective] are those who are either too old—e.g., spinster Jane Marple and widow Jessica Fletcher—or too young—e.g., teenager Nancy Drew—for romantic relationships and thus elude the complications that arise when career and romance compete.” See Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 4.

  15.Raymond Chandler, “Bay City Blues,” in Collected Stories (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2002), 831.

  16.Carolyn Keene, The Mystery at Lilac Inn (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930), 156.

  17.Quoted by Karen Plunkett-Powell, The Nancy Drew Scrapbook: 60 Years of America’s Favorite Teenage Sleuth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 18.

  18.Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day, Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest (New York: Random House, 2002), 229.

  19.Claire Fallon, “Hillary Clinton Basically Wanted to Grow Up to Be Nancy Drew,” Huffpost, June 2, 2017.

  20.Mary Jo Murphy, “Nancy Drew and the Secret of the 3 Black Robes,” New York Times, May 30, 2009.

  21.Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

  22.Carolyn Keene, The Sign of the Twisted Candles (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1933), 11.

  23.Harriet Adams, Stratemeyer’s daughter and owner of the Syndicate after her father’s death, urged Mildred Wirt Benson (by then she had married) to make the sleuth less bold and “more sympathetic, kind-hearted, and lovable.” See Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman, The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

  24.Deborah L. Siegel, “Nancy Drew as New Girl Wonder: Solving It All for the 1930s,” in Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and the Girls’ Series, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 179.

  25.Nancy Tillman Romalov, “Children’s Series Books and the Rhetoric of Guidance: A Historical Overview,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 117. See also Gillian M. McCombs, “Nancy Drew Here to Stay: The Challenges to Be Found in the Acquisition and Retention of Early Twentieth Century Children’s Series Books in an Academic Library Setting,” in Popular Culture and Acquisitions, ed. Allen Ellis (New York: Haworth, 1992), 47–58.

  26.Franklin K. Mathiews, “Blowing Out the Boy’s Brains,” Outlook, November 18, 1914, 653.

  27.Quoted by Esther Green Bierbaum, “Bad Books in Series: Nancy Drew in the Public Library,” The Lion and the Unicorn 18 (1994): 95.

  28.Emelyn E. Gardner and Eloise Ramsey, A Handbook of Children’s Literature: Methods and Materials (Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1927), 15.

  29.Carolyn Keene, The Clue in the Diary (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1932), 74.

  30.Carolyn Keene, The Hidden Staircase (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930), 11.

  31.Carolyn Keene, The Secret of the Old Clock (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930), 1.

  32.Keene, The Secret of the Old Clock, 135.

  33.For more on the Syndicate, see Amy Boesky, “Solving the Crime of Modernity: Nancy Drew in 1930,” Studies in the Novel 42 (2010): 185–201.

  34.Boesky, “Solving the Crime of Modernity,” 200.r />
  35.Bierbaum, “Bad Books in Series,” 101.

  36.Amy Benfer, “Who Was Carolyn Keene?,” Salon, October 8, 1999.

  37.James D. Keeline, “The Nancy Drew Mythery Stories,” in Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths, ed. Michael G. Cornelius and Melanie E. Gregg (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 23.

  38.Keeline, “The Nancy Drew Mythery Stories,” 24.

  39.Keeline, 25.

  40.Anne Scott MacLeod, “Nancy Drew and Her Rivals: No Contest,” Horn Book, May 1987, July 1987.

  41.Renee Montagne, “Nancy Drew: Curious, Independent and Usually Right,” NPR, June 23, 2008.

  42.Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Edgar Rosenberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 50, 69.

  43.Kathy Mezei, “Spinsters, Surveillance, and Speech: The Case of Miss Marple, Miss Mole, and Miss Jekyll,” Journal of Modern Literature 30, no. 2 (2007): 103–20.

  44.James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1981), 144.

  45.R. A. Knox, ed., “Introduction,” in The Best English Detective Stories of 1928 (London: Faber, 1929).

  46.David Frisby, “Walter Benjamin and Detection,” German Politics & Society 32 (1994): 89–106. See also Martin Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

  47.Edmund Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” New Yorker, October 14, 1944; “Mr. Holmes, They Were the Footprints of a Gigantic Hound,” New Yorker, February 17, 1945; and “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? A Second Report on Detective Fiction,” New Yorker, June 20, 1945.

  48.Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (1927; New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 19. Additional quotations are from pp. 29–30.

  49.Agatha Christie, Five Complete Miss Marple Novels (New York: Chatham River Press, 1980), 292.

  50.Agatha Christie, “A Christmas Tragedy,” in The Thirteen Problems (New York: Signet, 2000), 143.

  51.Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (New York: Penguin, 2011), 224.

  52.Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye (New York: Penguin, 1954), 108.

  53.Agatha Christie, Nemesis (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 9.

  54.Christie, Nemesis, 27.

  55.Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories (New York: Random House, 2003), 325.

  56.Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple (London: Routledge, 1991), 59.

  57.Shaw and Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, 59.

  58.Mitzi M. Brunsdale, Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection: From Sleuths to Superheroes, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010), I:142.

  59.Gates, Detecting Women.

  60.Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in Later Novels and Other Writing (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1995), 992.

  61.Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 52.

  62.Shaw and Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, 6.

  63.Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 115.

  64.P. D. James, “Introduction,” in The Omnibus P. D. James (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), viii.

  65.Maureen T. Reddy, “Women Detectives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 204.

  66.Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam (Leawood, KS: Brash Books, 1992), 15, 61, 83.

  67.William Moulton Marston, The Golden Age of Wonder Woman, vol. 1, 1941 (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2017), 7.

  68.William Moulton Marston, Try Living! (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1937), 128.

  69.“Neglected Amazons to Rule Men in 1,000 Years, Says Psychologist,” Washington Post, November 11, 1937.

  70.Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Knopf, 2014), 200.

  71.All quotations will be from Marston, The Golden Age of Wonder Woman, 10, 14.

  72.Natalie Haynes, Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (London: Picador, 2020), 118.

  73.William Moulton Marston, “Women: Servants for Civilization,” Tomorrow, February 1942, 42–45.

  74.Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, xi.

  75.Kurt F. Mitchell et al., American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940–1944 (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows, 2019), 77.

  76.Committee on the Judiciary, “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency,” H.R. Report No. 62 (1955), https://web.archive.org/web/20091027160127/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8580/kefauver.html.

  77.Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, 184.

  78.Olive Richard, “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” Family Circle, October 25, 1940, 10–11.

  79.Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, 209.

  CHAPTER 6: TO DOUBLE DUTY BOUND

  1.Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 16.

  2.Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, 85.

  3.Campbell and Moyers, 15–16.

  4.Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1998), 8. Hyde also acknowledges that the absence of female tricksters can be attributed to the dominantly patriarchal mythologies and religions in his purview.

  5.Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken, 1987), 138. Deldon Anne McNeely makes an interesting case for the trickster as an “androgynous archetype, to be thought of as masculine.” See Mercury Rising: Women, Evil, and the Trickster Gods (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1996), 9.

  6.In The Female Trickster: The Mask That Reveals; Post-Jungian and Postmodern Psychological Perspectives on Women in Contemporary Culture (New York: Routledge, 2014), Ricki Stefanie Tannen makes the point that the term “agency” comes from the Greek word for “potent, convincing, and compelling.” Agency, she points out, has a double meaning in the sense of “movement as action and also as being capable of acting on others’ behalf” (7).

  7.Stacy L. Smith, Marc Choueiti, and Katherine Pieper, Inequality in 800 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007–2015, report for the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, University of Southern California–Annenberg, September 2016.

  8.“Facts to Know about Women in Hollywood,” Statistics, Women and Hollywood, accessed October 24, 2020.

  9.Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, ed. Safron Rossi (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2013), xiv.

  10.Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (New York: Knopf, 2002). Quotations are from pages 346, 213, 362, 32.

  11.The quotes are from Laurie Penny, “Girls, Tattoos and Men Who Hate Women,” New Statesman, September 5, 2010. Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, “Corporations, the Welfare State, and Covert Misogyny in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” in Men Who Hate Women Who Kick Their Asses: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy in Feminist Perspective, ed. Donna King and Carrie Lee Smith (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 157–78. On the issues they raise, see Jaime Weida, “The Dragon Tattoo and the Voyeuristic Reader,” in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy, ed. Eric Bronson (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2012), 28–38.

  12.Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 31–32, 36.

  13.Helena Bassil-Morozow describes Lisbeth as an “uber-nerd” who feeds off the “mercurial qualities of the internet” in The Trickster in Contemporary Film (London: Routledge, 2012), 80. Bassil-Morozow further describes tricksters as “foolish, rebellious, asocial and anti-social, inconsistent, outrageous and self-contradictory” (5).

  14.Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1947).

  15.Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 156, 164.

  16.Eva Gedin, “Working with Stieg Larsson,” in On Stieg Larsson, translated by Laurie Thompson (New York: Knopf, 2010). Gedin describes Lisbeth as “a special character, a type rarely encountered in previous crime fictio
n series” (11).

  17.Karen Klitgaard Povlsen and Anne Marit Waade discuss the parallels between Pippi Longstocking and Lisbeth Salander, as well as between Lindgren’s Kalle Blomkvist and Larsson’s Mikael Blomkvist. See “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Adapting Embodied Gender from Novel to Movie in Stieg Larsson’s Crime Fiction.” Salander’s lawyer is named Annika, after one of the two sibling neighbors who befriend Pippi. P.O.V.: A Danish Journal of Film Studies 28 (December 2009), http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_28/section_2/artc7A.html.

  18.Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking (New York: Puffin, 2005), 110.

  19.Astrid Lindgren, “Never Violence!,” Swedish Book Review, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20201108100547/https://www.swedishbookreview.com/article-2007-2-never-violence.asp.

  20.Laura Briggs and Jodi I. Kelber-Kaye, “‘There Is No Unauthorized Breeding in Jurassic Park’: Gender and the Use of Genetics,” NWSA Journal 12, no. 3 (2000): 92–113.

  21.Paul Bullock, “Jurassic Park: 10 Things You Might Have Missed,” Den of Geek, June 12, 2019.

  22.Wesley Morris, “Does ‘Three Billboards’ Say Anything about America? Well . . . ,” New York Times, January 18, 2018.

  23.Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Crown, 2012), 393.

  24.See Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 219–33.

  25.Kim Snowden, “Fairy Tale Film in the Classroom: Feminist Cultural Pedagogy, Angela Carter, and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves,” in Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity, ed. Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2010), 157–77.

  26.John Hiscock, “Joe Wright Interview on Hanna,” Telegraph, April 22, 2011.

  27.Created in 1985 by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the test asks three questions: (1) Are there at least two women in the film who have names? (2) Do those women talk to each other? (3) Do they talk to each other about something besides men?

  28.Amber Pualani Hodge, “The Medievalisms of Disney’s Moana (2016): Narrative Colonization from Victorian England to Contemporary America,” in “Islands and Film,” special issue, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 37, no. 2–3 (2018): 80–95.