Nancy Drew—: A Modern Elsie Dinsmore?

Nancy Drew, the assertive super sleuth and symbol of the independent woman, and Elsie Dinsmore, apotheosis of the pious, passive female? At first glance, they are an incongruous pair. Admittedly, both stand among the best-known and best-selling girls' series of their respective centuries. The 28 volumes of Martha Finley's "Elsie books" (1867-1905) reputedly sold over five million copies; a 1945 study of the series called her "without question, the most popular character ever to appear in American juvenile literature" (Brown 80). Currently, sales of the almost 200 volumes in "Carolyn Keene's" two series about Nancy Drew (1930-) total over 80 million; one writer dubbed Nancy "the teen detective queen" (Billman 101), and her publishers claim she is "America's best-loved sleuth."¹ As befits popular series, both have inspired spinoffs, and both have been revised in response to complaints about unsuitable content.² However, the similarities go deeper than that. Both series have been the subject of numerous studies, and those works, while never explicitly comparing the two, frequently make similar points. Examining early titles in the Nancy Drew and Elsie Dinsmore series and analyses about them reveals that, consciously or unconsciously, the creators and writers of Nancy Drew bestowed upon her many of the qualities found in Elsie Dinsmore—most of which, in turn, derived from patterns in nineteenth-century literature and popular fiction.³

In the character and appearance of their protagonists, both series draw on images from earlier fiction. One image is that of the pure—or sexless—"snow maiden" (Fiedler 292), found not in juvenile fiction but adult literature. In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler traces this to The Last of the Mohicans, where Cora and Alice "the passionate brunette and the sinless blond, make once and for all the pattern of female Dark and Light that is to become the standard form in which American writers project their ambivalence toward women" (200-201). As he explains:

[Alice] has a "dazzling complexion, fair golden hair and bright blue eyes". . . [but] she is not gifted with the firmness of her [black-haired] sister Cora, whose . . . "complexion . . . appeared charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds." Yet Cora . . . envies the more pallid Alice. "She is Fair!" . . . Cora sighs. "Her soul is pure and spotless as her skin."

The point is clear: one is "spotless," which is to say, sexless; the other charged with blood and ready to break through all bounds: a passionate woman. . . .

(206)

Fiedler labels such fair women "blue-eyed Protestant Virgin[s]" and notes that their coloration "is white and gold and blue, the conventional color scheme" (294, 293).

Fiedler is primarily concerned with the portrayal of women rather than girls, although he notes that in the 1860s and 1870s "everywhere in the popular American novel the archetypes were being reduced to juveniles" (271). One early manifestation of this shift occurs in Uncle Tom's Cabin with Topsy and Little Eva, where "[j]ust as, in more adult versions, the sexuality denied the pallid virgin is projected in the gorgeous brunette, so here the mischief and normal juvenile cussedness denied the little angel is projected in the figure of the little (black) devil" (301).

These "little angels" are examined in more detail in Anne Tropp Trensky's "The Saintly Child in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction." Trensky found that a common pattern in nineteenth-century fiction for children and adults depicted "the confrontation between an innocent child and a corrupt society, and the demonstration of the ultimate power of innocence" (389). She then describes this juvenile wonder:

Certain features typify the child saints. They are bereft of one or both parents. . . . The mother . . . is usually pious and so fragile that she dies young. The father, characteristically young and handsome, is intensely devoted to and possessive of his daughter, his affection often verging upon the erotic. . . . The sign of inner grace is a supernatural beauty, marked either by pale skin and golden curls or by a spiritual glow that transforms otherwise plain features. The children frequently suffer hardship...