Nancy Drew’s Body: The Case of the Autonomous Female Sleuth

When thinking about female gynecological exams, Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler asks, “[w]hy the flashlight all up in there like Nancy Drew working against gravity?” (23). While many may not make an immediate connection with the female body and the popular fictional character, Nancy Drew, Ensler chooses to pose this question within the monologue entitled “My Angry Vagina” in order to elicit humor, and to draw audience members’ attention towards the problematic place of women’s bodies within contemporary American culture. In this vein, one frequently ignored aspect of female bodies within the American literary landscape pertains to longstanding female characters such as Nancy Drew, whose primary action is utilizing her body as a tool for solving crime, and subsequently expressing her internal investigative desires. Sally E. Parry supports this view by noting that “Nancy Drew is a good feminist hero in that her role in these mysteries is a strong and active one” (150). It is precisely the active nature of the character, and the place of the female physical body that remains central to this activity, that calls to mind theories posited by Hélène Cixous.

Nancy Drew prefigures many key ideas presented by Cixous regarding women’s action and agency in the realm of writing. Nancy has been sustained as a character through a collective of female writing, which spans several decades; she solves crimes physically, and feels internal reactions while investigating cases. In short, Nancy Drew’s body is not merely a beautiful object to be viewed; instead, it is a vehicle through which she can carry out her desires to solve crimes. Nancy Drew’s recipe for success involves the antithesis of passivity, therein promoting the idea of outward action and effectively serving as a subversively positive role model for young female readers.

Ilana Nash writes “[t]he Nancy Drew Mysteries, written under the pseudonym ‘Carolyn Keene,’ are the longest-lived and most enduringly popular series of books for girls in America” (29). Here, it is central to note that the volumes of Nancy Drew fiction were written by not merely a woman, but many women through several decades of publication. There is no actual Carolyn Keene. Instead, many women writers including Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Mildred Wirt Benson contributed to the creation and authorship of Nancy Drew’s tales (Rehak xvi; see also Karell 36). In this sense, a multiplicity of women were called forth to write these stories. This choral collective of female authorship can be directly aligned with the tenets of Cixous, who dared women to write themselves out of silence and into a new world. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous encourages women to write:

Women must write: her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must pull herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.

(257)

Just as Cixous calls for women to write themselves back into history by openly expressing their wants, needs, and desires without apology, Nancy Drew’s actions have been boldly chronicled and expressed by her female authors through numerous volumes of detective fiction. Nancy Drew’s textual accomplishments are arguably feminist due to their ability to provide voices for their authorial mothers—while simultaneously acting as a strong template for young female readers to admire and (perhaps) emulate. Lissa Paul speaks to the need for applying feminist theories to books such as the Nancy Drew series when she argues, “[t]here is good reason for appropriating feminist theory to children’s literature. Both women’s literature and children’s literature are devalued and regarded as marginal or peripheral by the literary and education communities” (149; see also hooks 23). Readers of Nancy Drew adventures are treated to a protagonist who embraces action and who takes risks. This is a vital contrast to commonly held pedantic notions about women and children’s social roles. Paul argues, “[c]hildren, like...