Rediscovering Nancy Drew

24. I Owe It All to Nancy Drew

lOwe It All to Nancy Drew Nancy Pickard ~~!lhen I was ten years old, I wrote: "I will be happy if I can have WW horses, solve mysteries, help people, and be happily married." In that order. For thirty years after that, I forgot on any conscious level about that wish list. When I finally came across it again, I was forty years old, married to a cowboy, doing volunteer work, and writing murder mysteries. The child was, indeed, the mother to this woman. It's easy enough to figure out why I wanted to "have horses"doesn 't almost every adolescent girl dream of riding Black Beauty? Growing up in the fifties made it de rigueur for me to want to "be happily married," and being a college student in the sixties made it nearly obligatory for me to want to "help people." But whence the desire to "solve mysteries"? That's easy, isn't it? I read Nancy Drew. Didn't you? Sometimes I think I owe it all to her-my career, my amateur sleuth heroine, most of whatever finer qualities I may possess, even my blond hair, blue eyes, and my name. Nancy Drew was (almost) everything I wanted to be when I grew up: intelligent, self-confident, incredibly courageous, honest, straightforward, kind, courteous, energetic , successful, and independent. I confess that I also wished I were well-to-do and beautiful, just like Nancy. Granted, it's possible that she could have used more of a sense of fun and humor, and it 208 I OWE IT ALL TO NANCY DREW 209 cannot be denied that in her language and attitudes she reflected the white, middle-class, Christian prejudices of her day, but I'd rather blame those failings on her creators. I like to think that had Nancy but known, she never would have thought, spoken, or behaved in those ways. Recently, for the first time since I was a girl I read the original version of The Hidden Staircase. First published in 1930, it may be the most famous and the most fondly remembered of any of the Nancy Drew mysteries. In 1959 the story was republished in a rewritten edition that drastically altered both the plot and the characters . If I had a daughter, the original version is the one I'd want to pass on to her. It is the edition I will give to my son. I think it is not overstating the case to maintain that the original Nancy Drew is a mythic character in the psyches ofthe American women who followed her adventures as they were growing up. She may have been Superman, Batman, and Green Hornet, all wrapped up in a pretty girl in a blue convertible. The original Hidden Staircase is a rich and nutritious feast of psychological archetypes, so that it assumes the quality of fairy tale and myth. Nancy herself, in the original version, is quite a heroic figure, one that in our culture we're more accustomed to seeing portrayed as a boy than as a girl: she's incorruptibly honest, steadfast, and courageous, a veritable Sir Lancelot of a girl, off on a quest to rescue the fair maiden, who is in this case her father, and to recapture the holy grail, which is in this case a silver spoon, a pocketbook, a diamond pin, and a couple of black silk dresses. We'd have to go back to ancient goddess mythology to find an equivalent female of such heroic stature, back to a figure such as Inanna, who was the chief Sumerian deity, a woman who went to hell and back on a rescue mission. Such journeys into the "underground " are viewed in psychological terms as descents into one's unconscious ; it is believed that a person must bring the contents of the unconscious into the light ofconsciousness in order to fully integrate one's psyche. In The Hidden Staircase, Nancy symbolically does just that, by tumbling like Alice down a black hole and then by journeying deeper and deeper into a really quite frightening tunnel where she perseveres with remarkable courage until she finds a way to ascend once more into the light. In so doing, she solves all mysteries 210 TRANSFORMING NANCY DREW and reunites everyone and everything that have been wrongfully separated. This is, at heart, no "mere" adventure story; this is myth. In the original story...